In a place where Caesar’s authority appeared unquestionable, Peter recognizes another kingdom and another source of authority. His confession quietly challenges every power that claims the final word over human life, hope, and belonging. It reorients allegiance away from imperial claims toward the reign of God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Psalm 2 presents the ways in which the powerful paint themselves as simultaneous victor and victim–and, more hopefully, it depicts a God who interrupts these fictions.
This Third Sunday of Epiphany is a celebration of light breaking into darkness, but as I write, my friends and neighbors are reeling from the death of a legal observer—shot and killed by a federal agent blocks from my home.
The joy of Christmas is always mixed up with the grief of the world’s suffering. One need only look today at the very town the magi came to visit.
Even in the midst of an empire that crucifies the innocent for political gain, despair is not warranted. Instead, there is work to be done.
To think of this empire as anything other than wrapped up in mimesis is to think otherwise. This essay explores how mimesis has captured us all and conscripted us into its political ontology. This essay offers another way to consider being; another way to find ourselves with the introduction of Jesus as a Political Atheist.
Christian nationalism is a form of superstition. It is superstitious because, instead of appealing to the God of all nations, it appeals to a culturally fabricated God for cultural privilege, power, and benefits.
Jesus’ parable identifies chosenness in those who resist, dissent, protest and refuse the invitations of the empire.
Any power we might feel we gain through the power over dynamic is illusory and fleeting, and will always eventually result in our death/defeat, with our illusions of power lying dead around us.
When we work towards the eradication of structures that perpetuate poverty in our communities, those that divide us, systems that perpetuate classism or any form of caste system, we each become the light that others see around them. This is also how we embody the glory of God as was experienced by the shepherds in the Lukan narrative.
In casting the return from exile as a new exodus, Second Isaiah activates an ambiguity in an ancient poem in light of new political realities.
Where state sovereignty as theology would have subjected groups accept their condition with its attending violence and suffering, the micro sovereignty I propose here – not merely as a futuristic idea, but more as a reflection on how subjected groups have dealt with subjection – invites us not to accept that violence and suffering, but to find creative ways out of it through the cracks of Empire.