Telos 188 (Fall 2019): Theology and World Order

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It would be naive to consider the question of global political order without engaging in debates about theology. Not only has it become clear that religious conflicts drive political ones, the very attempt to move “beyond” religion must be understood in terms of its theological meaning. The postsecular turn has not meant a return to religion so much as a realization that secularization was never a turn away from religion in the first place but rather itself a specific theological alternative among many. Accordingly, if our deepest political conflicts arise as consequences of theological disputes, we must address theology directly in order to get to the roots of major conflicts. Not only clear cases, such as conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians or between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, but also those between the United States and China revolve around theological issues that shape political and military conflict. Yet, our current approaches rely on political scientific and military calculations that have not yet been able to evaluate theology as a key and deciding factor in such conflicts. As the U.S. military and intelligence agencies debate the threat that Islamic State poses in Afghanistan, for instance, a key consideration should be the character and prospects of Islamic State’s theology, as well as the broader question of the role of theology in deciding political conflict. This issue of Telos engages in this discussion by considering how conceptions of world order arise from specific theologies.

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Telos 175 (Summer 2016): Political Theory, Political Theology

Critical theory inherited the mission of philosophy to know the world and to pursue the good life. Careful examination should shed light on the cosmos and our place within it and contribute to a beneficial ordering of human concerns, when wisdom informs governance. Yet that aspiration to know the world encountered the limits of intelligibility, beyond which reason could not proceed. Meanwhile, the efforts to remake the world in the spirit of reason elicited processes of rationalization, as deleterious to the world around us, the natural environment, as to the world within us, the ongoing cultural crisis of modernity and its social corollaries. That is Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment at the foundation of the critical theoretical tradition that continues to provide a framework with which to articulate a critique of the contemporary in its many heterogeneous facets: the disruption of all forms of solidarity, the pressures on family structures, the erosion of educational opportunities, the growing gap between rich and poor. Add to this the ominous shifts in the international order, including the breakdown of state structures from North Africa through the Middle East, the strains on the European Union, and the return of a repressive semi-dictatorship in Russia, while—at this point in the presidential election season—the United States seems to be tumbling dangerously toward Weimar conditions.

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