Palestinians march among the ruins of buildings in October 2023 following the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Positionality
I have served as Imam of Claremont Main Road Mosque, located in Cape Town, South Africa, for close to four decades. In this capacity, I have and continue to play a leading role in the vibrant interfaith solidarity movement against apartheid. In the wake of the assassination of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, we established a South African Interfaith Forum for Palestinian Solidarity, which is made up of anti-apartheid Christian leaders, South African Jews for a Free Palestine, Muslims, Hindus, people of other faiths, and people who are not religious. Since the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip, this interfaith group has been playing a leading role in the grassroots Palestinian solidarity protests that these events elicited. One of the inspirational interfaith solidarity events is a weekly Friday evening Shabbos for Gaza services which is convened by the South African Jews for a Free Palestine. On Friday December 8, 2023, the Claremont Main Road Mosque hosted one of these Shabbat services, which also coincided with the second of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. The strong interfaith dimension of the South African Palestine Solidarity movement counters the false narrative that seeks to frame the anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinians into a “religious conflict” between Muslims and Jews. Moreover, it is my considered view that the bold move by the South African government to charge Israel with the crime of Genocide in its war on Gaza at the International Court of Justice was not prompted by a cabinet decision on its own, but rather came in response to the unprecedented South African Palestine Solidarity movement that has emerged at the grassroots and civil society level. These reflections on Ramadan and Eid in Gaza arise amidst this background of grassroots organizing and solidarity with Palestinians facing daily and relentless violence.
Ramadan Amidst Famine
The gruesome consequences of what the International Criminal Court of Justice, on January 26, 2024, described as a plausible case of Genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip are defiling the devotion, compassion, and serenity that are the hallmarks of the sacred month of Ramadan. Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar and holds great religious significance and spiritual benefits for Muslims worldwide. It is a time of fasting—i.e., abstaining from food, drink, and sexual intimacy—from dawn to sunset. Fasting during daylight hours is accompanied by intensified prayer, alms giving, and self-reflection. One of the purposes of the Muslim fast is to experience how it feels to be hungry and thirsty, and thus gain an appreciation for the needs of the poor.
Observing these sublime virtues of Ramadan in 2024 has been challenging for the war-ravaged Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the taking of over 200 Israeli hostages, the Israeli army has been relentlessly bombing the Gaza Strip. The result of its campaign has been, at the time of this writing. the killing of over 32,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and the injuring of over 70,000 others. The dire plight of the people of Gaza is ironically being mercilessly exacerbated during Ramadan (aka the month of rahma i.e., mercy) by more than five months of severe restrictions on the free flow of humanitarian aid to the area by Israel’s military. The Israeli blockade has led to serious shortages of food, medical, and other essential supplies. As a result, many families in Gaza are currently struggling to access an adequate and nutritious diet, leading to severe malnutrition and food insecurity.
The dire plight of the people of Gaza is ironically being mercilessly exacerbated during Ramadan (aka the month of rahma, i.e., mercy) by more than five months of severe restrictions on the free flow of humanitarian aid to the area by Israel’s military.
A few days before Ramadan began, at sunset on Sunday March 10, 2024, the Palestinian Ministry of Health estimated that thus far more than 20 people, mostly children and elderly persons, have died of malnutrition and dehydration in Gaza. A United Nations agency for children (UNICEF) report, also released at the onset of Ramadan in early March 2024, found that famine is reaching devasting levels in the Gaza Strip due to the wide-reaching impacts of the five-month-old war. Nutrition screenings conducted by UNICEF have found that 28 percent of children under 2 years old living in shelters and refugee camps in Khan Younis suffer from acute malnutrition, and more than 10 percent have severe wasting.
Ironically, even Israel’s closest ally, the United States of America, acknowledged prior to Ramadan that the humanitarian situation faced by the people of Gaza was catastrophic. As a result of its feeble attempts to persuade the Israeli regime to conform to international humanitarian Law, just days before Ramadan the US joined a few other countries in resorting to air dropping aid over the sky of Gaza. Tragically a US humanitarian aid airdrop killed 5 people in Gaza after a parachute failed to open up. Further, the food drops do not change the fact that bombs sold by the US to Israel are also falling down from the sky.
As famine continues to stalk the Gaza Strip, the US is now planning to deliver humanitarian aid via a sea route by constructing a temporary pier on the shores of northern Gaza. Aid groups, however, argue that the airdrops and sea shipments are far less efficient than trucks in delivering the massive amounts of food and essentials desperately needed by the suffering people of Gaza.
A report released by Forensic Architecture revealed that the Israeli military has repeatedly abused the humanitarian measures of evacuation orders, “safe routes,” and “safe zones,” and failed to comply with the laws governing their application within a wartime context. According to the report “these patterns of systematic violence and destruction have forced Palestinian civilians from one unsafe area to the next, confirming the conclusion echoed across civiliantestimonies, media reports, and assessments by theUN and other humanitarian aid organizations, that ‘there is no safe place in Gaza.’”
Notwithstanding their precarious reality, Gazans are finding some solace, comfort, and spiritual sustenance in observing Ramadan as best they can under the circumstances. Media reports reveal that many Gazans are commencing and completing their daylight hour fasts with lemon soup, canned foods, and some are even forced to break their fast with grass. After breaking their fast at sunset, every evening, despite almost all mosques having been destroyed by Israeli bombing, many Gazans continue to perform special Ramadan prayers known as tarawih, the prayer of rests, in open air congregations. One of these open-air congregational prayers is taking place outside the ruins of a mosque in Rafah that has been bombed. This nightly congregational prayer meeting has encouraged a great sense of solidarity amongst the suffering Gazans.
Layla al-Qadr and the Final 10 Days of Ramadan
During the last ten days of Ramadan, Muslims are encouraged to dedicate themselves completely to God. Throughout these most sacred days, conscientious believers increase their spiritual devotions in anticipation of layla al-qadr, i.e., the most important night of the year. On this night Muslims believe that their sacred scripture, the Qur’an, was revealed. Some may even choose to go into a spiritual retreat (i’tikaf), where they will emulate the example of prophet Muhammad, who dedicated the last third of Ramadan to spending all of his days fasting and his nights in seclusion performing prayers and supplications. In addition to these intensified dedications, Palestinians have also added a special religio-cultural tradition of praying the final jumu`ah congregational service and bidding farewell to Ramadan in al-Masjid al-Aqsa, the third holiest place of worship in Islam. This year the final jumu`ah service occurs on Friday April 5, 2024.
Notwithstanding their precarious reality, Gazans are finding some solace, comfort, and spiritual sustenance in observing Ramadan as best they can under the circumstances
Because of the increased number of Muslim devotions at the al-Aqsa mosque during the last 10 days of Ramadan it has been a long-standing policy to restrict Jewish visitation to the holy site during these days due to “security concerns.” This Ramadan, however, because of the ongoing war on Gaza, the situation at al-Masjid al-Aqsa is going to be particularly tense. We have already heard calls from Jewish extremists groups, led by the Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, urging Jews to visit the holy site during the last 10 days of Ramadan. Such a scenario will inflame the already volatile situation in Jerusalem and the West Bank and will no doubt negatively impact the festival of the ending of the fasting month of Ramadan known as Eid al-Fitr.
Eid al-Fitr Amidst Famine
All predictions are that the 2024 Eid al-Fitr festival in the Gaza Strip, which is anticipated to occur on Wednesday April 10, will be a scaled down event compared to that of previous years. Eid al-Fitr in Gaza, this year, will be taking place under the shadow of daily Israeli bombing and slow death caused by famine and starvation. It will be difficult if not impossible for many Gazans to discharge the end of Ramadan alms given their dire plight. They will without a doubt share whatever meagre belongings they do have with each other to mark the blessed occasion of Eid al-Fitr. Even if a ceasefire agreement is reached before the end of Ramadan the lasting effects of the war and the blocking of humanitarian aid will be felt for a long time to come. Despite the challenges posed by Gaza’s precarious situation, the people of Gaza will come together to celebrate Eid al-Fitr with resilience and solidarity. They will exchange Eid greetings and find much needed joy and comfort in their shared traditions and faith commitment, albeit in a more subdued manner.
A. Rashied Omar is associate teaching professor of Islamic studies and peacebuilding in the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He also is a fellow of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. In addition to being a university-based researcher and teacher, Omar serves as imam (religious minister) at the Claremont Main Road Mosque in Cape Town, South Africa, and a trustee of the Institute for the Healing of Memories in South Africa
Hunger cloth from the Misereor humanitarian aid community in Wernberg Monastery, Villach Land district, Carinthia, Austria, EU. Via Wikimedia Commons.
I never met Enrique Dussel. Although he shared many spaces with my godmother and father, both Mexican academics themselves, I have no memory of ever meeting him as a child. I once heard him give a public lecture, and, like most Mexican citizens, I followed his activities in national leftist politics from a distance. Moreover, as a thinker and theologian, I am removed from the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers, who were the teachers of my teachers, and I am a student of their students. Despite this proximal distance, I do not think I speak in hyperbole when I say that the death of Dussel, an important figure in this first generation, represents a major moment for students of Latin American thought. His death marks the end of one era, although the next has already long begun. In this post, I reflect on how the continual reception of his work is shaping and will shape Latin American liberation theologies (LATL) in light of the decolonial turn.
In some ways, el giro decolonial (the decolonial turn) as later articulated by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, was an inevitability for LATL scholars writing in the middle of the last century. From its very inception, the thinkers, activists, and ecclesial and civic agents who shaped LATL worked to shift the epistemological centers of theology. In naming “the poor” as privileged subjects and emphasizing anew the practical dimensions of Christian theology, the very method of doing theology began to be transformed. The so-called “eruption of the poor” also led to prototypical theories on the history of coloniality/modernity. Early critiques of structures that created a dependency of impoverished countries on wealthier countries, often but not always vis-à-vis Marx, positioned them to critique globalizing economic structures.
However, if el giro decolonial does indeed consist of changing directions, not all liberation theologians followed their turn signals. While some have argued that LATL have formed integral parts of decolonial thought, still other Latin American (especially feminist) theologians and thinkers have critiqued earlier liberation theologies for their inability or unwillingness to problematize Eurocentrism in meaningful ways. These intricate (and, I will mention, necessary) debates among followers or inheritors of decolonial thought and LATL notwithstanding, Dussel’s legacy and influence in LATL can be seen most clearly in those that generally follow the “decolonial turn.” In the following two sections, I will focus on two ways that the methods and epistemologies of LATL scholars and activists both have and will continue to benefit from engagement with Dussel’s work. These are necessarily reductive, both together and individually. The first focus is on the importance of history in the context of praxis and the second is on how Dussel’s conception of the “Other” opens LALT to further epistemic frameworks.
The Turn to History
At a talk given at the Boston University School of Theology in 2019, Dussel, speaking in English, said that the claim that America was “discovered” is an “ethical mistake.” He followed up with “I will not say historical, I will say ethical.” Dussel’s transdisciplinary thinking was on full display here as he weaved together historical analysis and philosophical thought. Speaking to a group of students and faculty of theology, Dussel made the further claim that Eurocentric thinking has skewed our view of Christianity itself. The Christianity of the colonists, Dussel argued, was a double inversion of an original messianic Christianity (an argument he writes out fully in an article in Decolonial Christianities: Latinx and Latin American Perspectives). In Dussel, theologians find a voice that insists that we inspect unquestioned historical analyses not only as a matter of exactitude but of ethics. He provides us with tools to problematize Eurocentric accounts of religion/secularism broadly, Christianity more specifically, and most fundamentally, the entire discipline of theology. He wrote, “it will be necessary to redo theology as a whole” (42).
The “redoing of theology” started in LATL early on when its practitioners began situating praxis—that is, practice that is enacted because of theory or theology—within history. Ignacio Ellacuría, a Salvadoran liberation theologian, elaborated on what he referred to as “historical reality,” where history marked the fundamental possibility of salvation. Ellacuría sought to undo stubborn dichotomies, such as nature vs. grace, and bring the Kingdom of God back into theology as a central part of eschatology. Praxis took place in this historical reality, as each person chose to either bring about or work against the Reign of God (80). Dussel, who is sometimes referred to as the “Hegel of Coyoacán” because of his impossibly large thinking, explored multiple disciplines in this search for an understanding of “historical reality,” although he kept, for the most part, the divisions of labor separate.
