CRITICAL THEORY | SOCIAL ANALYSIS | POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
The following is the first of a four-part series. Neoliberalism as Biopolitics In this essay I claim that imposed religious and political ideologies colonize Ethiopian bodies. I will use Michael Foucault’s biopolitics and the Ethiopian political theologian Theodros Teklu’s fictive Amhara identity or homo aEthiopicus to interpret the elimination of in- between spaces in the […]
The following is the transcript of “Critical Conversations” No. 9, an ongoing series of Zoom seminars conducted by The New Polis with distinguished international academics. This seminar on economics, theology, debt, and the religious origins of the modern economy was held on May 18, 2021. While the ancient world offered various forms of large-scales debt […]
The following is the first of a two-part series. The Metapolitics of Sovereignty The question of what constitutes the political is a question of first principles. The question of the political versus politics in general – a distinction frequently drawn in the French language and in theory between le politique and la politique) – comes […]
America is fracturing. America is unravelling. Such a proposition, controversial four years ago, seems almost a truism these days. But a phenomenology of the Great American Crackup, quite evident in view of routine headlines and the apocalyptic and ostensibly calamitous outcome of the upcoming presidential election if the opposing party wings, according to the narratives […]
The following is the full text of a brief talk that was given as part of a special symposium, or webinar, on religious rights conducted on Oct. 9, 2020 by Human Rights Media. Thomas Jefferson, who by most historical accounts is the historical godfather of the human rights movement, declared to his fellow American revolutionary […]
Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, albeit not by a popular majority of votes, largely on his promise to “build the wall” that would stem the tide of illegal immigration across the southern border. Two and a half years into his administration the trope of the “wall” has become a master signifier […]
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 […]
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 community. We have to first […]