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Theorizing Modernities article

Weaponizing Indigeneity: Zionist Media Discourse on Possessing Palestine


The Palestinian village of Umm al-Khair, sorrounded by the illegal Israeli Settlement of Carmel. Released for publication via Dr. Nidal Makhamra, Mayor of Masafer Yatta. Via Wikimedia Commons.

This essay is adapted from a presentation delivered at the American Academy of Religion 2025 Annual Conference and draws on ongoing dissertation research.

In a Times of Israel blog post, Dani Behan cites a United Nations working definition of indigeneity and concludes: “In anthropological terms, indigeneity pertains to ethnogenesis, i.e. ‘where a people became a people’…Ashkenazi Jews—and Jews more broadly—meet all of the most important, relevant criteria” for claiming the Land on which the modern State of Israel exists as their homeland. In a Forward Community post, Micha Danzig and Yirmiyahu Danzig describe Zionism as “the first successful indigenous movement of a dispossessed and colonized people regaining sovereignty in their indigenous homeland.” In Tablet Magazine, Ryan Bellerose writes, “Archaeology, genealogy, and history all support the Jewish claim to indigeneity.” Across these and other examples from a particular subset of English-language Jewish media, a striking pattern emerges: Jewish people are framed as indigenous[1] to Palestine; Zionism is recast as an Indigenous liberation movement; and the State of Israel is described as the realization of Indigenous rights, a decolonial project, or even a model of “Land Back” for Indigenous peoples to emulate. In this post, I outline the findings of my study of the uses of the language of Jewish indigeneity in prominent Jewish publications, noting its drastic increase in recent years. I then turn to a critique of this deployment and outline what it might mean to engage more deeply with Indigenous thought.

Encountering “Jewish indigeneity”

I began paying closer attention to claims like these in early 2024 while doomscrolling during a live-streamed genocide in Gaza. Seeing Jewish indigeneity invoked in real time to defend bombardment, siege, and mass dispossession was jarring. Indigeneity—long articulated by Indigenous peoples as incommensurable with state violence and colonial extraction—was being mobilized to justify precisely those forms of violence.

Jewish symbolic, theological, ritual, and affective attachments to Palestine date back millennia, and Zionism as a political project has existed for over a century, so why has indigeneity become such a strategically compelling framing only recently? While I am not one of the first to notice and interrogate claims of Jewish indigeneity, the growing visibility of this rhetoric raised a set of research questions for me: Was it actually new? If so, when did it emerge, who was using it, and where was it primarily circulating? And what kinds of arguments, frameworks, and evidence were being mobilized to make these claims?

Indigeneity—long articulated by Indigenous peoples as incommensurable with state violence and colonial extraction—was being mobilized to justify genocide in Gaza.

Because I initially noticed claims about Jewish indigeneity appearing most frequently in Jewish media, I conducted a systematic survey of the most widely read English-language Jewish outlets. This analysis revealed that the rhetoric was concentrated in user-generated opinion pieces and blog posts published in Zionist-leaning Jewish outlets, such as The Times of Israel, The Forward, The Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), and others. These outlets also offered a more stable archive than social media or comment threads, making it easier to track and analyze trends over time.

By contrast, the language of Jewish indigeneity was largely absent or minimal in more progressive, non-Zionist, anti-Zionist, or ultra-Orthodox publications, such as Haaretz, Moment, Mishpacha, Tikkun, Jewish Currents, and others. This uneven distribution suggested that, while the discourse is growing, it remains polemical: actively shaped, debated, and negotiated rather than taken for granted. Importantly, it also indicates that this is not the Jewish discourse but a specific ideological formation within the broader and internally diverse landscape of Jewish public discourses.

Figure 1. Graph tracing references to Jewish indigeneity in Jewish opinion publications. Produced by the author

Tracking the discourse over time reveals a clear shift. Mentions of Jewish indigeneity[2] were marginal until the mid-2010s. They rose gradually, with noticeable peaks around 2014 and 2018, before rapidly increasing after 2020. This trajectory mirrors key historical moments, including the global rise of Indigenous rights; intensifying Israeli ethnonationalist policies; Palestinian activism and BDS campaigns; and a broader turn to liberal identity politics in the United States. These convergences created an opportune moment for some Zionists to deploy indigeneity as a counter-narrative to charges of Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism.

Where Palestinians Appear—and Disappear

Much of this discourse is shaped by how Palestinian indigeneity is addressed, subordinated, or erased. Many authors simply omit Palestinians—the people who have lived on the Land for centuries—reproducing a familiar settler-colonial pattern in which Indigenous peoples are rendered invisible to make room for a new or supposedly “original” population.

When Palestinians are mentioned, they are often reframed as generic “Arabs,” linked to seventh-century Arab Muslim conquerors and positioned as culturally rooted elsewhere. Other authors emphasize pan-Arab identity, suggesting that Arabness disqualifies Palestinians from being Indigenous to Palestine and that they already have many Arab nation-states to which they could belong. Some claim that Palestinians primarily descend from more recent migrants responding to early Zionist development, while a subset denies the historical existence of a distinct Palestinian people altogether, despite the irony that both Jewish and Palestinian national identities emerged in the same historical period.

Even when Palestinians are occasionally acknowledged as having deep ties to the Land or as “also indigenous,” they are usually framed as biologically adjacent “tribal cousins” to Jews. In these accounts, Jewish entitlement to the Land remains primary and uncontested.

What This Discourse Does

This discourse has significant consequences:

First, it naturalizes a singular Jewish story and recenters Zionism as the default way of being Jewish. The narrative—“We were here first, we were displaced, and now we have come home”—is treated as common sense, masking its distortions, gaps, and omissions. Alternative histories and visions of Jewishness, such as diasporic nationalism, Bundism, non-statist cultural Zionism, and anti- or non-Zionist traditions, are marginalized or erased. The language of Jewish indigeneity reinforces the notion that authentic Jewishness is oriented toward territorial possession of Palestine, most fully realized through the modern nation-state.

Second, it inverts settler-colonial critique. State Zionism, long understood—including by many of its founders—as a settler-colonial project, is recast as decolonization and Indigenous liberation. Jewish people are positioned as the colonized Indigenous population, while Palestinians are discursively displaced as Arab latecomers, invaders, opportunists, or, at best, secondary occupants.

Third, it weaponizes Indigenous rights language. A moral and political framework developed (and critiqued) by Indigenous peoples to challenge dispossession and assert sovereignty is redeployed to defend a powerful settler state and the ongoing occupation and displacement of Palestinians. Israel is positioned as exceptional, righteous, and beyond critique, shielded from accountability by the very framework meant to contest domination.

This is what I mean by weaponizing indigeneity.

Reading With Indigenous Articulations of Indigeneity

Indigeneity is a contested category. It is shaped by colonial encounters and used by states and institutions to name, delimit, manage, and eliminate populations. At the same time, it is articulated by Indigenous peoples as a useful category for rebuilding communal identities and relationalities, protecting Land rights and sovereignties, and cultivating global solidarities.

Children rummage through trash accumulated in areas across Gaza, posing catastrophic environmental and health risks. Photo taken by Ashraf Amra for UNWRA. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Indigenous scholars, activists, and communities consistently insist that indigeneity is not simply “who was here first,” a checklist of criteria, or a matter of DNA. Indigeneity has been meaningfully articulated as a deep-time, reciprocal, kin-based relationship to Lands and all beings, oriented toward obligation rather than ownership, possession, extraction, and elimination. By contrast, Zionist uses of indigeneity operate through a logic of possession: “We are indigenous based on [insert criteria], therefore we are entitled to a nation-state, to possess the Land, and to eliminate or expel others from it.” 

These logics are fundamentally incommensurable. Settler frameworks treat Land as possession, as property, enabling forms of violence—including ecocide and genocide—embedded in colonial and nation-state structures. Indigenous peoples articulate Land as part of an interconnected web of relations and responsibilities, a mode of relating that cannot be reconciled with the structural violence that modern nation-states—including Israel—inflict on Lands and Peoples.

Why This Matters

This discourse is dangerous for everyone. Most immediately, it further endangers Palestinians by providing a rhetorical shield for occupation, dispossession, apartheid, and genocide. For Jews, it reinforces a narrow and violent Zionist vision of what it means to be Jewish. For Indigenous peoples globally, it dilutes, distorts, and weaponizes a hard-won category of resistance against ongoing colonialism and extraction.

[1] I use lowercase indigenous when referring to Jewish claims of indigeneity in order to reflect prevailing usage in my dataset. Across hundreds of instances, only a small number of authors capitalize Indigenous, which is more commonly associated with Indigenous political movements and rights frameworks.

[2] The dataset includes: The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, The Forward, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), Tablet Magazine, Jewish News Syndicate (JNS), The Jewish Press, Jewish Journal, The Algemeiner, The Jewish Chronicle (UK), The Canadian Jewish News, The Australian Jewish News, and J-Wire. Reposts between outlets (e.g., articles reposted from JNS in The Jewish Press) are not included. The graph records whether an article includes any reference to Jewish indigeneity to Palestine, rather than the number of times the term appears within a single article.

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Sabina Ali
Sabina Ali is a PhD candidate in the Religious Studies Department at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research interests include religion, race, and settler colonialism, and her dissertation examines contemporary Zionist public discourse that makes claims about “Jewish indigeneity” to Palestine, focusing on how the category of indigeneity is co-opted, distorted, and weaponized to reinforce settler ideas about land and justify the dispossession and elimination of Palestinians.
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Hope in a Secular Age

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“Hope,” David Newheiser writes in Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith, “is decision added to desire, and as such it is unconstrained by calculation” (9). This is good news, since hope can coexist alongside the pessimism and uncertainty that circulate widely today, unmitigated as they are by systems of persistent calculation. The book explores hope as an intellectual project and as a practice of enacting a decision to go on desiring, matters that convene this symposium. The conversation below covers rich territory surveyed by Newheiser’s intervention, from its animating exchange between Pseudo-Dionysius and Jacques Derrida on the question of hope despite—or because of—instability, to reflections on democratic politics and its material contradictions, and an inquiry into various traditions of conviction, perceiving surprising affinities to forge a basis for solidarities and new hopes.

Hope in a Secular Age makes particular claims about reading. Like Dionysius and Derrida, Newheiser believes that “people think by reading” (11). Because of the deep mutual implication of present and future, self and other, knowledge and mystery, a “revolution in thought does not require pure novelty; instead, we can uncover unexpected possibilities in familiar traditions” (11). These claims bear an analogy to Newheiser’s insistence, here and elsewhere, that fidelity to the spirit of a tradition requires navigating between rejection and repetition with a painstaking invention that carries it forward (12).

Beyond simply making such striking claims, the book, more significantly, performs their implications. Hope in a Secular Age, like its theoretical inspirations, reads beyond and across discipline and identity. Through sensitive readings of various figures, it finds a constructive vision of hope in contemporary life that presumes neither the purported social certainties of the postwar era nor the pure, hermetically sealed traditions of confessional identity. Newheiser thus encourages us, in hope, not to turn away from but rather to face the dislocations—easily recalled by recent memory and conjured by current anxiety in 2026—that call into question who we thought we were and what we thought our lives might be. In that project, a faith is possible that can “draw power from the sacred without allowing it to harden into myopia,” insisting on changes in social arrangements that draw us closer to a justice to come (151).

The symposium respondents raise a number of considerations, both in affirmation and critique, to press Newheiser, and the rest of us, to grapple with the promises and limits of hope. For Ted Vial, Newheiser’s analysis of Pseudo-Dionysius and Derrida reveals dynamics and postures essential for navigating the complexities of modern politics. These include resistance to a sharp binary between religion and secularism and a refusal to choose between negation and affirmation. In examining Newheiser’s assertion that hope is rooted in the will and requires discipline, Vial explores the role of spiritual exercises and practices in cultivating hope even when grounds for it elude us. Vial also implies a suggestive link between pedagogy and the practices of hope. He proposes that reading, particularly the type of “reparative reading” carried out by Newheiser, can serve as a disciplinary practice for sustaining hope, while pressing Newheiser to make more concrete how hope as a discipline might be enacted.

Eva Braunstein questions whether Newheiser adequately addresses the hierarchical and potentially anti-democratic elements of Dionysian thought. While acknowledging Newheiser’s argument that the unknowability of God relativizes hierarchical arrangements in Dionysius, she argues that such divinely ordained hierarchy clashes with the contingent nature of modern democratic institutions. Such hierarchical structure, furthermore, coupled with the Dionysian valorization of secrecy, raises concerns about its compatibility with modern democratic values of transparency and equality. Braunstein also raises questions about Newheiser’s interpretive method and the broader challenge of retrieving insights from historically distant texts for contemporary concerns.

