Presenters

William Connolly, Johns Hopkins University
"Paper Title"

ABSTRACT

Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas
"Non-Theology and Political Ecology: Post-Secularism, Repetition, and Insurrection"

This paper applies François Laruelle’s thinking of non-philosophy to theology, to imagine what a non-theology would look like in contemporary terms of political ecology. First, I will contextualize the issue of political theology in post-secularist terms. The return of religion in thought, politics and culture deconstructs any simple opposition between religion and the secular. This return is also tied to the breakdown of modern liberalism and the crisis of global capitalism in terms of ecology, economics and energy, due to the demands for perpetual growth conflicting with the increasing scarcity of natural resources. Second, I will introduce some reflections based on Deleuze, concerning repetition, intensity, entropy, and thermodynamics. Repetition is the creation of entropy, but entropy is not heat death and irreversible loss of order, but rather the reduction of gradient differentials. What Deleuze calls repetition is similar to what Laruelle calls unilateral duality. Finally, I will briefly set out the task of a non-theology conceived in analogy to what Laruelle calls non-philosophy. Non-theology is contrasted with the-theology, which is more orthodox and hegemonic, proceeding according to the principle of sufficient theology, to use Laruelle’s terminology. Non-theology breaks with the logic of theology, becoming a more minor discourse in Deleuzian terms. Just as Laruelle attempts to think about religion and Christianity in terms of gnosis, heresy, and insurrection, here I deploy non-theology in insurrectionist terms, an insurrection with and against theology.

Gary Dorrien, Union Theological Seminary
"Paper Title"

ABSTRACT

Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Yale University
"Between a Rock and an Empty Place: Political Theology and Democratic Legitimacy"

In the last two decades political theorists have revisited the debate about the theological origins of the concept of sovereignty, and particularly the question of how these origins affect the legitimacy of contemporary democracy. In particular, Claude Lefort’s political theology has become an obligated reference in debates about representation, populism, and democratic legitimacy. According to Lefort, what keeps a democratic order from collapsing into totalitarianism, is the legacy of a divine conception of sovereignty which left “an empty place” in its wake. For Lefort and his contemporary followers, the hope and promise of democracy requires that we leave this place untouched. This paper argues that despite its many strengths in explaining 20th C totalitarianism, Lefort’s view cannot provide the positive political morality that democracy requires because it retains the hang-ups of early modern sovereignty such as its decisionistic conception of divine and earthly power. Rather than thinking of popular sovereignty as a negative place that demands distance and awe, democracy could profit from acknowledging the inherent indeterminacy of the people as a positive force that requires creativity and produces change. The people conceived as a process, is not unified or complete, but it does exist and it can be a positive source of political morality. However, given that the people is indeterminate, it cannot be described solely in the abstract; it consists of concrete practices of political contestation, as well as other lived practices relating individuals and communities to each other, and to the places where they dwell. In the paper I illustrate my claims with examples from the border of the United States and Mexico and show how the particular configurations of individuals, institutions and the environment can anchor democratic practices and aspirations worth upholding.  

Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Williams College
“'The River at Its Source Sang'”: Imagining Ecology in Aztlán and the New Jerusalem 

Global climate change has already caused states and cities throughout the southwestern United States to enter into litigation over the most valuable resource in the desert landscape: the fresh water of rivers. These same rivers have long been deeply informative of how people have understood themselves and their places in the region because rivers and other bodies of water are often both a life-giving resource and a basis upon which borders are demarcated. This paper is interested in how people read and make meaning in relationship to bodies of water, and I particularly examine the interaction between two contemporary, literary Chicana/o imaginations of Aztlán (Rudolfo Anaya and Cherríe Moraga) as utopian and ecological space and imaginations of Revelation's New Jerusalem as water-complex geography. Given the importance of Aztlán and the New Jerusalem to utopian visions for contemporary communal imaginations of the U.S. Southwest, this paper investigates what possibilities and limits reside in locating communal selves amidst utopian visions and narratives. Given that Anaya's and Moraga's Aztlán as well as Revelation"s New Jerusalem present this life-giving water as being both “without cost” and essential, what is at stake in reading for and making meaning with reference to water and utopia? What sorts of reading politics get practiced as the rivers of life in the Southwest fall under increasing and unequal ecological and economic pressures? 

