Browsing by Subject "Political theology"

This work offers a theological reading of and response to migration restrictions in the United States of America, focusing on their instantiation in the U.S.-Mexico border and on the discourses and practices of citizenship and alienage that support these arrangements. Unlike most works in Christian immigration ethics, this work not only highlights the negative effects of migration policies, but also unearths the basic assumptions grounding these policies, all while displaying the racial and theological imaginaries grounding them.

The first part of this work argues that the assumption grounding all migration policies is “the preferential option for one’s own people,” that is, the view that citizens not only may but must prefer or prioritize the life of fellow citizens over that of non-citizens. The first chapter draws on French theorist Michel Foucault and decolonial intellectuals to offer a reading of three non-theological arguments for migration restrictions, namely, security, economics, and culture. In short, those who believe the U.S. must have migration restrictions believe that aliens may threaten the security, economy, and culture—in short, the life—of citizens. The second chapter interrogates theological arguments for national borders, the most visible way of restricting migration, showing that ultimately theologians assume the legitimacy of Westphalian nation-states. The third chapter offers a theological reading of the concrete effects of border practices on “illegal aliens,” arguing that national borders will continue to exist as long as citizens assume both that “our people” means “fellow citizens,” and also that they may and must prefer and prioritize their life over that of others. The latter assumption is particularly troubling because it implies that the insecurity, poverty, and cultural denigration that aliens face—though perhaps saddening—is ultimately just. The central argument of the second, constructive part of this work is that Christians (and others) should not prefer or prioritize fellow citizens over non-citizens. Chapter 4 discusses the nature and task of citizenship in light of the parable of the Merciful Samaritan in Luke’s Gospel, and chapter 5 employs Hispanic theologians to articulate an alternative account of faithful citizenship with undocumented Latina/o migrants.

The doctrine of election holds the dissertation together theologically. The first part shows that the preferential option for one’s own people—even when proclaimed by a theologian—is a secularized performance of the doctrine of election: citizens elect themselves for life and belonging, but in so doing they damn the undocumented to death and anxiety. The second part shows that God’s election of the Jews, favor for the poor, and destiny of fellowship for the world sets Christians on a trajectory of border-crossing solidarity that opposes the preferential option for one’s own and de-borders belonging.

The Church in America is in sharp decline despite the nearly 4,000 new churches that are started each year. This thesis poses critical questions about the viability and effectiveness of church planting in America and inquires whether new “missional” churches are truly impacting their communities. Through research and field experience, this project will present a church-planting and church-renewal model that may lead to both missional community impact and growing communal influence through the principles of community organizing. The model presented here in this thesis will drive church planters and leaders to view church more as a social movement that empowers communal agency toward a telos of human flourishing rather than simply a footprint of a worshipping community that is focused on numeric growth. The key finding presented in this work is the framework of building institutional power through empowering participants toward three specific sets of practices that make a church “missional”: Kingdom Missiology, Incarnational Ecclesiology, and Political Theology. This thesis argues that precisely within the intersection of these three principles, paralleled in models of community organizing, is where all churches, but especially church plants, can create movements that shape identity and cultivate human flourishing.

The Laws is generally regarded as Plato’s attempt to engage with the practical realities of political life, as opposed to the more idealistic, or utopian, vision of the Republic. Yet modern scholars have often felt disquieted at the central role of religion in the Laws’ second-best city and regime. There are essentially the two dominant interpretations on offer today: either religion supports a repressive theocracy, which controls every aspect of the citizens’ lives to such an extent that even philosophy itself is discouraged, or religion is an example of the kind of noble lie, which the philosopher must deceive the citizens into believing—viz., that a god, not a man, is the author of the regime’s laws. I argue that neither of these interpretations do justice to the dialogue’s intricately dramatic structure, and therefore to Plato’s treatment of civil religion. What I propose is a third position in which Plato both takes seriously the social and political utility of religion, and views theology as a legitimate, and even necessary, subject of philosophical inquiry without going so far as to advocate theocracy as the second best form of regime.

I conclude that a proper focus on the dialogue form, combined with a careful historical analysis of Plato’s use of social and political institutions, reveals an innovative yet traditional form of civil religion, purified of the harmful influence of the poets, based on the authority of the oracle at Delphi, and grounded on a philosophical conception of god as the eternal source of order, wisdom, and all that is good. Through a union of traditional Delphic theology and Platonic natural theology, Plato gives the city of the Laws a common cult acceptable to philosopher and non-philosopher alike, and thus, not only bridges the gap between religion and philosophy, but also creates a sense of community, political identity, and social harmony—the prerequisites for political order and stability. The political theology of the Laws, therefore, provides a rational defense of the rule of law (νόμος) re-conceived as the application of divine Reason (νοῦς) to human affairs.

This dissertation is an account of how contemporary Pakistani ulama grapple with their political realities and the Islamic state of Pakistan. The central conceptual question that scaffolds my dissertation is: How do Pakistani ulama negotiate tradition, authority and sovereignty with the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? In engaging with this issue, this dissertation employs a methodology that weds ethnography with rigorous textual analysis. The ulama that feature in this study belong to a variety of sectarian persuasions. The Sunni ulama are Deobandi and Barelvi; the Shia ulama in this study are Ithna Ashari.

