Now that it is over, the vicious political battle that raged these past two weeks over the Brett Kavanaugh nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court appears less significant for its outcome than for what it revealed about what we might term the “deep culture” of America. What it revealed, in…
Political Theology
Nor On The Soles of Her Shoes? The King Of Infinite Space (Roger Green)
The tendency toward universalizing concepts has its legacy within the foundation of Religious Studies as a discipline, which, though little known outside the field, has recently interrogated its underwritten Protestant biases. This work continues, despite the fact that many religiously sentimental scholars merely take discussions of “postsecularism” to be an…
Carl Schmitt And The True German Origins Of Political Theology (Jonathan Cole)
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” Thus opens the book that is said to have given birth to political theology—Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, published in German in 1922. This deceptively simple proposition opens a highly stimulating and insightful examination of the relationship between sovereignty, law and the state.…
The Problem With “Christian” Political Theology – It’s Greek, Not Christian (Jonathan Cole)
Christian political theology has a problem, which for want of imagination I dub its “Greek problem.” Michael Walzer highlighted the essence of this problem in his stimulating book In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible: But there is no political theory in the Bible. Political theory is a Greek…
Dissolving The I In The We – Love And The Problem Of Community, Part 2 (Daniel Tutt)
The following is the second installment of Dr. Tutt’s St. Thomas More Lecture delivered on March 18, 2018 at St. John Fisher University. The first installment can be found here. Identity and Power Now that we have some conceptual resources to better understand the dialectic of Immunitas and communitas, I want to make…
Dissolving The I In The We – Love And The Problem of Community, Part 1 (Daniel Tutt)
The following is the first installment of Dr. Tutt’s St. Thomas More Lecture delivered on March 18, 2018 at St. John Fisher University. The second installment will follow upon this one. Part I Posing the Problem: The Dialectic of Communitas and Immunitas I want to talk tonight about the philosophy of…
Becoming Agamben – An Interview Concerning His Ideas And Influences (Antonio Gnolio/Ido Govrin)
The following is an interview with Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben conducted by journalist Antonio Gnolio. Originally published in La Repubblica on May 15, 2016. The interview is translated from the Italian by Ido Govrin. It is translated with permission of La Repubblica. “I believe in the link between philosophy and poetry. I have always…
Like Ghosts From An Enchanter Fleeing – Denver’s Divinatory Poetics (Roger Green)
The following essay in several parts is written as an apparatus for a public talk sponsored by the Denver-based group, Cri. In presenting it, my intention is both to show theoretical work in action and to defend it as a method, so it begins with an account of some major…
Political Theology Needs To Grow Up And Become A Real Discipline (Jonathan Cole)
Contemporary Christian political theology presents a rather confusing picture. A cacophony of voices offers conflicting accounts of what the Bible says about politics and what a normative Christian attitude towards politics ought to look like. Many of these accounts infer or perform eisegesis on Scriptural warrants for any number of…