Carolyn Chau challenges Newheiser’s focus on self-critique as the primary means of cultivating a chastened hope and argues against Newheiser’s framing of hope as solely a discipline of enduring incompletion. She emphasizes the transformative power of prayer and the role of personal encounter with the divine. Chau contrasts this approach with a purely negative theology, suggesting that engaging in constant self-critique might actually inhibit the kind of risk and vulnerability necessary for authentic faith. Completing the tripartite Pauline virtues, she contends that engagement with faith and love, grounded in the recognition of divine presence and power, is essential for hope’s transformative potential.

Andrew Prevot examines Newheiser’s comparison between Dionysius and Derrida, grounded as it is in a “kind/content distinction.” Prevot inquires about the implicit criteria for determining which pieces of “content” function to specify “kind” and which do not, criteria which Newheiser may depend on to adjudicate interpretive debates about both of the book’s figures. Acknowledging a constructive, in-between hope as a meaningful model for a secular age, Prevot nonetheless presses what can be said with non-dogmatic conviction speaking from some of that “content,” namely given but “never fully comprehended” Christian doctrines. These teachings can be meaningfully distinguished from the attempt to domesticate the essence of God, and Prevot makes a plea on behalf of the democratic fruitfulness of allowing differences in such content to nourish distinct hopes without neat synthesis.

Joseph Winters highlights the complex and ambivalent nature of hope, acknowledging its importance for human persistence while recognizing its potential to perpetuate harmful conditions. He highlights how Newheiser reconciles Derrida’s insistence on the “impossibility” of justice, that justice is “always to come,” with the necessity of engaging in calculation and judgments in the present. Evaluating Newheiser’s conception of hope as a form of perseverance that allows for transformation and surprise, Winters raises critical questions about the relationship between persistent engagement for change, on one hand, to matters of rupture, refusal, and abolition, on the other. In light of justified grounds for pessimism, what are the potential limitations of hope for addressing injustice? What does it mean to hope for a future when none can be imagined in light of the present system?

Atalia Omer perceives a tension between Newheiser’s desire to speak to conditions of material immiseration and insecurity, on the one hand, and his centering of an individual, mystical embrace of risk and uncertainty, on the other, questioning whether the latter advances an ethical posture unsuited to address the former. Drawing on her research in the Philippines and Kenya, Omer argues that, contrary to Newheiser’s reliance on the insecurity written into human being considered in abstraction, the empirical hopes of the people meant to be helped by the book are expressed in aspirations “for certainty and future predictability” that are better approximated in the lives of people who populate Anglophone seminar rooms. Such determinate hope, embodied, for instance, by people working for interreligious peace in Mindanao, expresses a “Sisyphean” attempt to transform conditions “for the persistence of suffering,” maintained in part through an “everyday struggle against despair.”

These interventions and Newheiser’s responses invite us to consider whether and how hope as a discipline and practice can navigate the fractures of our present, fostering resilience while daring to reimagine the future. The exchange opens horizons for further inquiry: the interplay among hope, praxis, and refusal in contexts of systemic injustice; the transformative power of communal practices even when or precisely because religious “belief” is placed under erasure; the legitimacy of hope in contexts of radical precarity; and the capacity of hope to negotiate seemingly incommensurable traditions, perspectives, and social locations. As Newheiser suggests, hope thrives not in certainty but in the creative tension of becoming—a disciplined assertion that even amidst dislocation, the potential for renewal persists. The labor of hope lies in continuing to uncover these possibilities, often in the darkness, inviting us to embrace the risk of transformation for a justice that remains to come.

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Devin Singh
Devin Singh is Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, where he teaches courses on religious thought in the West, social ethics, and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford University Press, 2018) and Economy and Modern Christian Thought (Brill, 2022). His next book, Sacred Debt, is under contract with Harvard University Press. His work has appeared in journals such as Religions, Journal of Religious Ethics, Harvard Theological Review, and Political Theology. 
Rick Elgendy
Rick Elgendy is the Martha Ashby Carr Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. His research asks questions of subjectivity, spirituality, and politics at the intersections of political theology, systematic theology, and critical theory. He is the author of Life among the Powers: A Political Spirituality of Resistance (Cascade, 2024) and co-editor with Joshua Daniel and contributor to Renegotiating Power, Theology, and Politics (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).
Theorizing Modernities article

Disciplines of Hope in a Secular Age


“Shadows.” Photograph courtesy of Flickr User Ian Sane. CC BY 2.0.

Reading and Teaching Hope in a Secular Age

I assigned David Newheiser’s Hope in a Secular Age in my class on religion in the public sphere. This class has had different foci in past years, but this time around it was focused on the ways in which religion undergirds, shapes, and is present in purportedly secular spaces. For me it was an opportunity to think through some of the strange dynamics in recent American politics. Newheiser uses a pairing that drives the arguments throughout the book—Dionysus and Jacques Derrida—to argue that religion neither can, nor ought, to be sealed off from the political sphere. It cannot because—as Talal Asad, José Casanova, and Charles Taylor have argued—the secular as a category is a historical development of a particular form of Protestantism, a category in turn that generates the modern category of religion (a differentiation Casanova makes explicitly).

This is a point that is easy to make in general, but difficult to flesh out in the specific forms. One of the great values of Newheiser’s book is just such a fleshing out of this point, which is true for worse and for better. On the worse side, for example, is Newheiser’s discussion of Derrida’s argument that Christian hegemony shows up in the modern period in the secular Enlightenment drive for universalism (115–116). On the better side is Newheiser’s arguments against readings of Dionysus and Derrida that try to force a religion/secular binary on them that fits neither. Both Dionysus and Derrida, on Newheiser’s readings, hold negation and affirmation in tension. “[M]ystical negativity complements the prophetic pursuit of justice” (104–5). If we let go of the latter we fall into despair. If we let go of the former we foreclose the critique that “opens the imagination to a future that has not yet come into view” (131). The book is full of interventions into secondary literature that cannot seem to bear the tension sustained in Dionysus and Derrida. Jack Caputo reads Derrida as very far on the negativity end of the spectrum, downplaying his commitment to “affirmation without assurance” (37), his commitment to justice in the here and now while justice is always to come (31). The latter is the idea that what we take to be justice here and now must be both struggled for and critiqued. Downplaying Dionysus’s negative side, Jean-Luc Marion argues that Dionysus does negate predications made of God but affirms God in the end through a discourse of praise (95). For Newheiser, Dionysus and Derrida stay in the tension, which gives us the hope that is needed in our political as well as existential situations: “[H]ope constitutes a resolute persistence in the face of uncertainty, and for this reason it incorporates both affirmation and negativity” (64).

One of the great pleasures in this book, for me, is a different tension that Newheiser holds elegantly throughout. His explications of Dionysus and Derrida, two thinkers I admit to finding mind-numbing and whom I tend to avoid, are crystal clear. I wish Newheiser had been my teacher years ago when I took (mandatory) classes on medieval theology. And yet, he wields erudition deftly and effectively. There are examples all over the book; one of my favorites comes in Chapter 4, when Newheiser distinguishes different significations of the Greek prefix hyper (“above and beyond,” and/or “in violation of”). When Dionysus writes “Since the unknowing of what is beyond being [hyperousiotētos agnosia] is something above and beyond [hyper] speech, mind, or being itself, one should ascribe [anatheteon] to it an understanding [epistēmēn] beyond being [hyperousion]” (97). Marion emphasizes the first signification of hyper in hyperousion, in which case Dionysus is saying that one can attribute speech to God, but in a higher sense. Language remains stable. But if one keeps in mind the second signification of hyper (“in violation of”), then Dionysus is saying something quite different. Created categories of speech are in violation of God’s being. Language is not grounded by a divine being, and Dionysus is insisting on a radical unknowing.

So how does Derrida read Dionysus? Newheiser traces the Thomistic understanding of hyper (“above and beyond”) found in the standard French translation of Dionysus, used by Derrida and by Maurice de Gandillac (who was Derrida’s teacher). Newheiser cites a lecture of Derrida’s on différance in which Derrida shows that he appreciates the alternate reading of hyper, in which the beyondness of God is not higher but “impenetrable hiddenness” (98). That’s just beautiful scholarship. Part of my agenda in assigning this book to graduate students was to give them an example of both what level of detail and sensitivity to language is necessary for good scholarship, and an example of how to write with simplicity and grace, without hiding behind dense obfuscation, even when discussing writers as opaque as Dionysus and Derrida.

The Discipline of Hope

One of the conversations I would most like to continue with Newheiser concerns his most basic argument, that hope is located in the will. It is not a cognitive or epistemological category. It does not necessarily function as a “pacifying fantasy” (63), as many have argued, and it is not a rational act in which one formulates an object that is at least possible and knows that the formulation advances your aim towards that object (79). Nor is hope located in the emotions, where Spinoza put it (78). Rather, hope is located in the will. “In my understanding, hope constitutes a disciplined resilience that enables desire to endure without denying its vulnerability” (2). That feels right. In a world that seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, despair is a copout, but lack of clarity about the enormity of our problems and the very likely failure of any attempts at action is an abdication of our responsibility as critics (all of us, not just the academics). Hope, while necessary, is not something one can talk themselves into with reason or count on to feel when it is most needed.

I want to spend a little more effort on the word “discipline.” If hope is both necessary but near impossible, locating it in the will does not mean that I can simply choose hope if I muster enough will power. And so the idea of discipline is of primary importance. The book ends with an anecdote related by Thomas Merton: “It was said of Abbot Agatho that for three years he carried a stone in his mouth until he learned to be silent” (155). Newheiser describes hope as an ethical discipline (143), the ascesis Derrida suggests is necessary to maintain an attitude or disposition of openness to the unforeseeable through continual self-critique (38-39). Ascesis, Newheiser reminds us, comes from the Greek for “training” or “exercise” (39).

It is hard to think of ascesis without thinking of Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life. Hadot writes that for ancient philosophical schools, for example, the Stoics, philosophy was an exercise. Not theory or interpretation of texts, but the art of living. And exercises, spiritual exercises, were required to transform “the individual’s mode of seeing and being” (83). One needs to be formed into a certain kind of subject to be in a position to see or do certain things. While reading Newheiser’s book I kept thinking, I would like to have hope. I would like the “bold humility” (155) that held at the same time realism and self-critique together with a space for imagining and acting for a better future. What are the spiritual exercises? Do I need to meditate more?

There is one suggestion for a form of discipline that runs throughout this book: reading. Newheiser’s own thinking that “unfolds through the interpretation of particular texts” (11), a kind of “reparative reading . . . guided by pleasure and improvement” (36, citing Sedgwick), the kind of generous “close reading” (94) Newheiser practices in this book, is surely one kind of discipline that can sustain hope. It is another good reason to assign this book to students. But beyond academics, at a more personal level, a level perhaps not appropriate for this beautiful book, I found myself wishing for Newheiser to act with what Foucault calls parrēsia, a “virtue and technique which could be found in the person who spiritually directs others and helps them to constitute their relationship to self” (43). What are the practices that lead to creative engagement in the face of climate change and White nationalism and the intractability of race and patriarchy and all the things that are so daunting? This is too heavy a weight for this small book that already does so much, but a question I suspect, though I do not know him well, about which Newheiser has read and reflected and has some insight. I am looking for suggestions for stones to carry in my mouth.

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Ted Vial
Ted Vial is the Potthoff Professor of Theology and Modern Western Religious Thought at the Iliff School of Theology. He teaches and publishes about religion, race, Judaism, gender, and artificial intelligence. He has served in leadership roles at the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and currently serves on the steering committee of the AAR’s Artificial Intelligence and Religion Seminar. He has won teaching awards from undergraduates at Virginia Wesleyan College and from students in the University of Denver/Iliff Joint Ph.D. Program.
Global Currents article

Letter from Scholars of the Holocaust, Jewish History, and Antisemitism Against the Adoption of the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism in New Jersey


Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now mobilize over a 1,000 Jews and allies to shut down Hollywood Blvd. to protest Israeli genocide in Gaza. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The New Jersey term of the current Senate and General Assembly will conclude on Monday, January 12, 2026. Throughout this term, a coalition of Jews, Palestinians, and Muslims in New Jersey have been fighting against legislation that would enshrine the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism into New Jersey law. On Friday, January 9, Speaker of the New Jersey General Assemblyman Craig Coughlin decided not to move the bill up for a vote in the Assembly on the last day of the term, this Monday. There is now massive pressure on him, on New Jersey Senate President Nicholas Scutari, and on New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy to bring the bill up for a vote. In this letter, scholars of the Holocaust, Jewish history, and Antisemitism outline the reasons for why the decision by Speaker Coughlin should be supported and the political, historical, and ethical problems that adopting the IHRA definition would entail.

