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This paper offers a potential solution to the collusion of theological claims about humanity and dehumanizing violence, socially mediated forms of harm that undermine human dignity. Using the work of theologian Edward Schillebeeckx and philosopher Judith Butler, it promotes the force of Christian eschatological hope as a methodological pathway beyond such harm. Schillebeeckx’s thought responds to experiences of contrast and suffering by reimagining humanity in line with the Reign of God and promoting a form of theology that works to defend the humanum, the new humanity announced by God coming into creation. Butler examines the ways a “world” conditions human subjectivity as circumscribed by violence. Their political philosophy promotes a nonviolent force of hope as a practice of worldbuilding. In integrating Schillebeeckx’s and Butler’s reflections on violence and humanity, this paper challenges theology to implement the force of hope to actively dismantle forms of dehumanizing violence through generating new worlds.
This presentation argues that political theology clarifies the problem of populist conflict, and it offers resources that can help us address it. I will focus my reflections on Justice and Love by Mary Zournazi and Rowan Williams (2021). Zournazi and Williams present a compelling case for the view that religion is a force for peace. In my reading, however, they underestimate the role of religious traditions in encouraging violence, and they overstate the value of civility. In response, I will argue that political theology can incorporate the commitment to political conflict described by feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, and Joan Wallach Scott. In my view, medieval negative theology models a politics that is capacious enough to incorporate connection and conflict, sympathy and refusal, appreciation and anger.
Two methodologies dominate queer theologies: an apologetic hermeneutics that seeks to normalize queer people, and a paranoid hermeneutics that seeks to upend systems of determining and validating what is normal. The apologetic approach fails to dismantle insider-outsider systems of recognition; it merely redraws the borders. The paranoid approach reduces the ethical value of queerness to an antisocial ascetic ideal; it thus eclipses the pleasures of queer worldmaking. This paper describes an alternative methodology that I call (with apologies to José Esteban Muñoz) reparative-disidentification. Two recent texts exemplify this approach: Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues and Ashon Crawley’s The Lonely Letters. These texts offer what neither the paranoid nor the apologetic mode can achieve: a queer economy of representation that circumvents straight, white, capitalist systems of recognition altogether, clearing ground for otherwise worlds in which queers receive the wahi of their queerness as an invitation to experiment with new relational forms.