In Dussel, theologians find a voice that insists that we inspect unquestioned historical analyses not only as a matter of exactitude but of ethics.
Theologian Peter C. Phan argues that it is this ability to extend beyond theology to understand the reality of the world that united liberation theologies in carrying out the critical reflection of historical praxis. The move to transdisciplinary studies has not gone uncontested within theology broadly speaking, but it has largely been defended by LATL thinkers who see in the social sciences tools for rethinking Christian theological concepts. In other words, their aim was not to just say new things about such concepts but to reformulate the dialogue around them (i.e., sin, salvation, divine transcendence).
In a volume entitled Decolonizing Liberation Theology, Nicolás Panotto explains, “The theme of history is fundamental within LALT, especially as a scenario for rethinking divine revelation and the liberating dimension of faith.” He argues for a historicism that moves from a hallowed out, homogenizing history towards a fuller history of marginality and heterogeneity. He continues:
… the divine as a universality that traverses and comes from history implies a questioning of any idolatrous practice that attempts to absolutize a particular image of the theological, even in the name of a particular model or form of liberation and emancipation. This is not achieved through a singular form, but through the deconstruction of the epistemic boundaries that enable the mobility of every practice, body, knowledge, and politics. (231)
Salvation found in this history of alterity, rather than homogeneity, unsettles normative claims of theology. It pushes against the European epistemic hegemony that is pervasive in theological thinking. To rethink history is to reconsider where it is that God communicates Godself, reconsider where the Divine has communicated to human beings. That is, to rethink history may indeed be to reconsider theology altogether.
Dussel’s modeling of historical recovery as a means of theological discovery does just that: it does theology anew by doing history anew. Decolonizing history means uncovering marginality throughout history. Doing so is an act of recovering traditions within Tradition and is an exposing of the paradox of pluriverses with a universal God. To understand how it is that praxis takes place in history in a decolonial key, therefore, LATL can begin to ask “What history, and who is telling it?” Following Dussel’s lead, we recognize that this is not only a historical question, but also an ethical one. The ethical concern of incorporating the pushing of epistemic boundaries leads us to the next section, which focuses on the openness to epistemological frameworks by the category of “Other.”
The “Other” and the Expansion of Epistemological Frameworks in Theology
Despite claims to the contrary, decolonial theologians are not shy or insistent against using European thinkers. This is a sentiment that underestimates the constructive nature of decolonial thought and one that risks further diminishing the creative and fruitful work of many thinkers and activists who found camaraderie in the projects of those for whom Europe (as the center of power, rather than merely geographical region) was a hostile home. Dussel’s use of French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish descent Emmanuel Levinas, who was “a victim of the Jewish holocaust in the heart of Modernity” (125) is one such example. Dussel wrote a lot about his encounter with Levinas, both about Levinas’s writings and personal interactions. When Dussel asked Levinas during a gathering at Louvain about the Indigenous people slaughtered in the Americas, “Aren’t they the other you’re speaking about?” Levinas answered, “That’s something for you to think about.”
Dussel’s subsequent appropriation of Levinas was fundamental to his theorizing on the construction of modernity. For LATL, one vital result of this encounter between Dussel and Levinas was the idea of the Other as epiphany of an incomprehensible exteriority (123). Dussel used Levinas’s understanding of the “asymmetrical problem” of the encounter between colonizer and colonized to go beyond colonial logic. Instead of the savage Other of the colonial imagination, the face of the Other in Levinas and Dussel becomes the face of an ethical revelation, thus the epiphany. In order for this to be the case, the Other has to be truly other. Dussel points out that the face-to-face exposure can happen between multiple levels of relationship, but the ethical demand happens at its strongest in the case where the Other is truly outside of myself, unable to be placed within an “us” (145). The widow is beyond the wife, the orphan beyond the child, the foreigner beyond the known, the poor beyond equality. Dussel argues therefore for an unwavering politicization of Other, which comes from this infinite exterritoriality by means of being truly other, outside of us. To love, be benevolent towards, be in relationship with Other in their totality is to love, be benevolent towards, and be in relationship with their alterity. This is why Dussel refers to this as the logic of alterity (la lógica de la alteridad).
While “the poor” represented one such politicized Other in the LATL vocabulary, the Dusselian category of the “Other” is a category of colonial alterity much better equipped to leave behind economic determinism. Dussel’s articulation of the Other aids LATL in moving forward with an open disposition towards a variety of epistemological frameworks because it opens it up to an alterity that refuses rigidity in the categories of analysis it deploys. In a different book chapter than the one cited above that, in part, responds to a focus essay written by Dussel himself, Panotto argues for “an internal critique of [LATL’s] own methodological axes” to be able to accommodate the “inclusion of alternative worldviews, and in deep deconstruction of the notion of God from the locus of divine otherness that makes visible the historical fissures inscribed within its diversity” (232).
While “the poor” represented one such politicized Other in the LATL vocabulary, the Dusselian category of the “Other” is a category of colonial alterity much better equipped to leave behind economic determinism.
In Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz and the mujerista theology she founded, we begin to see the pay-offs of an extended category of “Other.” She wrote in one of her final published works before her premature death, “If we claim to be about unveiling and enabling subjugated knowledges, definitely a liberation and decolonial move, then we have to enter into the world where that knowledge is produced, for there is no knowledge without ‘encountering’ the reality we claim to know” (55). These “subjugated knowledges” are unleashed through the logic of alterity that Dussel proposed, face-to-face with the Other, whose exteriority is wholly transcendent and whose reality places ethical demands on my reality. There is a constant need, then, to expand the epistemological horizons of LATL to configure a robust epistemological shift. More than new content, LATL provides new ways of thinking beyond colonial matrices—“an Otherwise-knowledge,”as Panotto refers to it (219).
Dussel, as an early contributor to LATL and liberation philosophies, will have a long and extensive reception. His work gives those of us living and thinking in the light of the earliest communities of ecclesial, civil, and academic agents of LATL tools to extend our thoughts through to the decolonial turn. His category of Other and his transdisciplinary understanding of what it means to practice theology allow us to further complexify and enrich our theological method.
Amirah Orozco is a PhD student in the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame with a subdiscipline of Systematic Theology and a minor in Gender Studies. She is originally from the Border between El Paso, Texas and Juárez, Chihuahua. She comes to academic theology through questions of liberation and emancipation of the poor and marginalized. She is most interested in feminist as well as decolonial theologies. Her doctoral research at Notre Dame will focus on feminist movements in the Catholic Church and how they relate to other social movements.
“King Billy’s on the Wall” mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo Credit: Flickr User aa440. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED
The Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland—more commonly known as the Orange Order—describes itself as “a membership organisation…committed to the protection of the principles of the Protestant Reformation and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which enshrined civil and religious liberty for all.” Yet, the history of the Order raises questions about such commitments as it was, at various times, seen to advocate a political union with Britain that denied Irish Catholics civil, religious, and political liberties. The Orange Order has historically struggled to align its stated “liberal” values with its desire to protect the idea of a “Protestant Britain.”
These contradictions are not often acknowledged by members of the Order who continue to view the organization in an almost entirely positive light and as representing a truer form of liberty that it believes stands in stark contrast to the “sectarian” politics of their Other—the Catholic, nationalist population. The development of the peace process in Northern Ireland, however, has served to once again shine a light on the Order and generated an internal debate as to how it should respond to growing criticisms from both within and without. Some within the institution, pointing to a declining membership amid controversies associated with parading disputes, have subsequently called for a new direction that better reflects wider social and political realities. Although efforts have been made to this effect, progress has been minimal due to a failure to overcome fears and suspicions of the Other; a failure largely explained by the fact that the narratives and traditions of the Institution continue to emphasize the perceived threat posed by the Catholic/nationalist population.
As such, the Orange Order is a useful case study for understanding how groups struggle to overcome long established processes of othering that reinforce the divisions from a turbulent past at a time when new and alternative futures are being sought.
“Othering” through “Constructed Perceptions of Reality”
In the words of Anthony J. Marsella, culture “influences and impacts conflicts and their resolution” (652). At the heart of his argument is the need to better understand “the power of culture” in constructing what he describes as an in-group’s “perceptions of reality” which “shape and construct our realities (i.e., they contribute to our world views, perceptions, orientations) and with this ideas, morals, and preferences” (657).
Two key outcomes of this process are crucial: (1) the constructed “perception of self as self-righteous, moral, justified, and ‘good’ by virtue of religion, history, identity”; (2) the perception of the Other as being “evil, dangerous, threatening” and therefore a “danger to national or group survival, identity [and] well-being” (653). Furthermore, these constructed realities provide an in-group with a degree of certainty about themselves and, as such, there will be a “reluctance” to “tolerate challenges to these realities” (653).
The Orange Order and Othering
The processes described above are evident across the history and evolution of the Orange Order which was founded in 1795 amid the increased sectarian tensions brought about by growing demands for social and political reform in Ireland, and a broader international crisis stemming from the upheaval of the French Revolution.
That international crisis had convinced many in the British political establishment that there was a pragmatic need to placate Irish Catholics as a means of preventing potential alliances with revolutionary France. The reforms being sought, however, were anathema for many in the Irish Protestant community who believed they went against everything that the Reformation stood for. In the short term the British (Protestant) state would be providing funds to support the education of Irish Catholic clergy via a newly established seminary at Maynooth, but more symbolically the state would essentially be providing a degree of legitimacy to Catholicism. Consequently, many Irish Protestants believed the proposed measures would threaten the social, political, and economic order they had fought hard to establish over the previous two centuries. Religion and politics in Ireland could not be separated.
King William III mural in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Photo Credit: Flickr user Jay Galvin. CC BY 2.0. DEED
Within the Protestant community the linkage between religion and politics was fed by negative popular representations of what the Catholic Church sought to achieve. In his history of the Order, Richard Niven (a member of the Orange) writing in the late nineteenth century, described the belief of members that “ever since the Reformation Protestants have been the subjects of persecution, and more particularly in our own land have been held up to every species of contempt” by “their bitter foe,” Catholicism, which sought a political “ascendancy.” The Orange Order, however, stood firm against this and was “the only organisation that has ever been able to cope successfully with Popery; not by secret conspiracy, but by open opposition and telling arguments” (3).
Popular written histories of the Institution, such as that by Niven and that by Michael Dewar, John Brown and Samuel Long, present long and detailed chronologies of persecution by their Catholic Other. Particular moments of Irish history are put forward as evidence of the constant threat Protestants have faced and continue to live with—from the rebellion and massacres of 1641 to the Williamite Wars of 1689-91; and from the 1798 rebellion, through the Easter Rising of 1916 down to the most recent conflict in Northern Ireland.
This selective use of the past entirely ignores historical complexities, and the narrative of the Orange becomes confined to a simplistic “Good vs Bad” form. Members of the Order are socialized in the history through a popularized retelling that is not confined to books and pamphlets that many members may never read, but which is depicted visually on the banners that adorn their gathering halls and are carried on parades. Similarly, these key moments are memorialized in songs that are central to important social events such as the traditional July 12th celebrations. Through such mechanisms members of the Order construct a reality about both the righteousness of the in-group and the ever-present threat posed by the Other.
“Othering” and Conflict Transformation
Perhaps unsurprisingly these processes of othering have raised questions about the Orange Order within the context of Northern Ireland’s peace process, which has sought a reconciliation between the communities in conflict. Critics of the Order argue that it is, by its very nature, a sectarian organization incapable of change or of playing a positive role in the search for stability. But is this necessarily the case? Is it possible for the Orange to reimagine itself in a manner that allows it to protect its core principles but at the same time become a force for political, cultural, and religious reconciliation?
Members of the Order tend to believe that it has never been a block to progressing peace but rather that it is merely misunderstood by wider society. To this end, the Orange has prioritized efforts to reach out across the political divide to form better understandings of what they claim the Institution is and stands for. This has, in the main, focused on educational initiatives with members of the Order often visiting Catholic schools to give presentations and engage with students.
