Democracy on Trial: October 13-14
What is the state of our democracy? Is democracy good for the world? How does religion support or hinder democratic practice? Throughout her career, Jean Bethke Elshtain has challenged both liberal and...
View ArticleLive From Occupied Wall Street
Christianity was forged as a movement in opposition to a hegemonic and oppressive Roman empire. Today, in that same spirit, battling against the oppressive weight of corporate greed and a government...
View ArticleReconfiguring Political Theology: an interview with Vincent Lloyd (Part 2)
First, I want to take social practices and norms as foundational. They do not come from anywhere else, not from people or institutions or God. It is practices and norms all the way down, as it were....
View ArticleRecovering Democratic Faith
By Jonathon Kahn, Vassar College Who are the fools among us who continue to have faith in democracy and in American democracy in particular? After a desultory three-year period of community organizing...
View ArticleCivic Republicanism and the Practice of Faith
With the elections in Spain two weeks ago, the first modern government to explicitly model itself on the work of an academic political philosopher was voted out of office. The Spanish Prime Minister,...
View ArticleThoughts on Democracy & Faith
During the past two decades, political liberalism has been put on trial. Political theorists indebted to Sheldon Wolin (William Connolly, Romand Coles, Bonnie Honig) have, in various ways, exposed...
View ArticleWhy I would like to help choose the next Archbishop of Canterbury
I would like a vote in the decision to choose the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Ideally, if I am honest, secretly, I would quite like to have the only vote. But that would be monarchy, and I don’t...
View ArticleDisillusionment, Democracy, and the Fate of President Obama
My post, “Two American Dreams and One Economic Reality,” looked at the debate about American values initiated by President Obama’s now famous quote: “You didn’t build that.” I argued that the radical...
View ArticleBook Preview – Towards a Post-Sovereign Foundational Politics: On Critical...
[Enrique Peruzzotti, Di Tella University, and Martín Plot, California Institute of the Arts, introduce their recently published collection on the work of Andrew Arato, Critical Theory and Democracy:...
View ArticleThe revolution against the state – something to celebrate this Fourth of July
As the Fourth of July, the 237th anniversary of America’s famous epoch-staging revolution against Britain arrives, the world is gripped by the strangest of ironies in this strangest of times. The...
View ArticlePolitical Theology and Islamic Studies Symposium: A potential collaboration...
In the coming weeks, the Political Theology blog will be hosting a symposium on Political Theology and Islamic Studies, bringing together reflections from a number of leading scholars at the...
View ArticleBook Preview: A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature by Anthony Paul Smith
[Anthony Paul Smith, La Salle University, previews his new book, A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).] I have a bad habit of making intellectual work...
View ArticleBook Preview: Modern Just War Theory by Michael Farrell
[Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, previews his new book, Modern Just War Theory: A Guide to Research (Scarecrow Press, 2013).] The just war tradition is one of several...
View ArticleLuther, Lacan, and the Heart of Human Destiny – What Psychoanalysis Can Tell...
Herman Westerink. The Heart of Man’s Destiny: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Early Reformation Thought. New York: Routledge, 2012. 161 pages. The question of the modern has always been a political one. We...
View ArticlePolitical Theology and Islamic Studies Symposium: Contemporary Islamism and...
I join this conversation as a student of comparative politics, writing a project that explores how islamiyun, often dubbed Islamists, imagine and enact democracy. Specifically, I use insights derived...
View ArticleTheolegal Officials (by Nathan C. Walker)
The United States is comprised of a religiously diverse citizenry, which leaves officials to balance the tension upheld by a constitution that simultaneously prevents the establishment of a national...
View ArticleThe Impossible Becoming Possible: Nonviolence and Democracy (by Jonathan McRay)
Apparently, nonviolence and democracy are strongly connected. Recent research suggests that nonviolent resistance campaigns are much more likely than violent ones to pave the way for “democratic...
View ArticleThe Dutch King’s Speech
Addressing the difficulties attending to necessary albeit unpopular reform of economic policy, the prime minister of Luxembourg Jean-Claude Juncker once made remarked famously, “We all know what to do,...
View ArticleThe Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the Corporate Statist Complex
Democracy is in crisis. Or, or more significantly, liberal democracy is in crisis. So writes Philip Coggan recently in The Economist, the Western world’s foremost punditocratic commentary on the...
View ArticleBook Preview – A Book Forged in Hell by Steven Nadler
Writing in May, 1670, the German theologian Jacob Thomasius fulminated against a recent, anonymously published book. It is, he claimed, “a godless document” that should be immediately banned in all...
View Article