The ability or inability of insiders to hear the silences that arise on the other side of the borders drawn by colonizing societies around themselves, to perceive them as the echo of missing voices, may constitute, for the victims of colonialism, an indication of whether they can place their hopes for a more just world in something other than violence.
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.
We present some AAR/SBL Annual Meeting 2025 sessions sponsored by the PTN-afilliated Political Theology Program Unit.
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.
