Católicos Por La Raza and the Cardinal’s Midnight Mass: Interrupting the Eucharist to Establish Just Worship
Jason Steidl revisits the day in 1969 when Católicos Por La Raza activists planned to confront their cardinal at the Eucharistic table.
Issue 25.5: Encounter
From the hypostatic union to imperial missiology, Christianity has always been about encounter—about the unexpected, tense, and sometimes redemptive collision of persons and possibilities. At the second annual Duke Graduate Conference in Theology, participants reflected on how the idea of an encounter shapes our Christology, pneumatology, theological anthropology, ecclesiology, and sacraments, as well as our engagements with race, gender and sexuality, geopolitics, ecology, the interreligious, and so on. The Other Journal, in collaboration with the conference committee, has invited several participants to adapt their essays here as a way for the larger public to see how a new generation of theologians is approaching contemporary questions in theology.
The Encounter conference was held at Duke University Divinity School from September 25 to September 26, 2015. This text is adapted from the original call for papers.
James Cone and the Blackness of God
This essay considers James Cone’s affect on thought through messing up and messing with the conceptual field of theology.
Bonhoeffer in the Boondocks
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was only twenty-one when he wrote Sanctorum Communio, a text hailed by Karl Barth as a theological miracle. And yet, perhaps because it was translated and printed much later than his other work, most students of Bonhoeffer miss out on this foundational work of ecclesiology. To simplify the miraculous: traditional ecclesiologies begin with […]
Making Cancer My Bitch: A Reflection on the Language of Cancer Treatment and Julian of Norwich
The magnet read, “I’m making cancer my Bitch.” It was one of the small trinkets in the cancer-survivor corner of the hospital gift shop: a cartoon sketch of a white, winking woman with bouffant hair and a plastered smile under 1950s twinkle typography. Beside bagged candy teddy bears, you could buy the magnet in the color scheme of […]
The Black Church and the Habitus of Resistance: An Ethnographic Study of Religious Practice and Social Change
Social change does not happen in a vacuum. Nor is social change the effect of crises, of those extreme moments in which the status quo is radically disrupted by, for example, mass protests (or riots) in response to state violence against civilians, flagrant judicial malfeasance, or governmental monetary misappropriation. Although crises may historically mark a […]
Disability, Vulnerability, and the Problem of Providence
I have a friend—I will him call John—who has lived with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) for many years. A man in his early seventies, John moves and communicates very slowly but laughs easily and loudly. He loves making artwork and walking outdoors. John also suffers from a form of mental illness called intermittent explosive […]
Catching the Spirit / Becoming-Animal: Animality as Transgressive Ecological Pneumatology in Appalachia
For the affect is not a personal feeling . . . it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel. Who has not known the violence of these animal sequences, which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at […]
Healing the Open Wound: Imagining Christian Border Ethics with Gloria Anzaldúa
Border encounters occur every day in our global and globalizing cities.[1] We consume food touched by people born outside the United States; we purchase things from non-citizens, brush shoulders with them as we go to work. Some of us kiss immigrants goodbye as we head out the door for the day, while others of us […]
