PTN members now receive a monthly thematic reading list with the most recent conversations on their topics of choice.
Has there been something fundamental to political theology that has made it a more convenient environment for men, and less so for women and non-binary people? What specific concepts, intellectual structures and paradigmatic convictions have made this specific field such a manly business?
Recent work in the fields of affect theory, especially in the fields of decolonial theory, queer theory, and disability studies, have shown how the necessity of attending to affect and temporality in ways that move beyond traditional accounts that prioritize inner states over exterior practices.
Both books evoke a sense of nature that likewise challenges and transcends conventional notions of creation as a passive, static object of divine activity. They do so by having nature engage with and even touching on the divine, or at least creating the conditions that allow such a touch to happen.
Max Strassfeld’s groundbreaking Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature is a masterclass in denaturalizing oppressive structures. As political backlash against trans folk continues its deadly escalation, Trans Talmud is a crucial intervention in both scholarly and explicitly political domains.
“I was only imagining it. Being freed.”
How have ideas about race, gender, and sexuality shaped the historical construction of U.S. American childhood? What can histories of African American childhood teach us about the intersection of religion and politics?
Spillers, Cheng, and Halberstam provide us with tools to approach the histories of violence, economics, relationships, desires, and contestation that infuse our experiences with flesh in its multiplicity. Flesh is never neutral.
Whereas Smith’s work on excess refuses metaphysical or conceptual capture, Alex Dubilet expands the philosophical logic of excess as undergirding a critical praxis.
That structural violence is always also relational, proximate, and personal is, perhaps, one of the core insights that the concept of mourning brings to the fore for political theology.
When we attempt to wrest human capital from exploitive, for-profit hands, there will be hell to pay. Does the church have the courage to bear it?
What would it mean for scholarship in political theology to claim monstrosity? Perhaps it would mean focusing on underappreciated aspects of the Christian tradition, and other religious traditions, particularly those developed by women’s intellectual labor.