Why did Dwight Hopkins, a leading Black liberation theologian and a longtime University of Chicago professor, move toward MAGA?
Benjamin argues that the violence of law emerges from its governing force and therefore from its ability to bind or impose itself. To this extent, the objective of my intervention is to frame a form of normativity that not only does not entail a binding power but that prohibits it as well.
These systemic injustices have a root: the root of a colonial system designed to supplant Indigenous life. They have a genealogy, a history, a process: their ancestor is money and their descendants are death.
Even homemade, organic eucharistic bread made with fair trade flour and kneaded in commitment to the life of the poor is not exempt from the kind of death-dealing economic structures that make such bread possible. While we may long for it to be otherwise, we are always both in and of the world.
In the post-secular world [Dick] envisions, religion has fully capitulated to the allure of the marketplace. As these perky commercials are meant to indicate, Dick expects humankind, circa 1992, to seek (and find!) redemption not in its devotion to (and fear of) otherworldly deities, nor in the afterlives these deities gatekeep for their favorites, but in its reverence for nifty consumer wonder products: beer, brassieres, plastic wrap, razors, etc.
You might be forced to accept your place in a fundamentally unfair world, but you should never take the next step to allow the values of that world to become the values that shape and give meaning and purpose to your life
We were not made for the capitalist subjection that characterizes our lives. The gift of the Sabbath serves us in the present by contesting work’s overlordship and disrupting the social controls by which capitalist hegemony maintains itself.
Mutual knowing is not a given in relationships…
Those who read Paul’s propertied incarnation in Galatians should not run away from its horrors or theologize them. We should find truth in them (though perhaps not the truth Paul intended). We should tell truth from them.
The Sabbath commandment is a word of freedom and of resistance to an economic system that is destructive to ourselves and our planet.
If we are willing to listen to those standing around without work, however, a new possibility emerges. Why are they standing around without work? “Because no one has hired us,” they reply (Matthew 20:7). They aren’t lazy, they’re desperate enough to stand around all day waiting for work. The laborers are many; the jobs are few.