The catholicity of dreams makes them powerful but politically ambivalent. In my mind, the dreams of utopian Christianity are no different.
We invited Mac Loftin, Hanna Reichel, and Phil Christman, authors of recent books speaking to our present moment of crisis, to reflect on the other two books — and the state of the world.
Science fiction utopias stretch hundreds or thousands of years into the future and light years away from Earth. But all secular utopias place limits on space and time that fall short of, say, God arriving into time to judge all of history and wipe away every tear.
In the space between celebration and condemnation, I ask: What happens to a person when the gaze of the public becomes so intense that the person can no longer be separated from what the public has made them represent?
Is the affective sense of meaning, purpose, and immanence a useful political horizon? Is this discourse of utopia something that we should seek to synthesize in religious or secular political contexts, even if its nostalgic historical reality is not born out in factual analysis?
“We should think of queer humanitarianism as a theological project. It suffers from a messianic complex.”
Early medieval people could and did differentiate ‘religion’ from ‘not religion’ when it suited them to do so. These secularizing strategies are no less historically significant for being situational and often fleeting.
How is the term “political theology” used today, and how does it add to our understandings of theology and politics?
[1]">Like authoritarian regimes throughout history and around the world, threats to cultural and political power are leading many on the Christian Right to fear declining national birth rates and promote traditional gender roles and having more babies for “the nation.”
People need structures to believe in, to focus their hopes and fears on – and when those structures disappear, the rupture can be disturbing, as those energies quickly get re-configured around something else.
David Brazil, Sarah Pritchard, Precious Bedell, and Joshua Dubler discuss the foundations of a national jail and prison ministry.