The Portadown District Loyal Orange Lodge return from the “Demonstration Field” along the Hamiltonsbawn Road in Armagh during the County Armagh the July 12th parades in 2009. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Yet, some members (and former members) of the Order have argued that these efforts are insufficient and that more needs to be done to confront the realities of a rising sectarianism within. The Rev. Brian Kennaway, in particular, has argued that the core values of the Order have been betrayed by elements of its own rank and file and that this has led to a decline in membership and public standing across the wider Protestant community. He maintains that the Orange needs to acknowledge a growing gulf between what the Institution claims to be and the practice of its members, with a particular requirement for the rank and file to better reflect the “Qualifications” for membership they signed up to. Kennaway, in his book on the subject, maintains that “far from being a sectarian, controversial and divisive body, the Order, properly reformed, could be a force for good and reconciliation in Northern Ireland’s deeply divided society” (xiii). He argues that the “Qualifications of an Orangeman,” which state that members “should strenuously oppose the fatal errors and doctrines of the Church of Rome” (4–5), should not be “judged to be any more ‘anti-Catholic’ than the doctrinal standards of the three main Protestant Churches in Ireland” (5), and points to the fact that the “Basis of the Loyal Orange Institution of Ireland” stresses that it should not “admit into its brotherhood persons whom an intolerant spirit leads to persecute, injure, or upbraid any man on account of his religious beliefs” (6). Kennaway maintains that the Order has become detached from such principles and that this has been to the detriment of the Institution. He argues that if the Orange is to have a future it needs better leadership capable of upholding what he has described as the “traditional and authentic values of Orangeism” (264).
Although this points to the possibility for reform by simply adhering to its own established principles, it must also be questioned as to the extent to which the Order has ever successfully lived up to these values as is stated by Kennaway. The fears of the Catholic Other have historically ensured that such values have, in the main, remained aspirational rather than practical. This leads to the further question: Has the peace process created an opening for the Orange to become the organization it claims to be?
One thing is increasingly clear, the fears generated by the processes of othering will not be overcome if the latter remains embedded in the traditions and the historical narratives people live by. For meaningful reconciliation in a post-conflict society, there is a need to engage more critically with history and the representation of that history—to acknowledge that our own roles in that story have not always been “glorious.” There is a need to better understand different interpretations and explore how conflicting narratives might be better reconciled or understood. If, however, groups such as the Orange continue to simply do what has always been done, how can alternative futures unfold?
Cathal McManus is a lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work (SSESW) and Queen’s University Belfast and a Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. He is interested in processes of Othering and how these contribute to the development and maintenance of social divisions and conflict. Related to this he is interested in identity formation and nationalism. His work has been published in journals such as Nations and Nationalism, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Ethnopolitics.
Picture of books in Spanish written by Enrique Dussel. Image via Wikimedia Commons
We might be approaching a time when we will speak of the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers as ancestors. Since the late-1960s, theologians and philosophers in this tradition have created pathways for a radical rethinking of theology and religious studies, for the theological critique of modernity and of capitalism, and for theorizing the liberative power that religious communities can exercise. This generation is passing on, leaving an irreplaceable void in liberationist and decolonial thinking and activism. On November 5, 2023, the Argentine Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel passed away, joining a cloud of ancestral witnesses that will continue to demand from the living that we do not let go of the call to liberation. Undoubtably, the commitment to liberation is the signature trait of Dussel’s intellectual and political work. It informed a double gesture that integrates the political demand to stand in solidarity with the oppressed as well as a form of epistemic solidarity that integrates non-hegemonic ways of knowing for the sake of decolonization.
Ever since Dussel’s passing, I have been reflecting on how impossible it is to overstate the force of his claim in The Invention of the Americas that there could not have been a Cartesian I think, therefore I am, without Hernán Cortés’ I conquer, therefore I am. Who could forget that remarkable preface and its strong delineation of modernity? “Modernity dawned in 1492 and with it the myth of a special kind of sacrificial violence which eventually eclipsed whatever was non-European” (12). There is not descubrimiento (discovery) without encubrimiento (effacement, covering over). Dussel shaped generations of thinkers whose starting point was this framing of modernity as a sacrificial project. For theologians like myself, Dussel contributed to the inception of liberation theology through his books on the history of Latin American Christianity, which emphasized the passage from colonial Christianity to a Christianity of liberation. And Dussel should also be situated as a key figure in the development of the theological critique of capitalism alongside figures like Franz Hinkelammert, who also passed away in 2023.
Dussel’s commitment to provincializing European philosophy as well as to establishing the grounds for a Latin American philosophy of liberation date back to some of his earliest texts. In his 1968 lectures on philosophical anthropology, for example, Dussel framed his project by juxtaposing Heidegger’s concept of “ontological forgetting” with the axis of colonial modernity. Dussel understood that an open task for philosophy was to identify the historical situations and cultural patterns that have been forgotten—more like erased—by colonial epistemologies (194). These forgotten fragments, as it were, form the substance of Dussel’s initial articulation of a philosophy of liberation. According to Alejandro A. Vallega and Ramón Grosfoguel, Dussel finds in Heidegger’s “appropriative de-struction of the history of Western philosophy elements that will be useful for the destruction of Western colonialist systems of oppression” (11).
Dussel understood that an open task for philosophy was to identify the historical situations and cultural patterns that have been forgotten—more like erased—by colonial epistemologies.
Early on as well, Dussel encountered Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, a work that caused in him a “subversive disorientation” and led him to question “all that he [had] learned thus far” (7). Levinas instigated Dussel to consider the dimension of exteriority and the fundamental category of the “Other.” These are concepts that Dussel quickly appropriated to theorize a passage beyond the logic of colonial modernity. While “disorientating,” Dussel’s encounter with Levinas confirmed to him something he had intuited during the time he spent in Israel, between 1959 and 1961. And that is: that the Hebrew tradition may be said to present an alternative view of humanity, one that affirms the historicity of the human subject and that places a special emphasis on justice, the moral agency of the oppressed, and the political imperative of liberation. This type of commitment, formulated in Dussel’s 1969 book, El humanismo semita, remained with him throughout his career. Dussel concluded his response to Levinas by situating the Levinasian call to the face of the other in the context of the colonial conquering ego. Dussel pushed for a historicization and a politization of the Other, naming it in its historical enfleshment as a “Native American, an African, or an Asian” (8).
It is possible to say Dussel’s incipient efforts in decolonization were marked by his investigations of existentialist philosophy and phenomenology, his knowledge of the history of Latin America, his encounter with Levinas, and his participating in the formulation of Latin American liberation philosophy and theology. A defining element of his thought would be added later on.
San Miguel de Tucumán, July 8, 2015 – Within the framework of the “National and Latin American Forum for a New Independence” that took place at the San Martín Theater, the panel “The Return of Politics” was held with the presence by Ricardo Forster, Jorge Alemán, Enrique Dussel, Horacio González, and Roberto Caballero. Image Credit: Romina Santarelli / Ministry of Culture of the Nation.
In 1975, Dussel was forced to leave his native Argentina after receiving death threats from the military junta that ruled the country. He sought refuge in Mexico, where he remained for the rest of his life. Dussel tells that his move introduced him to an intellectual circle with deep ties to Marxism. That marked an important passage in Dussel’s trajectory that eventually led him to a deep exploration of the Marx archives. The result of that research were four books, published between 1985 and 1993. Dussel’s reception of Marx was marked by his previous political and philosophical commitments to liberation and to the category of the Other. According to Eduardo Mendieta, Dussel read Marx’s Capital as an ethical book based on a radical critique of capitalism as a system that creates wealth at the expense of human suffering and exploitation (8–9). These claims are made explicit in Dussel’s final book on Marx, The Theological Metaphors of Marx (whose English translation will be published for the first time soon). In it, Dussel refers to Capital as a theological work that sought to expose the historical and material bases of an idolatrous system of accumulation and exploitation, a true demonic system that deifies injustice (175). For Dussel, Marx was an “implicit theologian” who put theological metaphors to use in the task of exposing capitalist exploitation (131).[1]
The path I have sketched in Dussel’s thought suggests a necessary alliance, what I’m inclined to call an epistemic solidarity between decoloniality, the critique of capitalism, and theology. That is to say, Dussel’s commitment to liberation is what guided him in the path of decoloniality but he walked this path precisely because he understood the task of decolonization under a certain theological register. That register was a certain allegiance to the image of a liberator God, a God with whom one stands “more or less as a comrade,” to cite an intriguing formulation once given by Paulo Freire. Enlisting God as such a comrade, Dussel interrupted the “holy alliance” (Marx) between the religious establishment and coloniality. But he also pushed for a renewed understanding of religion as an active force in the shaping of a world beyond colonialism. Dussel’s work in theology and religious studies embodies the task of decolonization by building upon the suppressed histories and ways of knowing of colonized communities and their spiritualities. Epistemic solidarity, as Dussel modeled so well in his writings, integrates multiple forms of suppressed knowledge for the sake of justice and liberation.
These are tasks that remain open for those of us who have learned so much from Dussel’s texts and teaching. There is therefore grief for his passing. As the grief for, and the farewells to, the first generation of liberation theologians and philosophers continue to meet us, the living will need to develop strategies to enlist these ancestors as sources for our efforts in the direction of decolonization. The task of mourning, always labor intensive, is now open for newer generations to whom the project of decolonial thought and of Latin American liberation philosophy and theology has always been associated with Dussel’s name.
[1] I explore this claim as well as Dussel’s intellectual trajectory leading up to his encounter with Marx in an upcoming essay, “The Haunting of Liberation: Derrida and Dussel, Three Decades Later,” under review with the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
Filipe Maia is Assistant Professor of Theology at Boston University School of Theology. He is co-chair of the Liberation Theologies Unit at the American Academy of Religion and co-convener of the World Parish webinar, a gathering of Wesleyan and Methodist scholars and leaders committed to the decolonization of the tradition. He is the author of Trading Futures: a Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism and co-editor of Methodism and American Empire.
Secretary-General António Guterres (center) meets with a delegation of North American Rabbis. UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe. Used with permission.
On January 25, 2023, I, along with 9 other rabbis, representing another 265 rabbis from around the globe and every imaginable denomination, met with Secretary General António Guterres at the United Nations headquarters. You might think that we went to tell him what most Jews are presumed to believe, namely that the UN has it out for Israel and always treats the Jewish state unfairly. Nothing could have been farther from our minds. Rather, we went to thank him and the UN’s agencies for courageously calling out Israel for the humanitarian crimes they are committing in Gaza and to promote our cause: Ceasefire Now!
For me it was a powerful moment on a long journey. When I was a fourth grader in Brooklyn in the 1950s, my beloved teacher, Evelyn Farrar, taught us about the United Nations. We memorized the lyrics to “United Nations on the March,” because the idea of “a hymn to a new world at birth,” a “free new world” achieved by diplomacy, encapsulated her hopes and dreams for what the United Nations could be. We visited the sacred site of the UN Headquarters itself and learned about the peacemaking accomplished by the Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld. Her lessons worked: as a child I fervently believed that the UN could bring about a world without war.
When I was in high school, I returned to the UN. On June 5, 1967, I joined other young Jews in a rally to encourage the US to help Israel just as the ’67 war between Israel and the neighboring Arab nations of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan was beginning. The new Secretary General, U Thant, had just withdrawn UN peacekeeping forces from Gaza and the Sinai at Egypt’s demand, and American Jews were worried about Israel’s safety. Attending that rally led me to spend time in Israel two years later and soon thereafter to become one of the first women ordained as a rabbi.
Dag Hammarskjöld outside the UN building in 1953. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In the fifty-seven years since my last trip to the UN, I have struggled to come to terms with the results of the ’67 war. In spite of what I believed in my youth, I see now that it led to Israel’s continuous occupation of Palestinian lands and unwillingness to grant Palestinians freedom in the land they share. But I never imagined that the current crisis would lead me back to the United Nations, hoping, once again, that they could help bring about an end to war.
As an active member of Rabbis for Ceasefire, I am honored to have been part of the delegation that met with the current Secretary General, António Guterres to discuss the terrible destruction Hamas wrought on October 7, 2023 as well as the unfathomably disproportionate destruction that Israel has committed in response.
Our meeting took place a few days after the Secretary General’s bold speech at the opening of a summit of the G77+China that met in Uganda. In that speech, he condemned Israel’s “unprecedented” and “wholesale” destruction of Gaza that has claimed the lives of 152 UN staff members among the 27,000 dead. The Secretary General pointed to the daily dangers survivors endure, not only bombs and bullets but damaged roads, communication blackouts, disease, and famine. He called the conflict “a threat to global peace and security” that must come to an end. That speech was a resounding echo of what the 275 Rabbis for Ceasefire are demanding: Ceasefire Now.
