Tag: Politics

This blog post investigates and problematizes a certain narrative strategy in the historiography of Malabar rebellion, in which “war” (“yudham”) and “riot” (“lahala” or “mutiny”) were configured on the model of “politics” and “religion”. The post asks what kind of sovereign formation was imagined in such a narrative strategy and why it needs to be addressed.

God’s call is not to engage in politics of personal power or self-service, but engage in a politics of liberation, one that ends the idolatrous hold on power so many have.

“Both authors travel to the margins and then send back a warning signal to fellow scholars about the limits and potential intrusiveness of our established methods.”

In this short essay, written from my perspective as a Jewish feminist, I draw together a plurality of engagements with natality to engender new conversations in political theology.

The following conversation between Jashodhara Sen and Kanu Halder took place on May 24, 2022. The discussion focuses on Halder’s research with the Matua, in which Halder evaluates Matua progressivity and political consciousness.

The judgment of history is a moral belief that, somehow in the long run, the good and the true will win out, since the “long arc of the universe bends towards justice.”

Joan Wallach Scott’s On the Judgment of History serves as an invitation to uncover a multiplicity of traditions, perspectives, and forms of agency that embrace discontinuity and tension while resisting closure, and the essays in this symposium function as an active experiment in precisely this type of endeavor.

For me, “political theology” thus names the study of the ways that imagination is embedded in sentient, desiring bodies, instantiated in vernacular forms of life and ordinary (ritualized) practices, and conjured in mytho-poetic metaphors, images or representations that are formalized by literary genres and assembled into scriptures.

This essay reclaims the value and role of faith in Shulman’s political theology and shows why it is important for wrestling with our contemporary political realities.

Facing the violence of contemporary terror, many intellectuals have spoken in our present times about a return of political theology and religion in its violent forms. Attention to the concept of martyrdom has reappeared due to an increasing interest in religious conflicts.

In our times when critical thought is suspect and even scientific facts have become articles of faith in need of defense, to play the double bind between the ethical and the political is the constant task Christians and others must continually engage in. This play contains serious risks, no doubt. What gives grace its generosity and generative capaciousness also makes it liable to be the locus of opportunism and oppression.

Andrew Suderman argues that the significance of protest lies in challenging the “policing” realities of death that plague our world and exposes the contingencies on which such logic rests whilst reasserting our own political agency by re-claiming the power we have to embody now the future God desires for this world. This is the form of politics to which Jesus calls us.