This forum reflects on Elad Lapidot’s The Politics of Not Speaking. In contrast to the common understanding of politics as a domain of speaking, this work reveals an alternative tradition where the spoken word fails, collapses, breaks (i.e., a politics of not speaking).
By recovering the critical potential of religious practice, this symposium asks how political theology can support democratic institutions that are under threat.
Liturgy constitutes a space and a time in which theopolitical power circulates across many scales, with all the solidarities, tensions, conflicts, interpretations, appropriations, and subversions that this entails. The papers gathered here explore the lived reality of liturgical practices as they are enacted in various contexts and by diverse people, both reproducing and stretching the boundaries of Catholicism.
While in recent years there has certainly been a shift towards more thoughtful and creative presentations of academic ideas within the various contexts of academic life, academics, mostly still exclusively trained in text-centered methods and deliveries, are still grappling with a contemporary culture dominated by images and digital technology that has profoundly disrupted the standard traditions of academic expression.
Tuning in to active nonviolence as a center of gravity in Jesus’ way, we can sense nonviolence as integral to the mission of the Catholic Church. This enables us to have a broader imagination of nonviolent praxis, a sturdier identity as interconnected beings, and an engrained commitment to better persist in active nonviolence even during difficult circumstances.
Under the multidisciplinary banner ‘Animal Studies’, we may decenter the ‘human’ in this history of capitalist agriculture, and instead attend to the political histories of insect agents. The resulting narrative is intriguingly subversive.
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By cataloguing an approachable Christian-oriented anti-fascism, we hope to engage audiences not merely in contemplation, prayer for change, or internal spiritual renewal, but in tangible action.
If nothing else, the national public attention and copy-cat movements following the Asbury Revival speak to the need for spiritual revival—as in the Great First Awakening, most people are dissatisfied with established religion and are looking for ways to experience a genuine spiritual awakening.