We met with him both to thank him for his courageous words and to find out how we could help add a Jewish moral voice to the UN’s efforts: to stop the threat to global peace and security, end the current attacks that are destroying Gaza and its inhabitants, and hold Israel accountable.
His answer was clear: continue to work for a reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Help them understand that for the security of all they must learn to live together in peace. Keep up your efforts, he recommended. Likewise, he promised us that he would work toward a ceasefire and, to the best of his ability, carry out the provisional judgments of the International Court of Justice that, although they fell short of demanding an end to hostilities, recognized the critical need to end Israel’s assault on Gaza’s civilian population, cultural institutions, and infrastructure and allow humanitarian aid to enter unimpeded.
Our conversation moved us beyond words, for this Secretary General follows in the path set by Hammarskjöld and the other men who preceded him as rodfei shalom, seekers of peace. A deeply faithful Catholic himself, he clearly understood the importance of the religious faith that brought us to work for justice in Israel/Palestine. We left feeling seen and heard by him; believing that he would, with grace and humility, continue to work toward our common goal of a lasting peace.
His answer was clear: continue to work for a reconciliation between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Help them understand that for the security of all they must learn to live together in peace.
We closed by offering him the ancient priestly blessing in the book of Numbers: “May the Holy One bless and protect you. May the Holy One shine upon you and be gracious to you. May you feel empowered to work for peace, shalom.” A hush fell over the room, and some of us found ourselves close to tears. The Secretary General told us that he’d sleep better having met us today. And we knew we would as well.
Little did we know that the day following the ICJ ruling, which will result in a long investigation of South Africa’s charges of genocide against Israel, Israel would react by claiming that 12 of the 13,000 UN workers for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) took part in the October 7, 2023 massacre. The UNRWA leadership responded swiftly and decisively, condemning the acts, firing nine of the workers (two are dead and one yet to be identified), and beginning an investigation into the claims. Despite this resolution and with no regard for the impassioned plea of the Secretary General, the US and many of its allies have temporarily suspended funding UNRWA. When funds run out at the end of February, the humanitarian crisis that exists in Gaza that was the focus of the Court’s mandate will become even more devastating. UNRWA is the only agency that makes medicine, food, and shelter available to the 1.5 million displaced residents of Gaza. The tragedy worsens and worsens.
We left the meeting with new hopes and now new fears, so we continue to pray: that the leaders of our country understand the gift that is the United Nations and its Secretary General. That they and their allies restore the funding to UNRWA and not become responsible for more death. That they heed the words of all of us who demand a permanent ceasefire now. That they stop using their veto to keep the UN Security Council from doing what it was created to do, as I learned in that song so many years ago, to bring into being “a new world at birth.” A world, as the song also says, “where our children (and all children) shall live proud and free.” And may it be so.
‘Peace For All’ sculpture by Derek A. Fitz Simons, Aghalane, Co. Fermanagh, erected 1999. Located at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, at the south side of the Senator George Mitchell Peace Bridge. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Almost everyone who studies religion, conflict, and peace has tried to understand Northern Ireland, so I was thrilled by the invitation from colleagues at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice to attend a workshop in Belfast.
I approached our shared task—to analyze “religious turbulence” and imagine “alternative futures”—as a historian of US religion associated with Peace Studies who has ancestors on both sides of the island’s troubled sectarian past. While more branches of my family tree include Catholics from the south, the Tweed branch descends from Protestants who were part of the seventeenth-century Scottish Plantation, settling on farmland in County Antrim and attending Presbyterian churches. While my direct ancestors left for America in 1848, during the Famine, those who stayed in the north went on to take sides during the Home-Rule debate, the Partition, and the Troubles. In other words, I have ancestral ties to the colonial past my Irish Catholic relatives lament and to the twentieth-century Troubles almost everyone laments, including those in my ancestor’s Presbyterian congregation who signed the 1974 “Witness for Peace” statement and who welcomed me warmly when I visited the day before the Belfast workshop.
I had not planned to visit those relatives or ponder my family history when I began preparing for our scholarly collaboration, but Northern Ireland religious leaders and US Peace Studies specialists reminded me that personal disclosures can help. Clergy in the north have recommended including “personal narrative in public discussions,” and Peace Studies specialists have said those hoping to cultivate the moral imagination required for “constructive social change in settings of deep-rooted conflict” must overcome the academic impulse to “eliminate the personal.”[1]
I tried to overcome that impulse as I considered what I might contribute as an outsider with distant ties to combatants on both sides of the sectarian conflict. I decided it might help if I took a step back and reflected on the most useful analytic frames, guiding metaphors, and interpretive terms for the analysis of religion and conflict in post-Brexit Northern Ireland. In particular, considering my research on the US and engaging scholarship about the island, I wondered how we might interpret both “specific trigger events” and “longer-term context,” or what others have called “short-term shocks” (Famine, Partition, and Brexit) and “long-term trends” (colonialism, urbanization, and industrialization)?[2] Almost all international, national, and local peacebuilding documents suggest islanders must confront the legacy of the past as they articulate a shared vision of the future, but polarization often sets in as soon as the stories start.
Maybe new frames, metaphors, and terms can help.
Frames, Metaphors, and Terms
The Peace Wall, Cupar Way, Belfast, Northern Ireland. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Scholars who write about the island have made helpful proposals. Brendan Murtagh has compared post-partition Belfast to political zones like Cold War Berlin and the Korean DMZ and argued the city is best understood as a “border landscape.” Others describe post-Reformation Irish religious space as a “theological palimpsest” and chronicle how the devout have inscribed competing notions of religious authenticity and collective belonging on the landscape.[3] Some highlight residential and activity segregation, suggesting that Belfast’s distinct communities can be understood as “ethnic enclosures,” or, analyzing local perceptions, they note that the barriers, flags, and murals that mark bounded space produce “landscapes of menace” and “landscapes of exclusion” (see, for example, F. W. Boal and Madeline Leonard). An ecocritic imagined the “Eden of the future” by foregrounding Belfast’s river-systems and figuring the city as a “riparian zone,” a transition area between fully terrestrial and fully aquatic systems (see Katherine M. Huber on this point). That analogical language is suggestive since just as riparian zones are prone to flooding, Belfast’s landscape has been the site of periodic deluges of sectarian hostility, and, as Ciaran Carson suggested in Belfast Confetti, the Farset, the city’s hidden river, follows “the line of the Peace-Line, this thirty-foot-high wall of graffiticized corrugated iron” (49).
The Comparative Gaze
While these interpretive vocabularies illumine some aspects of the conflict, I think terminology from the natural sciences, especially niche theory and sustainability studies, might help to reframe the conversation about the island by highlighting lifeway transitions, eco-cultural niches, and sustainability crises. That’s the approach I take as I analyze the history of religion in the lands that became America, where religion both escalated and eased crises of sustainability.[4] It inspired both status-reinforcing devotion and popular revitalization movements in stressed cornfield cultures between 1100 and 1350, when weather changed, crops failed, devotees clashed, and violence spiked. During the colonial exchange of biota, competing religious empires triggered demographic decimation, environmental stress, social inequality, and psychic trauma between 1565 and 1776 as settlers displaced Native Peoples and introduced the slave plantation. An urban industrial crisis intensified between 1873 and 1920, when fossil-fuel dependency increased pollution, and income inequality and health disparity in crowded northern cities signaled a wider decline in well-being. The global environmental effects of industrialization and urbanization peaked during the 1950s “Great Acceleration,” the onset of the time when human intervention in natural systems became predominant. The abrupt rise in carbon dioxide, methane, and ice-bound nitrates in polar ice levels signaled significant and long-term global ecological damage. That damage, in turn, threatened dramatic social and economic disruptions, from climate migrations to food scarcity, and presented new challenges to religious communities, which struggled to respond to deepening economic inequalities and mounting cultural polarization.
Descendants of the thirteenth-century cornfield cultures eventually confronted their difficulties, but the unresolved Colonial and Industrial Era crises were passed on to future generations. Americans now face the legacy of those social problems, including racial and economic inequality, while they also confront the unprecedented challenges of a global environmental crisis.
Reimagining the Island’s Past and Future
Can this framework help to reimagine the island of Ireland’s past as a series of resolved and unresolved sustainability crises? There was a medieval crisis as the climate-induced Great Famine (1315-1322) and the microorganism-caused Black Death (1347-1351) stressed farming and grazing niches in the fourteenth century. Were there lasting legacies of those crises that would shape the later sectarian conflict? Can we talk about a colonial crisis on the island? If so, when did it start and end? Was there a colonial exchange of biota, and a breaking of ancestral traditions, including spiritual practices focused on sacred sites, as with the veneration at holy wells? How did the displaced reimagine pilgrimage and recreate devotion in the new stressed niche? Was there an inequitable planation niche, as there was in the US South, and was it sacralized by a form of planter piety? If so, how did local revitalization movements use spiritual resources to challenge it? Specialists (for example here and here) have highlighted industrial Belfast, but does it also help to talk about an industrial crisis on the island, or at least in its northeastern corner, between about 1870 and 1920? Simon Purdue has documented ecological degradation in urban Belfast and demonstrated a decline in well-being, economic stability, and food security among mill workers. Most relevant for understanding the later conflict, Industrial Era employers constructed housing that would become the scene of post-1969 sectarian conflict, as Colm Heatley has argued.[5] During the Troubles, fatalities occurred disproportionately in the poorer, religiously segregated, working-class neighborhoods that had formed as grimy industrial niches. To what extent, then, can we see later religious conflict as the product of an unresolved colonial crisis and the legacy of an unresolved industrial crisis?
Demolition of Ewart’s mill in 1990. Belfast, Northern Ireland. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Does this analytic frame and interpretive vocabulary help? I’m not sure. But using sustainability and well-being has practical advantages because those terms have informed local and global thinking about possible futures. Similar language appears, for instance, not just in the UN Sustainable Development Goals but in The Belfast Agenda, the City Council’s vision for 2035. As I learned when I tried out the idea with my relatives in that North Antrim congregation, reframing those aims as the conditions for transgenerational sustainability and avoiding any mention of Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists might open some participants to reimagining the troubled past as a series of shared sustainability crises and to envisioning future-focused deliberations as collective efforts to repair Belfast’s socially and ecologically stressed eco-cultural niche.
[3] Anna Gritching, “Introduction: Social Ecologies and Borderlands,” in The Social Ecology of Border Landscapes, 2, 5, 9; Gregory, et al., Troubled Geographies, 1.
[4] Thomas A. Tweed, Religion in the Lands That Became America: From the Ice Age to the Information Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).
Walls of Derry, Derry/Londonderry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. Near New Gate Bastion: Mural of the main characters from the TV show Derry Girls. Via Wikimedia Commons.
What can we learn from the hit show, Derry Girls? (If you have not seen this, run off and start watching now!) Derry Girls is an Emmy-winning comedic coming-of-age series set in Northern Ireland. The show follows spirited teenagers navigating adolescence amidst a backdrop of political conflict. The show is set in the 1990s, before the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement that brought an “official” end to the Troubles. Today, Northern Ireland experiences a fragile peace. Yet, many themes behind the comedy still hold true for teens in Northern Ireland today.
Like the show, adolescents in Northern Ireland navigate history, culture, and the complex interplay between tradition and modernity. Our research team[1] is currently exploring how these teens learn and share their “truths,” which often are polarized by ethno-religious identity (Catholic/Protestant). We argue that a holistic approach is needed to study how polarized information is transmitted through traditional, structurally embedded narratives and systems that intersect with new information sources and modern values. We discuss novel methods that can begin to embrace these complexities, as now more than ever, information (and misinformation) are readily available literally at teens’ fingertips.
There is a large field of research in developmental psychology focussed on how young people learn information from others. We know that young people exhibit epistemic vigilance; that is, they are motivated to seek reliable information and bridge gaps in their knowledge. However, young people (like all people) also exhibit biases in their information seeking and sharing. As early as infancy, children prefer to learn from members of their own social or cultural groups, and take group membership into account when deciding with whom to share information. Children absorb and transmit information that aligns with the values of their community. This important area of study sheds light on the cognitive and social processes involved in children’s early understanding of information reliability at the individual-level.
A figure showing Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory of Development. Via Wikimedia Commons.