***

January 11, 2026

Dear New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, Senate President Nicholas P. Scutari, and General Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin:

We are a group of scholars of the Holocaust, Jewish history, antisemitism, and related fields. Many of us are Jews, including Israeli Jews. We write to thank you for choosing not to move Bill A3558 to a vote in the current New Jersey General Assembly and Senate term. Your decision protected the constitutional rights of people who live and work in New Jersey and ensured that the important struggle against antisemitism is not marginalized in the name of silencing criticism of Israeli state policies and violence against Palestinians.

There is a large body of scholarship (for example) and public commentary that has exposed the many problems of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition of antisemitism,” which serves as the basis of Bill A3558. We note here the obvious: 7 of its 11 examples focus on Israel, not on Jews. This flawed conflation of a people with a state is itself antisemitic, for it seems to confirm the antisemitic idea that ties all Jews—their interests and loyalties—not to the states where they are citizens but to a foreign power. The list of examples also includes one that tags as antisemitic any criticism of Israel as a racist state. This is absurd because charges of structural racism are a common critique of many states, including the United States. Americans have a First Amendment Right to criticize any state, including their own, and just as criticizing Russia’s racist occupation of Ukrainian territories is not the same as racist slander against Russians, criticizing Israel’s racist occupation of Palestinian territories is not the same as racist slander against Jews. Bill 3A558 would thus violate the constitutional rights of people who work and live in New Jersey.

The IHRA definition, furthermore, targets Jews for criticizing Israel, which is another absurdity, for Jews who criticize Israel often do so as a way to express their Jewish identity. There is, in fact, a long and rich history of Jews criticizing Zionism and Israel, which includes political and religious organizations and parties. Targeting Jews for the way they express themselves as Jews is very clearly not part of a struggle against antisemitism, but antisemitic itself. The state has no place to dictate to Jews how to express their Jewish identity. Doing so would violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act because it would subject Jews to harmful stereotypes about what constitutes “authentic” Jewish identity.

Finally, New Jersey already has strong antidiscrimination laws that protect all people who live and work in the state, including Jews. There is no need for legislation with a definition of antisemitism that, for the reasons mentioned above and many other reasons, has been hotly contested and rejected by many Jews in New Jersey, across the US, and around the world, including Israeli Jews. Indeed, Kenneth Stern, the American Jewish lawyer who drafted the document that served as the basis for the IHRA definition, is a vocal critic of its use in legislation to silence criticism of Israeli policies and violence against Palestinians.

The claim of Jewish Federations in New Jersey that they represent all Jews in the state is simply false. Many Jews in New Jersey are members of Jewish Voice for Peace in Northern New Jersey, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action in South Jersey, and other religious, cultural, and political Jewish organizations that have criticized and rejected the IHRA definition and the claim that any one organization or group represents all Jews. One of the reasons they do so is because they recognize the real danger of antisemitism today, which primarily stems, as it always has, from White supremacists and Christian nationalists on the right. The IHRA definition remains silent about this historical and contemporary source of antisemitic ideas, persecution, and violence. Many Jews in New Jersey know that legislation that will codify the IHRA definition into law will marginalize the real struggle against antisemitism, focusing attention on protecting a foreign state, Israel, from any criticism, rather than protecting Jews.

We thus congratulate you on your decision not to move Bill A3558 to a vote in the New Jersey General Assembly and Senate this term, and we urge you to remain committed to this decision also in the next term.

 

Sincerely,

 

Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in
the Study of Modern Genocide, Stockton University

Rebecca Alpert, Professor Emeritus of Religion, Temple University

Leora Auslander, Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora,
and Indigeneity and History, The University of Chicago

Omer Bartov, Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Brown University

Joel Beinin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History,
Emeritus, Stanford University

Peter Beinart, Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the Newmark School of
Journalism, City University of New York

Joel Berkowitz, Director of Jewish Studies and Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee

Shamma Boyarin, Assistant Professor of Religion, Culture and Society, University of Victoria
British Columbia

Renate Bridenthal, Professor (retired), Brooklyn College, CUNY

Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, UC Berkeley

Eric Cheyfitz, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters and Professor
of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Cornell University

Sarah Combellick-Bidney, Associate Professor of Political Science, Augsburg University

Jon Cox, Associate Professor, Department of Global Studies, and Director, Center for Holocaust,
Genocide, and Human Rights Studies, UNC Charlotte

Hasia R. Diner, Professor Emerita at the Departments of History and the Skirball Department of

Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University

Michael J. Drexler, Professor of English, Bucknell University

Debórah Dwork, Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes
Against Humanity at the Graduate Center—CUNY

Marjorie N. Feld, Professor of History, Babson College

Keith Feldman, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Emmaia Gelman, Director, Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism

Terri Ginsberg, Rutgers University, author of Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of
Ideology

Shai Ginsburg, Chair, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Duke University

Amos Goldberg, Associate Professor, Holocaust History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Atina Grossmann, Professor of History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Cooper
Union, NY

Wolf Gruner, Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor of History, University of
Southern California

Jean Halley, Professor of Sociology, Graduate Center and College of Staten Island of the City
University of New York

Marianne Hirsch, Professor Emerita, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies, Columbia
University

Brett Kaplan, Professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Program in Comparative and
World Literature, and Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory
Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Marion Kaplan, Professor Emerita of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University

Shira Klein, Associate Professor and Chair of History, Chapman University

Susan S. Lanser, Professor Emerita of Humanities, Brandeis University

Nitzan Lebovic, Professor of History and Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies, Lehigh University

Mark LeVine, Department of History, UC Irvine

Laura S. Levitt, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Gender, Temple University

Charles H. Manekin, Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies (Emeritus), University of
Maryland

Atalia Omer, Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame

Rosalind Petchesky, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Political Science, Hunter College & the
Graduate Center, City University of New York

Judith Plaskow, Professor Emerita, Manhattan College

Benjamin Robinson, Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, Indiana University Bloomington

Shira Robinson, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington
University

Penny Rosenwasser, City College of San Francisco

Doug Rossinow, Professor, Department of Ethnic, Gender, Historical, and Philosophical Studies,
Metro State University

Michael Rothberg, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA

Cathy Lisa Schneider, Professor Emerita, School of International Service, American University

Joan W. Scott, Professor Emerita, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton

Victor Silverman, Emeritus Professor, Pomona College

Santiago Slabodsky, Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair in Jewish Studies, Hofstra University-
New York

Tamir Sorek, Liberal Arts Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University

Leo Spitzer, Vernon Professor of History Emeritus, Dartmouth College

Jessie Stoolman, Postdoctoral Researcher, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Estelle Tarica, Professor, Spanish and Portuguese/Jewish Studies, University of California,
Berkeley

Barry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University

Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan

Max Weiss, Professor of History, Princeton University

Howard Winant, Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus, University of California Santa
Barbara

Orian Zakai, Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature, George Washington University

Ran Zwigenberg, Professor of Asian Studies, Jewish Studies, and History, Pennsylvania State
University

2 Comments on Letter from Scholars of the Holocaust, Jewish History, and Antisemitism Against the Adoption of the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism in New Jersey Array
Raz Segal
Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University in New Jersey. He was a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2023) and a recipient of the Baron Velge Award for his work on the history of World War II (2024). His publications include Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2016).
Global Currents article

The End of Antisemitism: How the Fight Against Hate Became a Weapon of Repression


On Saturday October 29, 2023, at least 100,000 people demonstrated in London in solidarity with Palestinians. Photo Credit: Alisdare Hickson, CC BY-SA 2.0.

In the wake of the recent antisemitic shooting in Sydney, Australia we have witnessed a disturbing but increasingly familiar pattern. On December 14, 2025, two gunmen—a father and son—opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach, killing at least 15 people and injuring more than 40 others in what Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called an act of antisemitic terrorism. However, this anti-Jewish violence has become the occasion not for serious reflection on bigotry, hatred, and communal safety, but for a coordinated campaign to silence Palestinian rights advocates, anti-Zionist Jews, and critics of Israeli state policy.

The response from Zionist institutions and figures was swift and revealing. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the attack on Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood, declaring that its policy “pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” Deborah Lipstadt, President Joe Biden’s former Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, immediately used the occasion to target Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s newly elected mayor, writing on social media that his refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” helped “facilitate (not cause) the thinking that leads to Bondi Beach.” Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams was more direct, claiming the attack in Sydney was “exactly what it means to ‘globalize the intifada.’” The New York Times and other major outlets—most of which have still refuse to acknowledge Israel’s genocide in Gaza—amplified these narratives, treating the attack as vindication for those who have long argued that pro-Palestinian activism inherently endangers Jews.

The shooting was an anti-Jewish attack, and must be mourned and condemned as such. Yet, the speed with which it has been weaponized reveals something profound about how accusations of antisemitism function today. Notice the narratives being constructed: the attackers, identified as 50-year-old Sajid Akram and his 24-year-old son Naveed Akram, are depicted as “normative” Muslims whose religion naturally produces antisemitism, which in turn manifests as anti-Israel activism. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar declared the attack “the result of the antisemitic rampage in the streets of Australia over the past two years,” explicitly linking campus protests and pro-Palestinian activism to mass murder.

Meanwhile, Ahmed al-Ahmed, the 43-year-old Muslim man whose refugee parents had just arrived from Syria and who wrestled a gun from one of the attackers and was himself shot in the process, is portrayed as a rare exception: the “good Muslim” whose heroism is invoked to highlight the supposed antisemitism of his coreligionists. Australian officials praised al-Ahmed as “a genuine hero” whose actions saved “many, many” lives, yet the broader discourse uses his exceptional bravery to reinforce the narrative that Muslims are inherently prone to antisemitism unless proven otherwise through extraordinary acts.

The clear message is that Muslims, Palestinians, and their supporters are inherently antisemitic—and therefore their critiques of Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide must be dismissed as bigotry rather than engaged as political analysis and protest. The attack becomes evidence not of the need to address actual antisemitic violence, but of the danger posed by student protesters, by critics of Israeli policy, by anyone who invokes the phrase “from the river to the sea” or supports BDS.

The tragedy has been turned into a moment where the attackers’ antisemitism is weaponized against those who criticize Israel for genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. Historian Simon Schama exemplified this on Wednesday when he slandered progressive Jews and others as shedding “crocodile tears” over the killings, suggesting our grief is insincere because of our opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

The tragedy has been turned into a moment where the attackers’ antisemitism is weaponized against those who criticize Israel for genocide, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing

In titling this post “The End of Antisemitism,” I don’t mean that anti-Jewish hatred has disappeared—far from it. Rather, I’m arguing that the term “antisemitism” has become so divorced from its 19th century origins, so thoroughly inverted and weaponized, that it no longer serves as a useful framework for understanding or combating anti-Jewish hatred. What began as a concept to name a specific form of modern racial hatred has been transformed into a tool for silencing dissent and expanding state violence against our most vulnerable populations.

To understand this transformation, it is helpful to trace the term’s historical trajectory. And if antisemitism has a history—if it therefore has a beginning—then it can also have an end.

The Origins of a Racial Category

The term “antisemitische” was, as best we know, coined in the 1860s by Jewish historian and linguist Moritz Steinschneider, who used it to describe the racial prejudices of his contemporaries, like Ernest Renan, who believed that Jews were part of an inferior race lower than that of Europeans. The context matters: 19th century philology was dividing humanity into racial categories based on language families, distinguishing “Semitic” peoples from “Aryans” or “Indo-Europeans.” This wasn’t neutral scholarship. The emerging race science portrayed Semitic languages and peoples as static, corrupted, deteriorating, and without a history of their own, while Indo-European languages and “native” Europeans were characterized as dynamic, healthy, progressive, and in charge of their own future.

The term ‘antisemitism’ has become so divorced from its 19th century origins, so thoroughly inverted and weaponized, that it no longer serves as a useful framework for understanding or combating anti-Jewish hatred.

