Isaiah 5:1–7 opens as a love song and closes as a verdict, judging a vineyard not by its structural industry but by its ethical fruit. Reading Isaiah’s brilliant wordplay through a womanist hermeneutic and the Civil Rights freedom song tradition, this essay names the counterfeit fruit of a contemporary Christian nationalism that calls violence just, elevates a flawed man to the status of savior, and labels empathy a sin—and asks who is still listening for the desperate cry (tse’aqah) beneath the nationalistic noise.
After the triumph of Mount Carmel, Elijah collapses under a broom tree and asks to die — not from failure, but from the deeper disappointment of a victory that never moved the throne. Reading 1 Kings 19 against today’s Christian nationalism, this essay argues that authentic prophetic faith is found not in wind, earthquake, or fire, but in the silence, rest, and companionship that sustain the weary for the long work of justice.
Jesus presents himself as a physician, and offers one of his most programmatic statements of ethics. The sick need a doctor, not the healthy. Why then does church seem designed for the already well?
This essay is part of the Discourses in Spirituality Round Robin.
Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy reveals how religion became not a check on power—but its strategic lifeblood.
Luke Roberts introduces the essays in the symposium on Religion and Public Life.
We asked a diverse array of scholars to share their reflections on Walter Benjamin and the role that theology plays in his thought, as well as the strengths and limitations of his approach to theology at various stages of his work.
On Democratic Disagreement as Ethical Formation
Whenever someone tries to become an absolute sovereign, to make oneself “King” or “God”, such an act of sovereignization brings about the de-sovereignization or in-sovereignization of everyone else.
Negativity cuts against a politics of nostalgia (which seeks to conserve the imagined glories of the past) and apocalypse (which rejects the world as irredeemably compromised)