Exploring the way religion and politics are brought into focus through the writings of the Caribbean thinker Sylvia Wynter, in dialogue with Words Made Flesh: Sylvia Wynter and Religion (Fordham University Press, 2025).
Vincent Lloyd is a professor of theology and religious studies and director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. He is the author of Black Dignity (2022), co-author of What Is Political Theology? (2025), and co-editor of Political Theology Reimagined (2025). Lloyd is editor-at-large of the journal Political Theology.
Symposium Essays
Sylvia Wynter and Religion
While Sylvia Wynter is not a scholar of religion, religion plays a significant role in her thinking, offering important lessons for political theology.
Anti-Blackness, the Sacred, and the Demonic
What would it mean to pursue, or even practice, the un-representable? How does the unruliness of the demonic differ from the unruliness that sovereign Man has always been able to claim as a special right, in the name of order and protection?
Stumbling Upon God in Sylvia Wynter’s Fiction
Sylvia Wynter’s fiction invites us to think the secular and the religious together in order to open new “continents of the spirit” and new “planets of the imagination.”
Counter-Worlds: Rastafari Sovereignty
The work of autonomous Rastafari world-makers is instructive for continuing to think about the type of resilience, risk, and endurance it takes to ensure the survival of our human species and our planetary home in the face of authoritarian governance.
From the Messy Middle
The planetary activities that spill out beyond the shape of any single form of life, full of uninvited faces, are what Sylvia Wynter calls the “necessary and indispensable preludes” to the emergence of our new self-awareness, to the development of new forms of life.