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Theorizing Modernities article

Is Restorative Justice a Tradition? Reframing the Practices and Values of Restorative Justice


“Layers,” by Flickr User Steve Crane. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

In Restorative Justice and Lived Religion, Jason Springs argues that mass incarceration in the US is being challenged via restorative justice practices. These practices are being enacted by people living in the communities that have most suffered from mass incarceration and its rippling harmful effects. As Springs documents, mass incarceration has wreaked havoc on the economic, social, political, and spiritual lives of people living in predominantly Black and Brown communities across the US. Springs trains his attention on a few neighborhoods in Chicago where local community members, accompanied by restorative justice practitioners, have instituted alternative practices to redressing harm than that of the retributive model of the state. In response to harm, the state locks people away, often for years. But in some of the communities where restorative justice initiatives have been implemented, people gather in face-to-face meetings where they work to repair the relationships that have been harmed as a result of wrongdoing.

This analysis is at its best in the chapters where Springs recounts his on the ground engagement with practitioners in the Precious Blood Ministry in the Back of the Yards community. Here, sometimes with sanction from the state, an alternative to the retributive model for addressing harm is being practiced. Crucially, for Springs, it is through the enactment of this alternative for repairing harms and achieving justice that a critique and transformation of the wider system of mass incarceration is able to take place. This transformation is not sweeping—it is not a revolution—but occurs rather through piecemeal work, community-by-community, person-by-person. Springs’s ultimate argument is that restorative justice practices and the values they cultivate in practitioners create the virtues necessary to combat mass incarceration at more structural levels. This might occur when members of the community advocate for changing laws around sentencing practices for minors or in working within the system to create more pathways for restorative justice alternatives for those who are caught up in the criminal justice system. As Springs notes, such work is slow and requires constant vigilance to avoid being coopted by the system of retributive justice. But rejecting any involvement with this system, as those who call themselves abolitionists often do, is simply not possible for those seeking to redress the harmful effects of mass incarceration in the present.

I want to focus in this post on what Springs argues is one of the secrets to restorative justices’ success and to its transformational vision for the wider system in which we attempt to repair harm in this country, and that is spirituality. I argue that Springs’s critique of purist accounts of abolition—which advocate for more restrictive understandings of religion to counter the secular state—are on target, but his account of restorative justice might be strengthened by reframing it not only as a set of practices and a theory of justice but as a moral tradition in its own right. The payoff of characterizing restorative justice in this way is that it clarifies its potential as a robust alternative to the dominant form of justice as practiced in our society.

Restorative Justice, Lived Religion, and Spirituality

Let me first unpack the role of lived religion and spirituality within the larger argument of the book. It is most clearly in the final two chapters that Springs clarifies how he understands the role of religion in the practices and values of restorative justice. For him this role is best exemplified by the category of lived religion, which refers to “meaning making that takes place through ad hoc practices of piety, reverence, devotion, and informally (or perhaps formally) ritualized action” (191). In other words, lived religion points to the everyday ways in which people embody their religious identity, rather than to the doctrinal and institutional forms of practice that we might typically associate with religion. Lived religion, for Springs, is no less of a “valid” or “authentic” form of religious practice, and in fact is responsible for the success of ministries like Precious Blood. Even though Precious Blood is associated with the Catholic Church, the restorative justice practices that they engage in at their ministry have been developed over time in what Claude Levi Strauss would have called a “bricolage” manner, drawing on ideas and practices from various religious and Indigenous traditions (see also Jeffrey Stout’s repurposing of this idea in the field of religious ethics). Springs meticulously documents how these practices are carried out at Precious Blood and the profound positive impact that they have had not only on those who have been victims and perpetrators of harm, but also their wider communities. By not being associated with any particular religious tradition, those who might otherwise avoid such practices are made welcome. Indeed, Springs adopts the language of “spirituality,” which is often derided by scholars, to describe how those engaged in restorative justice work understand their purpose. In the “co-creation of community” and in an other-regarding ethics, Springs makes the case for a lived religion and spirituality that enables a transformative vision of criminal justice in this country.

Springs counters those critics who see in this spirituality an unmoored form of religious practice that is all surface and no depth. For such critics, without tethering the practices and values of restorative justice to a particular religious tradition, such practices are unable to have a substantive effect on the problem of mass incarceration. They risk conceptual drift and at best help individuals without addressing systemic problems. For critics of restorative justice, this form of restorative justice does not pose real problems to the power of the state because of its weak spirituality. Where the Christian tradition offers a trenchant and historically and traditionally grounded vision of harm, punishment, and restitution that can counter the state’s power, restorative justice in the form currently practiced merely offers a bland and ultimately unimpactful alternative. For some critics, then, the goal should not be the reform of the current system via restorative justice practices, but instead its abolishment. And because the state operates on a secular logic, it is religion that should lead the abolition movement.

Springs adopts the language of “spirituality,” which is often derided by scholars, to describe how those engaged in restorative justice work understand their purpose.

Springs pushes against this binary choice—both in terms of secular vs. religion and reform vs. abolition—via the categories of lived religion and spirituality. The movement for abolition, as he sees it, is too often the victim of idealist thinking from intellectuals who do not face the grim realities that are the result of the New Jim Crow. But it is nonetheless accurate in its diagnosis of the dire conditions faced by marginalized communities. As such Springs proposes a transformative vision that pushes for dramatic change to the system while focusing on the “ad hoc” practices of restorative justice as the means to achieve such change. By showing how restorative justice not only offers an alternative to individuals within the criminal justice system but also makes possible a transformation of the structures that undergird the system, Springs attempts to thread together individual and structural transformation.

Restorative Justice as a Tradition

Springs’s critique of the secular/religious binary as it operates in these spaces is compelling. His on-the-ground analysis shows the seriousness with which practitioners of restorative justice engage their work and the measurable impacts they are having in their local, state, and national communities. But one area where I would like to do some conceptual unpacking and critique is in his use of lived religion and spirituality. Springs sets these in somewhat of an opposition to “official” or “doctrinal” religion. He does not claim that those who bring their religious beliefs into restorative justice spaces are wrong to do so, but rather that the restorative justice space is one that is characterized by a kind of Rawlsian overlapping consensus. Such consensus makes it possible for a host of people who might or might not hold the same religious beliefs to come into a shared space where they pursue common goals. In this space, they might begin to cultivate a shared spirituality based in the practices that are developed and refined over time. Nonetheless, in this case, for Springs, it seems like the more flexible approach to religious identity is preferable to a stricter understanding. But in order to retain this flexibility, Springs is compelled to use more moderate language in his description of what restorative justice actually is. At times in the book he refers to it as a “framework,” an “ethics,” “a set of practices and values,” perhaps least modestly as a “critical praxis,” and even a “theory of justice.” But he does not, as far as I could find, theorize it robustly as a tradition. In fact, Springs often sets “tradition” in opposition to restorative justice. And this does make some sense since to refer to it as a tradition would perhaps risk seeing it as too restrictive in its practices. Yet, I worry that avoiding such a description diminishes the robustness and compellingness of restorative justice as an alternative to retributive justice. The latter, which is supported by “law and order” politicians—however cynically—is often steeped in the language of tradition and this is in part what gives it its power. For example, Republican Senator Josh Hawley, in his address to the 2024 National Conservatism conference grounds his vision of “law and order,” with its retributive approach to migration and protests against police violence, in his particular reading of the Augustinian Christian tradition. In such a climate why not boldly name restorative justice as a tradition?

I think that Springs has, perhaps inadvertently, already demonstrated that restorative justice is a moral tradition in its own right via the content of the book. If we define a tradition as “a historically extended, socially embodied argument” as Alasdair MacIntyre does, (1981, 222), or as “enduring discursive practices,” as Jeffrey Stout does (136), we might begin to see why this is the case. In the heart of the book, Springs outlines the norms, practices, and history of restorative justice movements. He provides arguments for why practices like sitting in circle are effective for transforming relationships and communities. Given Springs’s engagement with the extensive literature on restorative justice in these sections of the book, it is clear that these practices are themselves contested and argued by those committed to restorative justice. Springs also speaks of restorative justice as aiming at promoting “human flourishing,” a not immodest goal that is often spoken of in scholarly debates around the aims of tradition. This might make Springs a bit nervous. For one of the things that makes restorative justice so powerful, in his view, is its dynamism. A longer quote from Springs on this:

Restorative justice has an array of historical origins and sources, is conceptualized in manifold ways, and is implemented in a variety of configurations. It is constituted by a historically instituted set of practices that are as dynamic as the communities in which they are developed. It is precisely this internal diversity that affords restorative justice ethics and practices hybridity and flexibility that can accommodate numerous specific religions and moral traditions, as well as ethical humanisms and nontheistic philosophies. (192)

The virtue of this rendering of restorative justice is that it is flexible and amenable to different contexts and historical moments. The risk, of course, is that in being so flexible it loses its hold as a coherent philosophy and worldview. This latter risk is not merely semantic, but practical. For part of what makes a tradition successful or not is its ability to create a coherent set of assumptions and practices that are able to be built upon by later generations. Knowledge and experience allow for the critique and improvement of practices and ultimately lead those in the community closer to attaining the ends that they seek. If the community is unable to sustain this dialogue through time, it might prove unable to sustain itself as a tradition, and in this case, as a plausible alternative tradition by which justice is meted out in this country. As noted previously, Springs has already begun to outline the contours of the restorative justice tradition in the bulk of the chapters in the book. By theorizing it explicitly as a tradition—or perhaps part of a tradition, like the democratic one—he would only strengthen the potency of these sections. And we need not adopt the more siloed understanding of tradition that communitarians and now postliberals like Hawley put forward. For as Springs reminds us, concrete reality is messier than we often give it credit for in the academy. People move between and within different traditions on an everyday basis in our democratic society.

As I have suggested, the language of tradition is impactful in the public sphere and can help bolster restorative justice ethics into the public realm more profoundly. The language of tradition continues to be used by the Right in the United States to promote misogynistic, anti-LGBT, and heteronormative views and laws that support those views. By reclaiming this language, the Left might strengthen the case for alternatives to their worldview that include traditions like that of restorative justice. In Democracy and Tradition, Jeffrey Stout argued against those who oppose democratic culture with that of a pre-liberal or post-liberal traditionalism. He notes, “Democracy is a culture, a tradition, in its own right. It has an ethical life of its own, which philosophers would do well to articulate” (13). Perhaps the same could be said of restorative justice in the context of Springs’ work.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His forthcoming book with UND press is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Theorizing Modernities article

Notes from the Funhouse: Disciplinarity and the Haunting Aporia of Black Lived Religion in the United States


Fun Spot America, Orlando Funhouse America. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“White power is the very undeclared, silent, confident domination of the world.
They don’t have to assert continually because we live in their dictionary.”

