Vincent Lloyd

Political theology has emerged as an enormously energetic, creative way of exploring the complex relationships between religion, politics, and culture around the world. Political Theology Reimagined centers decolonial, Black, queer, feminist, and Marxist modes of critical practice to offer a cutting-edge vision of the field that foregrounds a political theology animated by both a fascination with and a suspicion of the secular. Among other things, contributors explore how religious ideas, practices, and imaginations are inflected by anti-Blackness, patriarchy, and colonial histories; theorize anew the status of secularization narratives; probe the universality and translatability of conceptual abstractions; and experiment with the powers of genealogy and speculation. In short, they grapple with religion and critique in all their complexity, opening new itineraries in political theology by transforming its fundamental theoretical coordinates. Traversing diverse sites, from South Asia to the Middle East to Indigenous North America, and working across diverse scales, from the national to the planetary to the cosmic, this volume models the future of political theology by pairing rigorous critique with a commitment to collective liberation.

What does “life” mean in the protest slogan “Black Lives Matter”? This article draws on a close reading of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal to offer an answer to this question. In his poem, Césaire carefully examines the ways racial and colonial domination distort life. He identi?ies various false accounts of life complicit in domination, and he points toward an alternative. The article com-pares Césaire’s alternative to accounts of life put forward by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry, suggesting that Césaire pushes his cri-tique in a similar direction, but goes further.

What does “life” mean in the protest slogan “Black Lives Matter”? This article draws on a close reading of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal to offer an answer to this question. In his poem, Césaire carefully examines the ways racial and colonial domination distort life. He identi????ies various false accounts of life complicit in domination, and he points toward an alternative. The article com-pares Césaire’s alternative to accounts of life put forward by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry, suggesting that Césaire pushes his cri-tique in a similar direction, but goes further.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel by Thomas A. LewisVincent LloydReligion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel THOMAS A. LEWIS Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 277 pp. $135Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel explicates Hegel’s account of religion and contends that Hegel offers important insights for contemporary conversations in religious studies. Specifically, Thomas Lewis argues in this book that Hegel’s thought enriches discussions regarding the relationship between philosophy and religion, religious pluralism, the meaning of tradition, and the concept of religion itself.Lewis is careful and reasonable in his explication of Hegelian texts, cognizant of recent scholarship on Hegel in both English and German, but also attentive [End Page 226] to Hegel’s location in German political history and the history of ideas. The young Hegel, we learn, was primarily a social theorist and not a philosopher. Concerned with social fragmentation in the context of the late Holy Roman Empire, Hegel saw religion as a means to unify. He understood civil religion (not just philosophy or natural religion) as capable of engaging the imagination in a way that motivates people to act in line with reason and so to act morally. In Hegel’s mature thought, religion is integrated into his broader philosophical system; it is an entry point into the dialectical movement beyond immediacy. Yet Hegel continues to think that religion inculcates crucial intuitions about what matters most to us as we live together. While some philosophers have recently emphasized Hegel’s deep debt to Kant, others hold that Hegel’s account of religion demonstrates his distance from Kant. For Lewis, Hegel’s account of religion, as the entwined beliefs and practices representing a community’s sensibilities, demonstrates his close relation to Kant and his continuing struggle to bring together sensibility and understanding, worldly objects, and human thoughts.Lewis occasionally ventures beyond the explication of Hegel, although these forays sometimes feel brief and thin. Like Alasdair MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jeffrey Stout, Lewis presents Hegel’s view of religion as essentially mixing—or synthesizing—history, narrative, community, and identity. Lewis understands Stout to be in agreement with Hegel, extending Hegel’s account of religious tradition to include the broader array of traditions that we encounter in the contemporary world. He suggests that Hauerwas could learn to better appreciate religion’s conceptual aspect from Hegel. Hegel and MacIntyre share what might seem to be a Christian triumphalism, but Lewis reads this more sympathetically as a self-awareness that rejects relativism. They both argue that (certain versions of) Christianity can account for the insights of other worldviews and can address contradictions in those other worldviews. But MacIntyre requires that such judgments be based on deep knowledge of two traditions in a comparison; Hegel paints non-Protestant traditions with very broad strokes. Indeed, this is the point where Lewis himself is the most critical of Hegel. He charges that Hegel’s attempt to survey all major world religions (in his account of “determinate religion”) is overly ambitious, and he argues that Hegel would be more successful had he detached this survey from his argument for Christianity’s status as the “consummate religion.” Hegel’s conception of consummate religion should be understood more broadly, Lewis argues, to include nonreligious beliefs and practices, such as civic education, that reflect the spirit of a community.Lewis claims that Hegel complicates the supposed Protestant bias of religious studies scholarship with its focus on belief at the expense of practice. Although unequivocally Protestant, Hegel’s approach to religion emphasizes the inextricability of practice and belief. But what was Hegel’s approach? Was it an [End Page 227] alternative Protestant tradition? Was it a theological movement or simply a philosophical one? Further, it is unclear whether Lewis’s Hegel would find any use for religious ethics other than as an idiom for ethical reflection suited to those who are not capable of advancing to philosophical heights.Vincent LloydSyracuse UniversityCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics...

