June 9, 2023

Pluritopic Hermeneutics, Polycentricity And Islamic Diplomacy – Rethinking The Praxis Of Modern Diplomacy In Light Of Al-Ghazzal’s Embassy To 18th Century Spain, 1766-1767 (Achraf Idrissi)

Overview The aim of this article is to foreground a praxis of non-Western diplomacy within a rubric of interplay among international relations, cultural representation and intellectual thought. The 18th century Moroccan ambassador Ahmad al-Ghazzal’s diplomatic travelogue The Fruits of Struggle in Diplomacy and War (1776-1777) uncovers a certain segment of the diplomatic universe that has been heretofore overlooked, […]

Discovery, St. Junípero, Lewis and Clark (Tink Tinker, wazhazhe / Osage Nation)

Out of respect for Dr Tinker’s writing style, the editor has chosen to keep the author’s footnotesintact. Readers should know that they often expand and clarify the text in addition to pointing to sources. Readers may also be interested in Tinker’s earlier piece on The New Polis tracing the history of a book of Christian history that […]

“Subjectivities Since the Sixties” (Critical Conversations 2)

The following is the video and transcript of the second “Critical Conversation”, a monthly Zoom seminar with advance registration sponsored by The New Polis and Whitestone Publications and involving international scholars. The seminar took place on September 22, 2020. Critical Conversations: Subjectivities Since the Sixties Jason Alvis: Thanks everyone for coming, I just want to welcome you to […]

Left And Right Is Really Up And Down (Wendy Felese)

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ condescending dismissal of congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (during an interview with Fox News), went largely unnoticed during a week dominated by the latest rancorous national debate. It is difficult to imagine that anyone missed seeing mediated images from every imaginable angle and released over a period of several days, capturing a now […]

“Damn It, He’s An Injun!” Christian Murder, Colonial Wealth, And Tanned Human Skin (Tink Tinker, wazhazhe udsethe)

The New Polis is honored to present Dr. Tinker’s follow-up piece to “Redskin, Tanned Hide: A Book of Christian History Bound in the Flayed Skin of an American Indian: The Colonial Romance, christian Denial and the Cleansing of a christian School of Theology,” published in The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion, Volume 5, Issue 9 (October 2014). […]

Today’s Politics Bear Strange Resemblance To The 1850s (Martin Katchen)

The following article is republished from the former Political Theology Today. Observers looking for historic parallels between our time and bygone eras in United States history may have to go all the way back to the 1850s. In that decade the dominant party (which was the Democrats) was aligned with the largest monied interests of the […]

The Pataphysics of Pharmakoi (Roger Green)

Yesterday,  an article by Josh Katz and Margot Sanger-Katz in The New York Times drew attention once again to an opioid abuse epidemic in the United States.  As they write, the 2017 death rate caused by such abuse is “so steep that they have contributed to reductions in the country’s life expectancy over the last three years, […]

Willie Jennings And Palestinian Theologies Of Liberation – Naming The Missing Piece (Katherine Rainger)

Willie James Jennings, author of the award-winning The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, argues that issues of race and the Christian faith are so entangled in American life that one cannot be understood without reference to the other: Race in America is a form of religious faith, and we will never be […]

The Deep Framing By Totality (Roger Green)

A variety of competing descriptions of ‘whiteness’ making up racist retreats to Romantic imaginaries of Anglo-Saxon identity go at least as far back as Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson had imagined himself in an anti-papal tradition of resisting “the Norman yoke,” installed in with the papal backing of the French invasion of England in 1066, and the […]

Is Political History Fundamentally About the State? Part 2 (Keir Martland)

The following is the second installment of a two-part series. The first installment can be found here. The New Political History In the 1960s and 1970s, the emergence of history from below via the popular politics of trades unions and political parties challenged the validity and authority of traditional narratives of political history, all of […]