 –Haile Gerima, Filmmaker

Notes from a Rabbit’s Hell: Prolegomenon

The flaw in asking how far someone wishes to go down the rabbit hole is the assumption that we are not already trapped in the rabbit’s Hell. This becomes even clearer when a Black scholar is asked how deeply we intend to deconstruct the very disciplines that frame our writing and teaching. It assumes that we somehow landed upon these disciplines, rather than recognizing that the principalities and powers shaping the normative world foisted the terms of disciplinary order upon us. The fallacious notion that scholarly discourse can ever take place outside of this funhouse overlooks the fact that deconstructing these disciplines from a rabbit’s Hell represents, for many of us, a practice of emancipatory possibility. At the very least, it embodies a transgressive determination to keep our Black minds engaged in a profession and a world that functions as a kind of funhouse. This funhouse of academic disciplinarity order features shifting floors, trick mirrors, and other devices designed to scare and deceive those who teach, write, and establish our scholarly becoming within the region and shadow of disciplinarity. The arresting machinations underlying this funhouse ontology lead many to believe that the prize of legitimation is attainable—if only we can discover the door within the funhouse that truly offers something valuable for the Black scholar daring enough to enter while embracing the mantle of Black Theory.

It is within this Rabbit-Funhouse-Hell that I ask the question that will guide my brief contribution to this symposium:  What is the relationship between disciplinarity, antiblackness, the demands of justice, the institutional study of lived religious experience, and the academic study of religion writ large in the United States of America in the 21stcentury?

During a panel at the 2024 AAR conference about his book, Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in America, I discussed with Jason how his generous sharing of the book allows us to explore these ideas. I consider any invitation by a colleague to tarry with their research a deep honor and a high privilege I dare not take lightly.

Tarrying with Lived Religion

Central to Springs’s argument is the claim that restorative justice initiatives can challenge and transform the racist system of mass incarceration in the United States. According to Springs, this transformative potential relies on restorative justice’s capacity to foster moral and spiritual associations among people. Springs asserts that a holistic approach to restorative justice can serve as both a theory of justice and a basis for concrete practices. This framework nurtures moral and spiritual connections, allowing individuals to envision integrated approaches to community life and societal structures. By exploring this framework, we can observe restorative justice embodied in practices that reflect the dynamic nature of everyday moral and spiritual sensibilities.

During my brief attempt as a panelist to present my reflection, I shared that, as someone deeply invested in the core themes animating his research, I am particularly intrigued by the conceptual methodologies underpinning the project: transformation, spirituality, structural racism, and mass incarceration. As a discussant, my aim was to invite a deeper consideration of the theoretical implications of Springs’s work for political theory and the Black study of religion. Specifically, I sought to explore how a robust account of Black theorizations of religion and politics—especially those focused on antiblackness as a structural antagonism inherent to modernity and the emergence of nation-states—can expand and challenge the frameworks that shape his argument. While I would love to elaborate on how Springs’s work gestures toward and could benefit from a deeper engagement with Black political and religious theory, I have chosen to devote the rest of this essay to the following line of inquiry I presented before the panel, which elicited the clearest—and most varied—responses: What do we gain by critiquing the systemic evils of mass incarceration if we do not also critique how the principalities and powers that produce mass incarceration shape the academic disciplines that scrutinize and promote our research? What is lost in an account of the relationship between structural racism (i.e., antiblackness) and restorative justice if it does not also explore the connections between antiblackness, governmentality, and the study of lived religion within academia?

What do we gain by critiquing the systemic evils of mass incarceration if we do not also critique how the principalities and powers that produce mass incarceration shape the academic disciplines that scrutinize and promote our research?

Specifically, we must critically tarry with power in all its visceral discursivity as we consider the disciplinary frameworks that dictate who can be recognized as engaging in “legitimate” theoretical discourse worthy of substantive engagement within the academic discipline of religion in the United States. Put another way, those who currently hold the levers of disciplinary power within religious studies departments must summon the requisite boldness to ask aloud who within the discipline possesses the power to center some theorizations at the peripheralizing expense others? Who among us wears the badge that polices and lies? This manner of forensic science is crucial for apprehending the racial logic that determines what is codified within disciplinary curricula and syllabi as “foundational to the study of lived religion” versus what is ghettoized, peripheralized, and ornamentalized as little more than “contextual,” “specialized,” “densely abstract,” and “highly stylized” Black stuff.

As I tarried with Dr. Springs’s crucial intervention, I immediately noticed that, while he specifically charges those committed to practicing, researching, and teaching restorative justice to “relentlessly” focus on the systemic and structural causes of injustice, that same charge does not appear to extend to scholars who view lived religion as the conceptual anchor guiding their research within the discipline. Although Critical Participatory Action Research is his primary methodology, Springs presents lived religion as a conceptual anchor for those seeking to study the practices aimed at transforming structural violence. As I reflected upon Springs’s treatment of lived religion—and the broader power dynamics producing the terms of disciplinary order structuring the study of religion in the United States—I found myself contemplating the degree of separation between the structural causes of injustice underpinning mass incarceration in the United States and the horror-soaked terms of order that continue to structure religious studies within academia today.

Religious Studies, Lived Religion, and the Peripheralization of Black Theory

The most promising quality of Springs’s book also serves as its most pressing growing edge. In the book, Springs offers scholars a form of radical (in the etymological sense of deep-rootedness) witness that, if not also directed back at the antiblack discursive formations shaping the disciplinary terms of order governing the field of lived religion and religious studies writ large, risks denying the full power thereof. Unfortunately for the study of lived religion in the United States, Black theorization and Black lived religious experiences continue to present an aporia within the discipline of religion, characterized by a profound disjunction between the voluminous contributions of Black theorists and their continued peripheralization to the second-order categorizations of “highly stylized,” “sub-fields,” and “contextual studies.”  Aporia here refers to a state of perplexity or doubt, encompassing the contradictions and unresolved challenges within the discipline itself that it fails to engage with fully. This aporia illustrates a critical gap, where innovative perspectives that challenge established norms are often overlooked or excluded from codification with normative theoretical discourse. In an era where systemic inequities are under heightened scrutiny, the discipline’s failure to engage meaningfully with Black theorizations—beyond the pervasive trope of the “talented tenth,” sporadic epigraphs, or guest features in chapters reliant on often uncredited influences—reveals a troubling refusal among its gatekeepers to confront uncomfortable truths. This avoidance risks leaving the discipline of religion in a precarious state, teetering on the edge of hospice care, where it may struggle to justify its relevance and vitality in a viscerally disturbed and disturbing world. Religious Studies, from a disciplinary perspective, functions as a funhouse, captivated by its own distorted reflections, yet it neglects to confront the aporia that lingers in relation to Black theorizing. This refusal is rooted in the conceit that the methodologies and theories currently shaping the norms of the discipline meet the demands of a disturbed and disturbing world. As the embryonic study of religion took form in the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Black thinkers were also producing knowledge about and contending with the category of religion. These thinkers were constitutively foreclosed from the universities and lecture halls where the discipline was being codified. So they did what we have always done; they theorized outside. In the work of 19th-century abolitionists like David Walker and organic political theorists like Maria Stewart, we find a counter-approach—an anepistemological rejoinder to the formal study and practice of religion in the United States—not anchored in some Western, Euro-dominant academic delusion of political neutrality or detachment, but in the practice of abolition and the unfinished project of freedom.

If we produce an account of lived religion that conforms to existing disciplinary terms of order and does not constitutively engage Black theorists, restorative justice will merely become another room in Religious Studies’ Funhouse.

As we know, the discipline of religion structurally foreclosed such counter-approaches to study, both from the process of disciplinary canonicity and from the possibility of shaping methodological, pedagogical, theoretical, and publishing approaches. The haunting consequences of this exclusion continue to punctuate the discipline today. Accordingly, despite a genuine and commendable desire to use lived religion as a conceptual methodology to propel the discipline of religion out of its social and political malaise, I am concerned that if we produce an account of lived religion that conforms to existing disciplinary terms of order and does not constitutively engage Black theorists, restorative justice will merely become another room in religious studies’ funhouse.

To be clear, I do not believe that Springs is trying to assert some semblance of academic authority over the communities with which he spent a season building deep relationships. I honor that aspect of his work and commend him for it. My concern with Springs’s work and with lived religion in general is that academic scholarship centering non-White communities often makes the curious claim that theorists emerging from these communities do not need to anchor the theoretical account of their lives, their struggles, their striving. I am reminded of this every time I think about a moment when a White colleague earnestly told me they assign a White scholar of lived religion at the beginning of their course to provide students with the language and skills to engage the case studies that follow. It just so happens that one of the weeks they were covering Black-led protests against state-sanctioned violence. This colleague believed—and probably still remains convinced—that the only way to facilitate a conversation about Black protests in Mississippi is to have a White man provide the necessary terms of engagement.

The problem that I am emphasizing here does not originate at the publishing state but, rather, at graduate formation. Graduate programs are political in the sense that they are the site where individuals enter to engage in the struggle of knowledge production in the hope of generating knowledge that will impact, inform, shape, and challenge society. If grad students are not challenged to confront Euro-dominant epistemic biases or their reflective tendencies to center a White scholar when 15 Black scholars are ready, published, and available, then the discipline of religion will continue producing candidates who will stare at a hiring committee with a straight face and assert that Black students need to learn proper theoretical language from White experts before they can discuss Ferguson or South Central Los Angeles in a manner that is disciplinarily acceptable. The most chilling aspect of this is not the statement itself but the synchronized head-nodding and “mmmhmmm-ing” that are almost certain to follow. In the 21st century, Black lives, deaths, and afterlives are still brought into disciplinary order through white theorists who establish the boundaries and borders of the normative discourse. Of course, Black theorists are invited to join in, provided we understand the proper order of things.

Amusement and terror.

Welcome to the Funhouse.

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James Howard Hill Jr.
James Howard Hill Jr., Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Religion and Faculty Affiliate in African American & Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University. His scholarship explores the entanglements of race, culture, ecology, political theory, and theorizations of religion and secularism. He is the author of two forthcoming books: The Michael Jackson Cacophony: Antiblackness, Secularism, and Popular Culture (1963–1988) (University of Chicago Press) and The Haunted Fantastic: On Faith, Vocation, and Critical Hope (Fortress Press). Hill’s work engages archives of film, music, performance, social movements, and lived experience to interrogate how governance, imagination, and practices of freedom converge in (post)modern life. Moving across and beyond disciplinary boundaries, he seeks to illuminate how cultural forms and political practices generate possibilities for survival, critique, and transformation. Beyond academic writing, he is developing creative nonfiction, children’s literature, photographic essays, and a multimedia platform on vocation, pedagogy, and critical faith. He lives in Boston with his wife, two children, and dog.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium On Restorative Justice and Lived Religion


The concept of justice is attracting much theological reflection today. The current interest is in different kinds of justice for specific groups and issues, such as climate justice, civil rights, women’s reproductive justice, and economic justice, which are implicated with the others. This reckoning with justice is not new, of course. The history of Christian theology reveals a longstanding preoccupation with the concept. Justice is one of the preeminent divine attributes, as Paul writes in Romans 1:17. It was on this verse, in turn, that Luther concentrated his exegetical efforts, casting his reformation breakthrough as a new understanding of the iustitia dei: God makes the sinner just in Christ. The doctrine of justification in Luther’s theology thus connects God’s justice to human justice.