Antisemitism, then, was born as a modern racial ideology, distinct from but building upon medieval Judeophobia. While older forms of anti-Jewish hatred primarily centered on religious difference, modern antisemitism portrayed Jews as a fundamentally separate race or nation, inherently incompatible with and dangerous to Western nations. This ideology blamed Jews for the brutal disruptions of industrialization, capitalism, urbanization—for everything disruptive about modernity itself. It insisted on Jewish exceptionalism, drawing on biblical notions of chosenness to argue for Jews’ fundamental incompatibility with Christian Europe and its white settler colonial offshoots. By the early 20th century, antisemitism had become the basis of political movements across Europe, culminating in Nazism’s genocidal program.

Even in its early history, however, the term was being weaponized not only by non-Jewish racists but also among Jewish communities themselves. Jewish traditionalists leveled accusations of antisemitism against scholars engaged in Higher Biblical Criticism. They argued that the new higher criticism represented “the antisemitism of today,” and threatened to strip Judaism of its foundational claims by questioning the divine authorship and historical reliability of the Torah. What became known as the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis was not merely a scholarly theory but an assault on Jewish identity itself. In another instance, Jewish nationalists, including Zionists, deployed it against more assimilated Jews, accusing them of “Jewish self-hatred” for their commitments to integration and universalism. The pattern was established: a term meant to name hatred could also be used to police Jewish identity and silence Jewish dissent.

Post-Holocaust Transformation

After 1945, two interconnected ideas fundamentally altered how antisemitism was understood. First, the Nazi Holocaust came to be seen as evidence that anti-Jewish hatred was uniquely and exceptionally insidious—more dangerous than other forms of bigotry and violence. This view required a willful blindness toward the genocides that were part and parcel of European colonialism outside Europe, treating the Holocaust as utterly unprecedented in history rather than as another manifestation of European racial violence now turned against other Europeans.

Second, there emerged among western leaders a consensus that the State of Israel was owed to the Jewish people as compensation for the Holocaust and the world’s indifference to it. This proved a convenient solution to the “Jewish Question” that had preoccupied Europe for more than a century, allowing western nations to avoid confronting their own legacies of anti-Judaism while supporting the creation of a Jewish state on someone else’s land.

The founding of Israel in 1948, of course, came at the direct expense of the Indigenous Palestinian community which became a target of Anglo-Zionist dispossession since at least 1917. In the Nakba, which had begun (or accelerated) in 1947, Israeli forces destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages, murdered thousands, engaged in widespread sexual assault and hostage-taking, and forcibly displaced approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes into what we now call the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and into Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.

Almost immediately, pro-Israel groups in the United States and Western Europe began deploying a new strategy: to speak out against these abuses, against the violations of Palestinian life and rights, was, they claimed, itself a manifestation of antisemitism. This eventually became known as the “new antisemitism,” which supposedly existed alongside “classical” antisemitism. The argument insisted that Israel spoke for all Jews worldwide—an idea initially rejected by many Jews but eventually embraced by major Jewish institutions, for whom the allure of state power proved irresistible.

Here’s the bitter irony: what has permitted Israel to violate the very international law that had been created partly to prevent a recurrence of WWII’s genocidal violence was precisely its ability to capitalize upon antisemitic notions of Jewish exceptionality and Jewish difference. By insisting that Israel deserved special treatment because of Jewish suffering, by claiming that any criticism of Israeli policy was an attack on all Jews everywhere, the Israeli state and its supporters reinforced and exploited the very logic of antisemitism they claimed to oppose.

The Contemporary Inversion

Over subsequent decades, as Israel’s human rights violations became increasingly visible—through the intifadas, the apartheid system, settlement expansion, the 2006 and 2008–2009 wars on Gaza—the accusations of antisemitism intensified rather than diminished. The 1975 UN General Assembly declaration that Zionism was a form of racism—passed as post-colonial nations gained representation—was treated as proof of antisemitism rather than as a legitimate political analysis of settler colonialism. The BDS movement, a nonviolent call from Palestinian civil society to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel, has been criminalized in more than 30 U.S. states in the name of “combating antisemitism.”

By insisting that Israel deserved special treatment because of Jewish suffering, by claiming that any criticism of Israeli policy was an attack on all Jews everywhere, the Israeli state and its supporters reinforced and exploited the very logic of antisemitism they claimed to oppose.

The weaponization reached a new level with the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism by governments, universities, and institutions worldwide. In practice, this definition has been employed almost exclusively to silence criticism of Israel and to target Palestinian rights advocates. Meanwhile, actual “classical” antisemitism has grown dramatically: the Tree of Life synagogue massacre, the white supremacist march in Charlottesville where participants chanted“Jews will not replace us,” the rise of QAnon and Christian nationalist movements that traffic openly in antisemitic conspiracy theories.

The recent emergence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther—released on October 7, 2024, as part of the broader Project 2025 agenda—marks perhaps the culmination of this inversion. As the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace has noted in this space, this document creates a framework of a “Hamas Support Network” that encompasses virtually all progressive advocacy: Palestinian human rights organizations, campus activism, diversity and inclusion programs, ethnic studies departments, even challenges to unfettered executive power. Notably, Project Esther contains no mention whatsoever of what we might think of as “classical” antisemitism—no discussion of white supremacy, Christian nationalism, or the actual violent threats facing Jews today.

Instead, it provides a playbook for using antisemitism accusations to attack students, sanction Palestinian human rights organizations like CAIR, Al-Haq, and Al Mezan, dismantle DEI and affirmative action programs, defund ethnic and Middle East studies programs, attack transgender rights, undermine international law, and—most crucially—to further the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It offers a roadmap for the rise of racist nationalist states worldwide, all performed in the name of protecting Jews.

Toward an End and a Beginning

In what should be plainly obvious by now, none of these efforts undertaken in the name of combating antisemitism have made the world safer for Jews. They have not reduced hate crimes or challenged racial supremacist ideologies. They have not stopped attacks on Jewish communities. They have not addressed the Christian nationalist movements that see Jews as pawns in an apocalyptic drama. Instead, they have become mechanisms for expanding state power through violence against the most vulnerable populations—Palestinians first but foremost, but also students, activists, refugees, transgender people, and anyone engaged in solidarity work.

This is why I argue we have reached the end of antisemitism—not as a lived reality of anti-Jewish hatred, which persists and must be opposed, but as a useful analytical category. The term has been so thoroughly emptied out, inverted, and weaponized that it now describes its opposite: not a defense of a vulnerable people against state violence but a mechanism for expanding state violence against vulnerable peoples.

The task ahead isn’t to abandon the fight against anti-Jewish hatred. It’s to reclaim that fight on the basis of an ethical framework that rests upon common humanity rather than exceptionalism. This means recognizing that anti-Jewish hatred has always operated within larger systems of racial, colonial, and religious domination—not apart from them. It means reconnecting Jewish safety with universal struggles for justice rather than with nationalist or militarized projects. It means building bonds of genuine solidarity, divorcing anti-Zionism from anti-Jewish hatred, and pushing back against those who weaponize Jewish history to persecute others.

Rather than parsing endlessly over whether to hyphenate or capitalize the term—as if any of this would have material impact—we need new frameworks rooted in history and solidarity, not fear and censorship. We need to stop treating the term “antisemitism” as if it names a timeless, transhistorical hatred, and recognize it instead as what it has become: a weapon in the hands of those who would silence critique, expand state violence, and perpetuate genocide.

If antisemitism as we’ve known it is ending, then something new must begin: a genuine commitment to opposing all forms of hatred and violence, including anti-Jewish hatred, rooted not in the logic of exceptionalism but in the recognition of our shared vulnerability and our common struggle for liberation.

1 Comment on The End of Antisemitism: How the Fight Against Hate Became a Weapon of Repression Array
Barry Trachtenberg
Barry Trachtenber is a historian of modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, and genocide, Barry Trachtenberg is the author of The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish (Rutgers, 2022), The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse, 2008). He has published on issues related to American support for Israel, Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism in venues such as Jewish Currents, the Guardian, the Forward, Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss. In 2017, he testified to the US Congress on the topic of antisemitism on college and university campuses. In 2023, he submitted with colleagues expert testimony in support of a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and in 2024 testified in the trial DCI-Palestine v. Biden seeking an emergency injunction to stop military and diplomatic support for Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School. He holds the Michael H. and Deborah Rubin Presidential Chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC.
Global Currents article
Meghan J. Clark
Meghan J. Clark, Ph.D., is a professor of moral theology at St John’s University (NY). In 2022, she was the Assistant Coordinator of the North American Working Group of the “Doing Theology from the Existential Peripheries” Project for the Migrant & Refugees Section of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. She is a member of the Catholic team for the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity’s Informal Conversations with the Salvation Army (2022-2027). She is a senior fellow of the Vincentian Center for Church and Society and serves as a faculty expert for the Holy See’s Mission to the United Nations. In 2015, Dr. Clark was a Fulbright Scholar to the Hekima Institute for Peace Studies and International Relations at Hekima University College, Nairobi, Kenya. She has conducted fieldwork on human rights and solidarity in Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania. In May 2018, she was a Visiting Residential Research Fellow at the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham (UK). 
She is author of The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: the Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights (Fortress Press, 2014).  Active in public theology, she is a columnist for US Catholic magazine and has written for America Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, and other public outlets. She received her Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Boston College (2009).
Theorizing Modernities article

Mysticism, the Ordinary, and the Sacred: An Interview with Andrew Prevot

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Joshua Lupo (JL): Professor Prevot, thanks for talking with Contending Modernities about your recent book The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism (2023), a work that engages with a wide range of thinkers who often approach the topic of mysticism and ordinary life from very different starting points. Despite their differing starting points, you show that they are all working on projects with significant overlaps that have bearing on important issues in Christian theology. The book, in short, seeks to bring the resources of feminist theory to bear on Catholic theological conversations around the everyday experiences of the divine. In doing so, it shows how such experiences often lead those on the socio-political margins to push for change. To begin with, what motivated you to take up this project, and what was your process for selecting the thinkers on whom you write?

Andrew Prevot (AP): I first conceived this book as a sequel to Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality amid the Crisis of Modernity. The diverse roster of interlocutors in The Mysticism of Ordinary Life reflects choices already made in this earlier work. Both books develop a central theme in Christian spirituality (whether prayer or mysticism) by examining its influence on contemporary Catholic theology, postmodern philosophy, and diverse social-praxis contexts: European, Latine, and Black. On a more personal note, these are all pieces of myself. I am an American Catholic theologian with a background in continental philosophy, a mixed African and French ancestry, and a strong sense of obligation to resist oppression in whatever form it takes. Spirituality, which for me means a life in intimate relationship with God, motivates my work at all of these levels.

In Thinking Prayer, I focused on sources that could help me articulate a doxological alternative to metaphysics, that is, a way of approaching God through praise and worship instead of abstract systems of knowledge and being. I also discussed sources that expressed a spiritual basis for the struggle against economic and racial violence. I turned in The Mysticism of Ordinary Life toward a different, yet connected, set of questions surrounding the potential for a transformative mystical response to the metaphysics and politics of gender. I had been reading feminist theorists such as Grace Jantzen, Amy Hollywood, Catherine Keller, Sarah Coakley, and others, who were drawing on Christian mystical writings to make fascinating philosophical and theological arguments in this area, and I agreed with much that I found in their works. However, there was more that I wanted to say, especially by bringing a certain Catholic clarity (if that’s a fair word for it) to the philosophy-theology relationship and by taking a more intersectional approach to the feminist interpretation of mysticism.

I also wanted to emphasize that my concerns were not just about thought but life—ordinary life. The deeper I got into the research, the more I realized that this word “ordinary” was at least as difficult as the word “mystical,” because of the paradoxical manner in which it simultaneously channels the crushing powers of normativity and contests them through appeals to our never-fully-governable, living flesh (i.e., the “quotidian”).

Although I find Catholic theologians such as Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar useful in their efforts to retrieve an everyday Christian mysticism amid the hazards of western modernity, they remain vulnerable to rigorous feminist critique. The mystical theology they represent, therefore, needs further development. The postmodern reception of Christian mysticism, parsed as a symbol of Michel Henry’s notion of auto-affective immanence (the feeling of oneself that grounds subjectivity and humans’ connection to divinity) and Michel de Certeau’s disruptive alterity (that is, the “otherness” that disrupts our normative orders) has, whatever its theological limitations, been generative of new spiritually and socially meaningful approaches. The so-called “French feminists” Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva show the power of this sort of postmodern mystical thinking, both to subvert the androcentrism of psychoanalysis and western philosophy more broadly, and to develop women’s (and men’s) subjectivity. I wanted to take stock of all this theological and philosophical literature, while sorting out its different disciplinary warrants. I also wanted to bring it into dialogue with mystical works by women living in the wake of conquest and slavery, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Alice Walker, and M. Shawn Copeland, among others. I wanted to show that a theologically responsible, postmodernly revitalized feminist mystical theology could go beyond typical Eurocentrism. The quotidian lives of Black and Brown women are sites of divine presence to which theology and philosophy need to attend.

