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Idealism, materialism, secularism?
When I teach early modern political theory to undergraduates, I begin by trying to conjure a worldview and subjective experience not organized by capitalism, science, reason, secularism, and the...
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Sex & aggression
Alongside Taylor’s exploration of the conditions secularism—and therefore also of belief—in Euroatlantic late modernity, there is a surprisingly unreconstructed Christian faith that comes out when he...
View ArticleThe paradoxes of Pakistan
[This is one in a series of posts responding to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. For more on the situation in Pakistan, see the recently launched SSRC essay forum, Pakistan in Crisis.—ed.] Yet...
View ArticleHow religion gets mixed with violence
[This is one in a series of posts responding to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. For more on the situation in Pakistan, see the recently launched SSRC essay forum, Pakistan in Crisis.—ed.] The...
View ArticleJihad, fitna, and Muslims in Mumbai
As is now well known, bombs and gunfire rained down on multiple sites in the Indian city of Mumbai in a coordinated terror attack that began on November 26, 2008. The attacks reportedly killed nearly...
View ArticleViolence, publicity, and sovereignty
Mumbai’s Gateway of India was built to greet King Edward V of England when he arrived in 1911 for the Delhi Durbar, to inaugurate the new capital city. Like the new capital, the Gateway in Mumbai...
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Cheerleading for war?
One of the questions that plagues my study of American religion is why there is such a frequent close correspondence between American Christianity and war making. This question displays my own liberal...
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Gandhi meets Bin Laden
James L. Rowell, an assistant professor of religion at Flager College, published a book late last year called Gandhi and bin Laden: Religion at the Extremes: Rowell says there are few historical or...
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Exploring Buddhist violence
Michael Jerryson discusses his new book Buddhist Warfare, co-edited with Mark Juergensmeyer, explaining “how the notion of a purely mystical and otherworldly Buddhism—promoted by some of the great...
View ArticleTaking exception to American exceptionalism
In the recent posts on civil religion, I see two related issues. First, scholars ask, what is it? Second, they ask, how do we judge its value? Three alternatives emerge: in one, civil religion is alive...
View ArticleCatholics argue about waterboarding
In the first New York Times Beliefs column since the departure of Peter Steinfels, Mark Oppenheimer discusses the outrage among Catholics across the political spectrum about Bush speechwriter Marc...
View ArticleJudith Butler on Judaism, Israel, and anti-occupation politics
In Haaretz, Judith Butler gives a long and personal interview to American-Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni: [Aloni:] It’s interesting because when the war on Gaza started, I couldn’t stay in Tel Aviv...
View ArticleProminent Pakistani cleric condemns political violence
John Esposito reports at On Faith that Muhammad Tahir Qadri, an influential Pakistani cleric, has “issued a 600-page fatwa, described as an ‘absolute’ condemnation of terrorism without ‘any excuses or...
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“A Carefully Crafted F**k You”
At Guernica, Nathan Schneider interviews Judith Butler. His introduction to the interview is a nice testament to the power of Butler’s work and an eloquent summary of her current preoccupations: Judith...
View ArticleReligion and violence in the early church
The ever prolific American historian Philip Jenkins recently published yet another book, The Jesus Wars, which deals with the issue of “religious violence.” In a guest contribution to the Washington...
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Cosmic war on a global scale: An interview with Mark Juergensmeyer
As director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Mark Juergensmeyer brings the sociology of religion to bear on the analysis of...
View ArticleOn good, evil, and the role of religion
In response to statements made by Mark Juergensmeyer in his recent interview with Nathan Schneider, Vincent Pecora writes that Juergensmeyer’s “sense that religion alone cannot cause violence does a...
View ArticleBron Taylor: “The Roots of James Lee’s Rage against Civilization”
Bron Taylor on the shooting last week of activist-cum-vigilante James Lee at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Silver Springs, MD: Claiming to be wrapped in explosives and armed with a handgun,...