However, these findings currently lack perspective on how influences outside the individual, such as families, peers, schools, public policies, and cultural values, can combine to create a complex web of biases that shape the narratives young people construct about their communities. The socio-ecological framework (see, for example, Bronfenbrenner 1977) is a way of thinking about how different aspects of young people’s lives, from personal to societal to cultural, influence each other. The framework considers how individuals are shaped by their relationships, communities, and the larger society, as well as how they, in turn, can impact these environments. Using this framework, we can begin to elucidate how the push and pull of traditional post-conflict narratives and societal structures intersect with young people’s modernizing identities and values.
So, what can we learn from Derry Girls?
In episode 1 of season 2, the Derry girls participate in an attempt to mix their Catholic, all-girls school classroom with a classroom from a neighboring school of Protestant boys. A well-meaning but not-so-competent priest attempts to demonstrate overarching humanity through a brainstorming session of similarities across the mixed-background group. But alas, the failed exercise results in a full blackboard of “differences” between Catholics and Protestants, and an empty blackboard of “similarities.”
Re-created blackboard from Derry Girls for National Museums NI by Anna Mcaughtry, prop master on the show. Photo courtesy of Susan Dautel. Used with permission of Hat Trick Productions.
This replica of the now famous blackboard is on display at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The show presented these stereotypes in a light-hearted, comedic way, but unfortunately, stereotypes of Catholic and Protestant identity contribute to polarized narratives still today. To highlight the necessity of investigating the development of polarization and epistemic vigilance within young people’s broader ecological frameworks, we provide two examples from this episode of Derry Girls. These examples demonstrate how societal processes seemingly interact with individual-level social cognitive processes.
Intergroup Competition
One “difference” suggested by the teens on the above blackboard is “Protestants are rich and Catholics are poor.” This common yet polarizing cultural narrative demonstrates the impact of a long history of zero-sum conflict and power dynamics across the island of Ireland. Historic narratives may enter into present day interactions with the “other.” For instance, in this episode Michelle, a Derry girl, says, “…I don’t see why we have to get them [Protestants] a present? I mean they already have all the land, all the jobs, and all the f***in’ rights.” This macro-level narrative of competition is upheld by contested symbols (like the “Free Derry” mural in the backdrop of many scenes in the show) in teens’ local communities, a micro-level influence. Take another micro-level example—when the Derry girls and “their” Protestants get into conflict, the dialogue immediately escalates into a polarizing narrative, e.g. “because all Protestants are the same.” Such intergroup competition across the ecological system may disrupt teens from seeking reliable epistemic cues, further fostering a preference for ingroup information, even when that information is likely unreliable. (How many Protestants actually keep toasters in the cupboard?)
Segregation
“Why is everyone so desperate for them to mix? I think we should keep them separate,” says the headmistress from the Londonderry Boys School in the show. Over 90% of schools are “separate” in Northern Ireland, still today. Some teens attend Catholic Maintained schools and other teens attend state-controlled (often majority Protestant) schools. Our research, so far, finds that not only do young people attend different schools, but they may be taught completely different content in different types of schools. In a sample of secondary schools, 96% of Catholic schools teach a class/module on the history of “The Troubles,” compared to only 46% of state-controlled (often majority Protestant background) schools. In a representative survey of young people, a whopping 33% of teens say they were not taught (or did not know if they were taught) about the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in school. Religious education is also taught as part of the national school curriculum in Northern Ireland, but varies by school type. Studies of the two dominant school types during the Troubles found that they differed in time spent on religious education, rituals, symbols, and general ethos, but more current investigations are needed. Segregation also goes beyond schools into most layers of society. Teens often live in separate neighborhoods or towns, may attend church (Protestant) versus chapel (Catholic), have different hobbies, and read/watch different media. This separation within young people’s microsystems, i.e. their schools, classrooms, and local communities, can create false consensuses that reinforce ingroup perspectives and hinder the potential for cross-pollination and information sharing across group lines.
What may have changed for today’s teens in Northern Ireland since the 1990’s Derry Girls?
Anti Irish Sea border banner. Sandy Row, March 2021. Via Wikimedia Commons
A pessimist might say, not much. For instance, the “Protestants are British and Catholics are Irish” narrative on the Derry Girls differences blackboard features prominently in macro-level political discourse today. In the aftermath of Brexit, banners featuring polarized narratives around politics and national identity, like these, are frequent. Such macro-level narratives continue to intersect with micro-level structures, such as what young people learn in school and see in their local communities, leading to divided “truths” or knowledge structures at the individual-level.
“A United Ireland is for Everyone” poster via Sinn Fein. CC BY 2.0 DEED.
But thankfully, we are optimists. Now 25 years post the peace agreement, teens in Northern Ireland have been born into relative peace. Teens are motivated to move forward and continue to correct misinformation transmitted by previous generations: “Macaulay Culkin isn’t a Protestant, Ma!” (Erin, Derry Girls season 1, episode 1). Identities are shifting away from traditional dichotomous categories of Catholic and Protestant. Northern Ireland is secularizing—though it is important to note, not to the same extent as the Republic of Ireland or the rest of the United Kingdom. Teens are more likely to report having “no religion” or being “other” religion, as well as report being “neither” Unionist nor Nationalist. Churches, schools, and youth organizations are contributing to peacebuilding efforts through interfaith dialogue, cross-community initiatives, and integrated and shared education. What we still know less about is how and when young people today are motivated and able to seek out and share reliable information across group boundaries and beyond the limits of traditionally divided societal structures.
Call to Action: A Holistic Lens to Inform Effective Interventions
To navigate the intricate web of old and new, and micro- to macro-level influences on the development of polarization and/or epistemic vigilance in young people, we need innovative methodologies. Here are a few ideas that our team is working on (but we’d love to hear yours too, please comment below!):
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) emerge as powerful tools to analyze diverse texts, uncovering recurring themes and sentiments that occur in narratives across micro, meso, and macrosystems. This provides a nuanced understanding of the narratives influencing polarization. For instance, what were the Derry Girls learning about history and religion at Our Lady Immaculate College? Based on our current explorations, we have to assume a different history than their counterparts at the primarily Protestant background school down the road. Our team will use NLP to analyze pedagogical resources to understand polarization in history and religion education across Northern Irish classrooms.
Peer influence is a prominent theme in Derry Girls, pulling at times both towards (e.g., Erin tells her truth, “You can’t marry an Orangeman, Michelle!” Season 1, Episode 5) and away from polarization. Social Network Analysis expands beyond dyadic interactions, exploring naturally occurring social networks within settings like classrooms, local communities, or even more modern-day influences of social media. This approach helps decipher patterns of segregation, intergroup competition, and socialization practices, shedding light on the contextual factors influencing polarized (mis)information.
Diffusion paradigms, or experimental versions of the game of “telephone,” offer a real-time perspective on information transmission, allowing researchers to track how narratives, both polarizing and unifying, spread across groups. This method opens avenues to study the passing of stories and beliefs across peers, or across generations, contributing to our understanding of the perpetuation or amelioration of intergroup conflict.
Religion has influenced the narratives and perspectives of young people in Northern Ireland through community identity and belonging, education, rituals and commemorations, and moral and ethical interpretations of what is “true.” Employing interdisciplinary, mixed-method research is necessary to holistically explore how truth is defined and produced, how it is evaluated and transmitted at different levels of society, and how to increase epistemic vigilance. By synthesizing findings from various disciplines and methodological approaches, research can inform the development of targeted and effective interventions. These interventions, rooted in a deep understanding of the complexities highlighted in Derry Girls, can empower young people to enhance their epistemic vigilance. Ultimately, the goal is to equip young people with the critical thinking skills needed to catalyze positive social change, fostering healthier, more peaceful, and equitable societies, not only within Northern Ireland but also resonating beyond its borders.
[1] Our research team consists of Jocelyn Dautel (Queen’s University Belfast), Bethany Corbett (Ulster University), Kathleen Corriveau (Boston University), Emma Flynn (Warwick University), Eva Grew (Queen’s University Belfast), Mariah Kornbluh (University of Oregon), Caitlin McShane (Queen’s University Belfast), Jennifer Watling Neal (Michigan State University), Lara Wood (Abertay University), Christin Schulz (University of Amsterdam), and Jing Xu (University of Washington Seattle), funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation.
Dr. Jocelyn Dautel is a developmental psychologist researching how young people navigate their social worlds, especially when they are divided. She is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Psychology, Director of the Kids in Context research lab, and Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. She leads on global research collaborations, such as Communicating Truth and the Developing Belief Network, researching children’s religious identity and beliefs across 30 field sites with over 50 international research collaborators. Through global education, research, and service, she contributes leadership in debates about unique and universal processes in social cognitive development with an aim towards reducing inequalities and promoting peacebuilding.
Dr. Bethany Corbett is a developmental psychologist and lecturer in the School of Psychology, Ulster University, Northern Ireland. Her research has examined factors contributing towards children's prosocial choices (for example, to help and share), including experiences of minoritization within settings of conflict. Her research informs strategies to reduce inequalities and increase cooperation, from the interpersonal (the formation of positive relationships) through to the macro-level (support for dismantling the status quo). Other research interests include how young people learn about historical - and particularly, contested - information. Understanding these processes contributes to strategies designed to increase young people’s critical thinking skills, and reduce their susceptibility to misinformation
It was no coincidence that the three presidents who were called by the US Congress on December 5th, 2023 to testify about “antisemitism on college campuses” were the presidents of Ivy League schools (Harvard, MIT, and The University of Pennsylvania). It was also no coincidence that all three presidents were women, and that one of them (Harvard’s) happened also to be Black. And so, as usual, impeccably seizing the political moment, the US Republicans had smelled blood and understood that they had in their hands a perfect storm opportunity, and, characteristically, immediately jumped into action.
First was the matter at hand: antisemitism, a subject that often shuts down debate and discussion. The Democrats would have no wiggle room and no choice but to side with their Republican colleagues (as they did, and with relish), no matter how vituperative and unfair and even flatly false the Republicans’ attack against the witnesses might get.
But second, and most crucially for the Republicans, here was a chance to expose, in their mind, the hypocrisy of liberal elites: They have no problem shutting down speech, creating “safe zones,” letting dissenting colleagues hang out to dry (and not infrequently, gang up on them), and firing those who persist in their unorthodox ways (tenure in many cases offering almost no protection) when it comes to topics that touch on the rights of women, LGBTQ+ communities, racial minorities, etc. Yet there they were, mum and tolerating what they, the Republicans (and the vast majority of their Democratic colleagues), described as “antisemitism” and “calls for genocide of the Jewish people.” Where were the safe zones and the requisite firings, the Republicans asked? Why were these demonstrations allowed to happen day in and day out, while hosting a simple lecture by someone outspoken in a politically incorrect way was often barred as a matter of course? Aside from the bottomless cynicism and the fantasy that the speech that they were calling out (calling for a ceasefire in a war zone where civilians were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands, and chanting demands for the freedom of a people oppressed and subjugated for soon a century) was antisemitic, the Republicans did have a fair enough point to make by bringing the liberal chickens back home to roost.
For me, the revolting spectacle during those congressional hearings had this one redeeming aspect to it: It was a salutary lesson for all to learn that when you start to restrict civil rights (in this case freedom of speech—and on campus of all places), no matter how noble your cause and your intentions may be, a time will most certainly come when the circumstances will make it impossible for you to resist being pulled by the forces of an establishment power wishing to assert itself to shut down the speech of majorities expressing sharp dissent (80% among Democratic voters and 56% among Republican voters, support an immediate and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza).
I sent an invitation to submit a reaction to Prof. Finkelstein’s Op-ed (published by the Washington Post on December 10th, 2023), where she calls for limiting free speech when it comes to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, to exactly seventy academics and activists. Each one of them was someone with whom I had previously corresponded and who always responded to my emails. Out of the seventy, fifty eight did not reply, seven declined to participate, and five agreed to write something. Out of those five, one changed their mind and withdrew, two wrote something, but a few days later, withdrew their pieces (with one of them citing that they were not tenured and so could not risk it), so that I was left with exactly two contributions. From there, and with the help of the two remaining academics who were sticking to their guts, we managed to get ten contributions after several weeks of pushing and pulling. At the very last minute, as if all of this needed more drama—and crucially, after I had shared my introduction (what you are reading)—one academic checked with their department and informed me that they needed to withdraw their piece! And so here we are.
