Whenever someone tries to become an absolute sovereign, to make oneself “King” or “God”, such an act of sovereignization brings about the de-sovereignization or in-sovereignization of everyone else.
Eventually, we all need others, leaving cooperation, humility, and patience the only lasting realities of human access to power. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that power can abandon any of us, at any moment – even and especially on a debate stage, in full view of the entire planet. We all forget this lesson at our peril.
From Colombia to South Africa, from a decolonial stance to trauma theory, these scholars have offered polysemous approaches to the political as well as the theological.
This forum reflects on Elad Lapidot’s The Politics of Not Speaking. In contrast to the common understanding of politics as a domain of speaking, this work reveals an alternative tradition where the spoken word fails, collapses, breaks (i.e., a politics of not speaking).
By recovering the critical potential of religious practice, this symposium asks how political theology can support democratic institutions that are under threat.
Liturgy constitutes a space and a time in which theopolitical power circulates across many scales, with all the solidarities, tensions, conflicts, interpretations, appropriations, and subversions that this entails. The papers gathered here explore the lived reality of liturgical practices as they are enacted in various contexts and by diverse people, both reproducing and stretching the boundaries of Catholicism.