JL: To pick up a central feature of the argument you mentioned in your first response, I want to ask you to unpack two central concepts in the book—mysticism and the ordinary—for us. What do these terms mean in the context of your theological argument? And how do they relate to the pursuit of justice? They have at times been treated in academic and broader public discourse as reflective more of individual concerns rather than collective ones. Still, you have something different in mind, I think.

AP: There is a common feminist slogan, “the personal is political.” I endorse this statement and add my own spin by asserting that “the mystical is political.” Domestic spaces where patriarchy reigns unchecked, everyday struggles to put food on the table, the hard work of developing a voice as a member of a subaltern group, the quiet pain of living as a hated racial or sexual minority, the challenge of coping with intergenerational traumas—all of these are not merely examples of personal experience. They are socially constructed situations in which a potentially revolutionary encounter with the unknown God of incarnate love might occur. This is my argument in a nutshell.

To be more precise, it may help, as you suggest, to clarify my central concepts of mysticism and the ordinary. In the introduction to the book, I distinguish two broad ways of understanding mysticism. One of these is more philosophical or psychological (which does not mean it is off-limits to theology, but only that theology does not define it). This account associates mysticism with certain modifications of human consciousness, language, or embodiment, which push these features of our finite existence beyond the ways in which they typically appear or function. We might think of a mind in a state of ecstasy, in which the faculties of memory, intellect, and will are suspended. We might think of uses of language that feature bold negations, provocative metaphors, or incomprehensible paradoxes. We might think of out-of-body experiences or unexplainable visions or sensations. This model of mysticism brackets the question of its cause. Perhaps such alterations are a result of naturally occurring or meditatively or psychedelically induced shifts in brain chemistry. They may indicate some supernatural forces at play, whether demonic, angelic, or divine. Knowing the answer to this causal question is not necessary. The moral status of such mysticism is, therefore, ambiguous, as is its value for theology. It relies merely on some perceived difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary in human experience.

By contrast, a properly theological understanding of mysticism makes a claim about God. It holds that mysticism occurs when God enters into an intimate, perhaps even boundary-blurring relationship with human beings, transforming them into—or perhaps simply revealing them to be—vessels of divine love, goodness, or virtue. On this account, mysticism is a particular type of grace. It is not merely a gift of divine assistance; it is a deep partnership or intermingling between the divine and the human, which God initiates. A true recipient of such mystical grace aspires to live as God would have them live, and so the moral ambiguity largely drops away. Efforts to demonstrate the presence of such grace by appealing to unusual psychosomatic phenomena are misguided, because these prove nothing essential. By the same token, a person living a seemingly conventional life may be a true mystic walking among us: someone profoundly united with God. Compared with the preceding philosophical or psychological approach, this theological one can more easily recognize a mysticism of ordinary life without fear of contradiction, because, for it, mysticism is not defined as a departure from supposedly ordinary phenomenological norms but simply as God’s gracious union with us.

However, if mysticism means being one with God, as this account holds, then it follows that mysticism will resist social conventions that violate God’s benevolent intentions for humanity and creation. Therefore, the theological approach also allows for a mystical subversion of norms, but only to the extent that such norms contradict the loving and healing aims of divine grace. In a cultural environment where certain kinds of bodies are valued more than others because of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other differences, and where such hierarchies are violently enforced, the word “ordinary” can hardly be innocent. It carries the awful weight of this malicious sorting of people into categories of lovable and unlovable, grievable and ungrievable, welcome and unwelcome, free and unfree. The antagonistic energy found in both philosophical and theological forms of mysticism can be harnessed to oppose such unholy normativity.

In a cultural environment where certain kinds of bodies are valued more than others…and where such hierarchies are violently enforced, the word “ordinary” can hardly be innocent.

Yet, in this revolt, mysticism retains a positive relationship with ordinary life for at least two reasons. First, mysticism inevitably finds expression in what I call the “quotidian”: that is, the experiential, temporal, contextual, singular, plural, opaque everydayness of life, which is never fully governed by norms. There is nowhere else for it to appear, even if its phenomenological features are extraordinary. The normal and the quotidian are two poles of the equivocal concept of the ordinary. Second, mysticism, especially but not exclusively in the theological sense, encourages the development of diverse communities that are not merely sites of chaos but places of shareable, incarnate love. Theological mysticism is not anti-normative per se. It is only hostile to those norms that unjustly stigmatize, imperil, or otherwise harm the precious, mysterious creatures God has made, but this is enough to make it a powerful, justice-seeking force in the world.

JL: This framing of the mystical ordinary clearly poses a significant challenge to secularism and modernity as ideological projects. The norms embodied in those projects are no doubt responsible for the oppression that continues to run rampant in our world. The final two chapters in the book draw on mestizo/a and Womanist philosophies and theologies to build a liberatory alternative. Could you provide us with an example or two of how these thinkers challenge these forms of domination?

AP: While it is true that my book contests secularism, I also want to acknowledge that some varieties of the mysticism of ordinary life are compatible with, and even sustained by, secular (or secularizing) philosophy. We might consider, for example, certain streams in nineteenth-century romanticism and idealism that attempt to unite the absolute with the contingent in a manner that draws on German mystical thought while verging on atheism. As Part 1 of the book indicates, this is the intellectual milieu that influential twentieth-century theologians, such as Rahner and Balthasar, both presuppose and challenge in their efforts to recover a more orthodox mystical theology that would, nevertheless, take advantage of certain modern philosophical emendations.

Theological mysticism is not anti-normative per se. It is only hostile to those norms that unjustly stigmatize, imperil, or otherwise harm the precious, mysterious creatures God has made.

Part 2 shows how the postmodern, primarily Francophone, late-twentieth-century turn away from the totalizing ambitions of modern metaphysics goes hand-in-hand with an alternative way of secularizing the mysticism of ordinary life. The postmodern thinkers I discuss meditate on the phenomena of touch, affect, flesh, immanence, on the one hand, and otherness, strangeness, and difference, on the other, and treat these phenomena as analogous to, and perhaps even as substitutes for, God’s presence and transcendence. Although a new God of the philosophers is conceivable within this postmodern mystical discourse, as Henry and Irigaray perhaps show most clearly, it is also possible to take leave of God and advance an atheistic mysticism, in line with Georges Bataille. In these first two parts of the book, I attempt to sort out what a more traditional, grace-based mystical theology could look like amid the secularizing intellectual shifts not just of modernity but also of postmodernity.

In Part 3, which was more the focus of your question, I consider the configurations of the mysticism of ordinary life on the colonized and racialized undersides of modernity and postmodernity. All of the thinkers I study in this section refuse the secular insofar as it is an ideological project of cultural erasure. However, certain figures, such as the Chicana poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa and the founder of womanism, Alice Walker, approach mysticism in a manner that may be regarded as philosophical, psychological, or naturalist. For the most part, their sense of the divine as immanent in quotidian life is not derived from Christian scripture or tradition (though they do occasionally comment on such sources) but from Indigenous and personal experience. Anzaldúa and Walker are not atheists, but they do write in a manner that some might consider “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR)—or, if still religious, then neither Christian nor institutional. Anzaldúa and Walker find the strength to resist oppression through their intimate connections with a pervasive, life-giving Spirit, to whom Anzaldúa prays, “Oh, Spirit—wind sun sea earth sky—inside us, all around us, enlivening all / We honor tu presencia” (159; quoted in Prevot, The Mysticism of Ordinary Life, 196). Walker’s character Shug expresses a similar perspective: “My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed” (195; quoted in Prevot, The Mysticism of Ordinary Life, 241).

By contrast, the Catholic theologians Ada María Isasi-Díaz and M. Shawn Copeland take a more obviously confessional approach to the interpretation of Latina and Black women’s experiences of mystical grace, including in some cases their own. While walking a picket line, Isasi-Díaz had a sudden feeling of God’s indwelling love: “I could feel, sense God, and I could wrap my arms around the divine” (24, quoted in Prevot, The Mysticism of Ordinary Life, 203). Copeland reflects on the personal closeness that enslaved persons found with the crucified Jesus: “Bloodied and nailed to rough wooden plans, he was the One who went all the way with them and for them” (26; quoted in The Mysticism of Ordinary Life, 255). These are just a few examples. I want to be clear that, just because Isasi-Díaz and Copeland write as doctrinally committed theologians and thereby maintain a greater distance from the post-Christian secularity of modern and postmodern thought than Anzaldúa and Walker do, this does not make them more resistant to enslaving, conquering, and rapacious violence than Anzaldúa and Walker are. The diverse philosophical and theological versions of the mysticism of ordinary life that all of these thinkers elaborate are comparable in their level of defiance against the body- and soul-destroying evil of the present age.

JL: Your response to the previous question helpfully clarifies your methodology and relationships to the various currents in modern and postmodern theology and philosophy. As a final question, I wanted to ask you to consider the place of the book and its argument alongside another emerging trend in recent scholarship on religion.

Over the past few years, scholars in religious studies have returned to the language of the sacred as a challenge to something like what you call above “unholy normativity.” We see this in the work of religious studies scholars Barbara Sostaita, who finds the sacred, for example, in the crosses marking the sites where migrants died near the border between the US and Mexico, and in the work of Joseph Winters, who finds the sacred in hip hop artists who channel an unruly normativity to challenge White supremacy. Reading your book, I saw a kind of convergence in theological work and work in religious studies around a desire to find alternatives outside the constraints of a hegemonic rationalist discourse in the academy. Do you see your work as a part of (or in solidarity with) the “turn to the sacred”? Or does its desire to form a more orthodox theological response to the moment place it in a different lineage?

​​AP: I definitely see my work in solidarity with the projects of Barbara Sostaita, Joseph Winters, and others who reclaim “the sacred” as an honorific title for migrant, Black, Indigenous, and diversely gendered lives insofar as they disrupt, exceed, flee, or fight structures of domination, from which they, nevertheless, continue to suffer. (And thanks for drawing attention to these important books!) This use of “the sacred” is very closely aligned—to the point of being virtually synonymous—with postmodern accounts of “the mystical” as an anti-normative, quotidian flesh and otherness, especially as such accounts have been received and modified by the thinkers in Latine and Black studies and intersectional feminism whom I discuss in the last part of my book. Whether we call it “mystical” or “sacred,” this lived, critical distance from systems of control and punishment is an undeniable focal point of the sort of literature, theory, psychology, and politics that I regard as actually speaking truth in this era of rampant misinformation and ideology.

I grant that, by and large, the authors who share this sensibility are not writing as theologians. Often, they choose words like “sacred” and “mystical” carefully, precisely in order to avoid making doctrinal statements about God, even while holding fast to certain values or experiences that have religious resonances: e.g., sanctuary or ecstasy. Nevertheless, I maintain that such scholars are invaluable interlocutors for theology. Those of us in theology who are trying to work out the meaning of Christian faith in the midst of this violent world—in spite of the shameful Christian complicity in it, of which we are painfully aware; indeed, in hopes of reducing the level of this complicity and actually following the way of Jesus—need these nontheological seers of the sacred in much the same way that Augustine needed Plotinus, Aquinas needed Aristotle, or Rahner needed Schelling. They provide the “natural philosophy” in relation to which we can hope to formulate a new theology of mystical grace. To speak about how God may touch the lives of people in this world, theologians need to understand the material and structural conditions under which such lives survive, dance, hope, and pray.

Those of us in theology who are trying to work out the meaning of Christian faith in the midst of this violent world…need these nontheological seers of the sacred in much the same way that Augustine needed Plotinus, Aquinas needed Aristotle, or Rahner needed Schelling.

One goal of my explicitly theological work is to maintain a space within academic literature where the God-talk of racially oppressed women and men can be represented without being transposed into a register where questions of God are bracketed as a matter of course. Crying out to God, singing hymns to God, and placing all one’s hopes in God are prevalent practices in Latine and Black communities. I acknowledge that they are not universal: secularism exists in such spaces too. However, many of the embattled persons whom scholars across disciplines endeavor to support would associate the sacred and the mystical precisely with experiences of God working graciously in their lives, moving in their bodies and souls, and, at least in some cases, answering their prayers. They would think of such terms, if they recognized themselves in them at all, not merely as symbols of a lived antagonism toward normativity, but as names pointing to a personal relationship with an agential, powerful, loving, and mysterious deity. Theology enables me to express solidarity with these persons in their faith and to explore its complex connections with their culture and politics. To some extent, this is what religious studies and other nontheological fields are doing too by speaking of “the sacred,” but theology is, by design, more open to interpretations of this term that reveal levels of meaning beyond the natural and the anthropological.