I bring a theological perspective that connects justice and justification to my introduction of this book symposium featuring Jason A. Springs’s recently published monograph, Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in Chicago. Springs’s book, as the following responses concur, articulates a vision of justice-seeking that has political and legal dimensions, as the basic concept of justice denotes. But the social, religious, and spiritual forces of the book are its attributes that are most inspiring and generative. In fact, as Springs claims, the type of justice he is interested in, namely restorative justice, has to do with the building of social relationships that have spiritual and religious resonances. Restorative justice attends to the repair, restoration, and reconciliation of persons as they become connected to each other through the building of relationships. Springs studies peace-making circles in a particular community on Chicago’s South Side, namely the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, that was established to do the slow, careful, and delicate work of building relationships among persons who have been harmed by the political, legal, and executive actions producing the mass incarceration of Black persons. Sometimes such a peace-making circle, which usually centers on those harmed by police violence, also involves the perpetrator, such as a police officer, who has done violence to someone in the community. The restorative justice model transforms the perpetrator-victim relationship to one in which the perpetrator acknowledges their agency in harming another, while the victim (re)claims agency by narrating what they have experienced vis-a-vis the other. Repair, restoration, and reconciliation are the aims of the newly framed relationship. This model of justice focuses on cultivating personal relationships through an attentive awareness of the other. By means of such personal transformation, social transformation ensues. Justice is established in and through relationships, just as justification is the creation of reconciled relationships on the basis of the divine justice.

Springs’s book offers us the opportunity to reflect on justice in the polyvalent terms he deploys. The authors contributing to this symposium are cognizant of how the various aspects and areas of human existence in contemporary society—political, legal, cultural, environmental, and religious—contribute to either justice-denying or justice-seeking projects. Each author represents different approaches to theorizing about and advocating for justice. They show that the task of justice is central to our work as citizens, scholars, and practitioners in the arts of becoming persons to and for each other. The symposium attests to the intention of Springs’s book—that we take restorative justice seriously as a viable practice for social transformation. Whether that society is the community of researchers, as James Howard Hill Jr. notes, or a community of learners in prison, as Connie Mick describes, or a gathering of women advocating for the rights of pregnant women to choose to host a fetus for a time, as Rebecca Todd Peters relays, society is better served by intentional relationship-building that honors the agency and contributions of every person in it. Springs’s attention is on the local; yet the promise of restorative justice as he envisions it is global, for persons and for creation. Justice is for, and justice creates, what theologian Thomas Berry referred to as the “communion of subjects” (17). It is a glimpse of the divine justification intended for the entire cosmos—a vision of the reality in which Christ will have reconciled all things to God (2 Corinthians 5:19).

Our symposium begins with a methodological reflection on how scholars might embody the kind of justice they study. James Howard Hill Jr.  begins by tracking the self-reflexive question: Do scholars perpetuate injustice, even as they study justice, by denying theoretical agency to the persons they study? Hill probes the genealogical deficit and theoretical limitations of scholarship in his field of religious studies. Black scholars tend to be marginalized from genealogies of the discipline and White scholars tend to restrict their theories to the critical traditions they have inherited. How can the academic community practice restorative justice for both its Black researchers and the Black persons studied? Hill presses us to think past a politics of citational practices or a model of inclusion that can be capriciously revoked under a new political regime. He asks us to imagine and to realize communities of researchers who search for truth about the world with each other. If scholars adopted practices of restoring relationships among themselves, their theories would cohere with their actions, and their quests for knowledge would embody the knowledge they learn from their neighbors.

Josh Lupo, meanwhile, is interested in the question of whether religions are to be regarded as traditions, and if so, how such traditions exist? The question of construing a religion as a tradition has to do with the inheritance of a nineteenth-century approach to religion, specifically Christianity, that privileged historical construction. A religious tradition is founded on an identifiable origin that then sets parameters into historical motion. Subsequent history exhibits traits of these parameters such that the tradition is recognizable as such throughout its different historical expressions. Lupo’s concern is whether the restorative justice model constructs religious sensibilities of a distinctive sort through its cultivation of relationships that might constitute a distinctive religious tradition. Lupo suggests that while this model is not a “tradition” in the above historical sense of the term, it has possibilities for sustaining spirituality through relationships that are both local and flexible. Even if spirituality is not explicit in discussions, it is central to them, in the senses that Springs identifies in his book. Furthermore, Lupo is interested in using this model to expand the restrictive and disciplinary notion of tradition as used by law-and-order politicians to make a case for the concept of tradition implied by restorative justice with its commitments to the human dignity of all participants, even as these practitioners of this model contribute to the tradition(s) of democracy.

The authors of the two subsequent contributions take their local experiences of restorative justice as points of entry. They both consider how Springs’s analysis is helpful in making sense of their respective experiences. Amy Carr is a theologian who, like Springs, uses critical theory, philosophy, and spirituality in her work. Focusing on the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, Carr recounts the challenges this community faced when confronted with the prospect of constructing a casino on tribal grounds. Carr acknowledges that practices aimed at restorative justice are multi-pronged. They can aim at the elimination of polarizing elements, address the specific legal and political issues at play in the community, and frame discussions in ways that allow healthier forms of community to take shape. Carr’s conclusion reveals her theological rationale for addressing the pursuit of justice: restorative justice offers a glimpse of the Spirit’s work in rebuilding and repairing communities in which persons are honored, recognized, and cherished.

Connie Mick draws on Springs’s claim about the humanizing dimensions of restorative justice to reflect on her teaching experiences at Westville Correctional Facility, an Indiana state prison for men. Mick describes some of the conversational practices she has developed to nourish the teaching relationships she has with her students. She insists, for example, that the use of the present tense is important, speech that recognizes the presence of another. The obvious realities—that poverty and race and the prison-industrial complex are systems designed to strip personhood from persons—are mired in the logics of retributive justice. Mick shows how the model of restorative justice can engage in the “critical praxis” of discussing the systems of injustice—poverty and race—with those who have been harmed by these systems. The practice of storytelling serves to dismantle the singular narrative of retributive justice embedded in these systems, while opening the forum to new stories. In telling and listening to stories, the one story is decentered, mutual respect and recognition of each other’s personhood is nourished, and the possibilities of personal and social transformation are set free, at least for a glimpse.

This book symposium concludes with a contribution by Rebecca Todd Peters, who has dedicated much of her scholarly work in the field of Christian social ethics to the topic of reproductive justice. Todd Peters’s book, Trust Women: A Progressive Christian Argument for Reproductive Justice  is one of the most important sources today for thinking about a Christian ethics of abortion (see her website as well), a work that also influenced my own thinking about the topic. Todd Peters shows how the systemic structure underlying the prison-industrial complex in the US is analogous to the interlocking systems at play in diminishing the personhood of women and in compromising their capacities to make decisions about the pregnancies they are sustaining. The retributive justice model currently operates in many US states. Laws are designed to punish women who make decisions to terminate pregnancies; these laws also entail grave consequences for women experiencing complications around pregnancy, such as miscarriage. They were behind the recent efforts in the state of Georgia to keep a brain-dead woman on life support in order to sustain fetal development. Todd Peters advocates for a restorative justice model that informs women about the different factors that converge on their decision-making processes. But she notes that the structural systems in place continuously devaluing women’s capacities to make decisions about their pregnancies need to be entirely dismantled. A social “revolution” guaranteeing full personhood to all pregnant women is required in order for the transformative impact of restorative justice to be actualized.

Restorative justice offers a glimpse of how a community can be transformed by justice. The orientation to restoration challenges the structural social and political regimes that reinforce injustice. It also offers possibilities of imagining transformed social worlds and how this transformation affects the natural worlds in which social worlds are embedded. The discourse of transformation resonates with the theological idea of God’s plan that the divine attributes are revealed in creation (Romans 1:20). The vision of transformative justice coincides with the revelation of the divine justice. Justice as the human work of seeking justice in the world is oriented to God’s work of revealing the divine justice in creation. The doctrine of justification, in other words, is about justice.

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Christine Helmer
Christine Helmer is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, where she is also Professor of German and Religious Studies. She was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2017 from Helsinki University. Professor Helmer focuses her current research and teaching interests on questions in constructive theology, Schleiermacher, religion and politics, and theology in relation to the study of religion and the humanities. She is on the executive committee of the Internationale Schleiermacher Gesellschaft (based in Halle/Berlin) and facilitates the Lutheran Scholars Network. Her most recent book is co-authored with Professor Amy Carr, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice (Baylor University Press, 2023).
Global Currents article

Pope Francis, Liberalism, and a New Theology of Poverty


The tomb of Pope Francis in Santa Maria Maggiore. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Pope Francis will undoubtedly be remembered as a reformer of the Catholic Church. He was often perceived as radical, even revolutionary in his approach to changing contemporary Catholicism. Yet it was precisely the meaning of reform from the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) that has divided papal commentators, especially Catholics on both sides of the political spectrum. In the global North the political barometer often used for measuring Francis’s reform legacy was how well he adhered to, or deviated from, an ideal of progressive liberalism. This ideological and partisan political standard has confused and obscured much more than it has clarified and explained the reform papacy of Francis. Its continued usage will only perplex commentators trying to understand yet another pope from the Americas, Leo XIV, who is evidently pursuing the reform program of his predecessor, though perhaps in a different style.

The late pontiff had an approval rating in the US that apparently made President Donald Trump envious of the papal office. But he also had vehement critics among conservatives and progressives. Notably, both sides of the “culture wars” were in agreement that Francis had a failed liberal papacy. Francis’s opponents on the Left took his reform efforts to be, at best, ineffectual and half-hearted. The papacy ultimately failed to follow through and implement the doctrinal changes, usually related to sex and gender, demanded of a modern, more liberal Catholicism. On the Right, his papacy was viewed by some in the worst possible terms as disorderly, disastrous, and even diabolical. It was a futile attempt at liberal subterfuge against an unchanging faith and morality that younger traditional followers will find vindicated with a future conservative pope. As a Jesuit trained in the Spiritual Exercises, Francis did not conform to a progressive liberal ideal for Church reform but instead applied the spiritual standard of Jesus’s poverty. Despite the mixed reactions to Francis’s effort to reform the papacy in the example of its divine founder, his theology of poverty opened new pathways for Christian social and political engagement.