View Article“Killing in the Name of. . .”
Ayça Çubukçu on state sovereignty and the political theology of humanitarian intervention, with regard to the ongoing crisis in Libya, at Jadaliyya: If I have raised the theological dimensions of...
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Have the jihadis lost the moral high ground to the rebels?
It has been a season of earthquakes, and the political ones in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Middle East may have shifted the moral high ground within Islamic opposition movements. Put...
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Implicated and enraged: An interview with Judith Butler
Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is among the leading social theorists alive today. Her most recent books are Frames of War (2009) and The Power of Religion in the...
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Political theology and liberalism
Over the coming weeks, The Immanent Frame will host a discussion of Paul W. Kahn’s recent book Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. What follows is an excerpt from the...
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Pluralizing political theology
Paul Kahn’s book offers bracing yet troubling meditations on the four chapters of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. Because Kahn aspires “to think with rather than think about” Schmitt, he necessarily...
View ArticlePractical Matters call for submissions
The journal Practical Matters is now seeking submissions for the Spring 2012 issue on Violence and Peace. Practical Mattersis an online, multimedia, transdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal designed...
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Not for the squeamish
Paul Kahn has written a remarkable meditation on Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. A truly adequate response would undoubtedly require a book at least as long as Kahn’s own. Instead, I want to offer...
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Ground: Zero
Paul Kahn’s brilliant and timely text must be welcomed for many reasons; in particular, for the way it re-introduces in the field of constitutional law and legal theory the debate on sovereignty and...
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After the secular age
Just out from Verso Press, Simon Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology investigates the role of religion in the postsecular twenty-first century: The return to...
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Responses to Qur’an burning in Afghanistan
Reports that NATO personnel had burned copies of the Qur’an first appeared in the New York Times on Tuesday, February 21. Since then, there have been several days of protest, leading to the deaths of...
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Death in the Middle East: What happens next?
On the 11th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt and U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya were attacked amidst protests over a trailer for a purported film entitled...
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The discourse of Islamic militancy
Over at ISLAMiCommentary, TIF contributor Mbaye Lo sees a clear disconnect and calls for a retrospective analysis in the wake of the furor created by the film Innocence of Muslims. Noting the...
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Preaching after the Trayvon Martin verdict
Saturday’s verdict in the case of neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who stood trial for the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, has ignited a renewed inquiry into...
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René Girard dies at 91
Earlier this month, Stanford University announced that prominent faculty member René Girard had died after a long illness. Among many contributions, Girard is best known to many for his theory of...
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Democracy and the secular predicament
In the United States, the Middle East is almost always presented as a problem to be solved—most significantly, the problem of religious extremism and conflict. Popular explanations of such conflict...
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A gesture was all there was
It was during a bus ride to my field site in 1984, a few months after the assassination of the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, that everyone on the bus began to notice a short steady beat of...
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Becoming nothing
By Harris & Ewing Studio [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsAn acquisitive mind would no doubt insist that the measure of man (and of everyone and everything else) is growth. Such a mind would...
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Ekklesia: An introduction
Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State takes the tenacious rubric of “church and state” and examines it through a series of revealing things: treaties, royal proclamations, bibles, staffs,...
View ArticleTrafficking as terror
In 2005, two young men were executed in Mashad, Iran, sealing multiple fates at once. Outside Iran, the execution was labeled an “execution of gay men because they were gay.” Inside Iran, the story was...
View ArticleChristian theology, feminism, and unmarked fatherhood
For a female theologian of my age, writing a post on divine fatherhood is a strange throwback experience. I grew up intellectually in the world of Beyond God the Father, After Patriarchy, Womanspirit...
View ArticleWhat does a son want?
To discuss fathers and their divinization and not mention Sigmund Freud would be surprising, albeit a welcome surprise in some quarters. To discuss Freud’s ruminations on the Divine without mentioning...
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