Volume 9, Issue 1

Is there a political theology of revolution in Carl Schmitt or is his political theology only and exclusively autocratic? Schmitt sees the key to revolutionary politics in the construction of the idea of the people as a constituent power. This idea, and the first event it produced, namely, the French Revolution, not only establishes a concrete state of exception but also makes exceptionality both at the same time a constituent and a de-constituent element of the political order of the Modern State. The exception goes from coming from “outside” the political order to being integrated into it as an element of stasis , that is to say, of destabilization. Hence, all modern politics, under the mask of legality, become permanently revolutionary. This article analyses the juridical genealogy and the theological–political transfers involved in the construction of the modern revolutionary political era that follows from Schmitt’s insights.

The question of the exact role of theology in Schmitt’s political theology remains undecided. Several authors have raised this question and distinct answers have been given. In order to reach an accurate representation of the political–theological dimension in Schmitt’s work, I will attempt an interpretation which takes into account not only Schmitt’s more widely known theses, but also the perceived esoteric and unsaid aspects of his work. Against Heinrich Meier’s prominent thesis, in his The Lesson of Carl Schmitt , of the strict theological nature of political theology, my thesis is that Schmitt gives precedence to the political over theology and that political theology is a theology and metaphysics of the political. Starting from Peterson’s theological objections, centered on Trinitarian dogma and eschatology, I will reconstruct the trail of political theology throughout Schmitt’s work in view of its epitome in the notion of a Trinitarian stasiology and in the figure of the katechon . It is the connection between these two themes which defines Schmitt’s positive and polemical political theology, which can be designated as a katechontic and metastatic political theology. The katechon itself will be defined as the metapolitical and transcendental condition of possibility of the political. The Nomos of the Earth will also be a necessary reference point for the correct understanding of the connection between theology and politics, given the theme of “detheologization,” as well as Schmitt’s lifelong engagement with the problem of the state in the work of Thomas Hobbes.

Carl Schmitt’s well-known declaration that “all significant” modern political concepts are “secularized theological concepts” has sometimes been treated as hyperbole: a metaphorical axe aimed at the frozen sea of legal positivism, a provocation rather than a thesis. In this article, I demonstrate the fecundity of this thesis by applying it to secularism, a concept undeniably central to the Liberal state; crucially, however, I do so in the context of early modern South Asian history and ongoing debates over the secularism of premodern Mughal polity. As I argue, Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar (1542–1605 CE) – a monarch of the Mughal dynasty often cast by South Asian secularists as a precocious emblem of the neutral state – was, in fact, an ideal type of Schmittian sovereign, who nonetheless stands equidistant from both Schmitt and his Liberal opponents in his stance toward religious pluralism. The theological correlate to Akbar’s “secularism” was an Islamicate theology of religions, which provided a contentful religious justification for religious pluralism, very different from contemporary “post-metaphysical” arguments. The final section of the article takes a critical turn, as I examine Akbar’s legendary reputation in the present, my intervention into his “secular” mythos, and the special difficulties involved in applying Schmittian concepts to an early modern, non-Western sacred king.

This article explores the potential theological–political discourse of Hans Urs von Balthasar, presenting the following arguments: (1) Despite its often-disregarded status, Balthasar’s thought contains a discernible thread of political theology; (2) His exploration of kenosis and community serves as a direct challenge to Schmittian concepts of sovereignty and representation. This challenge opens up new discourses of sovereignty, diverging from the conventional plenipotentiary paradigm and accentuating a vision of community rooted in shared gift; (3) Balthasar’s thought embodies a form of negative political theology, deconstructing and rectifying presupposed categories within the domain of political theology, as his theological principles do not merely establish a direct correspondence between theological concepts and the political realm; moreover, it rejects the analogical correlation drawn between the theological and the political. Lastly, the article concludes that Balthasar’s affirmative Christology offers profound insights into the intricate interplay between religion and politics, thereby catalyzing a reevaluation of contemporary theopolitical discourses.

In this article, I explore the liberal–conservative reception of Carl Schmitt’s political theology in post-war West-Germany. By focusing on the work of prominent members of the Ritter School – Hermann Lübbe, Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, and Odo Marquard – and on the contributions of Hans Blumenberg, I will demonstrate how Schmitt’s thought was appropriated and critically inverted, in order to provide theoretical support to liberalism. This project of liberalizing Schmitt involved developing a “weak decisionism,” which avoids the state of exception, providing a liberalist reading of Schmitt’s Hobbes-inspired narrative on the origin of the modern state and even formulating a “political polytheology.” Finally, this article offers a reflection on “political theology” as a conceptual field. I argue that the liberal–conservative, “neutralizing” reading of Schmitt is to some extent already available as an option within this framework, and I conclude that this finding problematizes Schmitt’s own dualistic antagonism.