Contextualizing Francis’s Theology of Poverty

Pope Francis was not a liberal. Such a claim is a categorical error that ignores his Latin American social and pastoral background. One event that helps situate Francis’s theological inheritance from the global South happened just before his papal election, which he mentioned in his Spanish language memoir of Pope Benedict XVI, El Sucesor (2024). On March 13, 2013 during lunchtime at the Conclave that would elect Francis, a group of European cardinals asked then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio about the politics of liberation theology in Latin America and “the supposed political deviation of that theology” (54). For these European cardinals the political deviation was not progressive liberalism, but revolutionary Marxism. Bergoglio did not relate all he said to the cardinals, but his response would have drawn on his familiarity with Argentina’s distinctive theology committed to the integral liberation of poor communities through an analysis of the cultural history of a people instead of a Marxist social analysis of class.

The liberation of the people (along with their wisdom traditions) from both a domestic and foreign “enlightened” liberal culture, which prizes instrumental rationality and unrestricted wealth accumulation, was a rallying cry across the Patria Grande in the twentieth century. After the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI’s social encyclical, Populorum progressio (1967), many Catholic leaders believed the Church could not remain silent on a continent longing for hope amid drastic social inequality. In this context of widespread poverty, Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez made a novel claim in A Theology of Liberation that “participation in the process of liberation is an obligatory and privileged locus for Christian life and reflection” (46). To a certain extent, liberation theology, like the “new political theology” of Johann Baptist Metz in Europe, was a form of Christian spiritual resistance to modern bourgeois liberalism with its privatization of religion, techno-scientific rationality, and sanctification of private property.

In Argentina, Paul VI’s opposition to the “international imperialism of money” and “private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right” inspired the Movement of Third World Priests, which faced deadly repercussions for its actions under the anticommunist military dictatorship (para. 26). The political assassinations of high-profile clerics associated with the nonviolent revolutionary movement in the 1970s during the “Dirty War” included Fr. Carlos Mugica and Bishop Enrique Angelelli, both of whom shared the cause of the working poor and a commitment to the socialization of property in urban and rural settings. Two Argentine priests who also belonged to the movement yet outlived it, Lucio Gera and Rafael Tello, were the architects of the pastoral ministry on the streets of Buenos Aires that became the basis of a people’s theology (teología del pueblo). Gera and Gutiérrez had a theological friendship that focused on prioritizing the poor. Their friendship lasted nearly a half century. It began at a small gathering of theologians at Petrópolis in 1964 and crystalized at the Latin American meeting of Catholic Bishops at Medellín in 1968, where poverty as institutionalized violence was explicitly addressed. Their great friendship even endured the official exclusion of Gutiérrez by conservative churchmen from the Puebla meeting in 1979, though that did not stop the new language of the preferential option for the poor from being included in the final document.

Cardinal-Archbishop Bergoglio’s leadership in Buenos Aires during the 2000s imbibed the teología popular y pastoral of Gera and Tello. It amplified the lived faith of the poor on the social peripheries and their struggle to flourish with dignity. Numerous priests under Bergoglio’s care had been taught by them, especially Gera who served as Dean of Faculty of Theology at the city’s Pontifical University. Bergoglio frequently turned to the more affective sensus fidei (an instinctual sense of faith through love) known among God’s beloved poor, themselves agents of history, to evangelize and bring the hope of Jesus Christ to broader secular society. When he oversaw the drafting of the Latin American Bishop’s final document at the Aparecida meeting in 2007, the term “people’s mysticism” (mística popular) was used to convey the inseparability of traditional popular piety and progressive social justice, thus unsettling conventional political categorizations (no. 262). A main target of the Aparecida document was a neocolonial culture of liberal individualism, which detaches persons from communities and traditions of meaning in the quest for personal self-advancement and is indifferent to the common good (no. 46). This self-serving uniformity flattens cultural diversity, especially among poorer and historically dispossessed communities, such as Afro-Americans and Indigenous peoples in Latin America. For this reason, the document stated the need for the “decolonizing of minds and knowledge, to recover historical memory” of cultures systematically repressed and excluded (no. 96).

Remembering the Poor as Pope

Whatever transpired at the 2013 conclave over lunch must have assuaged any lingering political concerns about Bergoglio and liberation theology since he was elected pope later that evening after only five votes. Once he had more than the required two-thirds votes, his longtime friend from Brazil, the late Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, embraced him, saying, “Do not forget the poor” (No te olvides de los pobres). Francis’s papacy immediately began with a spiritual decision to choose the mendicant lover of poverty, peace, and creation from medieval Assisi as his namesake. He dropped the fancier papal attire and lived at the humble guesthouse of Casa Santa Marta instead of the Apostolic Palace. His papacy ended in a simple wooden casket at Santa Maria Maggiore, a Roman papal basilica outside the Vatican, after a corporal work of mercy donating €200K of his personal money to a juvenile prison. Francis was by all means a pastor to the world’s poor and excluded, not a sovereign prince for a new gilded age.

Although there has been some attention to the question of whether Pope Francis was a proponent of liberation theology, it is clear that he was an unqualified advocate for a theology of poverty, itself based on St. Paul’s teaching about “the mystery of Christ who lowered himself, impoverished himself, to enrich us” (2 Corinthians 8:9).  Liberal cultures indeed contain good and humane values that seek to minimize material poverty, lift up the poor, and aid the needy with charitable giving and philanthropy. However, Francis’s theological meditations go much further than bourgeois moral ideals: Christian poverty, a spiritual and voluntary act, is about giving what is one’s own and not merely from one’s excess. To choose poverty for the sake of enrichment because Jesus himself was poor exposes what no liberal ideology based on luxury or middle-class comforts would ever endorse. Pope Francis’s entire pastoral ministry and teachings make this preferential option for the poor the spiritual nucleus for converting the Church. The kind of reform Francis had in mind was formulated by ressourcement theologians of Vatican II, like Yves Congar, OP, and Henri de Lubac, SJ, whom Francis occasionally cited in his speeches and writings.

Francis was by all means a pastor to the world’s poor and excluded, not a sovereign prince for a new gilded age.

Francis’s first trip outside Rome was to the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where he brought to the world’s attention the poverty of stateless migrants and refugees from North Africa. In the twentieth century, the Jewish political philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to such persons as “superfluous” in her monumental work that deserves urgent re-reading today, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s exhilarating diagnosis of the bourgeois origins of modern tribal and racial ideology challenged her readers to recognize “the existence of a right to have rights” despite the liquidating effects of imperialism and later Nazism and Stalinism (296). Francis often called contemporary migrants “throwaways” (descartados) of a globalized economy of exclusion and indifference, or displaced victims of a piecemeal Third World War. Neoliberalism, the technocratic paradigm, and the idolatry of money were, for Francis, twenty-first century threats not only to social well-being, but also to political stability and ecological sustainability.

The Annual World Day of the Poor created by Francis during the 2016 Jubilee Year of Mercy was a deliberate effort to recognize the dignity and worth of “socially excluded people.” It was one among numerous examples from his pastoral leadership going back to his Anti-Human Trafficking Masses in Buenos Aires. God chooses the poor by giving them a name. For example, the angel of the Lord told Joseph that Mary, his betrothed, would give birth to “God with us” (Emmanuel) in the flesh of an infant, named Jesus, born naked and poor. Pope Francis reminded listeners that the homeless man Lazarus, from Jesus’s Gospel parable, had a name at the divine judgment, whereas the rich miser begging Abraham for mercy after death did not (Lk 16:19–31). There is no greater recognition of social and political belonging, no greater dignity, than receiving a name directly from the Creator who loves and wills our existence. On the Fifth Annual World Day of the Poor, Francis declared that poor persons are icons of the flesh, “a sacrament of Christ” who “represent his person and point to him” (para. 3).

The concrete faces of the poor and excluded, not unlike Emmanuel Levinas’s biblically and Talmudically inflected phenomenology, communicate divine transcendence. Riffing on Arendt, I would often hear Gutiérrez say later in his career that “the poor are those who do not have the right to have rights.” In Francis’s final autobiography, Hope, coinciding with the Jubilee Year and his death, Francis returned to the characteristic theme of his reform papacy: “The Church’s preferential option toward the poor must also bring us to know and appreciate their cultural way of living the Gospel… When, as members of the Church, we get close to the poor, we discover—beyond the enormous difficulties of life—a transcendent sense of life” (174).

Against both political liberalism and economic neoliberalism, Francis identified popular piety in the streets and the social function of property as antidotes to the privatization of religion and the new tyranny of money.

The way of poverty, as lived by the earliest followers of Jesus, was the stubborn anchor and controversial standard of Francis’s reform papacy devoted to changing the worldly culture of modern Catholicism in the West, from the Vatican to the parish. Francis sought to clean house, so to speak, by introducing a new culture of apostolic poverty at the Roman Curia, which is the administrative center of the Holy See at the Vatican. This alternative logic (or way of thinking) had greater and lesser successes, though it was largely misunderstood by political commentators. Whether reducing the annual salaries of the cardinals, or making “simplicity of life and love for the poor” a necessary job requirement for working in the Curia, Francis was determined to institutionalize proximity to the poor as the authentic criterion of Christian discipleship and unity. In his first address to the media after the 2013 conclave, he told the audience, “How I would like a Church which is poor and for the poor!” If this spiritual standard of apostolic poverty did not afford the late pontiff a ready-made solution for rectifying the worldwide clergy sex abuse crisis, straightening out Vatican finance, or strengthening women’s participation in the Curia and across the life of the Catholic Church, at least it broke open the possibility for sincere structural reforms centered on love for the poor and listening to the excluded without the traps of worldliness and clericalism.

Francis’s blueprint for radical Church reform under an “apostolic” framework was his first letter, The Joy of the Gospel (2013), which expressed his desire for a Church of and for the poor (para. 198). He also exhorted “each individual Christian and every community… to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor, and for enabling them to be fully part of society” (para. 187). This apostolic exhortation, which Pope Leo XIV resolutely reaffirmed in his first speech to the cardinals, shows just how mistaken the label of liberalism is for understanding Francis. Against both political liberalism and economic neoliberalism, Francis identified popular piety in the streets and the social function of property as antidotes to the privatization of religion and the new tyranny of money. Francis even referred to popular piety as a locus theologicus (or source) for gaining wisdom about God (para. 126). He stressed the image of the polyhedron to reflect a unity in diversity instead of a neocolonial culture of liberal individualism. All these themes received more theological explanation in his two social encyclicals on integral ecology (Laudato si’) and social friendship (Fratelli tutti).

