Populism is a political ontology, in which political being is centered on the question of collective identity. It is also a political theology embedded within constitutional democracy.
New Article: Populism as Political Ontology
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Sitges
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We are Sitges. We got here last week and we’ll be here for another eleven days or so. We are using it as a homebase while I write and we take a variety of day trips around Catalonia. Sitges is one of those places that’s been described as “the crown jewel of the Mediterranean.” It is a beautiful beach town about 40 minutes South of the center of Barcelona by train (the train leaves every 15...
London Libraries
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Since my purpose in visiting London was to conduct research, it only seems reasonable that I offer a blog post about the city’s libraries. I spent time at only a fraction of them. There’s probably well over a half dozen libraries that I could have made use of if I had had more time. But, because I was in the city for only two weeks of archival research, I focused my time on two places, the...
Prague
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After I left Oxford, I spent the weekend in Prague. Like my time in Oxford, the trip was primarily work related. I was there visiting the Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková. Her show at FotoFest 2022 will be held at First Houston. My father and I are curating it and the objective of the visit was to work with her to make the final selection of images for the exhibition. I think it is going to...
Religion in Houston’s Pan-African Community
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I’m excited to announce that, with Sade Perkins, I’ll be a Crossroads Project Fellow for 2022-2023 for a project we’re doing on “Religion in Houston’s Pan-African Community.” We’ll be facilitating a series of public conversations and oral histories with community elders about the relationship between their justice work and religious beliefs and spiritual...
Presentation at the American Academy of Religion 2021
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This Saturday I’ll be presenting a paper at the AAR on “The Universal Black Men Catechism: The African Orthodox Church and Marcus Garvey’s Populism” as part of a panel on “A Century of African Orthodoxy: Exploring Racism, Blackness, and Religious Identity” organized by the Afro-American Religious History and Eastern Orthodox Studies Units. The panel commemorates the...
Varieties of Populism in the United States
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Next Monday, November 16th, at 6:30 p.m. Central, I will be giving an online lecture at Rice University on “Varieties of Populism in the United States.”
The New French Right: a Conversation with Pascale Tournier
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Last December Mark Lilla published an article in the New York Review of Books titled “Two Roads for the New French Right.” It discusses intellectual currents in French amongst the Right, specifically amongst people about my age or younger. According to Lilla, they represent something new. They are more concerned with climate change and more critical of capitalism than their elders. Some of them...
Ethelred Brown (and Langston Hughes!) on Unitarianism
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As part of my research for the Minns Lectures on American Populism and Unitarian Universalism I recently stumbled across the following description of Unitarianism by the Rev. Ethelred Brown in Langston Hughes’s column “Week by Week,” which Hughes wrote regularly for the Chicago Defender. This was published in 1960, about four years after Brown died. I am not certain when Brown...
Paper Presentation: Unitarian Universalism and the White Supremacist Theological Imaginary
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I will be presenting a paper entitled “Unitarian Universalism and the White Supremacist Theoligical Imaginary” at the 2017 meeting of Collegium. Here’s the text of the accepted paper proposal: This exercise in comparative theology will contrast the white supremacist theological imaginary with the theological imaginaries of two Unitarian Universalism’s foundational figures:...