I will let all those facts speak for themselves, as well as the nine pieces below. The reactions are listed below, in alphabetical order by first name.
Prof. Adam Rzepka
Associate Professor, English
Montclair State University
Prof. Claire O. Finkelstein’s op-ed extends a tradition of arguments from prominent legal scholars against constitutional rights in order to manufacture consent for war crimes executed or proxied by the U.S. I am reminded most directly of John Yoo’s infamous “torture memos”—the immediate application here is less atrocious, but the stakes are ultimately just as high. Finkelstein’s argument is effectively against the right of students and faculty to rely on the First Amendment in order to oppose a genocidal military campaign whose unconditional funding, supply, and political support is the current policy of our federal government.
As has been pointed out in other responses in this collection, the supposed rash of calls for “genocide against Jews” on campuses is a rhetorical phantom: such warnings are never accompanied by any actual examples. The slanderous implication that objections to Israel’s campaign in Gaza are aligned with violent antisemitism serves only one real purpose: to give institutional and intellectual cover for public acquiescence to what is at best a string of war crimes, almost certainly ethnic cleansing, and probably genocide, with the U.S. as its only foreign patron.
Like all such ideological covers, this argument necessarily proposes an abrogation of constitutional rights and the rule of law. In Finkelstein’s case, the forced consensus that genocidal violence must be lock-step public policy is the deeper point of the phrase “with or without the First Amendment.” Even on public university campuses, whose free speech standards must adhere to that amendment, calls for an end to the U.S.-supplied killing of some 3000 children per month in the Gaza campaign must also pass the test of whether or not those objections create a “hostile work environment” for specific ethnicities or national origins.
That last point is the most insidious one for public universities, especially, because it perverts the justice of Title VI and similar statutes by weaponizing them against objections to a specific government policy. Contortions like Finkelstein’s are already forcing cracks in longstanding free speech protections at public universities, which until now were set aside as a counterexample in the furor over private speech policies at Penn, Harvard, and Columbia.
At my public university, my own persistent advocacy for a ceasefire on our faculty discussion listserv quickly drew an anonymous complaint that I was creating a hostile work environment. For three weeks, I was banned from all speech on that listserv, without knowing any details of the complaint. When some (though not all) of these details were finally shared with me, the “investigation” was immediately dropped.
More than 2200 children in Gaza had been bombed to death in those three weeks. Nothing I could have said to the campus at large could have saved them, but I would have liked to speak out against this slaughter to those at my university who were publicly defending it. The next day, the university, in an effort to head off the flood of new harassment claims, unsubscribed all users from the discussion forum, effectively shutting it down. It did the same to the all-campus listserv, the only remaining channel of communication available to the full campus. Because of the way tactics like Finkelstein’s have manufactured a conflict between free speech and respect, we can no longer speak to each other as a community, for any cause.
Prof. Atalia Omer
Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies/Sociology
Co-Director, Contending Modernities
Keough School of Global Affairs
The University of Notre Dame
If the conclusion drawn from the university presidents’ congressional hearing on antisemitism on December 5, 2023, is that academic freedom needs to be restricted, it reveals how dangerous it is for Jews to fall into the false equation of antisemitism and criticism of Zionism and Israeli policies of occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism. Rather than combating antisemitism, Representative Elise Stefanik (a New York Republican)—who ignorantly equated legitimate recognition of Palestinian resistance (intifada) with an eliminative intent (genocide) in her interrogation of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania—exposed the weaponization of antisemitism in the service of White supremacy. Ignoring her embeddedness in White supremacist discourse, Rep. Stefanik conveniently instrumentalized the fight against antisemitism to come across as riding a moral high horse (scolding the university presidents for supposedly supporting a far-fetched hypothetical scenario of calls for genocide against Jews, an accusation leveled at a time when, according to leading genocide and Holocaust scholars, actual genocidal actions are unfolding against Palestinians in Gaza). Rep. Stefanik’s prior parroting of the “great replacement theory” that deems “the Jews” as instrumental in facilitating the “replacement” of White Christian Americans with minorities is underpinned by actual forms of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Black racism. Indeed, regardless of the rhetorical efforts to separate antisemitism from other forms of racism, these bigotries are always interwoven.
We need to go no further than the chilling chants by White nationalists in Charlottesville in August 2017, “Jews will not replace us,” in a “Unite the Right” march protesting the overdue plan to remove a symbol of the Confederacy, which inflicts constant moral injury upon Black Americans. The dangers and fallacies of disentangling an analysis of racism from antisemitism likewise manifested in the mass shooting in Pittsburg’s Tree of Life synagogue on November 4, 2018. The shooter was primed to carry out his attack because he learned about the synagogue’s involvement with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and their commitment to working with immigrants and refugees. In this way, his actions reflected the perverse influence of the “great replacement” theory. These examples illuminate the entanglement of anti-Black racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and reactionary White Christian nationalism with antisemitism. Hence, the congressional hearing gestures toward a moment of opportunity in a broader “culture war” against wokeness enabled by an entrenched Jewish and Christian Zionist infrastructure already in place. This infrastructure criminalizes and litigates Palestinian narratives through the equation and conflation of Jews with a nation-state (represented by an aggressive promotion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance “working definition” of antisemitism). Thus, weaponizing antisemitism is convenient for such forces that have assaulted LGBTQI, migrants, Muslims, and other marginalized communities. Jews need to be alarmed by their persistent assimilation into Whiteness and their instrumentalization in policing academic freedom and debates on campuses.
Prof. Ebrahim Moosa
Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought & Muslim Societies
The University of Notre Dame
A new meme—a usage, a style, code phrases—that subliminally replicates in our minds an entire ideology, “genocide against Jews,” is taking root in American public discourse. Literally menacing, this meme did not surface when White militias were braying, “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville, VA in 2017 under Donald Trump’s rule. Trump endorsed that right-wing protest with his shameful claim that there were “good people on both sides” at that protest. Neither Israel nor its supporters in the US amplified that horrific meme as “genocide against Jews.”
As the defining moral moment of our time, the post-October 2023 groundswell of support for the Palestinian cause on US campuses and around the world, criticism of Israeli occupation and settler-colonialism gets maliciously perverted as “genocide against Jews.” Everything from academic conferences on Palestinian literature to protests by Jewish Americans are framed under this self-serving and diabolically designated meme. The goal is not to squelch critique of Israel but to outlaw it. Calls for limits to free speech advocated by people like Claire O. Finkelstein are part of a wider ideological project in support of an Israeli propaganda war.
This meme is a hoax and ruse to silence critical debate and should be called out for what it is: a bid to justify Israel’s atrocities and comfort its conscience over its serious human rights violations. Imagine White South Africans who favored apartheid racism complaining because criticism of racism made them feel uncomfortable? In fact, the parallel is inadequate: apartheid ruined the lives of millions, but no apartheid government murdered and targeted more than 20,000 defenseless people with 2,000-pound bombs. Defenders of Israel’s atrocities ought to feel uncomfortable for supporting horrific murders and the dispossession of Palestinians going back to 1948.
Advocates of speech restrictions are surreptitiously importing Israeli propaganda memes into our public and campus discourses. Such speech restrictions would not even be tolerated in Israel itself. But the chutzpah to upend US free speech codes beggars the mind. It is a covert attempt to curb the political tide against Israel’s privileged status in US politics and to whitewash that country’s settler-colonial atrocities against Palestinians with US taxpayer dollars.
Prof. Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar,
Montclair State University
Claire Finkelstein’s Op-Ed in the Washington Post deserves condemnation for several reasons, most obviously for its call to curtail First Amendment rights upon which much of the integrity and independence of thought and expression, which is the strength of US academia, rests.
More or certainly just as insidious, for me, is the way her convoluted and bad faith (il)logic, opens the way for a convergence of the worst excesses of right-wing politicians and their academic counterparts.
By equating chants of “intifada” or “from the river to the sea” with calls for the genocide of Jews—arguing that such speech thus incites violence “against a discrete ethnic or religious group,” and thus requires censorship of “free speech” tout court by college administrators—she is guilty of a disingenuous sleight of hand. By linking certain words and phrases to her interpretation of them, she is laying a trap of the exact same kind her congressional counterpart Elise Stefanik did, into which the presidents of UPenn, Harvard and MIT fell one after the other.
We should be clear, as these otherwise smart women were not: when Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” they are not calling for genocide against Jews—many of them are Jews themselves! They are advocating for one secular and democratic state where all citizens can live together as equals. This is not possible in the current apartheid state of Israel, which has no right to think it speaks in the name of Jewish people of conscience: those who believe “never again” means never again for anyone!
If we in academia can’t debate and challenge illogical and pernicious views such as those of Ms. Stefanik and Prof. Finkelstein—to engage in the “dialogue” Finkelstein herself claims disingenuously to approve of—then the very foundations of critical thinking and vociferous, sometimes unpleasant debate we hold dear, never mind free speech, are doomed to extinction.
Prof. Genevieve Lakier
Professor of Law and Herbert & Marjorie Fried Teaching Scholar
The University of Chicago Law School
What a difference a month makes. A month ago, the public conversation about freedom of speech on American campuses took place in the shadow of a frightful specter: the image of antisemitic mobs who, according to Republican politicians, pro-Israel groups, and Claire Finkelstein, were rampaging across American campuses, calling for the genocide of Jews, with the permission or at least without the active constraint of university officials. That specter continues to haunt the imagination of some—and may continue to influence American law and university policy for years to come.
In the last month however, the story of speech on campus has become considerably more muddled. In the wake of South Africa’s arguments at the International Court of Justice last week—arguments that focused on the very real possibility that Israel has violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention of 1948—it has become increasingly hard to ignore the possibility that, when Elise Stefanik grilled the university presidents on their policies regarding genocidal student speech at the now infamous House committee hearings, the answers the presidents gave about their treatment of pro-genocide speech were more relevant to the pro-Israel speech on campus than the speech of pro-Palestinian groups.
This is not to suggest that the voices of pro-Israel students and supporters should be muzzled in the name of protecting students against genocide-encouraging speech. It is to suggest instead that there is a reason the college presidents—and American free speech law— is generally skeptical of efforts to identify exceptions to the ordinary principles of free speech, particularly when it comes to incitement. The reason is, of course, that judgments about what counts as (to use Finkelstein’s language) “hateful rhetoric” and “poisonous speech” are inevitably political judgments that can and have and—in the current climate—almost certainly will, if empowered, be used to repress political dissent.
This does not mean that there are no limits to what students or faculty can say. But it does explain why these limits are, as the university presidents explained at those hearings, very limited, particularly when it comes to protest and other kinds of speech. Ultimately her op-ed, with its deeply distorted understanding of what in fact is and has been taking place on campuses across the country, helps remind us of why it is so difficult to craft exceptions to the general free speech principles that do not swallow us whole.
Professor Claire Finkelstein recently argued that imposing restrictions on speech on US campuses is necessary to combat rising antisemitism. Her examples, however, cite only politically protected speech.
Such speech is at the heart of First Amendment’s protections. As the unanimous 2014 Supreme Court decision in McCullen v. Coakley held, even facially neutral “time, place and manner” restrictions on such speech can be struck down when they proscribe more speech than necessary. Private universities, while not obligated to follow the First Amendment, would surely be impoverished if they did not permit as wide a latitude for political speech as possible. The Supreme Court has only recently reaffirmed that political speech may only be proscribed when the speaker has a specific intent to foment imminent violence. Finkelstein provides no evidence that students at Penn or elsewhere, when they use these phrases, intend the genocide of Jews. Some Jewish students might subjectively experience such words as threats, but that does not provide a basis in our law to restrict the speech of others. Professor Finkelstein implicitly admits that the speech she describes as genocidal is equivocal, describing it as speech that “arguably incites violence.” Precisely because it is equivocal, controversial political speech invokes other crucial functions of the university that Finkelstein endorses: “civil dialogue across differences, . . . cultivating critical listening skills, . . . [and] promoting the ability to engage in moral reflection and building resilience in the face of challenge.” Students advocating for Palestine are engaged in a serious political critique of Zionism based on its devastating impact on non-Jewish Palestinians. Jewish students at Penn or other universities may experience this critique as painful or even hateful, but they are not entitled to immunity from hearing political critique of Jewish nationalism. Resilience, too, is a value the university promotes.