Decolonizing Ecology with Indigenous Knowledge

In Francis’s reflection on the Amazon synod, Querida Amazonia (2019), he showed the decolonial aspects of his thinking through his constructive dialogue with Indigenous cultures of the region. On the one hand, he claimed—in an unprecedented way among popes—that the Amazonian bioregion is itself a theological locus where believers can encounter the living God (para. 57). On the other hand, he praised the culture of material simplicity among Indigenous Amazonians who uniquely know how to live well (buen vivir), because “God’s little gifts” matter more than “accumulating great possessions,” and ecological care for creation is privileged over needless destruction of things (para. 71). What may appear as living in poverty to a bourgeois standard is considered great wealth when harmony between family, community, and Pachamama (Mother Earth) are preserved. This alternative way of thinking from Indigenous communities can contribute toward an integral ecology not focused on economic progress, but sustainable living and intergenerational solidarity to better care for our common home. Francis’s letter to the Amazon also showed the influence of the Argentine cultural anthropologist and philosopher Rodolfo Kusch, from whom Francis learned the mythical and organic sense of a people rather than a logically abstract concept. In the Introduction to the English translation Kusch’s Indigenous and Popular Thinking in América, Walter Mignolo makes the important point about Kusch’s contribution to decolonial thinking and “awareness of immigrant consciousness.”

Conclusion

With nearly half of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics inhabiting the Americas, it is not surprising to see the first pope from this side of the Atlantic followed by a US-born pope indebted to a Latin American pastoral approach learned in Peru. The observation of Brazilian Jesuit Henrique de Lima Vaz in 1968 that the Latin American church was shifting from a projection of Europe to a source for global Catholicism has now been validated by history and, in the eyes of the faithful, the Holy Spirit. That Pope Francis brought a theology of poverty from his home continent to reform the Church, beginning with the Curia, and to address the new challenges to today, is a legacy sure to endure in the twenty-first century with Leo XIV.

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David Lantigua
David Lantigua is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame where he is Co-Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. He is author of Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-editor with Lawrence Clayton of Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights: A Brief History with Documents (University of Alabama Press, 2020). His current book manuscript examines the Latin American theological and cultural dimensions of Pope Francis's social thought and its implications for global Catholicism in the twenty-first century.
Global Currents article

Cracks in the Wall: Pope Francis and Palestine

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Pope Francis touches the wall that divides Israel from the West Bank, on his way to celebrate a mass in Manger Square next to the Church of the Nativity, believed by many to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ, in the West Bank town of Bethlehem, Sunday, May 25, 2014. /GALAZKA_1405.01/Credit:Osservatore Romano-Pool/SIPA/1405251417 (Sipa via AP Images).

In 2014, Pope Francis’s unscheduled stop at the Israeli apartheid wall in Bethlehem, adjacent to “Free Palestine” graffiti, marked a pivotal moment in his papacy. This act came to symbolize his profound engagement with the plight of the Palestinian people, an engagement that gained renewed urgency with the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people.

With his passing, and in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, many Palestinians as well as marginalized communities globally mourn the loss of a crucial spiritual advocate and ally. Pope Francis’s legacy extends beyond Palestine; it embodies compassion to all, resistance to Eurocentric power structures, and unwavering solidarity with the oppressed. As global upheavals, particularly in Palestine, persist, it is imperative to reflect on and perpetuate his legacy to foster a more just and decolonized future. This reflection on Pope Francis’s legacy remains critical even as the bombs fall and starvation continues, and there is no accountability for those who have committed and continue to commit these crimes.

The Visibility of Palestinians

Despite the live-streamed genocide in Gaza and the intensification of the occupation and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Palestinian suffering has been normalized. Following decades of settler colonialism and constant dehumanization, Palestinians have been left invisible, their pain muted, and their lives disregarded. Decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon observed how the colonized are reduced to an “animal existence,” stripped of dignity in ways that make their suffering not only bearable to the oppressor but structurally permissible. In this sense, Israel’s siege on Gaza and erection of the apartheid wall are not just physical barriers, but instruments designed to erase Palestinian humanity.

The erasure of Palestinians thus does not occur only through their physical annihilation by bombs and starvation tactics. It also happens through the complicity of individuals and institutions that maintain or accommodate the colonial status quo, a complicity that fits the definition of what Hannah Arendt termed the “banality of evil.” Yet in this context of systemic invisibility, Pope Francis emerged as a rare global voice who, to a meaningful degree, resisted this erasure and affirmed Palestinian humanity on the world stage.

Israel’s siege on Gaza and erection of the Apartheid Wall are not just physical barriers, but instruments designed to erase Palestinian humanity.

His 2014 pilgrimage to the Holy Land was not a routine diplomatic visit. It was a journey marked by empathy and moral clarity, where he was attentive to the literal and symbolic walls that structure Palestinian life—walls that define political, social, economic, and ethnic boundaries. Pope Francis did not repeat sanitized, Eurocentric platitudes; instead, he aligned himself with the marginalized. His intentional stop at the Apartheid Wall created a crack in the dominant narrative that Palestinians are a violent mass that are to be feared and therefore need to be controlled. Instead, it reflected the reality that they are a people yearning to live with dignity in their homeland despite the brutal grip of occupation.

For many Palestinians, this unscheduled and spontaneous stop followed by prayer was an unfamiliar but deeply affirming experience: the feeling of being seen. It was reminiscent of Christ’s healing of the haemorrhaging woman (Mark 9:25–34). In this story, Jesus defies social taboos when he stops and restores humanity to a woman cast aside by the world.

In his final years, even as illness overtook him, Pope Francis continued to offer radical visibility to Palestinian suffering. His statement—echoing the conclusions of legal and human rights experts—that the atrocities in Gaza bear the hallmarks of genocide was a powerful and necessary intervention. Pope Francis’s call for a thorough investigation shattered the dangerous complicity of silence among world leaders, including within the Vatican itself. Beyond statements, he conducted daily phone calls with members of the Holy Family Church in Gaza, embodying a form of solidarity that was not abstract but grounded in direct pastoral solicitude.

Through both his public declarations and private acts, Pope Francis offered a holistic witness to Palestinian humanity. He may not have had the power to halt the genocide, but through his papacy—from the 2014 stopping at the Apartheid Wall to his final sermon in 2025 calling for a ceasefire—he made the suffering of Palestinians visible in a world led by those who are determined to look away.

Sacredness and Institutional Solidarity

For many of those who stand in solidarity with the Palestinians’ cause, and aim to protect their lives, Pope Francis has been an ally. His role as the spiritual father of the Catholic world, one that includes Palestinian Christians, imbued his stop at the Apartheid Wall in 2014 with profound spiritual significance. That act was not merely symbolic, political, or diplomatic, it was a liturgical gesture of resistance, a sacred disruption of the empire. In placing his head against the wall and praying, Pope Francis enacted a theology of incarnation and solidarity, embodying the Church’s preferential option for the oppressed. His stillness proclaimed loud and clear what the Church must never overlook: that God’s preferential option is always for the oppressed. To truly follow Christ is to draw near to the wounds of those who are overlooked in the world. In this way, the wall becomes a holy altar for lament.

Through that gesture, Pope Francis reorients the spiritual and prophetic imagination of the Church. He names Palestinian suffering as not only a human rights issue but also a reality of people crucified, echoing the suffering Christ. Many Palestinians, confronting the threat of their imminent annihilation, echo Christ’s plea in Gethsemane: “Let this cup pass.” In contrast to the silence preferred by the empires of the world and those who choose to remain asleep, just as the disciples did in the garden, Pope Francis makes visible what power seeks to erase, stirring conscience where indifference prevails. In this way, stopping and praying at the wall, as well as his daily calls to the Holy Family parish community in Gaza became a faithful act of solidarity.  Such sacred acts pointed to God’s presence among the poor, dispossessed, and the oppressed. Pope Francis is also demanding a divine act for justice in the face of structural sin.

In placing his head against the wall and praying, Pope Francis enacted a theology of incarnation and solidarity, embodying the Church’s preferential option for the oppressed.

Sacredness and religious expression are often organized and mediated through institutions that can both constrain and amplify spiritual and moral witness. Indeed, many of today’s most potent prophetic voices regarding Palestine have emerged from outside institutional walls, even as powerful institutions have actively attempted to suppress the global solidarity movement for Palestine. Yet Pope Francis, through his pastoral approach, represents a prophetic voice from within an institution often perceived by Palestinians as complicit in their colonization.

The affirmation of Palestinian humanity, enacted both through acknowledging their suffering and validating their political aspirations, powerfully demonstrates that even amidst the historical failures of many Christian institutions concerning Gaza and Palestine, work needs to be done inside and around these spaces. These voices remind us that while institutions may often be slow to act, they remain vital spaces where moral authority is contested and redefined. It is crucial to recognize prophetic allies within institutions. Institutional comrades matter profoundly because they possess the capacity to shape narratives, mobilize resources, and influence global norms, especially when it comes to audiences that the pro-Palestinian camp may not have access to.

Resisting Eurocentricity

Pope Francis’s witness to the humanity of Palestinians and their aspirations for freedom stands as a powerful moral and theological statement. Combined with his broader commitment to the poor and oppressed and his identity as a leader from the Global South, Pope Francis’s witness establishes a legacy that positions Palestinians as a matter of prophetic concern within the Vatican. His stance also challenges the Eurocentric discourses and attitudes that have long shaped Christian engagement with the question of Israel and Palestine. This is especially significant in light of post–Vatican II Jewish-Christian dialogue, which often excludes Palestinian Christians and remains silent in the face of settler colonialism and genocide.

Beyond this exclusion, the crimes of the Holocaust and European antisemitism have rightly produced a deep sense of guilt among western Christians, particularly theologians. However, this guilt has become a theological and moral stumbling block, leading many to idolize Jewish suffering while ignoring or denying the suffering of Palestinians. As a result, Jewish-Christian dialogue has too often become a protected space for Zionist assumptions rather than a forum for honest theological and ethical engagement with colonialism in all its forms.

Institutional comrades matter profoundly because they possess the capacity to shape narratives, mobilize resources, and influence global norms, especially when it comes to audiences that the pro-Palestinian camp may not have access to.

Pope Francis, through his solidarity with Palestinians, confronts the limitations of western Jewish-Christian dialogue and calls the Church to reflect on its moral and theological failures. This challenge is both necessary and urgent, offering a path toward a more holistic commitment to the protection and liberation of Palestinian lives, both Muslim and Christian, alongside Jewish lives, whether Israeli or international, without denying or excluding the suffering of any.

From Intuition to Strategic Action

For Palestinians, especially Palestinian Christians, Pope Francis’s legacy is a call to believe that even within ancient institutions and hegemonies, cracks can form, light can enter, and solidarity can emerge. Undoubtedly, Pope Francis’s legacy suggests a new path that must be taken forward. His intuition to stop at the Apartheid Wall and engage with the Holy Family parish in Gaza needs to evolve into a concrete stance and strategic action that opposes discrimination, occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In other words, it is not enough to simply acknowledge the situation; the available resources must be used to dismantle the wall and stop the atrocities in Gaza. If we do not transform Pope Francis’s legacy into robust change, we risk failing to fully realize the vision it embodies.

