In turning Jesus’ seemingly dismissive image of dogs and children at the meal table to her advantage, the Syrophoenician woman illustrates the tenacity of parents fighting for their children. As we act in God’s name within the world we should show the same determination on behalf of all of his children.
There is a good case to be made that the American criminal justice system is itself criminal. Up until around 1980, all statistics we have suggest that the incarceration rate varied at around 100 inmates per 100,000 people. After about 1977, and especially after about 1982, the rate began to rise; in 2008 it was over 700 prisoners per 100,000, and while it seems to have begun a modest decline in the past few years, it remains over 700. In this context, “American exceptionalism” is not an overstatement; the United States is effectively the largest incarcerator in the world; the only states near us are Cuba and North Korea.
Last week, we mourned the news that Peter Losonczi, a contributing editor to Political Theology Today and a member of the editorial board for the journal, Political Theology, had suddenly passed away. Contributions in his memory for Peter’s wife and children may be made at GoFundMe. Peter’s longtime friend and colleague, Aakash Singh Rathore, remembers Peter below.
The journal Political Theology is very pleased to announce new members of its editorial team who will further the journal’s geographical diversity and will strengthen the journal’s interdisciplinarity. New editorial team members include Ruth Marshall, a scholar with joint appointments in political science and religion at the University of Toronto; Elizabeth Phillips, a theologian at Cambridge University; and Timothy Stanley, a philosopher of religion at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Brad Littlejohn, the managing editor of the journal’s blog, will continue in that capacity and will now be recognized as Associate Editor for the Blog.
I would not shoe-horn the following contributions into the terms of the remarks posted yesterday, yet there is a familial space where kindred concerns find different expression with these authors. Christoph Schmidt focuses on Rene Girard’s defense of Christianity in encounter with Nietzsche in terms of Nietzsche’s antithesis between Christ and Dionysius. Girard identifies this as the antithesis of modernity as such.
This is the first of a series of five articles on understanding China today. The articles cover politics, economics, culture and religion, since all of these are important for making some sense of what is happening. Each topic is approached from the Marxist tradition, for this is a key that is too often ignored. The
Jesus’ calling of Nathanael in John 1 illustrates the way in which God’s vision of us precedes our own. The primacy of God’s vision has implications for our politics and economics, unsettling our assumption that the world is measured and determined by our sight and valuation.
…Instead of treating contemporary consumerism as a wholly negative phenomenon, Augustine suggests we look at the issue differently. The behaviour of the shopper or spiritual tourist is the way it is because of the deep structure of the human condition. The longing for fulfilment is at root an existential need: a secularized version of the call at the heart of Augustine’s Confessions: ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’