Prof. Nermeen Arastu
Associate Professor of Law
Co-Director, Immigrant and Non-Citizen Rights Clinic
The City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law
Professor Finklenstein argues that University administrators should surpass existing systems of collective governance, accountability, and analysis (she brusquely writes off task forces and study groups) to make unilateral top-down decisions about what constitutes hate speech, a category with no fixed legal definition. The focus of her essay, political speech in support of Palestinian liberation and critical of the Israeli government, deligitimizes speech in defense of one persecuted minority currently facing unprecedented death and destruction in favor of another historically persecuted group.
Glaringly absent from her analysis are the harms that Palestinian students, faculty, staff and their allies face where their legitimate speech critical of an occupying government are dangerously categorized as an incitement of violence, or genocide. In the last months and beyond, these communities have already faced harassment, surveillance, and physical violence. They too, deserve an academic environment where they can access equal educational opportunities, engage in collective action and grief, debate the effectiveness of international human rights systems, and build community relationships.
For Finkelstein, these populations, equally in need of protection and safety, are invisible at best. At worst, Finkelstein falls under the trap of employing tropes commonly used against minority religious and racial communities from the earliest days of the formation of the nation: calling them uncivil, hate-filled, and implying their inability to engage in reasoned dialogue. This language dangerously sets the tone for the surveillance, criminalization, and over-policing of minority students that follows them and their families off campuses and into communities long into their adult lives.
It is not possible to fully distinguish between speech and action. We live in communities largely characterized by meanings embedded in language. Speech shapes the character of these communities and, therefore, can profoundly affect the emotional and social wellbeing of those who live in them. In this respect, speech is action. Hate speech is a form of emotional and social violence even if it never results in physical assault. I believe, therefore, that College administrators have a responsibility to prohibit hate speech on their campuses. The problem comes in trying to distinguish between true hate speech and legitimate political expression. Take, for example, the word “intifada.” Intifada might be translated “resistance,” or “liberation.” A call for “intifada” against the state of Israel is legitimate political expression. A call for “intifada” against “the Jews” crosses the border into hate speech, as it is suggestive of the antisemitic charge that “the Jews,” en masse, are an oppressive presence in the world. How and where to draw the line between legitimate political expression and true hate speech is a difficult question. Nevertheless, I do believe a line must be drawn. Calling for the genocide of Jews, or the lynching of blacks, or the persecution of any ethnic or religious group is speech that should not be tolerated in communities dedicated to the advancement of truth and knowledge. How and where to draw the line between legitimate political expression and true hate speech is a difficult question that would need to be carefully considered on a case-by-case basis.
Prof. Tom Ginsburg
Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and Director of The Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression
The University of Chicago
Professor Finkelstein is the latest in a long line of academics, from both the left and right, calling for the repression of campus speech they don’t like. Her position is the logical outgrowth of our era, in which students’ feelings take priority, and the use of terms like “violence” and “safety” have lost any connection with their traditional uses. Violence is what is happening in Gaza, while American universities are among the safest places on the planet. Our universities, with their ever-large bureaucracies, have encouraged rhetorical drift, but in doing so, have undermined one of their core missions—to prepare students as citizens of a plural, democratic society in which they will encounter opinions with which they strongly disagree. In the United States, with the First Amendment, this means that even private universities need to prepare students for a world in which all kinds of horrific speech is allowed, and so should generally take the same approach as public universities. This doesn’t mean that universities have to allow everything: perhaps a true call for genocide of Jews ought to be disallowed, though we have not to my ears yet heard one on an American campus in the wake of Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attacks. Israeli policy is an obvious area of democratic concern, and so must be fully debated, even if some find the slogans of one or the other side offensive. Of course, protests and speech must be carried out peacefully, without physically intimidating others, shutting down speakers, or interfering with classrooms. But Finklestein’s call for content-based restrictions is doubling down on a policy that is failing students and undermining public trust in higher education.
Enrique Dussel in 2013. Image via Flickr User Secretaría de Cultura de la Cuidad de México. CC-BY-SA 2.0.
Since the 1980s, Enrique Dussel has been regarded as the most important scholar in the fields of philosophy and theology in Latin America. An early contributor to liberation theology (teología de la liberación), a pioneering leader in the concurrent field of liberation philosophy (filosofía de la liberación), all the while being a highly respected historian of the Catholic Church in his own right, Dussel’s work spanned fields, geographies, and world history in an effort to dismantle the Eurocentric and colonialist pretensions of modernity. His contributions to these academic fields are simply too numerous to begin to list here. Without a doubt, the epistemicdecolonialization of these fields is at the front and center of his scholarship. However, the full potential of his work would be deficient if its reception were limited to a disciplinarily decadent interpretation that refused to cross boundaries. I argue that one of the most significant legacies of Dussel’s work is the urgency to rethink disciplinary divides with an eye toward epistemic decolonization. The relation between history and philosophy and the relation between history and theology are good examples of this interdisciplinarity.
The fact that Dussel was a contributor to the emergence of both liberation theology and liberation philosophy has often resulted in a misguided, if not outright dismissive, reception of his work from the fields of theology and philosophy. On one hand, some theologians argue that his liberation theology is not properly theological due to the strong influence of Marxism on its development. They argue that this influence leads his theological work to be a merely Marxist secular philosophy in disguise. On the other hand, some philosophers argue that his brand of liberation philosophy is not philosophical enough due to its close historical and theoretical relationship with liberation theology. Ofelia Schutte argues, for example, that if his philosophical work is not simply a theology in disguise, then at least it is a secular imitation of liberation theology (174). This is the case even though Dussel himself never sought to blur the boundary between philosophy and theology. Instead, he kept a strict distinction between the two discourses based on a division between faith and reason. For him, whereas philosophy is geared toward a universal secular community of reason, theology is geared toward a particular religious community of faith.
One of the most significant legacies of Dussel’s work is the urgency to rethink disciplinary divides with an eye toward epistemic decolonization.
Nevertheless, such formal distinction did not prevent creative and critical explorations of the ways in which the theological and the philosophical come together. In my view, these explorations are some of the most fertile moments in Dussel’s work. We see this in Dussel’s politico-philosophical study of Paul the Apostle. Here, a formal distinction between philosophy and theology is maintained in a way that seeks to overcome philosophy’s Enlightened secularism.
Picture of books in Spanish written by Enrique Dussel. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Without stepping into the ecclesiastical domain of theology, the philosopher can examine texts or topics that have traditionally been taken up in theology in the interests of determining a potential universal rationality. To be clear, this move is not the methodological discovery of a “philosophical theology” (which applies philosophical methods to elucidate theological frameworks) nor a “political theology” (which more narrowly analyzes the political field from the sectarian perspective of a religious tradition). As I have argued elsewhere, this move instead denotes the development of a dialectically postsecular philosophy that is invested in overcoming the ways in which the modern secular/religious divide has been falsely universalized through the coloniality of knowledge.
A more intricate instance of this exploration between the theological and the philosophical can be seen in Dussel’s The Theological Metaphors of Marx, a text that will be published for the first time in English translation in 2024. This text reconstructs Marx’s critique of theology as a critique of politics in a way that re-fashions political philosophy as an “anti-fetishist” philosophy of religion, where profane sacralization is diagnosed to be the root cause of political domination. While Dussel would write this text intermittently over a 20-year period parallel to the historical development of liberation theology, his argument largely stands on postsecularist philosophical grounds rather than theological ones. In this regard, it is similar to another heretically Marxist text: Ernst Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity, in which the German philosopher aims to establish a conversation between Marxism and religion “purged of ideology” (in the case of the latter) and “purged of taboo” (in the case of the former) (51). Interpreters who miss this methodological nuance end up all-too-quickly diagnosing the failure of The Theological Metaphors of Marx as a forced theologization of secular concerns. But this conclusion misses the entire point of the text, which is to rescue the critical value of theological metaphors as a critique of politics–which is to say, to probe the theological as the unspoken infrastructure of the politico-economic. It is in this way that The Theological Metaphors of Marx philosophically uncovers Marx’s own “proto-theology” or “implicit theology” made possible by the conceptual labor of a metaphorical language (18).
At the crossroads of the theological and the philosophical, the task of the decolonial postsecular philosopher is to diagnose the fetishisms or “false names,” which is to say, the false gods of the modern/colonial world that demand worship. This is why an atheist “anti-fetishism” is the very “first thesis” of liberation philosophy: it is an atheism of the fetish. And that secularism is one of these fetishes that plague modern philosophy is why a postsecularist impetus is important for the purposes of epistemic decolonization.
This is not to say, however, that all “dialectics of secularization” are absolutely doomed to culminate in irredeemably colonialist and fetishistic dynamics, as the ideology of secularism has done in modernity. This is why there remains, after all, a distinction between philosophy and theology, itself based on a division between faith and reason. If one can diagnose the irrational fetishisms of modernity, it is because somewhere a critically emancipatory and universal kernel of rationality remains alive. “There is no liberation without rationality,” Dussel claims, “but there is no critical rationality without accepting the interpellation of the excluded, or this would inadvertently be only the rationality of domination” (36). Accordingly, epistemic decolonization can be recognized as the interpellation of the excluded that calls out the fetishisms of a colonialist modernity. Evidently, this is not a crude call for the abandonment of modernity, nor simply a reaction against it. It is, rather, a creatively dialectical critique that goes through modernity itself. In Dussel’s terms, it is a “transmodern,” project, rather than an anti-modern or a postmodern one.
Decolonizing the relation between philosophy and theology is likewise not simply a matter of just blurring or undoing the boundaries between them. The lesson from Dussel’s work is to embrace the creative dialectics of decolonization which demands a new transmodern way of thinking about the points of mutual correspondence between philosophy and theology in a way that allows for liberatory interpretations of the world, beyond the fetishisms of modernity (such as secularism). At least this will be but one of the many legacies that his work will allow future generations to explore.
Rafael Vizcaíno is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University. His work employs decolonial approaches to examine the intersections between race, religion, politics, and secularization. In 2020, he earned the American Philosophical Association’s Essay Prize in Latin American Thought. His first book (in final stages of revision) recounts the modern dialectics of secularization from the perspective of Latin American and Caribbean thought. His second book (in development) will examine the relation between philosophy of religion and political theology in the context of epistemic decolonization.
View of Gaza Strip from Israel – October 2009. Image Credit: Flickr User David Berkowitz. CC By 2.0 DEED.
There is no use pretending that all we know about time and space, or rather history and geography, is more than anything else imaginative… imaginative geographical and historical knowledge.
Hamas’ October 7, 2023 killing of over 1200 people in Israeli communities bordering the Gaza Strip precipitated the vengeful and disproportionate Israeli state military assault of Gaza that has since taken many thousand more Palestinian lives (over 23,000 at the time of writing), and as a result mass displacement and a humanitarian crisis. Predictably, White American Christian Zionists explain and refract these events through the opportunist eschatological prism by which they see the world. Sean Durban explains that this is all part of God’s greater plan for his son, the messiah, to vanquish evil and bring about a millennium of Christian peace. These conclusions are especially difficult to read in the context of these events. Such imaginations of past and future are stuck on “orthogonal time,” a concept I borrow from Philip K. Dick to illustrate the ways in which such events are imagined to have always already happened as God’s future events for the apocalypse are set in time like a record on a turntable. Christian Zionists interpret the assault on Gaza as one such event, bumping the stylus forward as evidence of Christ’s imminent return. This temporality explains how Christian Zionist prophecies for Gaza naturalize these awful human—all too human—atrocities as fatalistic predetermination.
In this piece, and as a geographer of the apocalypse, I explore the ways space, and specifically landscape, is used as an instrument to (1) provide evidence of the imminence of Christ’s return, (2) to justify settler colonial erasure, and (3) reinforce Christian Zionist national identities. However, landscapes also open a liminal space for counter discourses. Ethnographic work with Christian Zionists reveals dissonate perspectives on the dominate discourse of erasure and colonization of Palestinian Gaza.
Most famous among the Christian Zionist commentators is Hal Lindsey. Lindsey is the author of the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth. Ever the Cold Warrior, Lindsey explained the 7/10 Hamas attack as follows: “I consider it a precursor to the war prophesied in Ezekiel 38 and 39—a war led by Russia and Iran. And make no mistake, Russia is tied to this.” His perspective of omniscient fatalism is typical of dispensational premillennialist theology—the dominant evangelical eschatology that states Christ will return to Israel prior to the millennium—in orthogonal time. He explains that “Christians should remember that this did not catch God by surprise… his plan continues.”