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John Munayer
John Munayer is a Palestinian theologian from Jerusalem and holds degrees from King’s College London, the University of Edinburgh, and VU University Amsterdam. John is currently involved in interreligious activism and the founder and editor of the Journal of Palestinian Christianity at the Bethlehem Bible College. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, researching the political theology of the Palestinian laity in relation to the Holy Fire ceremony. Together with his brother, Samuel, they co-authored the book: The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology amid Gaza (Orbis, 2025). 
Samuel Munayer
Samuel Munayer is a Palestinian theologian from Jerusalem and holds degrees from Durham University and Exeter University. Samuel works as an advocacy and access officer for a humanitarian organization that works in Gaza and the West Bank. He recently co-authored with John the article entitled, “Decolonising Palestinian Liberation Theology: New Methods, Sources, and Voices,” and their new book The Cross and the Olive Tree: Cultivating Palestinian Theology amid Gaza (Orbis, 2025). 
Global Currents article
Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby is the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Global Affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1994. The author or editor of fifteen books on modern religion and conflict, he currently serves as the interim director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion.

Previously Appleby served as the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School (2014-2024), as the John M. Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (2000-2014), and as the director of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism (1994-2002). In 2010 Appleby founded Contending Modernities, a multidisciplinary study of religions and secularisms in interaction. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, he holds the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1985) and is the recipient of five honorary doctorates.
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Zohran Mamdani and Strategic Islamophobia


Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in Bryant Park, New York City on Oct 27th, 2024. Via Wikimedia Commons.

On June 24, 2025, Zohran Mamdani won the most votes of any candidate in NYC primary history for the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City. Mamdani ran a confident, creative,  and populist campaign, wherein he was refreshingly plainspoken about his democratic socialist commitments, his unwavering focus on the working class, his unequivocal support for the equality and dignity of the Palestinian people, and his focus on New York City alone.

Mamdani’s message clearly resonated with New York City voters, who delivered him a stunning victory across all demographics. Voters under 50 favored him by a 2:1 margin. He won the Asian American vote by 15 points. He won the White vote by 5 points. He won the Hispanic/Latino vote by 5 points. Overall, he won 56% of the vote over Cuomo, the favorite’s, 44%. Mamdani also won a significant share of the American Jewish vote (20%), and was cross endorsed by Brad Lander, New York City’s Controller and the highest ranking Jewish politician in New York.

Though New York City can get a bad rap in the rest of the United States, those of us who live here know that there is a version of it that is a beautiful and successful social experiment. New York City does not have a majority ethnic or religious population, but is instead made up of a series of pluralities. In the face of this incredible diversity, everyone gets along rather well. At New York City’s best, the ethos is not so much “live and let live” as it is “we are all in this together.” This is the heart of New York City—perhaps not appreciable from the outside—but a core that was manifested in the results of this election.

Crusader Logic

Despite this inspiring on the ground reality, since his election, we have seen a wider Islamophobic backlash to Mamdani’s win that exposes deeply entrenched media and elite narratives, as well as forms of social control that are threatened by his ascendancy and what it might represent. Simply put, his election unearthed a Crusader logic that exists under the surface of a western civilization that sees itself as defined against “Islam” and Muslims. This logic was repackaged from its medieval origins in the twentieth century through an ideology most famously articulated by Samuel Huntington in his “Clash of Civilization” thesis, which argues that “Islam has bloody borders,” and that while the world temporarily was occupied by a bilateral struggle between Communism and Capitalism, once Capitalism “won,” the deeper structure of world enmity became, once again, Islam vs. Christendom. In the United States and Europe, particularly after the creation of the State of Israel by combined Zionist and European powers after the Holocaust, the idea of Christendom was amended, and a new concept called the “Judeo-Christian” was born, wherein European Jews joined with Christians in the old, Crusader-era struggle (ironies here, of course, abound) as long as, the deal implicitly goes, European Jews would stand on the front lines of the confrontation with “Islam.”  It is also worth noting that there is a version of this conception of a clash of civilizations that is mirrored in the Muslim-majority world, though with slightly different contours. In any case, it is an inherently base and simplistic way of thinking, but one that nonetheless inspires fear, irrationality, and suspicion.

This substructure is of course not the only one animating western Civilization and has been admirably challenged through the tradition of liberalism, with its concepts of equal human rights and citizenship. But liberalism itself is often grafted onto this older Clash of Civilizations/Crusader mentality, which largely explains, in my view, “liberal Islamophobia.” In this version of Islamophobia, Muslims are assumed incapable of respecting liberal values that uphold difference and dissent. This might all sound too weighty a historical buttress for the election of one young Assemblyman as the Democratic nominee for mayor in New York City, but the extremity of the rhetoric against him suggests otherwise. His election has been described as an “invasion.” A Congressman who tweeted that Palestinians should “eat rockets” with the hashtags #BombsAway and #StarveAway, and who told one of his Palestinian constituents “go blow yourself up,” declared that Mamdani would install a “caliphate” in New York City. Far-right activists declared him a “jihadist Muslim,” and a Republican representative wrote a letter to the Department of Justice calling for Mamdani’s citizenship to be revoked and for him to be deported. A partner in a prominent Silicon Valley firm declared that Mamdani, “comes from a culture that lies,” and a Senator from New York falsely claimed Mamdani had “made references to Global Jihad.”

The Islamophobic Backlash

To explain this vociferous response to Mamdani’s win, I would offer this striking assertion: Islamophobia is one of the ideological currents that significantly undergirds our current world order, which is a product of the history I laid out above, and Zohran Mamdani’s election disrupts the flow of that ideological current.

It bears mentioning, of course, that Islamophobia is not the only reason people object to Mamdani.  Concern about his economic policies, for example, are real, and can and are articulated without coming close to Islamophobia. I focus here, however, on the Islamophobic response, and what is at stake in it.

I believe Mamdani’s unusually courageous support of Palestinian human rights and justice has triggered a particularly acute Islamophobic response. In an address to the UJA-Federation of New York, a prominent American Jewish organization in June of 2025, he said,  “My support for BDS is consistent with the core of my politics, which is nonviolence. And I think that it is a legitimate movement when you are seeking to find compliance with international law.” On X, on July 9, 2025, he wrote, “Can any pro-Israel voice explain why baby formula is being blocked from entering Gaza?” Mamdani’s first statement about the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which he issued the day after, expressed mourning for “the hundreds of people killed across Israel and Palestine in the last 36 hours.” He then added that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “declaration of war” will “undoubtedly lead to more violence and suffering… The path toward a just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.”

Islamophobia is one of the ideological currents that significantly undergirds our current world order . . . and Zohran Mamdani’s election disrupts the flow of that ideological current

I would argue that if Mamdani did not articulate a political vision and set of stances that stood up for the dignity and equality of the Palestinian people (who are both Muslim and Christian), and if he did not ground that in the norms of international law, and if he did not explicitly criticize Israeli policies, he would be facing far less, if any, Islamophobia.

Take the reaction to figures such as Fareed Zakaria or Mehmet Oz—prominent media figures in America who one might not have even realized are Muslims. These figures either never comment on the question of Palestine or take positions in support of Israel. They face little to no Islamophobia and are embraced by the political and media establishment. It is clear that perhaps the most contentious issue that critics have with Mamdani is his stance on Palestine, and that Islamophobia is a tool used to attack Mamdani on that issue.

The current world order—which seems to be steadily changing—is one in which the United States continues to exist as the strongest military and economic power in the world, with much of Europe dependent on it for its security and hence often in lock step with it politically. There are at least nineteen U.S. military bases in the Middle East (especially in the Arabian Gulf) and at least 50,000 troops stationed in the region. Israel is the US’s closest ally and sits in a strategic location in the region where it has a calculated military and intelligence edge against all of its neighbors. It has launched offensives against surrounding countries on several occasions and illegally occupies land in the region. (Israel does not have declared permanent borders.)  The US is interested in asserting control of this region because of its oil resources, and because of a sense of “Judeo-Christian” affiliation with the European population of Israel.

Though the destabilization of the Middle East has been unfolding for almost eighty years, the current manifestation of conflict in Israel/Palestine has become perhaps the most contentious in the world today. The genocide in Gaza and increasing governmentally sanctioned settler violence and ethnic cleansing on the West Bank are largely condemned by civilian populations and human rights organizations around the world, including Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, while allowed to continue or actively supported by the governments of world powers, especially the United States. This state of affairs has created outrage across the world. American Muslims (and Christians from the region) make up the subset of the American population that have the most exposure to this conflict and can speak to it most poignantly from an intimate and humane perspective. Hence their voices—voices like Mamdani’s—must be silenced. The liberal “Judeo-Christian” civilizational logic that I argue often functions as the contemporary version of Crusader logic—“us against Islam”—requires that the Muslim, especially in in western politics, not be able to speak for themselves. They must be contained, spoken for, and marginalized. Contemporary Islamophobia is focused on creating a narrative about Muslims and Islam from the outside. This is a strategic Islamophobia that aims to prevent Muslims from assimilating as equals into western populations. The narrative about Islam and Muslims fashioned by this strategic Islamophobia turns Muslims into objects to be constantly demonized as figures of suspicion who are assumed to want to “dominate,” and thus are labeled as “supremacists,” and much more. Mamdani refuses this; he claims a Muslim identity and asserts his pro-Palestinian politics, which challenges an important current of the existing world order —and hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers of all races and religions agree with him. It becomes easy to see why this is such a large threat to modern-day Crusader logic.

Geopolitical positions are not the only threat to this Crusader form of liberalism—one’s stance on social issues are also scrutinized. Here again the figure of Zohran Mamdani presents a dangerous disruption to the stereotypes about Muslims upon which the Judeo-Christian modern Crusader logic depends. He is American, well spoken, attractive, empathetic, sincerely championing policies that benefit all New Yorkers, especially the working class of any race or religion. Here is a Muslim with significant Jewish American support, a Muslim who marched in NYC’s pride parade and carried a trans flag, a Muslim who smiles and laughs easily. In short: a normal, amicable, well-meaning person.

Mamdani’s Challenge to Strategic Islamophobia

Simultaneously—and dangerously, for the neo-Crusaders—Mamdani made a few brilliant rhetorical choices during the primary campaign that challenged long-held orthodoxies regarding the question of Palestine. During one of the primary debates, all of the candidates were asked which foreign country they would visit first as mayor. Many of the candidates answered, “the Holy Land” or “Israel.” Mamdani was the only candidate to say he would stay in New York City, where he will meet extensively with Jewish New Yorkers: “I would stay in New York City. I’ll be meeting Jewish New Yorkers at their synagogues, temples, or at their subway stations.” Not satisfied with this answer, the establishment media followed up with a seeming non-sequitur, asking if he believed Israel had the “right to exist” as a “Jewish state.” His response once again struck at the heart of elite American political orthodoxy while echoing the sentiments of the majority of Americans: “I am not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else.” It is widely speculated that rather than derail his campaign, this answer bolstered it and earned him more votes. This in and of itself is a political earthquake.