Melanie Johnson-Debaufre, Drew Theological School
"Paper Title"

ABSTRACT

Vincent Lloyd, Syracuse University
"From the Theopaternal to the Theopolitical: On James Baldwin and Barack Obama"

This paper investigates what divine fatherhood means in the African American context, where fatherhood is always already put under erasure by white supremacy. The analogue between divine and human sovereignty at the center of recent discussions of political theology depends on a very specific way of understanding the sovereignty of God. Black fatherhood provides a more equitable alternative model. This suggestion is developed through readings of the autobiographical writings of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, attentive to the slippages between divine and human fatherhood, and to the theopolitics that results.

Elias Ortega-Aponte, Drew Theological School
"Paper Title"

ABSTRACT

Joerg Rieger, Perkins School of Theology, SMU
"Contesting the Common Good and Religion in the Context of Capitalism: Abrahamic Alternatives"

According to the ideals of capitalism, selfishness and greed are not vices but contribute to the common good, due to the invisible hand of the market. Today, these ideals are increasingly called into question, based in part on the experience of sustained economic hardship and downturn. Rather than developing alternatives by juxtaposing one set of ideals with other sets of ideals, more robust notions of the common good grow out of the lived experiences and the emerging deep solidarity of the majority of people who no longer benefit from the structures of capitalism. In this process, alternative experiences of religion develop that resonate with the Abrahamic religious traditions, which have their own roots in situations marked by power differentials and struggles for liberation.

Nathan Schneider
"Crazy Eyes: Notes from Occupy Wall Street's May Day Apocalypse"

After creating an international phenomenon virtually from scratch in the fall of 2011, organizers in Occupy Wall Street set about planning something even bigger for the following May Day: a general strike. But as May Day itself approached, the event that they hoped would be their movement's apotheosis—"the face of God," one of them said—began to seem like it might be the last hurrah. Based on up-close reporting at discreet planning meetings and last-minute sign-making sessions, this is a study of the ambivalent space between religion and politics so apparent as Occupiers brought art, organizing, and theological themes together in order to sustain and deepen their movement.

Kathryn Tanner, Yale University
"The Ambiguities of Transcendence"

In conversation with the work of William Connolly, this paper tries to uncover socio-political ambiguities in the ideas of divine transcendence associated with the (evangelical) Christian/capitalist resonance machine.  Reinterpreted and re-deployed, those very ideas, I argue, can be aligned with the sensibilities of a counter-resonance machine helping to push current configurations of capitalism in more eco-egalitarian directions. 

John Thatamanil, Union Theological Seminary
"The Invention of 'The Religious' and 'The Political': Genealogy of Religion, Interfaith Dialogue and Political Theory"

Sociologists, political theorists and theologians now not only recognize that the long forecasted death of religion has failed to materialize but observe instead that religion has returned with teeth. But just what is this “religion” that refused to leave? What if the modern secularization project was itself the very moment in which “religion” was invented, and invented precisely to be marginalized and excluded? On such an account, resurgent religion may be best understood as a politicized version of a relatively recent invention.
The constitution, marginalization and return of a phenomenon that is anything but ancient suggests that we must attend to and interrogate the very configuration of religion qua religion (and the secular as secular—with the political putatively residing securely within the secular) instead of venturing a project that seeks to define the proper relationship between the “religious” and “the political,” in a fashion that presumes to know securely what these two are. Too often, conversation proceeds under the assumption that we know what it means to be religious and to be political but just don’t yet know how these two modes of being ought to be properly related. This paper contests these assumptions in conversation with William Connolly’s decades long refusal of secularism, a salutary posture that does not presume that the “religious” and the secular political can be tightly cordoned off from each other.
I will also offer an account of the religious—sensitive to the genealogical constitution of that very category—that can aid in the important work of rendering identity fluid and always under construction rather than as a reified site of contestation. As W.C. Smith long ago argued, religion, in its modern senses, serves to reify identity and even absolutize it thereby becoming yet another and often toxic source of social friction rather than a lubricant that serves the common good. Other possibilities are offered by religious traditions—possibilities that suggest that our identities are never securely knowable because they open up into mystery (being-itself), because they are infinitely dense and contingent, and because they are through and through constituted by an open-ended network of relationality. These sites of ontological wonder—attention to which is cultivated by religious traditions—can be appreciated by naturalists and theists alike as sacred. Attending to these ontological mysteries which elicit wonder can open up ways of being together that honor difference without fetishizing it. Connolly is right to suggest that without such recursive labor, labor that can help us to appreciate that our own deepest convictions and identities are contingent and contestable formations, it is unlikely that polities can withstand the shearing pressures behind the impulse to demonize those whom we take to be other and exclude them from status and voice in the body politic.

