Political Theology on Edge: Ruptures of Justice and Belief in the Anthropocene(Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia)

In Political Theology on Edge, the discourse of political theology is seen as situated on an edge-that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared planet. Each of the essays in this volume attends to how climate change and our ecological crises intersect and interact with more traditional themes of political theology.
While the tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt-and the critical attempts to disengage religion from his rightwing politics-the contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. Important themes include the Anthropocene, ecology, capitalism, sovereignty, Black Lives Matter, affect theory, continental philosophy, destruction, and suicide. This book features world renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking.
Contributors: Gil Anidjar, Balbinder Singh Bhogal, J. Kameron Carter, William E. Connolly, Kelly Brown Douglas, Seth Gaiters, Lisa Gasson-Gardner, Winfred Goodwin, Lawrence Hillis, Mehmet Karabela, Michael Northcott, Austin Roberts, Noelle Vahanian, Larry L. Welborn

Introduction: Political Theology on Edge
Catherine Keller and Clayton Crockett 1
PART I : POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND THE ANTHROPOCENE
1. The Anthropocene as Planetary Machine
William E. Connolly 19
2. Anthropocenic Journeys
Michael Northcott 35
3. Resisting Geopower: Political Theologies of the Anthropocene
Austin Roberts 57
PART II : DESTRUCTION AND SUICIDE
4. The Tradition of Destruction (Kaf ka's Law)
Gil Anidjar 79
5. Suicide Notes (In Remembrance of David Buckel)
Winfield Goodwin 91
6. Catachresis in the Margins: Notes on Theologico-Political Method
Lawrence E. Hillis 109
PART III : AFFECTIVE AND AXIOMATIC INTERVENTIONS
7. Doing Theology When Whiteness Stands Its Ground
Kelly Brown Douglas 139
8. Paul between Protagoras and Rancière: "On the basis of equality, . . . that there may be equality"
Larry L. Welborn 149
9. Listening for the Power of the People: A Political Theology of Affect
Lisa Gasson-Gardner 165
PART IV : GLOBAL POLITICAL THEOLOGIES
10. Undressing Political Theology for an Animal-Saint Redress
Balbinder Singh Bhogal 183
11. What Is Political about Political Islam?
Mehmet Karabela 214
PART V : FROM GENOCIDE TOWARD A SACRED POLITICS
12. #BlackLivesMatter and Sacred Politics
Seth Gaiters 237
13. Genocide and the Sin of Identity
Noëlle Vahanian 254
14. Mystic S/Zong!
J. Kameron Carter 272
Acknowledgments 313
List of Contributors 315

Clayton Crockett is a professor and the director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Derrida After the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism, and a co-editor of Doing Theology in the Age of Trump: A Critical Report on Christian Nationalism. He is a fellow of Westar Institute's Seminar on God and the Human Future.

Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion, Drew University. She works amid the tangles of ecosocial, pluralist, feminist philosophy of religion and theology. Her books include Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming; On the Mystery; Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement; Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. She has co-edited several volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, most recently Political Theology on Edge: Ruptures of Justice and Belief in the Anthropocene. Her latest monograph is Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances.

Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Religion and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is currently completing a manuscript titled Sparta and Gaza: The Tradition of Destruction; sections of it have been published here and there.

Balbinder Singh Bhogal is a professor in religion and the holder of the Sardarni Kuljit Kaur Bindra Chair in Sikh Studies at Hofstra University, NY. His primary research interests are South Asian religions and cultures specializing in the Sikh tradition, particularly the Guru Granth Sahib, its philosophy and exegesis. Secondary research interests include critical theory, political mysticism, and decolonial, animal, and affect studies.

J. Kameron Carter is a professor of religious studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has additional appointments in the English, Gender Studies, and African American and African Diaspora Studies departments. He is co-director of IU's Center for Religion and the Human. His work focuses on questions of race, empire, and ecology as matters of political theology and the sacred. Carter is the author of Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008), the editor of Religion and the Futures of Blackness (a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, 2013) as well as The Matter of Black Religion: Thinking with Charles H. Long (a special issue of the journal American Religion, 2021), and the author of the forthcoming book, The Anarchy of Black Religion (Duke University Press).

William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins, where he teaches political theory. His books include Resounding Events (Fordham, 2022); Climate Machines, Fascist Drives, and Truth (Duke, 2020); Aspirational Fascism (Minnesota, 2017); Facing the Planetary (Duke, 2017); Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Duke, 2008); Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minnesota, 1999); The Ethos of Pluralization (Minnesota, 1995); and The Terms of Political Discourse (Princeton, 1983; 3rd ed., 1993). In a poll of American political theorists published in 2010, he was named the fourth most influential political theorist in America over the last twenty years, after Rawls, Habermas, and Foucault.