Of course, these disciplinary differences are ultimately matters of personal preference. And, in any case, solidarity does not imply uniformity. In my books and my ongoing teaching and research, I embrace contributions across various academic and nonacademic, theological and nontheological sectors of the struggle, and I see my work as making just one small addition to what is a diverse, collective effort. I stand with anyone who strives to affirm quotidian lives and to resist oppression. To me, this is a sacred practice regardless of whether it is done for religious or nonreligious reasons.

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Andrew Prevot
Andrew Prevot is the Joseph and Winifred Amaturo Chair in Catholic Studies; Senior Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs; Professor in Theology and Religious Studies; and Affiliate Faculty in Black Studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of Black Life and Christian Spirituality (Orbis Books, forthcoming); The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism (Oxford University Press, 2023); Theology and Race: Black and Womanist Traditions in the United States (Brill, 2018); and Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality amid the Crises of Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). He co-edited Anti-Blackness and Christian Ethics (Orbis Books, 2017) and has published more than thirty articles and essays. Before coming to Georgetown, he was on the faculty at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. and M.T.S. in Systematic Theology from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. in Philosophy from the Colorado College. 
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

Against Abolition, Against Reform: The Case for a Transformational Vision of Restorative Justice


Originally empty lots that PBMR transformed into community gardens, and which have now grown into a full-fledged urban farm that feeds the surrounding neighborhood. Photo by Jason Springs.

The responses gathered here illuminate one of the central purposes of Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: to develop an account of how restorative justice has emerged as a transformational social movement, and what such a movement can do to address harms that are not merely perpetuated by one individual against another but reproduced by an entire “justice” system. To accomplish this, I explore the ways that several lived restorative justice initiatives on the South and West sides of Chicago both resist, but also transformatively engage, the criminal legal system. In light of this focus, in the first part of this response, I return to the controversy among contemporary restorative justice practitioners over the ability—or alleged inability—of restorative justice to transform systemic injustices (with specific attention to the context of U.S. mass incarceration). I reiterate that restorative justice must be understood holistically, taking into account what I argue are its distinctive moral and spiritual dynamics. Doing so, I contend, allows us to overcome a reform vs. abolition dichotomy that has emerged in scholarship and activism. In the second part of this response, I reflect on the colonial and racial dynamics that undergird work in the scholarly community’s restorative justice and lived religion spaces.

Beyond the Reform vs. Abolition Dichotomy

To reiterate an insight shared by the respondents in this symposium, I begin by affirming that justice must be pursued at all levels and in all forms. This process requires transforming individuals through practices that ennoble and empower; transforming communities through cultivating healthy, just, and sustainable relationships; and transforming systems and structures. I agree with Professor Peters’s point that focusing on transformation should not overlook the importance of revolutionary change. However, it should also recognize the vital role played by reform efforts, which are often dismissed by those who advocate solely for revolutionary change.

The logic of revolution also has its limits, and fixation upon that logic has its dangers. The culture and legal wars over abortion to which Peters points analogically are acutely instructive on the point.  The prevailing belief has been that the revolution in reproductive health rights effected by Roe vs. Wade, with its status as a near fifty-year established precedent, could only be lost by a counter-revolutionary overturning of that ruling. It is arguable that precisely such fixation upon this revolutionary logic made the reproductive health rights movement ripe for ambush by what was, in fact, cumulative transformation built gradually over decades by the anti-abortion movement in stark contrast to revolutionary happenstance. As a result, when Roe vs. Wade was actually reversed it came in the wake of the “million cuts” against reproductive health rights that occurred over decades of slowly cultivated anti-abortion ideology, cultural movement-building, and, perhaps most importantly, institution building and transformation (for example, the invention, rooting, and expansion of the Federalist Society starting in the early 1980s, ultimately making possible capture of the Supreme Court itself). The logic of transformation, by contrast, helps us see how the anti-abortion movement effected gradual transition in its strategic developments of “fetal personhood” and judicial battlegrounds that eventually resulted in Roe vs. Wade being overturned as a tipping point (rather than revolutionary endpoint). This movement now turns its efforts to the States.[1]  The reproductive health rights movement will need to overcome the limitations of the logic of revolution and counter-revolution if it is to successfully counter these developments.

The logic of revolution also has its limits, and fixation upon that logic has its dangers.

I argue that a transformational social movement for restorative justice must heighten the contradiction between those who believe that only piecemeal reforms of the current criminal legal system are sufficient and those activists who argue that the entire criminal justice system should be abolished in a revolutionary way. This illuminates what I call the “reform/abolition” dichotomy. This dichotomy has become a major obstacle for many who teach about and work against the U.S. prison-industrial complex. A central goal of my book is to mediate this rigid opposition.

In contrast to those who portray restorative justice as strictly “interpersonal” and then call for revolutionary change in opposition to it, I argue that the capacity to counter structural and cultural violence is intrinsic to restorative justice when it is holistically understood and practiced. More specifically, I suggest that restorative justice has the capacity to transform structural and cultural violence in and through the cultivation of healthy and just relationships (rather than as an adjunct, after, or separate from that cultivation).

Approached holistically, restorative justice is a theory of justice with concrete practices that foster moral and spiritual forms of association between people. This approach rejects the view that restorative justice is a “tool in a tool kit” to help mediate conflict. Instead, it recognizes that restorative justice offers a framework for envisioning and cultivating an integrated approach to individual agency, life together in community, policy and legal change, and society more broadly.

A “peace pole” marking the PBMR campus in the middle of Back of the Yards. The peace poles are made in PBMR’s wood shop, and the artwork for which is designed and created in the PBMR art studio. Photo by Jason Springs.

Many actors in the system (judges, attorneys, and policymakers) recognize how unsustainable and destructive it is to all the people it enmeshes. Many of them are searching for ways to divert young people and families out of the system. Their efforts enable practitioners implementing diversions to pursue aims that might differ from those of the system. This happens in part through the conceptualization and implementation of a culture of restorative justice in particular neighborhoods and, gradually, across wider sections of U.S. society. In the book, I also offer examples of legislative and policy changes achieved by restorative justice proponents. For example, Julie Anderson led a mothers’ peacemaking circle and others in a relentless effort to pass state legislation abolishing the mandatory sentencing of juveniles to life without the possibility of parole (see chap. 11, 130–51).

The aim of such work is not to make the system as it exists kinder, more humane, and/or more palatable. It is rather to weave together and expand upward and outward transformed understandings of justice; it is to stitch together practices, initiatives, and community centers that are community-based and community-led to address harms and needs and to enact a constructive and reparative form of accountability. The key point I make in my book is that the daily, grinding, sometimes piecemeal work that is often diminished or dismissed as “reform”—when built upward and outward strategically over time—can contribute vitally to the work of transformation (though these are not sufficient on their own). Revolutionary ideals, energy, and utopian aspirations also can call and/or push the transformational process forward to its highest ideals and aspirations (though, in isolation, they are often un-pragmatic, alienating to needed third-party allies and potential collaborators, and fall prey to self-sabotage).  And thus the selective examples Peters holds up from my book only skim the surface of the case for transformation that I build there, and the numerous other examples I offer of the work of Chicago’s restorative justice community that accumulate in transformational potential and impact. Indeed, the policy vs. ideology account Peters sets forth is part of the problem. Sustained and sustainable transformation—and how to “change it all”—must be all of the above. It must occur in cumulative change through organizing people and communities around small then increasingly larger issues and goals. It must build up over time in changes in policy and law. It must occur in institutional changes and transformation of practices, as well as culture. It must seep into and come to pervade widely shared commonsense understandings. Each of these is occurring in the movement that I document in my book, and need to be recognized and understood for the ways they interweave and work together. My purpose in building this case is to counter the impulse to limit our imagination to either reform or abolition and to chart a more constructive path forward. This is a point to which James Hill’s response speaks powerfully.

Coloniality and Restorative Justice

Frantz Fanon found colonized intellectuals despicable. These were intellectuals who came from, lived among, and counted themselves among those who had been oppressed. Even in their efforts to somehow escape the colonial discursive regime that suffused their thinking, they maintained its hegemony. It is precisely this sense that James Hill’s meditation so instructively illuminates about the methodological and critical dimensions of my book. He illuminates the key methodological point of my book—namely, that the entirety of academia and “modern scholarship” is a discursive regime shot through with dynamics of its own self-fixation. Of course, this includes Black Theory and Black academic thinking as well. Black Theory (including Black lived religion) is not “outside” the funhouse, as though it somehow extirpates itself of the very discursive stuff in and through which it has its being. Black theory is a part of academic discourse and thus does not escape its funhouse.

Of course, Fanon did not simply castigate and reject the credentialed, professional academics and theorists who spoke among and on behalf of the colonized. Fanon held out some hope, saying they might—just might—eventually come to “discover the strength of the village assemblies, the power of the people’s commissions and the extraordinary productiveness of neighborhood and section committee meetings” (11). They might, in other words, cease striving to certify their “anti-colonial bona fides,” and open themselves up to what people on the ground actually engaged in resistance are saying, thinking, and doing. Through critical-participatory action research, my book undertakes precisely such work. Indeed, the whole point of Paulo Freire’s work on this point (who’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed drew upon Fanon’s account of praxis by inverting it from violence to love) is that the oppressed do not need an elite class of academics to theorize on their behalf. Through praxis—the use of critical intelligence to reflect upon practice in light of the work they undertake to transform the world—they, in effect, “theorize in passing” for themselves. I explicitly explore and convey this point numerous times throughout my book (Connie Mick’s response—a comparative meditation on her teaching in prison and the peacemaking circles I studied—provides a different, but no less powerful, example of what this can look like). Indeed, time and again, I call on academics to learn to be quiet, listen, and actually learn something in the process of critical participatory action research (the true, and only methodological and theoretical “anchor” in the book). Thus, the examples of “lived religion” I explore emerge from and are exemplified in the nonnegotiable independence yet persistent relationship-building insisted upon and struggled for by the restorative justice initiatives and practitioners themselves. In fact, critical participatory action research compels scholars and researchers to move inductively, so that, again, it is the agency—the praxis—of those with whom we engage, seek to understand, and learn from that orients and inflects the content of our terms. Such an approach is especially challenging for scholars of religion to grasp, let alone put into practice. This is because the theoretical and methodological castles in the air that credentialed scholars of religion formulate and build are just that—professionally credentialed and sanctioned—and thus function in precisely the way that Fanon despised, whatever their color, and however hegemonic or transgressive. Welcome to the funhouse, indeed.  

I call on academics to learn to be quiet, listen, and actually learn something in the process of critical participatory action research (the true, and only methodological and theoretical “anchor” in the book).

What I discovered in my work was that the reality within which the restorative justice practitioners live, move, and act is interspersed and interwoven with ideals (moral and spiritual) that take the form of practices of restorative justice. These are the practices and tools —and, indeed, tradition (as Josh Lupo helpfully points out and Amy Carr illustrates in her response)—through which these people have become—and are becoming—architects of their own liberation. The account of tradition toward which Lupo gestures illuminates that the point of holding up and amplifying examples is not merely to praise and imitate the ideals they embody and practice. It is also to subject those exemplified, embodied ideals to further discussion, deeper understanding, historical and present-day contextualization, and critical exposition. In so doing, it makes them available for further enriched practice and implementation in new circumstances and different, novel contexts. This all stands in the background of the concept of “tradition” Lupo invokes, and it also is at the heart of the concept of “critical praxis” that I rely upon throughout the book. So, portraying the moral and spiritual ideals embodied in the implementation of restorative justice is not simply act of reportage, but rather serves to make them available for further discussion and novel forms of application. These ideals are living and breathing in the bodies, lives, and practices of communities featured throughout the book, rather than static and imprisoned. As such, they are part of a living tradition of ideal-infused practice, and it is critical reflection upon this practice that makes wider structural changes realizable in the long term through further, enriched practical application.

Saturday “Sanctuary”

While I was working, there were many calls to abolish or defund the police. Such calls are an example of ideals imprisoned in rhetoric, with limited traction in practice (beyond protest). To such calls, Fr. Dave Kelly, a central figure in the book, asked, “And then what? What do you propose to put in its place?” Kelly told me again and again that if you speak of defunding the police, you must immediately qualify that with specific, concrete proposals to re-route and re-invest funding in local community settings to underwrite positive, constructive, community-led practices. While they infuse energy, analysis, and a vigilant posture that are valuable, rhetorical appeals to social revolution are not close to enough, not without concrete, practical plans and examples of actual transformation.

