By David Pan · Friday, March 19, 2021 Telos 194 (Spring 2021): Political Theology Today is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 What does political theology mean today? At the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference from which many of the essays in this issue originated, a primary goal was to discuss the crisis of secular liberalism and “how faith is reshaping culture and politics today.” But even this project perhaps limits too much the scope of political theology, implying that we have a choice between reason and faith, or that political theology is a commitment to faith rather than an analysis of the element of faith that underlies all of our endeavors. The idea of political theology begins with the premise that every existing human order is built upon some understanding of ultimate meaning. The task would then be to analyze the kind of meaning that each existing order embodies and determine the kinds of decisions about meaning that are made and need to be made at various points in its history. Even secular liberalism, to the extent that it constitutes an existing order, presumes some answer to this question of meaning, and a closer look at the political theology of the United States reveals a mythic dimension that underlies its liberal democratic processes. The essays in this issue examine the political theological underpinnings of economy, politics, technology, and religion, laying out the ways in which these areas of human life develop not as autonomous spheres but as the result of struggles over a set of political theological choices.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, March 18, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with F. Cartwright Weiland about his article “Reflections of a Rapporteur,” one of a group of essays from Telos 192 (Fall 2020) on the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By B. Venkat Mani · Monday, March 15, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
On January 31, 1920, Dr. Bhimrao “Babasaheb” Ambedkar—lawyer, thought leader, social thinker, and one of Columbia University’s most famous alumni, who later became the prime architect of the constitution of the postcolonial Republic of India—published the first issue of the Dalit newspaper Mooknayak (The Silent or Muted Hero). The aim was to create, in the Marathi language, an alternative narrative of self-representation of Dalits (then called “untouchables”) to counter the caste-biased local vernacular and colonial English-language newspapers in pre-independence India. Under Dr. Ambedkar’s leadership, and often led by his editorials, Mooknayak quickly turned into a megaphone for those who were consciously being silenced by those in power, a platform to champion the rights and dignity of the oppressed and impoverished lowest castes. The idea was effective: through Mooknayak, those who were marginalized and minoritized were able to leave a paper trail of their accounts, their struggles for dignity, hope, and rights for the next generations to come.
On December 18, 2020, at the end of a year marred by the global COVID-19 pandemic, during which a shadow pandemic exposed the socio-economic divisions and the differences between the mainstream and the marginalized across the world, the most befitting centennial tribute to the spirit of Babasaheb’s Mooknayak came through the publication of Trolley Times, a self-published newspaper of the Indian farmers’ movement. The paper drew its title from the trolleys (trailers) hitched to a tractor or a truck that have become the temporary abodes of thousands of farmers protesting at the borders of New Delhi since November 2020. The genesis of this newspaper is as extraordinary as its founding team, comprising a freelance journalist, a filmmaker, a documentary photo artist, and a physical therapist and farmer. Launched bilingually in Punjabi and Hindi with a first printing of 2,000 copies that quickly grew to 10,000 in the subsequent editions, Trolley Times established itself as a very important space for the narrative self-representation of the political and cultural spirit that is the driving force of the ongoing Indian farmers’ movement. With the digital presence of this newspaper on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and more recently through online English translations of its issues, it is hardly surprising that Bloomberg called it the “fastest growing newspaper in India today.”
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By Wolfgang Thierse · Friday, March 12, 2021 The following essay was originally published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on February 22, 2021, and appears here in translation with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
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Community membership used to be a matter of religion and, after that, ideology. Today this function has been taken over by the concept of identity. Religion and ideology in the past led repeatedly to serious and even bloody conflicts. Will this history repeat itself under the new principle? Themes of cultural membership seem to be rattling our Western societies increasingly, splitting them along the political lines of distributive justice. Questions of identity—ethnic, gender, sexual—dominate, as the debates over racism, postcolonialism, and gender grow violent and aggressive. These are probably unavoidable confrontations in an increasingly pluralistic society, just as they give expression to social conflicts, fought over the distribution of visibility and influence, attention and recognition.
As unavoidable as these conflicts may seem, they are also confusing, opaque, and ambivalent. The violence of some attacks against traditionalist positions, as well as the violence in the defense of tradition, in addition to the radicalness of identity demands lead to the question: How much identity politics strengthens the pluralism of a society, and at what point does it turn into fragmentation? The principle at stake is this: the ethnic, cultural, and religious-worldview pluralism that is growing in Germany as elsewhere is no idyll; on the contrary it is full of disputes and conflict potential. If this multifacetedness is to be lived out in a peaceful manner, then pluralism must be more than the mere coexistence of minorities and identities that not only differ from each other but also separate from each other. Fundamental commonalities are necessary, including of course a common language, and naturally also a shared recognition of justice and law.
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By Russell A. Berman · Friday, March 12, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
Former President of the German Bundestag Wolfgang Thierse mounts a powerful argument against identity politics in Germany and their political consequences. His comments here and originally here have elicited a robust discussion in Germany, especially because the current leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), of which Thierse is a long-term member, reportedly responded that they felt ashamed at his “regressive” views. While the leadership represents the current left wing of the party, other voices from the center rallied to Thierse’s defense. At stake is the gap between alternative aspirations within this venerable party, once the foundational political organization of the German left with roots in the workers’ movement of the nineteenth century.
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By Telos Press · Thursday, March 11, 2021 To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan talks with Elham Manea about Switzerland’s recent decision to prohibit the wearing of full facial coverings in public, thereby restricting the burqa and the niqab. Manea’s new book The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism, which investigates the broader context of this decision in comprehensive detail, is now available from Telos Press in our online store for 20% off the list price.
An excerpt from the article:
 European democracies differ from America’s in notable ways, and many Americans have reservations about the Swiss prohibition: Aren’t burqa bans an illiberal curbing of religious and expressive freedom? By some reports, fewer than 100 women in Switzerland wear the burqa. Do they constitute so great a threat to the venerable Swiss nation that their constitution, which guarantees freedom of faith and conscience, has to be amended to alter their sartorial practice?
Aware that judgments from afar can sometimes be glib, I put these questions to Elham Manea, author of a book published last month titled The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism. . . . Ms. Manea is quick to dismiss the argument that the ban curbs freedom. You can’t separate the burqa and niqab from their “religious and political contexts” and turn this into “a simple question of ‘choice.'” The burqa didn’t “come out of nowhere” and Muslim women haven’t “decided to embrace it on a whim.” Many Western feminists, she says, tend to “neutralize the context, as if it is of no consequence.” She urges those who are squeamish about the ban to ask which ideology teaches women to cover themselves completely. What are its theological features? What does it say about women?
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