Clayton Crockett is a professor and the director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Derrida After the End of Writing: Political Theology and New Materialism, and a co-editor of Doing Theology in the Age of Trump: A Critical Report on Christian Nationalism. He is a fellow of Westar Institute's Seminar on God and the Human Future.

The Very Reverend Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas was named dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary and professor of theology at Union in September 2017. She was named the Bill and Judith Moyers Chair in Theology in November 2019. She also serves as the canon theologian at the Washington National Cathedral and theologian in residence at Trinity Church Wall Street. Dean Douglas is widely published in national and international journals and other publications. Her groundbreaking and widely taught book Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (1999) was the first to address the issue of homophobia within the Black church community. Her latest book, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (2015), examines the challenges of a "Stand Your Ground" culture for the Black church.

Seth Gaiters is a doctoral candidate and interdisciplinary scholar at the Ohio State University investigating the intersection of religion, race, and politics in the Americas. He is especially concerned with the conjuncture of religion and progressive social movements in the history of Black communities in the United States. Seth's dissertation examines the religiosity of the Movement for Black Lives, popularly called the Black Lives Matter movement. His study of these matters is driven by religious studies, Black studies, American cultural studies, critical theory, and political theology; alongside methods of narrative and discourse analysis.

Lisa Gasson-Gardner is a PhD candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies in Religion at Drew University. Her research interests include the status of truth in contemporary political discourse, ethnographic accounts of charismatic evangelical Christianity, radical theology, and political theology. She is a full-time instructor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Lisa is committed to dismantling white, cis, hetero, abled patriarchy everywhere.

Winfield Goodwin is a doctoral student in philosophy of religion at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.

Lawrence Hillis is a doctoral student at Drew University. Located within the department of Theological and Philosophical Studies in Religion, his transdisciplinary research focuses on the intersection of political theology, religion and economics, queer and affect theories, and childhood studies. Hillis is a candidate for ordination in the United Methodist Church and has received several awards and fellowships for his work pertaining to constructive theology and Wesleyan-Methodist studies.

Mehmet Karabela teaches in the School of Religion and the Department of History at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. He is the author of Islamic Thought through Protestant Eyes (Routledge, 2021) and Mustafa Sabri Efendi (Opsi Press, 2021). Karabela's articles and writings have also appeared in edited books and journals. He has taught courses on Islam, religion and democracy, political theology, and religion and politics in Muslim societies as well as seminars such as the European perception of Jews and Muslims during the Enlightenment and Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire.

Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion, Drew University. She works amid the tangles of ecosocial, pluralist, feminist philosophy of religion and theology. Her books include Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming; On the Mystery; Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement; Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public. She has co-edited several volumes of the Drew Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquium, most recently Political Theology on Edge: Ruptures of Justice and Belief in the Anthropocene. Her latest monograph is Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances.

Michael Northcott is a professor of religion and ecology at the Indonesian Consortium of Religious Studies, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2019–), and emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Edinburgh (2018–). He was guest professor at the University of Heidelberg in 2018. His most recent books include A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming (2008), A Political Theology of Climate Change (2013), and Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities (2015).

Austin Roberts is a doctoral candidate at Drew University in the Graduate Division of Religion. His current research focuses on the intersections of political theology, process philosophy, and critical Anthropocene studies. He lives, works, and teaches in Northern California.

Noëlle Vahanian is a professor of philosophy in the Social Justice and Civic Engagement program at Lebanon Valley College, in Annville, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Language, Desire, and Theology: A Genealogy of the Will to Speak (2003), The Rebellious No: Variations on a Secular Theology of Language (Fordham University Press, 2014), and co-author of An Insurrectionist Manifesto: Four New Gospels for a Radical Politics (2016). Her current research engages the problem of genocide and its relevance to philosophy of religion.

Larry L. Welborn is a professor of New Testament and early Christian literature at Fordham University in New York City and honorary professor of ancient history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Welborn holds an MAR from Yale Divinity School and a PhD from Vanderbilt University. Among his publications are Politics and Rhetoric in the Corinthian Epistles (1997), Paul, the Fool of Christ (2005), An End to Enmity (2011), Paul's Summons to Messianic Life (2015), and The Young against the Old (2018). Welborn is co-editor of Synkrisis, a series published by Yale University Press, and editor of the Paul in Critical Contexts series of Fortress Academic.