“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.”
As we watch the illusion that was Man fall apart, we also see these more-than-human worlds that Man called “animal” disrupting and revealing the cracks and fractures in his own divine intentions.
To understand what’s going on today, we need to understand the 400 year story of Christian privilege in America.
We are all indebted to Shulman’s important delineation of prophecy’s role in American thought, especially in relation to race and redemption.
Gilroy’s “planetary humanism” contributes to political theology by offering more than a critique: in his work, humanism is a starting point, a concept to guide multicultural political projects today.
Diaspora might be a problem for political progressives for the very reason that it is so alluring. Diaspora promises both freedom and connection: freedom from national borders or the essentialisms of race and language, connection between people who affirm shared memory and heritage.
But heritage is never really free.
This essay invites readers to consider what white Catholics reveal about the history and meaning of the term “law and order,” and what that turn of phrase reveals about twentieth century Catholicism in the United States.
This post considers how the purportedly “secular” state strategically deployed “Catholicism” in its imperial actions abroad and how those reverberated at home. The Central Intelligence Agency found Catholicism to be a useful ideological ally in the struggle against communism during the Cold War, raising up anticommunist, conservative, and largely white US Catholics as ideal citizens at home to support their use of Vietnamese Catholics as anticommunist allies abroad.
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.
While Carl Schmitt claims that the enemy constitutes “the political,” his various writings largely ignore the historical and discursive evolution of the enemy. Anidjar’s major contribution to modern political theology lies in responding to this lacuna.
Mamdani’s latest book defends the promise of decolonization against the ongoing nationalist violence of modernity. Rafael Vizcaíno sits with the renowned Ugandan intellectual to discuss postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, the reform-revolution debate, anti-racism, and the example of South Africa.
If there is one common thread which cuts through the essays in this symposium, it is the powerful testimony of the important role that religion plays in shaping the socio-political viewpoints of many conservative religious minorities.