In assessing the relationship between Pakistani ulama and their nation-state, I assert that the ulama's dialectical engagements with the state are best understood as a dexterous navigation between affirmation, critique, contestation and cultivation. In proposing this manner of thinking about Pakistani ulama's engagements with their state, I provide a more detailed and nuanced view of the ulama-state relationship compared to earlier works. While emphasizing Pakistani ulama's vitality and their impact on their state, this dissertation also draws attention to the manners in which the state impacts the ulama. It theorizes the subject formation of the ulama and asserts the importance of understanding the ulama as formed not just by the ethico-legal tradition in which they are trained but also by the state apparatus.

Pursuing the good life today is costly. Contemporary conceptions of freedom, flourishing, and progress depend on using vast amounts of natural resources like coal and oil: Oil is used to drive to church, fabricate children's toys, and import food; coal illuminates school classrooms and powers ventilators. These things constitute our lives. Yet, at the sites where these resources are extracted, stored, processed, used, and wasted, people get sick and die young, babies are born with congenital defects, lands are appropriated, rivers and soils are polluted, and habitats are lost. The environmental harms produced by our resource-intensive economies are concentrated in places scholars call “environmental sacrifice zones.” This project in constructive religious ethics examines these dynamics and seeks to understand the conditions and possibilities of confessing God as the giver of life while securing our lives through participation in economies that sacrifice others’ lives and lands. How should Christians bear witness to God’s life-giving economy of creation and salvation in a world littered with sacrifice zones?

Resources to answer this normative question are derived from analyzing the creation care organization Restoring Eden’s response to several of coal’s sacrifice zones and bringing fieldwork-derived concepts into constructive dialogue with theology, theory, and critical nature-society studies. Through ethnographic research and an extended case study of Restoring Eden’s citizen science community health studies in coal’s sacrifice zones in Central Appalachia, Chicago, and Birmingham, this study brings the practical wisdom of practitioners into academic debates. Though many residents in these sacrifice zones believed their poor health resulted from living near coal mines, waste sites, and coal plants, there was no scientific data about the correlation between community health and proximity to coal industrial sites. This absence inhibited efforts to end the sacrifices. Restoring Eden partnered with scientists, residents, activists, and volunteers from Christian colleges to fill this gap by making the human costs of coal visible in numbers, charts, and graphs that were then published in health journals. Coal industry personnel and their allies launched a campaign to discredit the group’s findings, politically defang them, and endow a research institute to provide knowledge that would favor industry. I contend that this case reveals the degree to which effective, concerted environmental action to contest sacrifice zones depends on local environmental knowledges that bear authority in public deliberations over coal issues.

My descriptive argument is that Restoring Eden’s citizen science studies integrated faith, science, and environmental action through the concepts of creation, sacrifice, truth-telling, and witness. They responded to what they perceived as the false sacrifice of human and nonhuman creatures through developing a form of ecopolitical witness they called “citizen science as restorative truth-telling.” Their integration of empirical, moral, and theological meanings of witness shows how science could be practiced to love God, neighbors, and creation.

The study begins by describing how the Restoring Eden projects foregrounded environmental knowledge production as a site of environmental practical reasoning about how to transform sacrifice zones. It then argues that sacrifice zones should be understood as sites of conflict between rival political ecologies of sacrifice: an extractivist ecology of sacrifice that sustains “our” lives and lands by putting “their” lives and lands to death and a Christological ecology of sacrifice that loves falsely sacrificed creatures by inventing practices that enable sacrifice zones to be transformed into sacred zones. Finally, science is shown to be enmeshed in these rival ecologies, and a set of practices to democratize and pluralize environmental knowledge is proposed as an aid to concerted action in response to extractivism’s sacrifice zones. This account of ecopolitical witness is contrasted with the technocratic theory of action often manifested by a climate change framework: Ecopolitical witness ought to begin not with the hole in the sky but with the holes in the ground, in our societies, and in our hearts.

This dissertation attempts to do two things. First, I provide a theological interpretation of congregation-based community organizing by connecting this activity to the politics of the church. The link between the two, I argue, is the rule of Christ, a non-hierarchical process of political judgment that operates in a mode of receptive generosity and vulnerability as well as accountability to deliberate and discern how best to resolve conflicts. Situating this activity within an apocalyptic orientation determined by lordship of Jesus Christ, I suggest that this process, when accompanied by the other structuring practices of the church, allows the social, historical community to embody the new age of God's reign. Congregation-based community organizing, I conclude, is the extension and extrapolation of this constitutive process, and therefore, can be understood as an act of mission in witness and service to the world. In addition, this missionary activity can also help to retool the church in the practice of binding and loosing, which has fallen into desuetude. Second, I describe how this missionary activity functions both faithfully and effectively to challenge and counteract the forces of late, global capital. By challenging the configuration and experience of time under capital, the work of organizing can serve to recover political judgment from a regnant market ideology so as to reconstitute the way decisions are made and conflicts resolved by opening them to a process more lilted to the justice of God's reign. Moreover, in doing so, the political work of organizing can serve to offer a new future through forgiveness and reconciliation to individuals and a society trapped within a capitalist history whose end is immanently experienced in the destructive pursuit of unlimited growth and expansion.