The present work analyzes the interface between Quimbanda and the digital environment in the daily life of a Quimbandeiro. Quimbanda is an Afro-Brazilian faith that has grown in the virtual universe through consultations and other uses of digital media. In addition to analyzing the Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram pages of these religious groups, we interviewed and followed the daily life of a teacher and also conducted bibliographic research on the subject. In their daily practices, Quimbandeiros use the internet as a space for interaction, quotidian practices of care, and the manufacture of spells. We analyze how digital interaction presents this religious belief in the virtual public sphere and the interconnections between religious and technological narratives. Quimbanda, a somewhat stigmatized religion, expands its boundaries in virtual mode. In the case analyzed in this article, Quimbandeiro work is directly linked to the movements of Exu, the entity who controls the crossroads. Through the mediation of the production of religious images, Exu expands his spiritual and technological presence offline, flooding online communities with meaning.

This study aims to demonstrate that media can achieve a religious construction of an event or issue and set the public sphere in a religious frame through the sacralization of events and persons. This perspective can be supported empirically by the studies showing the way in which mass media framed different events in a religious imaginary and language and proposed this image as a frame for public sphere debates and theoretically by the concepts of media events, mediatization, ritualization, and sacralization, in order to reveal the processes through which the translation from a secular discourse to a religious discourse is produced. Under certain circumstances, mass media work as an “as if” (metaphoric) religion, and the events are presented through a religious frame – through themes and figures that come from the religious sacred narratives. Journalists accomplish this by setting events and leaders within the symbolic frame specific to religion: within this framework, those who report the facts are using narratives close to hagiographic stories, and by this, they are accomplishing the sacralization of these events. This enables journalists to exert a “ritual mastery” over presenting the events and imposing its significations.

Ever since cartoons were created as a medium of political and social commentary, they have been used to both criticize and uplift religious communities. The anti-Catholic cartoons of Thomas Nast and Jack Chick are easily recognizable, but interestingly, among twenty-first-century Catholic communities in Europe and the United States, Catholics themselves have been creating caricatures of Pope Francis, a more left-leaning pope in favor of reinforcing post-Second Vatican Council modernizations. These digital cartoons are tangible examples of a radically traditional antagonistic Catholic counter-public. This study delves into how radical traditional Catholic communities, who argue that pre-Vatican II traditions are a more authentic form of Catholicism than that encouraged by the current Pope Francis, are using cartoons to voice their agenda. By drawing from discourse theoretical analysis and hermeneutics, we identify four themes of criticism and discontent surrounding the pope: exposing his “bad agency,” ridiculing papal values, unveiling Francis’ “polarized and unbalanced” behavior, and expressing his predatory attitude toward representatives of Catholic traditionalism. Ultimately, we see these cartoons as the product of an antagonistic and anti-Pope Francis force internal to the Church, hypermediation without sources to public actions, and the digital milieu based on modernity in technology.

Whether one opts to refer to it as filial piety, filial obedience, family reverence, and family feeling, or filiality, the concept of xiào 孝 has been widely studied throughout history. However, to this day, the religious dimension of xiào is far too often ignored. This article intends to demonstrate that beyond merely having a religious dimension to it, the very concept of xiào cannot be removed from the realm of Chinese popular religion. More specifically, this article constitutes an ethnographic examination of the beliefs and practices pertaining to xiào of undergraduate university students in Beijing. These beliefs and practices will be compared and contrasted with how xiào is regarded by the parents of these students. By demonstrating that xiào essentially constitutes a religious belief that has deep meaning and importance to all the interviewees of this study, this article adds to the growing corpus of scholarship that seeks to contrast the popular view that China is a deeply irreligious country. I will also assert that there is a notable generational difference in how xiào is conceived.

This article traces differences and similarities in the ritual sweat bath usage through a comparative perspective that includes contemporary practice in Poland and the central and the north American traditions that inform it. I argue that there exist continuity and consistency of representations related to sweat bathing across time and space, which can be identified by the metaphors designating certain elements of the ritual. The bathhouse from a cross-cultural perspective can be considered a sacred and liminal space, a gateway that enables the transcending of ordinary space–time dimension and interaction with primordial creation–destruction forces. Fertility appears as only one aspect of these ambivalent forces. It manifests itself in the main metaphors of the Mother Earth’s womb and death–rebirth process in ritual’s contemporary descriptions in Poland. The similarities in the way the sweat bath experience is conceptualised reveal the influence of particulr elements of the ritual that induce specific bodily sensations, intrinsically related to the human organism conditions.

