There is no single, correct mode of embodiment. For those who regard themselves as part of the body of Jesus, part of the family that grows from Jesus’s body, that one body is really many bodies, complicated bodies, with hands, blood, some foreskins, and a whole lot of multi-colored flesh.
Woodbine’s beautiful narrative is extraordinarily self-aware, and deeply humane. Haskins’ own voice is strong, active, present throughout. I had not planned to read it in one sitting but I literally could not put it down. Only a couple miles northwest of Haskins’ Roxbury, in the mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood of Chestnut Hill near Boston College, there is a totally other religious and cultural world. This is the place of white priests, educated Catholics, lecture halls, and the circuits of urban Catholic power. Particularly in the 1960s and 70s, it might as well have been another planet from Afro-Caribbean Roxbury.
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.
Contemplating a radical response to contemporary politics of (sexual) desire
Polish Catholics protest against the Church’s conservative approach to sexuality. Liberal traditions have been successfully silenced since John Paul II, so now they create their own theologies of desire. Will the Church listen?
Stuck at home? Join the PTN for a series of virtual workshops on supersessionism, sexuality, surveillance, and more.
Political theology, insofar as it can articulate an analysis of and resistance to rape culture, offers many resources for confronting sexual violence.
