Theorizing Modernities Archives | Contending Modernities

QAnon, Conspiracy, and White Evangelical Apocalypse

Jason Springs
June 16, 2021June 16, 2021

Ethno-religious nationalism—and the distinctive logic and dynamics of zombie nationalism—forms the connective tissue between much White evangelicalism and QAnon conspiracy ideology.

Introduction to Zombie Nationalism

Series: Zombie Nationalism

Jason Springs
June 16, 2021June 16, 2021

The Trump-infused ethno-religious nationalism of White evangelicals is but the most recent upsurge of a political and cultural current that is traceable back at least sixty years, and indeed, much further.

Can We Mediate between the Historical and the Rational? Reflections on al-Juwaynī’s Epistemology and Politics

Series: Law and Politics under the Abbasids

Mohammad H. Fadel
May 6, 2021

Integrating quotidian practices into natural human reason seems to me to be the only way to provide them a secure foundation in modernity, when even deeply embodied customs cannot provide stability.

A Spurned Bride? Religion and Religious Community in the Absence of a Caliph

Series: Law and Politics under the Abbasids

Omar Anchassi
May 4, 2021

That the Caliph’s writ could hardly be said to extend beyond his palace walls mattered less than the fact that the institution itself was the source of tremendous symbolic power.

Law and Politics under the Abbasids: A Symposium

Series: Symposium on Law and Politics under the Abbasids

Omar Anchassi
May 4, 2021May 6, 2021

The coherence in the Juwaynian project is by no means assumed in this book. Rather, it is demonstrated through a painstaking reading of a number of his most influential texts in the domains of legal theory and theology.

Politics, Religion, and the Priority of Belief

Series: Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade

Giuliana Chamedes
April 26, 2021

We too need to come out from behind the curtain and frame the “so-what” of our story not just in terms of scholarly debates, but with careful attention to what our story can illuminate about the human condition.

The Vatican’s Foreign Policy: Avoiding Confrontation, Accommodating Interests

Series: Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade

Toussaint Kafarhire Murhula, S.J., PhD
April 23, 2021April 23, 2021

Far from living the radical idealism of Jesus, the Church as a realist and discerning body politic accepts that both good and evil will always coexist in this imperfect world.

The Enduring Appeal of Christian Europe

Series: Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade

Paul Hanebrink
April 21, 2021

A Twentieth-Century Crusade reveals just how closely the civic components of Catholic internationalism imitated aspects of its Communist rival—or, more precisely, of Communism as it was imagined in Rome.

Twentieth-Century Crusades and Crusaders Reimagined

Series: Symposium on A Twentieth-Century Crusade

Cara Burnidge
April 19, 2021April 19, 2021

The “religious” figure and body in this book is not a “faith-based” “non-state actor” seeking to share gospel stories or convert others, but rather a state actor focused on further developing its legal power and political authority.