PBMR peace garden that the community built on the vacant field of rubble that the diocese left behind when it removed the St John of God parish church, sending the 180 ft bell towers to St Raphael’s on Chicago’s north side and stained glass windows to Loyola University. Photo by Jason Springs.

An example of transformational justice in practice is a program that a restorative justice community center in Back of the Yards Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, calls “Saturday Sanction.” This example demonstrates what happens when we listen to those on the ground rather than theorize abstractly from within protected academic spaces. The center started this program at the request of the Cook County juvenile justice system. Probation Department representatives asked them for a program to refer young people in the system to fulfill their community service sentences. Indeed, the name “Saturday Sanction” was assigned by the Probation Department. Yet once placed in the hands of restorative justice practitioners and community members who were building a restorative justice community in Back of the Yards, the transformational possibilities I describe above opened up.

Precious Blood runs the program as anything but a “sanction.” The program is devoted to restoratively oriented relationship building with youth and young adults. The group integrates peacemaking circles for purposes of relationship building, sometimes in response to harm and wrongdoing. But it also takes the young people on day trips across Chicago and the region. In fact, the description of the group’s purposes and activities was so antithetical to “sanctions” that I worried I might have mis-transcribed the name in my initial interviews. In following up with the Director of the center, Fr. Dave Kelly, I asked whether the program was actually named “Saturday Sanctuary,” thinking it meant to convey that the group meetings and activities were a refuge from the various forms of violence that the young people in the group were dealing with. “No,” Kelly replied, “but [sanctuary] would be a good name for it. It was named by Probation [Department] so it was designed [to be a sanction]. But we never used it that way. And we were very forthcoming in telling them, ‘We won’t do that.’” He continued,

For us it’s Saturday engagement. It’s a chance for us to get to know these young people more, and to do something outside of our community. So it would broaden their world. . . . But it’s interesting because . . . the word [‘sanction’] was overwhelmed by what it became. So it’s like ‘sanction”’didn’t mean ‘sanction’ anymore. It was something that kids said, ‘Can I go?,’ ‘Can I do that?’ So it wasn’t punishment, even though the words, by definition . . . that’s what they called it. . . . And I told [the Probation Department representatives] right from the very beginning, because the idea was that rather than locking somebody up, they would send these kids to the [restorative justice] hubs and the organizations would have them paint, or clean, or something. I said, ‘I’m not interested in that. But I will take that young person and strive to build a relationship with them and strive to make them feel like they’re part of the community, and take them out of the neighborhood to let him experience something beyond their ghetto. I will do that.’ And they didn’t buck that. They just said, ‘Okay, well, it’s your program. Do what you want with it.’[2]

Kelly describes an opportunity that Precious Blood embraced to matter-of-factly resist the punitive orientation of the Cook County criminal justice system, even—and perhaps especially—when that system understood itself to be in a “reformist” mode (willing to collaborate with the hubs). The program implemented an altogether different engagement with youth and young adults caught in the system—quite literally transforming the very meaning of the word “sanction” in this context and circumstance. For this opportunity to present itself in the first place, Precious Blood and the other members of the community restorative justice hub network had to be in relationship with actors in “the system” (in this case, the Probation Department, as well as prosecutors and justices across the Cook County juvenile justice system). They had to be willing to talk and work with them, rather than maintain a strictly rejective, oppositional stance toward the state actors and representatives. It is, however, in their explicit, firm refusal to cooperate with the punitive interests and purposes of the system, and in their insistence that they remain free of the system’s dictates, that resistance and constructive transformation could merge in and through relationship building. Indeed, it was the trust and reliability that certain system representatives felt in their relationships with Precious Blood that led Probation administrators to hand the program over entirely to the discretion of Precious Blood, and ultimately say, “Okay, well, it’s your program. Do what you want with it.”

Operating at the grassroots level within neighborhood settings through holistic self-sufficiency and community building, as well as advocating for policy and legal reforms to create spaces of relative self-determination that are strategically resistant to state dominance—while still engaging with and relating to actors within the state—this approach mediates between the real and the ideal. These practices of restorative justice aim to avoid dictatorial control by the justice system itself, while also remaining open to collaboration with actors within that system who are willing to engage restoratively and to acknowledge and respect the integrity of restorative justice norms and practices. The key difference is that the latter works within the constitutional, liberal-democratic context to challenge and transform it, rather than trying to (somehow) leap outside it.

[1] See, for example, Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate  and Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction.

[2] Kelly, interview.

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Jason Springs
Jason A. Springs is professor of religion, ethics, and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Springs is particularly interested in ethical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of restorative justice, attending specifically to its potential to intervene in racialized and class dimensions of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. He works on questions of structural and cultural violence, conceptions of religious toleration and the challenges posed by religious pluralism for transforming conflict, Islamophobia in Europe and North America, and democratic theories and practices. These concerns are oriented by his broader research interests in American Pragmatist thought. Springs’s most recent book, Resurrection in Back of the Yards: Restorative Justice and Lived Religion on Chicago’s South and West Sides (2024), examines the effectiveness of restorative justice initiatives in responding to structural forms of racism and injustice (e.g., the New Jim Crow). He is the author of Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary (2018), Toward a Generous Orthodoxy: Prospects for Hans Frei’s Postliberal Theology (2010), and coauthor (with Atalia Omer) of Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook (2013). His articles appear in Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Journal of Religion, Modern Theology, and Contemporary Pragmatism, among others. 
Theorizing Modernities article

Restorative Justice and Prison Education as Transformative Visions of Justice


 

Detail of a mural in the Back of the Yards area of Chicago by @ateliertree2. Photo Courtesy of Flickr User Terence Faircloth.

Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in Chicago by Jason Springs takes Back of the Yards Chicago as its primary setting, a place with an exceptionally high incarceration and poverty rate. As Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson says, “In too many places, the opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice” (17). In a world of plenty, the presence of poverty signals the presence of injustice. Poverty is both a cause and a consequence of incarceration. While this is a thoroughly academic book that theorizes and argues that restorative justice practices enact justice, it is also a book about the people who teach us how to do that work. Through his description of the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation work, Springs invites readers to visit a place with high poverty and low justice populated by people with immeasurable vision and love. Springs helps us see how transformation happens through critical participatory action research and deep, empathetic listening.

Springs includes the voice of critics of restorative justice from the beginning to the end of the book. The power and place of restorative justice in our world today, he establishes, is a living question and we live in a critical moment for determining how it can play a role in transforming mass incarceration across the United States. He outlines critical debates related to restorative justice and mass incarceration: interpersonal versus systemic transformation, religious versus spiritual frameworks, and prison abolition versus prison reform. He gives all positions careful attention while showing that restorative justice has often been misrepresented by its critics.

Teaching Justice Inside and Out

I teach a course inside the Westville Correctional Facility, a 3,400-bed Indiana state men’s prison. Every Friday, I take University of Notre Dame students into the prison to learn with incarcerated men and corrections staff in a course called “Poverty and Justice: Inside-Out.” This book prompted me to consider how this program fits into the ecosystem of restorative justice.

One day in this class, one of the younger incarcerated students arrived with his blaze orange synthetic knit hat pulled way down on one side. But he could not pull that hat down far enough to hide his huge black eye. He was late and sat quickly between two outside Notre Dame students. The students sit in a circle alternating between those who live inside and outside the prison so that they can get to know each other. They are not allowed to touch one another in any way. All exchange of materials has to go through me, so there’s a spoke system with the instructor in the center. The inefficiencies in the system are incredibly irritating—and enlightening. I have these tiny moments throughout the day where I get to look at each student and exchange a few words. I savor those opportunities to connect.

In a world of plenty, the presence of poverty signals the presence of injustice. Poverty is both a cause and a consequence of incarceration.

This student was agitated and I was deciding how I should address him as I handed him materials. I never ask how an inside student’s week has been going. I assume it hasn’t been going great. In these situations, I try to focus on the present. So that day, I said what I always said, “It’s good to see you. I’m glad you’re here.”

He paused to see if I was going to ask the obvious question or demand a story. I did not. Then he said, “Shit happens.” I said, “Yep, shit happens.” And I moved along. He relaxed and participated fully in class. His cap gradually moved back up to normal position.

This image came to me when I read Springs’s description of our current justice system as retributive, a system that “isolates and incapacitates,” that prescribes “an eye for an eye” (79). In this case, an eye was the literal payment for some transaction in the underground economy of the prison, which functions a lot like the above-ground economy in that it extracts and exploits us until we are broke and broken. Oppression replicates oppression.

In his description of the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation neighborhood, Springs notes that this is the same place Upton Sinclair exposes in his muckraking 1906 book The Jungle. Springs says Sinclair describes the “squalor of impoverished life” there, and those of us who know that area today might say that in some ways that description still applies (29). I assign The Jungle to my Inside-Out class so that they can connect the injustices described centuries ago to what they have observed and experienced in their own lives in that same region. The phantom of systemic injustice emerges as something very real and tangible through their recognition of these historic continuities. Sinclair writes, “There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside. And there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside” (235). For some people, the persistence of poverty and injustice means that being inside or being outside a physical prison isn’t that different.

And to complete this class picture, I will share that another young inside student in that class had lost an eye entirely. His wound was older and had healed, physically anyway. I cannot help but think that these men bore the physical scars of the psychological wounds we inflict through our current justice system, which is blind to the pain it causes.

Inside-Out Courses as Restorative Justice?

I don’t know if Inside-Out courses would be considered pure models of restorative justice, but they are certainly informed by it. While Inside-Out trains us to teach in circles and build community, it also mandates that we not contact the inside students after our class ends. Relatedly, Springs notes, “The criminal justice system operates by severing relationships. This is one of its structural features” (56). This Inside-Out rule, which is in place for valid reasons—protecting confidentiality of inside and outside students so that there is no question that we are there purely for academic purposes—thus seems to run counter to that goal of building and maintaining relationships.

Still, somehow, I do think this course works toward that restorative justice goal of humanizing all participants. It operates at the individual level, of course, so it might not achieve the systemic transformation Springs argues is key to restorative justice. But I think it is in the right orbit. Let me make the case for its relevance to Springs’s vision for restorative justice by reflecting on a recent change made to the course.

During the Spring 2025 semester, my class included 8 Notre Dame undergraduates, 4 Notre Dame Law students (at least two of whom want to be prosecutors), 9 incarcerated men, and 4 corrections staff. This was the first time that corrections staff were included in a Westville Inside-Out course. It is a rare exception to how Inside-Out classes are organized anywhere. The founder of Inside-Out cautioned me about taking this approach.

Through his description of the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation work, Springs invites readers to visit a place with high poverty and low justice populated by people with immeasurable vision and love.

But I did so at the request of the Deputy Warden of Westville and the Director of Prison Education for the Indiana Department of Corrections, key partners for all the Notre Dame Prison Education Programs. We have a longstanding and strong relationship with them, and to keep the prison education programs in good standing, we entertained this request.

To be honest, I was willing to include corrections staff immediately. It was clear to me that they often come from similar backgrounds as the incarcerated men and thus would be rich conversation partners for the other students. I could only take four of the six selected. The Deputy Warden said that was fine, the others could do it the next time. I was glad to hear that he was already invested in a “next time.”

It went as expected—a little bumpy. On the first day, one of the incarcerated students said something about the corrections staff getting paid to be there, and they quickly corrected him that they were off-the-clock and there by choice (or more accurately incentivized, in part, by the three credits, just like every other student in the class). Later, one of the corrections staff got into a back-and-forth with one of the incarcerated students about why people end up in prison. We moved on, but on the way home, the outside students said they were uncomfortable with the exchange and I considered how I could address it. Then at the start of the next class, the corrections staff person apologized to the student unprompted.

Is that a spark of systemic transformation? Are the core elements of holistic restorative justice as Springs outlines them present here: encounter, accountability, and transformation (76)? Or is this program an example of restorative justice being co-opted, “captured” by the state? (161). I do not know. I do know that this experience made us throw out our reductive dichotomous labels—our “inside” and “outside” geographies were no longer the most important part of how we showed up in class (Springs, 75, 96, chap. 14). What became more important was what we held inside ourselves and what we choose to put outside into the center of the human circle we created.

