Original Sin in Modernity
Edited by Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie
Telos has devoted significant attention to political theology in recent years, and historically, the politics of original sin has been the most fertile topic in this field. Because of the many connections that scholars have drawn between original sin and politics and culture, especially modern politics and culture, it is a particularly rich locus for reflection on method in political theology. Does original sin still have an influence in secular culture? Does it name something true to our experience? Or have new and quite different secular ideas replaced or “reoccupied” the space left by Christian anthropological doctrines? The articles in this special issue of Telos span the course of modernity, showing how original sin operates in unexpected ways, and how these operations raise methodological questions for political theology.
Introduction
Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie
Carl Schmitt and the Nineteenth-Century Catholic Reaction on Original Sin
Brian J. Fox
Fall and Redemption: The Romantic Alternative to Liberal Pessimism
Adrian Pabst
Not a Fall, but a Rise (for Some): Hegel and the “Genesis” of a New Liberalism
Robert Wyllie
Oikonomia Leaves Home: Theology, Politics, and Governance in the History of the West
John Milbank
What Original Sin? Political Theology, the Jewish Question, and the Work of Metaphor
Victoria Kahn
Hawthorne, the Politics of Sin, and Puritanism
Tracy B. Strong
Always Already Sin: Der Sündenfall and Modernity
Vincent P. Pecora
George Steiner on Original Sin, Hope, and Tragedy
Steven Knepper
Critical Theory of the Contemporary
Nationalism, Populism, Islamism
Russell A. Berman
Nationalism, Liberalism, and World Order
David Pan
Seven Days in January: The Trump Administration’s New Environmental Nationalism
Timothy W. Luke
The National-Populist Illusion as a “Pathology” of Politics: The Greek Case and Beyond
Andreas Pantazopoulos
Better Look the Other Way? Islamism and Gender Issues in the Muslim World
Arno Tausch