Lindsey’s position illustrates the centrality of not just time within the Christian Zionist imagination, but also space. Conceptualizations of space bring us back to Said’s words in the epigraph; this “imaginative geography” allows Christian Zionists to predict the future, and in doing so close off its other potentialities by attempting to re-make the world from their maps about it. Rendering the apocalypse cartographically potentializes the present and actualizes the future as a method of persuasion by rendering the apocalypse visible, exploiting the specious infallibility of cartography, and reducing future complexity to the apocalyptic abstraction that erases both Palestinian and Israeli agency and presence as mere objects of future history.
Hal Lindsey’s Chart of Armageddon. Source: Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth. Image and permission courtesy of Tristan Strum.
Christian Zionists are a powerful political lobby and cultural force in both American politics and geopolitics. Domestically, “64 percent of Evangelical Republicans say [Israel] matters ‘a lot’ compared with just 33 percent of non-Evangelical Republicans and 26 percent of all Americans.” In other words, given that 38 percent of Republican voters are evangelicals, Israel is not simply an evangelical concern but a Republican issue. Christian Zionists are a central election base—both for campaign contributions and votes—that might determine Donald Trump’s future return to the White House in 2024. Geopolitically, and as Stuart Croft argues, the Christian Right has developed its own views on foreign policy that challenge Realist, Liberal, and Marxist positions, what he terms “evangelical foreign policy.”
Lindsey famously focused on geopolitics to explain prophecy, and in so doing avoided the austere and certain failure of apocalyptic date-setting. Michel De Certeau explains this modern god-trick tactic of transposing space and time: “to be able to see (far into the distance) is also to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading space” (36). But this focus on space by Christian Zionists is not limited to the global scale of geopolitics. I ask what is lost in our analysis of Christian Zionism by focusing only on its famous (mostly men) authors, its Hal Lindseys?
My current book project, The Future is Foreign Country, focuses on the landscape pilgrimage sites of the apocalypse, visited by over 100,000 American Christian Zionists each year. I’ve been conducting an ethnography in Israel/Palestine since 2008, travelling with dozens of Christian Zionist pilgrimage groups. The places of interest, where the coaches tend to stop and the pilgrims disembark, are not the places one would expect for Christians, i.e., sites of Christ’s miracles, but are instead landscape vistas from which pilgrims can look out and, as Stephen Daniels once succinctly put it, “picture the nation” (5) with its strength, beauty, history, and future.
Upon these landscapes, American Christian Zionists revere, even consecrate, a group of people—Jews—with whom they do not and cannot belong, and a territorial state—Israel—from which they usually cannot gain citizenship. Here the territorial fetishization of “the Jew,” as Jonathon S. O’Donnell argues, is an antisemitic construction for the proper place for Jews in Israel against which all other Jews are out-of-place globalists. This nationalism is religious at its core, sprung from a set of interpretations of the Bible that identifies the Jewish return to Israel as a prophetic sign of the imminence of the apocalypse. This is religion as nationalism where nationalism is embedded in their theology as a religious rite and portended expectation.
Why Landscapes?
Pre-American Civil War, America was imagined as the New Jerusalem in stark distinction to England where these new Americans created a “geoeschatolic and geoapocalyptic consciousness… of the sacralization of an alternative place within the eschatology and apocalyptic drama of salvation and redemption” (Zakai 1992, 72). During the Reconstruction Era (1863-1877), however, Palestine figured prominently in American popular culture. In particular, pilgrimage narratives and guidebooks found a market far beyond the small number of Americans who actually crossed the sea. Pilgrimage to Palestine’s landscapes was one of self-imagination and renewal after the deep and divisive scars of the American Civil War. Palestine became these pilgrims’ new and unadulterated origin story, divorced from Europe and the troubles at home in America. As Hilton Obenzinger illustrates, “Travel to Palestine allowed Americans to read sacred geography…. While the persistent preoccupations with the Bible and biblical geography stood at the ideological core of American colonial expansion, actual travel to Palestine allowed Americans to contemplate biblical narratives at their source in order to reimagine—and even to reenact—ethno-religious national myths” (5). Palestinian landscapes were, as John Davis points out in his magisterial book, The Landscape of Belief, sacred spaces and the medium for American national self-definition for Protestants. They served as an anchor of morally pure beginnings.
This nationalism is religious at its core, sprung from a set of interpretations of the Bible that identifies the Jewish return to Israel as a prophetic sign of the imminence of the apocalypse.
Christian Zionists seek landscapes for three main reasons: (1) When 19th century White American Protestants arrived in Palestine, most of the urban sacred sites and buildings in Palestine were already claimed by non-Protestant groups. (2) Combined with the Protestant rejection of idolatry, such claimed space helped foment the rejection of monuments, buildings, and cities. Like early Jewish Zionism, the soil itself served a validating purpose. Davis explains “that Christians should put their trust in the soil of Palestine rather than the urban sites of Orthodox and Catholic tradition became a fundamental precept of most American activity in the region” (46). (3) Landscape creates an open space for Christian Zionists to perform their beliefs with abstract generality from afar, and without counter discourses of Palestinians. If the landscapes of Israel can be possessed through performative definition, then so too can the credentials of truth and faith be possessed, validated, and confirmed. To possess the landscape is to possess the truth.
These performative apocalyptic logics are not only a form of terra nullius (empty land), but also more specifically the imaginings of a spatial vacuity of Palestinians and Palestine, a vacuum domicilium (empty of inhabitants). This is what Christopher Pexa more generally frames as “settler colonialism’s exterminatory logic and its apocalyptic temporality” (4). Christian Zionist settler imaginaries find justification for colonization through the pre-emptive logic of terra nullius as orthogonal time. In other words, terra nullius is perceived as a rational pre-emptive logic of natural law with material consequences for appropriating inhabited lands.
Landscape is a masculinist visual representation and as such an ideological subject position, in this case, an imperial one taken up by a particularly powerful religio-political group. Scripting landscapes or “landscaping,” despite giving the illusion of being simply static and inert objects, are processes. I focus on the scripting and practices through which both landscapes and national subjectivities are constructed. Landscapes are often argued to be objects or stages upon which they are attributed meaning. And as meaning is applied to landscapes through various social mediums, they also naturalize operations of power by simplifying them through the erasure of that which does not fit their imaginings. In this case the presence of Palestinians. Landscaping is therefore an organizing principle that sustains mystification and is constructed through performances: dances, tears, prayers, sermons, gestures, tour guides, books, pamphlets, and various Bible translations. Landscape is not just iconographic or performative; it can produce a hegemonic experience.
Landscape is a masculinist visual representation and as such an ideological subject position, in this case, an imperial one taken up by a particularly powerful religio-political group.
Landscape is of course open to other future imaginings and while the Hal Lindseys in the movement hold significant interpretive cultural capital, my ethnographic work upon these landscapes, by embedding myself within pilgrimage tours, illustrated moments of dissonance with such dominant narratives. Nearly every day during Operation Cast Lead (2008–9), I travelled with Christian Zionists to Sderot, a town bordering Gaza. We delivered food to elderly residents as Kasam rockets regularly fell. At the end of each trip, we travelled to a landscape location that was about 100 meters from the official “press hill,” and 200 meters from the Gaza border. The edge of Gaza City was visible but blurred by the humidity and smoke. We were there to watch the war take place on the landscape, a kind of setting sun on our “benevolent” acts in Sderot.
Christian Zionists watching the war from Sderot. Source: Tristan Strum.
The lookout was a theatrical performance which served as evidence for many pilgrims that God’s work was being done by the “the world’s most moral army,”a common legitimating phrase at the time invented by the Israeli Occupational Forces. Edward Said argued that all representation was of a theatrical nature, “the idea of representation is a theatrical one… a theatrical stage affixed to” (63) the national origin of the viewer. Despite seeing the various dense pluming puffs of white smoke that signified an Israeli bomb, it was the sound of the war that was most arresting and affecting; the sound of the bombs themselves that could be felt most acutely as the shock waves pushed through our bodies. It was here in this embodied landscape space that imaginations of Palestinian erasure were challenged.
I asked one of the American leaders of the trip what he thought about the ceasefire, and he replied: “The wars will never stop. My father said it would be the last war when I was a child. There have been five wars since. We must realize that there cannot be peace.” He then mimed a crash by bumping his fists together, and continued, “They will have their land we will have ours. Just separate, but not in peace…. Muslims are a people of death, and Jews and Christians are peoples of life.” This man was willing to concede that Palestinians did deserve land or at least that they would stubbornly never let it go. Such a concession is marginal, but nevertheless a discourse that challenges the dominate settler colonial discourse of Hal Lindsey’s erasure of Gaza as a prophetic event to make way for Christ’s return.
End Time
Israel’s 2023-24 military assault on Gazans is interpreted by Christian Zionists through an orthogonal apocalyptic lens that prophesizes a future settler colonialism of Gaza. The cultural capital of Hal Lindsey-type voices reinforces the eschatological fatalism that Christ’s return necessitates Palestinian erasure and hollowing out of Gaza. Lindsey and other powerful men like him, have, to borrow the words of Sacvan Bercovitch, converted “geography into eschatology.” As such, their imaginative geography of Palestinians being “out-of-place” to justify further atrocities as inevitable, even sanctioned by God, is awfully predictable. But as I theorize, the space of apocalypse does not operate just at the global geopolitical scale, but is crucially performative of the landscape. Their apocalyptic future is a foreign country where they advocate for a religious nationalism in a state of which they normally cannot become citizens. Such advocacy is predicated on a Christian eschatological discourse about a narrative of future affairs they believe to be infallible.
Christian Zionists thus attempt to performatively make the anticipated spatialization of the apocalypse tangible, and present, in the landscape through the insulated practice of American Christian Zionist pilgrimage in Israel/Palestine. Landscape is performed to tell a story about the virtual future, which becomes reinforced as everyday practice in the present by the tour guides, pastors, and the tour group. Crucial to understanding this co-constitution of landscape and nationalism is how it is performed not only as a place to see but also foresee. In a more recent article, Lindsey subtly conflates Palestinians with the devil. Quoting Ephesians 4:26–27 (NKJV) he helps his readers foresee and therefore justify Israel’s plans for Gaza: “do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil.”
Landscape is performed to tell a story about the virtual future, which becomes reinforced as everyday practice in the present by the tour guides, pastors, and the tour group.
Ethically, the cultural “politics of hope” that Arjun Appadurai defines as a “politics of possibility over a politics of probability” is not always a progressive one (3). Anticipated spatializations of Israel are hopeful and eventually performative of exclusionary practices that mete-out Palestinians as at best racialized unwanted interlopers and at worst embodiments of evil as the Antichrist’s army. This said, the narrative is at times a contested one, though these spaces of pilgrimage are most often closed-off from transculturation due to the cloister of the bus and the oblique distance of landscape. It is here on the pilgrimage landscapes where discursive dissonance, and the inescapable question of the fate of people, namely Palestinians, are confronted by Christian Zionist pilgrims; where, as Rob Shields notes, “the ‘near,’ or the face-to-face and present-at-hand, [must confront] the ‘distant,’ the future, and the possible” (22).
I hope this piece encourages scholars of religion—and specifically apocalypse—to think about the geographies produced by their research subjects and how such spaces, in this case landscape, have co-constitutional affects. Landscape in this research reinforces Christian Zionist identities by providing evidence for a biblical apocalypse, and as such, the orthogonal time of apocalypse expects Palestinian erasure as a necessary precondition for Christ’s return and rule on Earth.
Tristan Sturm is Senior Lecturer in Geography at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the Director of the MA in Geopolitics and a Fellow of both the Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice and the Centre for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) at the University of Heidelberg. He is interested in apocalyptic thought related to climate change, conspiracies, and religious movements in the USA and Israel/Palestine. He has published over 30 academic articles and is co-author of the book, Apocalyptic Conspiracism (forthcoming with Bloomsbury), and co-editor of Mapping the End Times (Routledge) and The Handbook of Apocalypticism and Millennialism (forthcoming Bloomsbury). He has disseminated his findings in the Toronto Star, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, National Post, THE Magazine, BBC Radio 4, ITV, BBC Newsline, among other media spaces.
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Prof. Nermeen Arastu