In his theory of evolution by natural selection, Charles Darwin provided a plausible alternative to Christianity’s creation account of human origins. In response, the Christian botanist Asa Gray suggested that the variation that drives evolution might be generated by God. Darwin rejected Gray’s hypothesis, invoking philosophical naturalism, a hallmark scientific paradigm. Darwin’s conclusion was reached on ideological grounds rather than empirical ones. I frame the question of the source of biological variation in a way that is accessible to modern experimental science and trace historical advances in biology that have accumulated to favor Gray’s theistic view. In particular, I show that empirical evidence collected subsequent to Darwin’s time contradicts the assumption of randomness in the mutation process, and thereby undermines the basis for his invocation of naturalism in the origins of biological variation.

Juan Antonio Estrada, a Spanish philosopher and theologian, proposes the search for meaning in life as the theological place for a valid experience of God. The “achieved” or fully realized life, to which every human being aspires, is the proposal of salvation that Jesus makes possible with the proclamation of the Reign and that opens a hopeful future with Easter. By bringing reason and faith into dialogue, Estrada contributes to fundamental theology by talking about God, not from the traditional concepts of classical theology, but from the human experience related to the search for a deep meaning for existence. Although this author emphasizes the elements of a problematic faith with unresolved issues and doubts – including the timeless challenge of theodicy – his agonizing and perplexed position is full of confidence in the certainty that God’s salvation plan will inevitably come true. In this contingent life, everything remains incomplete; yet God in Jesus gives the ultimate meaning for life that all human beings grope for. This fundamental issue of human reflection will be developed by going deeper into Estrada’s philosophical and theological work.

In this article, I study how symbolic theology can be advantageously utilized in the resistance against oppressing structures and ideologies. Studying two sermons of Paul Tillich and two speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the symbols used herein as a call to resistance against injustice, I wish to show how theologically grounded symbols have been used to resist injustice and in the call for justice. Furthermore, I study how the symbols used by Tillich and King can be utilized and reinterpreted in the various struggles taking place today against old and new oppressing structures and ideologies. The resistance against injustice must, however, also be undertaken intersectionally. And finally, I propose to bring the understanding of theology as symbolic engagement from Robert C. Neville into conversation with intersectional symbolic theology. I believe an intersectional symbolic theology can be successfully applied to feminist theology, queer theology, and other liberative theologies today.

This article addresses the topic of hymnal revision in the context of liturgical churches by proposing a methodology that takes into account both historical developments in the field of hymnology and recent concerns regarding the Liturgical Movement and theological considerations that have arisen in the last few decades. The text proposes, in practical terms, a methodology and a structure for developing and/or revising hymnals in the context of ecumenically minded, contemporary, liturgical churches.

There is currently no secularity scale with strong psychometric properties that would allow for the examination of the secularization process experienced by Muslims. Thus, the purpose of this article is to develop a psychometrically sound and quick-to-apply scale that can be used to measure the degree of secularity among Muslims. For exploratory factor analysis (EFA), an inventory with 65 items was applied to 1,573 university students, and it yielded a two-factor structure with an internal reliability of 0.975 for Daily Life factor and 0.952 for Faith and Prayer factor. After EFA, the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed with 4,391 individuals, and a structure that can be deemed very solid was found. The measurement invariance was also examined, and it was discovered that the scale can be used for various populations. In addition, the scale has convergent validity, a high test-retest result, and discriminant validity. The 25-item Secularity Scale has a new theoretical approach – which is not only based on faith and prayer but also daily life activities – and sound psychometric properties. Examining how secularity manifests itself in Muslim societies might be useful in describing, predicting, and explaining how individuals act in a variety of contexts. The scale might also help to avoid the use of approach utilized in Christian-centred secularity debates in the case of Muslim-majority societies.

Roman-Catholic scholars tend to interpret Luther’s emphasis on the exteriority of salvation as a critique of the goodness of creation. Through an analysis of De servo arbitrio, this article shows this to be wrong. While emphasizing the unconditionality of God’s work in both creation and salvation, Luther still insists that humans are created in God’s image as his co-operators, thus repeating the divine lordship over creation. This is further emphasized in other works that go beyond De servo arbitrio in finding Christology to be a key to the relationship between God and humans. Luther thus has an integrated understanding of all aspects of human life as the area of divine creation and should not be seen as a forerunner of a modern, secularized worldview. This role rather belongs to Erasmus, who insists that God stands idly by while humans make up their minds about how to live their lives.