Like Springs does so often in his book, I find myself asking questions as I think about this work. I wonder, for example, is it cruel to talk about poverty and justice in the heart of mass incarceration? The more I teach there, the more I am convinced that this is exactly the place for serious academic discussion on poverty and justice. It is a form of critical praxis, Springs says, “that facilitates people’s recognition of the sources, nature, and character of the injustices they experience in their lives and in their communities” (77). In some ways an honest education is cruel—it’s hard to confront the atrocities of our ancestors and our contemporaries.

But honesty is a core principle of restorative justice. And right now many schools are expunging that history from the curriculum in the United States as it relates to DEI and critical race theory. If we censor evidence of those harms, there is no avenue to even consider restorative justice as a means of addressing those harms. And that unresolved pain often shows up in and is amplified by our carceral system. As we read Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America, incarcerated students said things like, “I always felt like things were stacked against me, that I couldn’t get ahead. Desmond confirms that it’s not just me, there’s a whole system out to get me. Desmond has citations, he has science.”

Shit happens—by design.

That evidence can be both heartbreaking and liberating. There are street smarts and there are Wall Street smarts. This class is defensive training against powerful predatory financial and social systems that rely on ignorance and submission. Springs quotes Fr. David Kelly quoting Fr. Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries as saying, “nothing stops a bullet like a job.” But maybe books are bulletproof, too; books read in accompaniment, in radically inclusive classrooms.

Narratives of Justice

As I read Restorative Justice and Lived Religion, my mind also wandered to two popular kinds of heroic justice transformation stories from my youth. The first was the DC Comics Hall of Justice that held superheroes, the kind that started out “mild mannered” and quite ordinary until they went into a phonebooth to change or spun into Amazonian perfection. In a flash of dramatic transformation, these heroes had the power to impose justice on anyone who violated their rules. They were the indomitable League of Justice. As I read Restorative Justice and Lived Religion, I wondered if there’s a restorative justice flash that signals successful transformation.

Then I thought of the other, even more popular, transformative justice story from my youth: the story of Jesus. In this story we start with the all-powerful hero, and that hero does the most unexpected, extraordinary thing: he divests his power, he becomes human. Fully human. Jesus ate, he drank. He made friends, he made enemies. He taught, he learned. He lived and he bled.

So what does restorative and transformative justice look like?

I taught at Westville on Valentine’s Day. Holidays are tough to celebrate in prison.

Nonetheless, I still wanted to acknowledge the holiday, so I opened the class by asking the students to define a different kind of love, agape love. The collective wisdom was impressive. They said that Agapic love is “unconditional,” “empathetic,” “abundant,” “action-oriented,” and “selfless.”

We had finished reading Poverty, By America for that class. In his conclusion, Desmond has his readers imagine a world without poverty. He encourages us to ensure all Americans have their basic needs met so that they do not feel the kind of isolation and disconnection that leads to acts of despair. He has us imagine a place where that better world is enacted through what Springs might call critical praxis.

So I handed out blank paper to the students and had them draw agape love. Some drew pictures of an abundant and flourishing natural world with clean water and air. One student drew the basketball court where his struggling family would gather in their own cheering section to support him. Another drew hands reaching to connect.

Then I had the class read pages 36 to 37 of Restorative Justice and Lived Religion aloud. This passage describes how Precious Blood reclaimed the dismantled and denuded space where St. John of God church had stood. What the formal church vacated, the everyday church re-inhabited, transforming “the vacant crater that the diocese left into a peace garden—a welcoming space, mowed, blooming, and useable,” replete with grills, a basketball court, and beehives. The students read this passage aloud, summoning this sacred space, breathing agape love into the room. And for just a second I felt that transformative flash. I felt that maybe this book has the power to stop bullets.

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Connie Mick
Connie Snyder Mick is senior associate director and director of academic affairs at the Institute for Social Concerns where she directs the Poverty Studies Interdisciplinary Minor. Mick teaches Introduction to Poverty Studies and Research and Writing for Social Change. At Westville Correctional Facility, she teaches Poverty & Justice: Inside-Out with “outside” students from Notre Dame, Holy Cross College, and Saint Mary’s College and “inside” students incarcerated in the prison or working as corrections staff.

Mick’s research addresses the role of writing in social change, the rhetoric of poverty, and the pedagogies of community engagement. She edits the Journal of Poverty and Public Policy (Wiley) and the Enacting Catholic Social Tradition series (Liturgical Press). Her books include Poverty/Privilege: A Reader for Writers (Oxford University Press) and Good Writing: An Argument Rhetoric (Oxford University Press). Her essay “Letting the Light In,” exploring how poverty imprisons us, appears in the winter 2025 issue of Notre Dame Magazine.
Decoloniality article

The Influencer in Eden: De/coloniality of the AI Data Paradigm and the Counter-exegesis of Human Life


Domenichino, The Rebuke of Adam and Eve, 1626. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Public Domain.

Would Noah have updated his Instagram story while building the ark? On TikTok, millions have watched Artificial Intelligence-generated short videos that imagine just that: Bible characters recast as modern-day influencers in 2025. We see a pregnant Mary posting vlogs from a barn—giving it five stars for privacy and zero for comfort—and Daniel livestreaming from inside the lion’s den. For many viewers, these may be humorous, ephemeral clips to be “liked” and scrolled past. Part of their appeal lies in making ancient stories relatable; imagining Moses checking his phone for a “divine notification” collapses the temporal and cultural gap between the distant past and the familiar present. For all their humor, however, these AI-generated vignettes are more than fleeting memes or “AI slops.” They are also potent artifacts that show how today’s most powerful computational systems can be used to repurpose ancient texts, extending a colonial logic that operates in a datafied world.

While different AI large language models (LLMs) may think differently, they do not imagine in a vacuum; they draw on a vast corpus of digitized information, including biases baked into centuries of texts and images. In one popular TikTok video featuring Eve as an influencer, she is consistently cast as a slender, blonde, White woman, posing in a curated Eden. Whereas the book of Genesis indicates that Eve’s husband was “with her” when she took the fruit (Genesis 3:6), the AI-generated video isolates her in the scene and later has Adam declare, “This is literally your fault, Eve!”—a line entirely absent from the biblical text. This algorithmic canonization of bias, in fact, echoes centuries of patriarchal interpretive patterns of gendered blame placed on Eve in art and commentary. On a textual level, this was done by omitting the phrase “with her” in a number of versions of the English translation of the Bible, including the Revised English Translation (1989), as Julie Faith Parker demonstrates (740). Whether by mistake or on purpose, this lost phrase in translation has now been reproduced by an algorithm, giving an automated imprimatur to centuries of a misogynistic interpretation that has long assigned primary culpability to the woman.

AI-generated vignettes are potent artifacts that show how today’s most powerful computational systems can be used to repurpose ancient texts, extending a colonial logic that operates in a datafied world.

Yet the problem runs deeper than the replication of existing prejudices. The production of AI-generated biblical retelling exposes a discrepancy between what these models actually know and the human perception of their knowledge and credibility. LLMs generalize across assorted data types by processing through the model’s dominant language. This means an English-dominant model processing the Genesis account in different languages, along with medieval Eve paintings and contemporary influencer aesthetics will think about all of them through an English-centric framework, collapsing them into a seemingly coherent but essentially distorted output. Meanwhile, humans also generalize about LLM capabilities, assuming that these models exhibit human-like patterns of expertise and believing that a model’s ability to produce a desired result is a sign of reliable understanding.

More than reviving predispositions and spins, the phenomenon of AI-generated videos based on the Bible exemplifies what Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias define as “data colonialism”—a new and intensifying phase of capitalism that continues the extractive logic of historical colonialism through a new mechanism they identify as the “appropriation of social resources” (85). While historical colonialism involved the seizure of tangible assets like land and natural resources, data colonialism appropriates social resources, including human behaviors, relationships, desires, and expressions, and transforms them into a resource for profit. In her critique of current AI ethics, Rachel Adams also argues that AI’s reliance on Eurocentric modes of thought and racializing logics constitute a universal “colonial rationality” (179, 182–85). Seen through the lens of coloniality, this dynamic not only extends extractive relations but also reveals how the epistemic hierarchies of colonialism persist beyond the formal end of colonial rule, suggesting that AI’s modes of knowledge production may reproduce these enduring asymmetries.

The issue isn’t just in the AI training data or the architecture of the LLMs, but in the collapse of critical distance between user and machine. The algorithms that drive AI do not just illustrate a story; they decide how that story should look, feel, and be received by millions of human users, whose agency in the decision-making process is steadily diminishing. Guided by user prompts, these systems can reinforce the dominant values of the influencer economy—charisma, relatability, and aesthetic polish—and map them onto the ancient text. In this way, these AI-generated videos can do what empires have done for centuries: reshape the Bible to match the logic of cultural power. When the Bible arrived in colonial India, wielded by British missionaries, a group of Hindu intellectuals began to “talk back.” As R. S. Sugirtharajah shows, they did not simply reject the biblical text. Rather, they reinterpreted it as an act of cultural and political resistance. Thinkers like Keshub Chunder Sen, for example, argued for an “Asiatic Christ,” seeking to detach Jesus from his European missionary packaging and reclaim him for an Eastern context (64–65). Through this reshaping, the Bible became a text that could coexist with India’s many divinities, rather than a monolithic text of global dominance (210).

“Eve as a modern-day influencer in Eden, based on the biblical narrative in Genesis 3.” Image generated by the author using Sora (OpenAI, 2025).

To be sure, this is not the first time the Bible has been reimagined. Appropriation and reproductions are at the heart of the history of biblical interpretation. What we see on TikTok today is one of the latest iterations in a long and contested history of humanity’s relationship with scripture across different cultures and eras. The Bible has always been repurposed to reflect cultural priorities that are never socially and politically neutral, and such reinterpretations are often direct responses to the ancient text’s own ambiguities. Consider the passage preceding the flood in Genesis 6, which describes the encounter between the “sons of gods” and the “daughters of humans” and mentions the mysterious Nephilim. Read on its own terms, the text portrays neither the Nephilim nor the event as sinful. In verse 4, their origin is set against the backdrop of unions between divine beings and human women, but the text contains no language of wickedness or corruption that could justify the flood that follows. The passage, however, took a different interpretive trajectory in late antiquity. The book of Enoch recasts the brief, cryptic passage into a full-blown cosmic rebellion. In its version, fallen angels, led by Shemihazah, descend to earth, take human wives—an act described as a “great sin”—which results in the birth of giant offspring, the Nephilim (1 Enoch 6:3–6). This retelling has proven influential for centuries, resurfacing in modern pop culture—most notably in Darren Aronofsky’s film Noah (2014), which visually adapts these fallen angels as colossal, rock-like beings.

The common thread in these examples is that interpretation did not just explain the Bible; it reshaped its meaning. Where ancient readers saw gaps and filled them with giants and fallen angels, modern humanity sees those same spaces and fills them with AI-mediated imaginations, reflecting our own digital selves back at us. The challenge, then, is not whether such reinterpretations should exist—they always have—but how responsibly and consciously we produce and consume them. The Bible’s stories endure precisely because they are retold, yet each retelling, whether inscribed on parchment, rendered in paint, or generated in pixels, carries the political weight of interpretation—the power to reinforce or subvert certain meanings. An Eve with an iPhone might look like a laughable meme, but it is also a mirror—reflecting how today’s most prominent digital technology continues to carry the age-old struggle over who owns the Bible’s meaning.

At this juncture, I argue that a decolonial response should not demand a simple dismissal of AI technology. Instead, it can emerge through the pursuit of a counter-exegesis that engages both ancient scripture and our modern experience of human-computer interaction. In the similar way that Couldry and Mejias’ concept of “counterhistories” challenges dominant historiography’s singular narrative (111), a counter-exegesis can invite us to uncover multiple possibilities in the human interpretation of life, including the afterlives of scripture. The very algorithms designed to capture our attention and appropriate human desires also generate an unprecedented exposure of our collective consciousness—what some find humorous, what others hold sacred, and what we are willing to rationalize as typical. This exposure can become a site for critical intervention toward the decoloniality of the data paradigm. The human task, then, is to move from being the data that AI models read and consolidate to becoming readers and interpreters of the algorithms, so that human meaning remains not a resource to be mined but an unfinished future sustained by the friction of conscious interpretation.

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Ki-Eun Jang
Ki-Eun Jang is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Fordham University, Bronx, NY. Her forthcoming book, Contesting Labeled Identities: The Sociology of Gentilics in Biblical and Northwest Semitic Literatures, examines both the social world of ancient West Asia that produced the Hebrew Bible and the intellectual legacy of modernity that has shaped how the (post-)modern humanities have conceived of materials received from the past.