Nimi Wariboko, Andover Newton Theological School
"Elements of Tradition, Protest and New Creation in Monetary Systems:
A Political Theology of Market Miracles"

This transdisciplinary paper provides a religious theory of the tripartite articulation of economic life in order to craft a messianic conception of market miracles as a basis for interpreting the microphysics of expansion of a national-monetary economy and its “common good.” What is at stake in the relation between market miracles and the common good is the caesura in the praxis of human freedom: the potentiality to do and the potentiality to not-do. The potentiality to not-do has been corrupted by modern democracy-capitalism and has become foreign to most citizens who need to redeem it for the (re)-construction of the common good or the good commons. The centre of the discourse, the threshold at which economics and theology pass into each other, the point of contact through which political philosophy and economics reflect into one another to offer a doctrine of freedom as the democratic citizen’s impotence in the face of threats to the commons and its good, is an original political theology of market miracles.

Respondents

Sharon Betcher is a free lance academic, living on Whidbey Island, Washington, and Affiliate Professor of Theology, Research and Teaching Fellow, at Vancouver School of Theology (Vancouver, BC).  She is the author of two academic manuscripts, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Fortress, 2007) and Spirit and Cosmopolis: Theology for Seculars (Fordham, forthcoming 2013) as well as essays on ecological, postcolonial and disabilities theologies within multiple anthologies.  Over the past several years, she has been exploring the diverse genres within creative nonfiction and recently won first place in the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts’ 100 Word Story Smash with her composition, “Blackberry Memorial” and in the Whidbey Island Writer’s Association 2012 1200 word memoir competition with her composition “Facing Diminishment.”

Peter G. Heltzel is Associate Professor of Theology and Director of the Micah Institute at New York Theological Seminary. He is the author of Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race and American Politics (Yale University Press). His edited volumes include The Chalice Introduction to Theology (Chalice Press), Evangelicals and Empire (Brazos Press) with Bruce Ellis Benson, and Theology in Global Context (T&T Clark Press) with Amos Yong. In addition to writing for Books & Culture, Science & Theology News, and Sojourners, he has published numerous articles in journals, such as Political Theology, Princeton Theological Review and the Scottish Journal of Theology.

W. Anne Joh is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

Catherine Keller is Professor of Constructive Theology at the Theological School of Drew University. In her teaching, lecturing and writing, she develops the relational potential of a theology of becoming. Her books reconfigure ancient symbols of divinity for the sake of a planetary conviviality—a life together, across vast webs of difference. Thriving in the interplay of ecological and gender politics, of process cosmology, poststructuralist philosophy and religious pluralism, her work is both deconstructive and constructive in strategy. She is currently finishing Cloud of the Impossible: Theological Entanglements, which explores the relation of mystical unknowing, material indeterminacy and ontological interdependence.

Hyo-Dong Lee is Assistant Professor of Theological Philosophy at Drew Theological School. Professor Lee’s research and teaching interests lie in comparative theology and comparative philosophy of religion, with a focus on the dialogue between the Christian/Western theological and philosophical tradition on the one hand and Northeast Asian philosophical and religious thought, including Confucianism, Daoism, Donghak, etc., on the other. His interests extend also to postcolonial theories and European postmodern thought.

Otto Maduro is a philosopher and sociologist of religion. Married to the writer and scholar Nancy Noguera, both are parents to Mateo (b. 1995). Otto has an M.A. in Philosophy of Religion (1973), another in Sociology of Religion (1975), and a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion (1977) from the Catholic University of Louvain, all magna cum laude. Involved in the Latin American Liberation Theology movement since its inception, he has published, in over 20 countries and seven languages, close to 200 essays and five books -- and edited three other books -- on themes of religion, knowledge, and liberation. His latest book is Mapas para la fiesta: Reflexiones latinoamericanas sobre la crisis y el conocimiento (La Paz, Bolivia: Verbo Divino, 2008). Since 1992 he is Professor of World Christianity at Drew University Theological School. He directed a study of U.S. Latina/o immigrant Pentecostal churches in Newark (NJ) with grants from the Ford Foundation and the ATS/Henry Luce Fellows in Theology Program (1999, 2006). He was elected in 2006 National Director of the Hispanic Summer Program, and in 2011 President of the American Academy of Religion. He received the Virgilio Elizondo Award from ACHTUS (the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians in the U.S.) in 2012.