Three recent attempts to draw resources for theology from the work of philosopher and social theorist Gillian Rose are examined. Although her work has received little attention, it has been influential in the development of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’. Yet her dense style has led to many misunderstandings of her work. Each of the three attempts to draw theological resources from her work examined is problematic, either because it misrepresents Rose's work or because it reads Rose too narrowly. The outline of a positive account of Rose's philosophy is developed through critical engagements with these three readers. I suggest that an alternative theological appropriation of Rose that focuses on her account of the theological virtues, particularly faith and love, might be possible

If liberal Protestantism begins with suspicion of tradition, is “thick” liberal Protestant theology possible or must liberal Protestant theology always be “thin”? This review essay examines several recent contributions to “thick” theology that make use of, and speak to, social and political engagement. The books under review describe and reflect on the varied forms of Christian political activism and organizing that have emerged in recent years around issues of immigration, fair wages, and global justice. I argue that a distinction between Christian activism and Christian organizing must be made, where the former denotes advocacy on behalf of a community and the latter means standing together with a community, bringing out the capacities of community members, and allowing oneself to be transformed in the process. Further, I reflect on whether liberal Christian theology necessarily results in liberal politics

Gillian Rose was a philosopher, social theorist, memoirist, and Jewish convert to Christianity who died an untimely death in 1995. She offers a novel account of faith, which grows out of her Hegelian philosophical background inflected by her reading of Kierkegaard and her rediscovered Jewish heritage. For Rose, faith is a mode of social practice. Rose's conception of faith is here reconstructed by translating her obscure jurisprudential idiom into the language of social practices and norms. The conception of secular faith developed by Rose is shown to have implications for contemporary discussions of ethics and politics. The contemporary relevance of Rose's work is made clear through comparison with recent work by Robert Brandom, Robert Adams, and Patrick Deneen

Faith-based community organizing is receiving an increasing amount of attention from scholars of religious ethics. This essay is motivated by the worry that accounts of such organizing depend on a problematic embrace of multiculturalism, an embrace characteristic of our neoliberal era. Like the powers that they purport to challenge, organizing efforts often embrace difference only when it is carefully managed. This is being challenged by theological accounts of organizing that take the religious dimension of such efforts seriously, as well as by feminist critiques of community organizing. This essay probes how race might be taken just as seriously by religious ethicists who study community organizing. Drawing on the civil rights movement's legacy of faith-based community mobilization as well as traditions of Black theological reflection, this essay challenges the easy embrace of multi-racial coalitions in faith-based organizing

The contemporary American philosopher David Velleman recently noted, “Love is a moral emotion precisely in the sense that its spirit is closely akin to that of morality.”1 Although their kindred spirits are manifest, it is the tension between love and morality that at first glance is striking. Love seems to be supremely personal, unique to one individual and directed at another for highly contingent and possibly mysterious reasons. Even if Kantian or Utilitarian fantasies of objective morality are dismissed, the common alternatives that put emphasis on community values or obligation to the Other are still distant from an affect directed…