To uphold the strategic project of Islamophobia, the complex reality of who Zohran Mamdani is as an individual—emblematic, I think, of the majority of American Muslims—must be obscured by stereotypes and slander that have nothing to do with him. The reality is that Muslims function like any other religious community. There are people that are more observant, and people that are less observant. There are people that identify with the right politically and people who identify with the left. But obscuring the banality and normality of Muslims—keeping them in a permanent state of exception and stifling their authentic and complex voices—is essential to manufacturing the consent to continue to militarily dominate and subjugate Muslim-majority lands. American Muslims, many of whom have ties and/or deep knowledge of the countries, people, and life-worlds that have been demonized and attacked in the “War on Terror,” are the western demographic most likely to speak up for those oppressed people. Thus, modern Crusader logic wants to silence those voices.

To uphold the strategic project of Islamophobia, the complex reality of who Zohran Mamdani is as an individual . . . must be obscured by stereotypes and slander that have nothing to do with him

Mamdani also threatens another important rhetorical tool of strategic Islamophobia—the idea that all Muslims are inherently antisemitic. He has made his opposition to Israeli policies clear and made his unwavering support for the Palestinian people clear, and it turns out that most people agree with him. This has nothing to do with his, or certainly “Muslims’” feelings en masse about all Jewish people—and this seems obvious to most people observing Mamdani, including many Jewish people in New York. The relationship between Mamdani and Lander threatens the narrative of constant, ancient immutable strife between Muslims and Jews—an ahistorical narrative that is again needed to manufacture consent for present-day conflicts—instead modeling the reality: centuries of friendship, mutual respect, and future possibility for collaboration between Muslims and Jews (and everyone else) toward the common good, right here in New York City.

Conclusion: Beyond the Conflict Framework

Islamophobia is a latent phenomena that can be fanned and flamed, but we do not have to think of it inflexibly as an inevitable or intrinsic feature of western civilization. As a professor of Islamic Studies, I have seen how histories of strife and conflict appear to be more exciting objects of study—if you want to study the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, for instance, you will have to study revolts and conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim communities.  It is, for some reason, more mundane to produce research on histories of friendship, breaking bread, mutual aid, solidarity in the face of natural disasters or other external threats, or the millions of everyday instantiations of common humanity that make our world turn. And this is what I think explains the cognitive dissonance of Mamdani’s Islamophobic detractors, who cannot understand the gap between the real affective and political expressions of a vastly diverse population living together peacefully in New York City, and the metanarratives and stereotypes that are operationalized to fuel and sustain conflict. The former reality is quiet, every day, unassuming, and frequently under theorized; the latter is loud, brash, designed to frighten and create binaries that make populations easier to control. New York City is poised to offer a much-needed injection of this logic of the everyday and the normal into the public consciousness that, added together, is the stuff that injects peace and humanity into our political discourse.

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Sarah Eltantawi
Sarah Eltantawi is Associate Professor of Modern Islam in the Department of Theology at Fordham University in New York. She is currently at work on a book on the Political Theology of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which is a study of religion and politics during the period of the birth of Egyptian modernity. Her first book, Shari’ah on Trial: Northern Nigeria’s Islamic Revolution (University of California Press, 2017) examines the career of the stoning punishment in Islamic Law through the infamous trial of Amina Lawal in Nigeria. Eltantawi has published numerous articles on Islamic law and Islamic modernity and post-coloniality. She holds an MA in International Studies from Harvard University and a PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard University.
Global Currents article

The Eyes of Silwan: The “Undefeated” Powers of Palestinian Struggle


Along the narrow streets of Silwan, East Jerusalem, “The Eyes of John Berger,” English poet, painter, essayist. Photo by Kobi Wolf. Used by permission from Art Forces.

Shown above are the eyes of John Berger (1926-2017), a renowned English poet, essayist filmmaker, painter—and advocate for Palestine. His eyes are depicted in a mural in the occupied Palestinian community of Silwan in East Jerusalem.

But Berger’s eyes are only one pair of many sets painted along Silwan’s neighborhood streets. Some eyes are those of East Jerusalem’s own Palestinian dead, like Eyad al-Hallaq, a special needs young man with autism whom an Israeli border police officer killed in 2020. Others’ eyes commemorate those with whom Silwan organizers feel a close international solidarity, such as Bai Bibyaon (leader of her Indigenous tribe who sought to defend ancestral lands in the Philippines), Ghassan Kanafani, Shireen Abu Akleh, Che Guevara, Hamad Mousa (a Palestinian farmer from Akka, Palestine), George Floyd, Alex Nieto, Rachel Corrie, Malcolm X, and more.

Why are Berger’s and these eyes on the walls of buildings in Silwan? I suggest that they express a sense and belief that the “whole world is watching.” Indeed, they represent the power of the dead for the living in Palestine. They manifest what John Berger once named Palestinians’ “undefeated despair” amid decades of occupation and a hundred years of British, Israeli, and U.S. domination.

Consider the occupation. As Israeli forces occupy Silwan’s community, they also guard Jewish settlements there. Israelis’ aim is to displace and replace Silwan’s 50-60,000 residents. They invoke a “bogus archaeology” to justify this, interpreting the ancient Jerusalem sites underneath Silwan as being what a majority of archaeologists agree they are not, a biblical “City of David.” Israeli Zionists and Christian tourists relish this biblical fantasy while real-world residents of Silwan are dispossessed to create these archaeological parks.

Even if archaeological evidence proved Israeli claims (which they do not), the Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and the “City of David” settlement are illegal by international law (Occupation Remains, 18), and the land confiscation in East Jerusalem is part of Israel’s “belligerent occupation” of Palestine. There is no justification, then, for displacing current residents, surely not for their continuous repression, as reported by Silwan’s Madaa Creative Center: “Not a day goes by where the residents aren’t rained [on] by gas bombs, sound bombs and rubber bullets during the clashes while trying to defend their existence, their lives and their land.”  Overall, as historian and archaeologist Nazmi Jubeh summarizes, the plight of Silwan’s Palestinians is desperately precarious. They live below the poverty line and are crowded into homes often unfit for human habitation. Silwan has experienced almost every form of maneuver for eradication by Israel’s occupation and repression.

In painting their murals, however, the people of Silwan are also organizing.

Silwan is active: its residents mobilize themselves and international visitors, like the delegation of theological educators with whom I visited Silwan and East Jerusalem. We were hosted by Sabeel, a Jerusalem-based ecumenical liberation center. Silwan’s organizers explained to us, as they do to all visitors, their history of dispossession. They showed us their property lots reduced to rubble by Israeli demolitions. They pointed out the Jewish settler’s homes which were replacing their own. Local activists, artists, and residents showed us the mural art gracing the neighborhood streets—like the bold eyes painted throughout Silwan. This art is the fruit of solidarity between the U.S.-based public art group, Art Forces, and Silwan’s own Madaa-Silwan Creative Center. As videos at the “I Witness Silwan” site show, Silwan is home to a world movement, full of vitality—even festivity—amid resistance to occupation.

The displacement we saw being creatively resisted by residents of Silwan was supplemented by what we also knew of the occupiers’ exterminating ways. In fact, the same day as our visit in Silwan (June 3, 2025) Israeli forces were intensifying their genocide in Gaza, firing upon Gaza’s hungry people at designated food distribution points. On that single day, 90 were wounded and 27 were killed. A Haaretz investigation confirmed the intentionality of this latest phase of the Gaza genocide: “IDF Soldiers Told to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Civilians Waiting for Humanitarian Aid.”

Since October 7th, well over 58,573 Gazans have been killed and 92% of Gaza’s housing units have been destroyed. After just one month’s bombing, Israel dropped on Gaza some 25,000 tons of mostly US-made bombs, equivalent to the two nuclear bombs dropped in Japan. After six months it had dropped 70,000 tons on Gaza, more than the tonnage dropped in World War II on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined.

Israel in Gaza now stands charged with “genocide” in the International Court of Justice. The charge is confirmed by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and by three reports of the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine (March 2024, October 2024, July 2025).

Genocide Studies scholars remind us that the word “genocide” names not only a horrible singular event (which it does), but also a structural process at work in peoples’ everyday living in racist and capitalist systems emergent from colonial and imperial powers (on this point, see Wolfe, Estes, Koshy).

So, maybe as we stood there in Silwan, we were watching “slow genocide” as a structural process, while nearby, Gazans were experiencing genocide as a stark and brutal event. Genocide in either form, though, is a harrowing, elongated, dehumanizing brutality.

Berger knew of Palestinians’ persistence when he wrote of their “undefeated despair.” Surely the mural eyes show an “undefeated” people, throwing back at occupiers the very gaze that Israeli surveillance and occupation impose. As Susan Greene writes in a stellar article on the eyes of Silwan, “The Israeli state has placed all Palestinians under extensive systems of surveillance, a ‘colonial gaze’ that renders the population hyper-visible as objects but invisible as subjects.” Palestinians, however, are watching, and looking back—and we the world with them.

I suspect Israelis feel the resistance from the painted eyes of Silwan. Occupiers do not like to know they are watched, to have their fancies and brutalities unmasked. Reminding us of this is the great twentieth-century African American scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois described how he countered the White imperial gaze of his day, how he, as a Black man gazed back at “the souls of white folk.”

I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. . . . I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious. . . . As they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped—ugly, human.

To see like this—to have eyes like those of John Berger and Du Bois—is to see through the occupier’s pretensions and brutalities. It is one part of organizing against them. It is to be “undefeated.”

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Mark Lewis Taylor
Mark Lewis Taylor is a Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research and teaching focus on critical theory for “political theologies of liberation.” He teaches courses on white racism and hegemonic masculinism, empire and capital in theological perspective, cultural-political hermeneutics, and on the theologies of Paul Tillich and Gustavo Gutierrez. Among his books are Religion, Politics and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers and American Empire (2005), The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (2015), and The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (2011).
Global Currents article
Scott Appleby
Scott Appleby is the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Global Affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1994. The author or editor of fifteen books on modern religion and conflict, he currently serves as the interim director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion.

Previously Appleby served as the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School (2014-2024), as the John M. Regan Director of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (2000-2014), and as the director of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism (1994-2002). In 2010 Appleby founded Contending Modernities, a multidisciplinary study of religions and secularisms in interaction. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, he holds the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1985) and is the recipient of five honorary doctorates.
Theorizing Modernities article

Bibles Belong to All of Us: Elizabeth Shakman Hurd Interviews Hannah Strømmen

and
Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” housed at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain. Cropped and edited from a photo taken in 2024. Via Wikimedia Commons

In the previous post I reflected on how Hannah Stømmen’s The Bibles of the Far Right reveals the interrelation between ideas of masculinity, “civilization,” and religion. In this interview I dig deeper with Hannah into the theoretical positions and ideas that shape her analysis.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (ESH): Your chapter on the Crusades, Middle Ages, and masculinity as part of the “War Bible assemblage” also evoked other “sticky” factors for me, such as the significance of violent video games and gun culture in the lives of many of the aggrieved men discussed in this chapter. Would you include those factors as well? More generally, how much “Bible” content does there need to be for something to “count” as a biblical assemblage and when does it morph into something broader? Is gun culture a biblical assemblage?

