You discuss a God that both invites us to love our enemies, already incredibly challenging, and a God that also seems to allow, endorse, or sometimes invite violence against the oppressor in certain scriptural texts. Both are hard theological pills to swallow.
What does the food on Christian tables say about our commitments to justice? How well do our dietary choices reflect the concerns we express for other animals, for the environment, and for one another?
Catholic Re-Visions welcomes proposals for its next slate of content. How might we talk of “Catholicism,” being attentive to the past, while engaging with the messy present, to encounter a future that is not yet known?
Woodbine’s beautiful narrative is extraordinarily self-aware, and deeply humane. Haskins’ own voice is strong, active, present throughout. I had not planned to read it in one sitting but I literally could not put it down. Only a couple miles northwest of Haskins’ Roxbury, in the mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood of Chestnut Hill near Boston College, there is a totally other religious and cultural world. This is the place of white priests, educated Catholics, lecture halls, and the circuits of urban Catholic power. Particularly in the 1960s and 70s, it might as well have been another planet from Afro-Caribbean Roxbury.
This essay presents some historical sources for tracing and understanding Corita Kent’s departure from Catholic religious life and the institutional Catholic church. This effort to make sense of Corita’s spiritual trajectory sheds light on wider trends in Post-Vatican II U.S. Catholic life.
Despite her rejection of Catholicism as irredeemably patriarchal, this essay explores Mary Daly’s complicated relationship with her theological past. Daly offers a vision for “boundary living” — where institutional disaffiliation creates a space for creatively reclaiming and reconstructing the tradition.
A different type of project beckons the queer, brown Christian: Invention, coupled with mourning for what is irrecoverably absent, becomes a necessary spiritual practice for all those who cannot find their own ancestors in the canons of church history
As part of a larger project of racial profiling, officer testimonies reveal that the establishment of reasonable suspicion, the search and seizure of vehicles, and the violation of fourth amendment rights of Mexican and Mexican-American drivers often rely on faith-based determinations between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Officers in such cases incorporate information learned at privately-run law enforcement trainings and seminars, where religion, racial profiling, and crimmigration intersect.
This essay invites readers to consider what white Catholics reveal about the history and meaning of the term “law and order,” and what that turn of phrase reveals about twentieth century Catholicism in the United States.
This post considers how the purportedly “secular” state strategically deployed “Catholicism” in its imperial actions abroad and how those reverberated at home. The Central Intelligence Agency found Catholicism to be a useful ideological ally in the struggle against communism during the Cold War, raising up anticommunist, conservative, and largely white US Catholics as ideal citizens at home to support their use of Vietnamese Catholics as anticommunist allies abroad.
Using the example of nineteenth-century “Americanist” archbishop John Ireland, and his boarding school initiatives in Minnesota, this essay demonstrates how the US Catholic Church came to behave as an American institution by seeking common ground with liberal ideals of freedom, while simultaneously embracing state policing and punishment against populations marginalized from the body politic.
The Political Theology Network is happy to announce the launch of its most recent blog–Catholic Re-Visions.