Dan Miller is Assistant Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Landmark College. He researches in the areas of religion, secularism, and political theory; contemporary Continental philosophy; and political theology. He is currently completing his first book, The Secular in Question: Politics, Religion, Democracy.

Johannes Morsink is Professor of Political Science at Drew University. Always having had political philosophy as his first love, in 1992 he moved over to Drew’s department of political science, where he teaches courses in the history of political thought, in political theory and in jurisprudence and human rights. He does research in the area of human rights and has published articles on that subject in the Human Rights Quarterly.

Inese Radzins is Assistant Professor of Theology and Dorothea Harvey Professor of Swedenborgian Studies at Pacific School of Religion. Her research interests lie in the intersection of theology and political theory, philosophy, and women’s/gender studies. She teaches courses in constructive, feminist, and political theology, Swedenborgian thought, and modern philosophy.

Mayra Rivera is Assistant Professor of Theology and Latina/o Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Her transdisciplinary work in critical theological studies engages key Christian themes in relation to current theory and philosopy Rivera's work also analyzes the role of religious ideas in Latina theory and literature. Her book The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God (2007) explores the relationship between models of divine otherness and ideas about interhuman difference. She is also co-editor, with Stephen Moore, of Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology (2010) and, with Catherine Keller and Michael Nausner, of Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (2004). She is currently writing a book that explores the connections between theological and philosophical metaphors of body and flesh.

Jeffrey W. Robbins is Professor of Religion & Department Chair of Religion & Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College. His area of specialization is in continental philosophy of religion. His teaching interests include contemporary religious thought, world religions, Christianity, Islam, and religion and politics. In addition to teaching courses in religion, he also is the director of the American Studies program and the college colloquium.

Santiago Slabodsky is Assistant Professor of Ethics of Globalization at Claremont School of Theology. He is an Argentinean scholar trained in Jewish, Liberationist and Decolonial philosophies. He researches global ethics and the intersection between Jewish and Postcolonial social theories, especially in Latin America, the Caribbean and the Maghreb.

 

Workshop Leaders

Debi Hall-Dean: "An Hour on Route 78: Bridging Environmental and Economic Landscapes Through Partnership"

Rev. Harper Fletcher: "Divest and Reinvest – Climate Change Campaigns for Campuses and Faith Groups"

Darnell L. Moore: "Standing in the Intersection: An Interactive Conversation on Race, Sexuality, Activism, and Religiosity"

George Schmidt: "Taking Place: Squatting and Organizing with and Among the Homeless"

Nathan Schneider: "How Religious Studies Can Take Over the World"

Michael Sniffen: "From the Pulpit to the Streets: Empowering God's People for Social and Economic Justice"

Leena Waite: "An Hour on Route 78: Bridging Environmental and Economic Landscapes Through Partnership"

 

Student Presenters

Youn Tae An, Drew University
"Labor, Creation, and the Death of God: Immanent Exteriority in Hegel, Negri, and Dussel"

Karen Bray, Drew University
"The Common Good of the Flesh: A Methodology of the Obscene in the Work of William Connolly and Jeorg Rieger"

Elijah Prewitt-Davis, Drew University
"Chick-fil-A Recognize(s) Me!: The Politics of Recognition After God"

Shelley Dennis, Drew University
Respondent

Elizabeth Freese, Drew University
Respondent

P. Joshua Griffin, University of Washington
"The Event’s Becoming: Imminent Ecotheology in an Age of Planetary Liminality"

Hannah Hofheinz, Harvard Divinity School
Respondent

Charon Hribar, Drew University
"Common Sense/Good Sense: Rethinking the 'Common Good' and the Myth of the Middle in U.S. Society"

Anatoli Ignatov, Johns Hopkins University
“The Earth is like a Skin:” Earth Priests, Sacred Groves and African Eco-Theologies"

Beatrice Marovich, Drew University
"Spectral Creatures and the Figure of Justice"

Dhawn Martin, Drew University
"A Cosmopolitan Political Theology: Engaging 'The Political' as Incarnational Field of Emergence"

Michael Oliver, Drew University
"Commonly Good Sacrifice: Kenosis as a Theological Intervention for Environmental Politics"

A. Paige Rawson, Drew University
"A (Socioeconomic) Hermeneutics of Chayim: The Theo-Ethical Implications of Reading with Wisdom"

Sara Rosenau, Drew University
"Re-considering the Communitarian Argument in Political Theology"