Hannah Strømmen (HS): Violent video games and gun culture could absolutely have been included as factors in the War Bible assemblage. And not just guns but weapons more generally. It is striking that several of the missiles used by western forces against ISIS were biblically named “Brimstone” and “Hellfire” missiles. In 2015 the UK politician Hilary Benn argued in favor of military intervention in Syria by alluding to the Good Samaritan story from Luke 10:25–37: Britain should not walk by on the other side of the road. In the book I discuss the way the story about David fighting Goliath (1 Samuel 17) is used to frame those on the far right as warriors defending Europe against Islam. Receptions of this story are able to tap into the idea of the valiant underdog, where violence against a much stronger enemy can be justified as righteous.

The War Bible assemblage is not only about biblical components or influences, though. Breivik drew on Norse mythology to name the weapons he used. What I find helpful about the assemblage concept is that it can elucidate how different sources and traditions—from video games, to Norse mythology, or indeed the Bible—are not as incompatible as they might appear, but can be combined to reinforce fantasies of masculinity and drive violent action.

It is, I think, often not clear where biblical reception morphs into something broader. Sometimes direct citations of the Bible are straightforwardly recognizable. But vague references to the Bible are worth studying in addition to direct citations because much biblical reception is about what people think of as “biblical.” Many examples could be mentioned here. In addition to Benn’s comment about “walking by on the other side of the road” mentioned above, there are references to storms and catastrophes having “biblical” dimensions, or modern-day activists such as Greta Thunberg being compared to biblical prophets. In the case of the far-right politics I discuss in The Bibles of the Far Right, it is crucial that the Bible is not only directly cited. More important than citations is its association with western civilization, whiteness, masculine heroism, and righteous truth-telling in opposition to “elites.”

The blurred line between biblical reception and something broader is important also for thinking critically about how the “secular” is imagined. The popular perception that people in the west were biblically literate but no longer know the Bible obscures the fact that perceptions of the Bible circulate in numerous ways and with varied effects. As Peter Phillips points out, we need to get away from the idea that biblical literacy is only about reading the Bible. Some fairly extreme forms of biblical reception gain visibility, such as in debates about abortion or visions of the apocalypse. But much political and cultural Bible-use goes unnoticed and unstudied due to a secularization narrative in which the decline of biblical literacy is a key part. As the contributors to Katie Edwards’ Rethinking Biblical Literacy show, that narrative depends very much on what we mean by biblical literacy and biblical knowledge. Hanna Liljefors has recently shown how problematic attitudes to the Hebrew Bible stubbornly persist in Swedish media culture—a country which is often declared to be one of the most secular in the world. The attitudes toward the Hebrew Bible she identifies participate in long-standing supersessionist receptions that demonize Judaism, but are professed with no awareness of this history and its impact. It is crucial to pay attention, as Holly Morse argues, to the “myths and meanings” surrounding biblical texts (4).

This is the reason why I prefer to talk about Bible-use, where “use” can be implicit and explicit, textual and non-textual, related to Bibles as artifacts or as an archive of ideas and inspiration for theologies, ideologies, and practices. “Use” can be reading as well as not reading. In fact, some uses of the Bible require that the texts have not been read!

(ESH): You draw on an impressively diverse array of thinkers in this book (including several of my Northwestern colleagues including James Bielo, Regina Schwartz, and Robert Orsi). Setting aside Deleuze and Guattari, which thinkers or approaches influenced you most in this project, and how? Do you expect to stay with them in future work, or explore new paths? If the latter, which ones?

(HS): I hadn’t realized the scholars you mention are all at Northwestern! It must be a great place to work.

Yvonne Sherwood’s work has influenced me greatly. Her work on the Bible of George W. Bush Jr. has been very important for explaining more broadly the way contemporary assumptions about a “Liberal Bible”—a Bible that vaguely supports the ideals of liberal democracy—go back to the Enlightenment period. Her book on the afterlife of Jonah was also inspiring for me in identifying different dynamics in the reception of the Bible, from receptions that become so mainstream they are barely questioned, to more minority or “backwater” receptions, as she calls them.

Your own work on the “two faces of religion” paradigm, which has taken hold in political debate in the last decades (and continues to operate), has also been instructive and inspiring for me. It allowed me to see how the Bible becomes caught up in a global dynamic in which the category of religion is frequently split into the problem of so-called bad religion (which is sectarian, intolerant, and therefore requires discipline and surveillance), and the solution of so-called good religion (which is irenic, peace-building, respectful of rights, freedom, and tolerance).

I am excited by emerging work in biblical reception criticism, particularly by PhD students. I am thinking of, for instance, Rebekah Carere’s project at the University of Oslo on Trump’s Bible, Rebekah Hanson’s research at the University of Chichester on the Bible in digital culture, and Samuel Auler’s work at Lund University on the Bible in Brazilian far-right politics. Also, the team of postdocs for the project I am currently leading at Lund University, “Scripture and Secularism”—Joel Kuhlin, Hanna Liljefors, and Frida Mannerfelt—are all producing exciting work that explores how the Bible is used in different modern publics. Their work will no doubt inspire me in continuing to research the complex dynamics between the “biblical” and the “secular” in modernity.

(ESH): Sara Ahmed’s approach to affect appears to have shaped the project in significant ways, such as in your discussion of responses to biblical violence in Chap. 7. Can you discuss how attention to the nonlinguistic and nonrational influenced how you approached this project? What looks different in your field when viewed through the prism of affect, or “socially-produced sensation” as you describe it on page 219, citing Fiona Black and Jennifer Koosed?

(HS): Questions about affect have significantly impacted my way of thinking about biblical reception. Most biblical scholars are trained to work closely with texts, with textual analysis, and with exegetical work. Working on the reception history of the Bible could easily be a history of exegesis, where exegesis takes the form of textual commentaries and works consisting of systematic engagement with biblical texts. Towering historical figures such as Augustine and Luther would be obvious contenders for projects tracing biblical reception. But much biblical reception does not consist of close readings of biblical texts or of systematic treatises (by “great men”). Or, at least, you miss significant aspects of biblical reception if you only investigate explicit and textual exegesis of biblical texts throughout history. Biblical reception scholars working on art, music, TV and film, demonstrate the importance of appreciating the Bible beyond textual reception (see, for instance, the Visual Commentary on Scripture; T&T Clark Companion to The Bible and Film; The Handbook of Jesus and Film; Bibles in Popular Cultures). There is an enormous amount of work to be done on biblical reception, not least when it comes to politics.

Many scholars and journalists pointed to the way Breivik’s manifesto was a patchwork compilation, a cut-and-paste document, and not a systematic treatise. The biblical citations in the manifesto could easily be dismissed (along with the whole manifesto) as incoherent. But the manifesto continues to be circulated and cited. Its success does not depend on a rigorously systematic argument. Ahmed asks about what emotions do. I wanted to reflect on how emotions stick to different uses of the Bible and make them compelling. Why might a series of biblical citations be compelling to include in a far-right manifesto? Why is the Bible proudly held up as a civilizational marker of the west in contrast to the Qur’an? Why is the supposed loss of the Bible lamented due to immigration to Europe? What nostalgia, anger, resentment, and desire might be fueling this use of the Bible?

Ahmed takes seriously the “affective value” that sticks to particular works, particularly classics and canonical texts. The Bible operates with an “iconic” dimension; it is “ritualized” (and not only by faith communities!), with various forms of authority tied to it depending on the context, as James W. Watts has so helpfully explained.

Emotional investments and interests may be resistant to arguments that operate on a rational or intellectual level. It is important to point out that I am not only thinking about “ordinary” people’s reception of the Bible—as if they are beholden to irrational feelings while scholars are the privileged bearers of rational knowledge who can appear with their “corrective expertise”, to quote the classicist Clare Foster (62). Scholars also have affective investments. Some Bibles make us feel good. Others will make us shudder or cringe. The affects that are produced will depend on our beliefs, commitments, contexts, and experiences, as well as the larger histories, ideologies, and practices in which we are embedded. Biblical assemblages can be resilient and stubborn, accumulating theological and cultural capital over time, and stabilized in peoples’ assumptions about what “the Bible” is. For scholars to critically map different forms of biblical reception, then, it is necessary to identify the affects and effects of uses of the Bible. Only through this work can one uncover which kinds of reception become entrenched and resistant to change.

Taking affective investments seriously can, I think, be transformative for understanding the staying power of trends and tendencies in biblical reception. Here I draw also on Brian Massumi’s understanding of affect, where affect is not only or primarily about feeling or emotions. It is about the potential for change—for something to affect and be affected. How might different kinds of biblical assemblages challenge the far-right assemblages that are part of propagating racism?

Towards the end of the book, I suggest “BibleLab”—inspired by Erin Manning and Massumi’s SenseLab project—as a mode and space for experimenting with Bibles. The idea of BibleLab is not that people can somehow engineer a particular assemblage that is benign for ever after. No one has the power to control and constrain an assemblage. But through experimentation, different Bibles can emerge. BibleLab is about what encounters can be curated, in bringing together different bodies, things, artifacts, texts, feelings, words, movements, materials. Such experimentation will obviously not “solve” the violence and racism of far-right movements. The mapping of biblical assemblages furnishes indirect ways of tackling the use of Bibles by figures on the far right.

Deterritorializing Bibles in the way I discuss in the book is about forging new connections between people, challenging assumptions, creating new attachments and foregoing old ones, inspiring and provoking different ways of thinking about Bibles, and prompting the emergence of other, more liberative Bibles. This way, deterritorializing Bibles can help to awaken new solidarities.

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Hannah M. Strømmen
Hannah M. Strømmen is Senior Lecturer in Bible, Politics, and Culture and Wallenberg Academy Fellow at Lund University in Sweden. Her scholarly passions are focused on uses and interpretations of the Bible in philosophy, literature and politics. In her first book, Biblical Animality after Jacques Derrida (SBL Press, 2018), she examined how distinctions between gods, humans, and animals are constructed in and by way of the biblical archive. Over the last years she has been working on the Bible and the European far right. With Ulrich Schmiedel she has written The Claim to Christianity: Responding to the Far Right (SCM Press, 2020). Her latest book is The Bibles of the Far Right (OUP, 2024).

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She studies the public and political careers of religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the international politics of secularism and religious freedom, American borders, and US actions in and representations of the Middle East. She is the author of Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion (Princeton University Press, 2015), The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton University Press, 2008), and four co-edited volumes on religion and politics, including, most recently, At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia University Press, 2021). At Northwestern, Hurd co-directs the Global Religion & Politics Research Group and is a core faculty member in the MENA Studies program.