New Work 2023
2023 saw a few more articles of mine come out. This is just the ones in English (I’ll write a separate post for the German-language pieces). In reverse chronological order:
Chris and I put out a special issue with the Dutch theology journal NTT based on a symposium we hosted in Amsterdam last year. It includes a piece of mine reading the Schleitheim articles, which my research is increasingly focusing on, alongside the anarchist idea of “propaganda by the deed.”
… certain action functions as rhetoric, not so much arguing its case as revealing its own possibility, revealing the non-inevitability of human political organization and the shared vulnerability of the human (and perhaps nonhuman) community. Anarchist theorist Gustav Landauer thus interprets the propaganda by the deed in its essence not as a defense of violence, but … the formation of alternative kinds of community.
In this article, I will offer a reading of one such attempt to form an alternative community: the group of radical reformers around former Benedictine monk Michael Sattler. In particular, I will analyze the declaration of principles formulated by this group in 1527, not long before Sattler’s arrest, torture and execution. Certainly, the text I will read may seem far removed from Landauer’s and other anarchist concerns … Yet I hope to show there is nevertheless a greater affinity than is perhaps immediately apparent. For these Anabaptists’ declaration, known as the Schleitheim Confession, in a sense encapsulates this propaganda by the deed as an ecclesiopolitical assertion of possibility: that the ways in which ecclesial and worldly sovereign order are organized are not inevitable, but are made under particular conditions of force, and therefore can be remade.
Mennonite Quarterly Review also published an article of mine investigating Schleitheim’s argument on oath-swearing with the help of Giorgio Agamben. Oath refusal is sometimes seen as an afterthought to more central Anabaptist concerns, but I argue it is crucial to the Anabaptist idea of community without sovereignty.
in envisioning a collective life apart from the structures of sovereignty, it begins to upend exactly what Agamben hopes to dissolve. For this is a confession that isn’t a confession; it does not describe the propositional content of creed (“faith as dogma”), but points toward faith as a form of life, and sees its truth manifested in the relationships shaped by its repeated practice. This is a togetherness that cannot be ascertained or guaranteed, is never finally given or achieved, but must interminably be restaged and reasserted.
… we may find this sense of repetition oddly illustrated in the words of Jesus that Schleitheim cites in its closing lines: “Let your words be yes, yes, no, no” (Matt 5:37). … Yes, yes: If you say yes, once will not be enough. Faith as practice must be affirmed and reaffirmed. This originary yes, not beholden to the oath structure, does not guarantee or seek to seize or dominate a relation to the world, but admits to its own incompleteness; another yes will always be required. Likewise no, no. If you say no, once will not be enough. Resistance must be reasserted interminably.
(You might see how these pieces are starting to coalesce into a coherent argument; I hope to finish my book on Schleitheim soon, and see it published in 2024)
I gave kind of a strange paper at the European Academy of Religion in St. Andrews last summer. I’m not sure if I’ll use its argument in the book. Audience reactions definitely ranged from enthusiastic to quizzical.
Finally, I reviewed Knut Wormstädt’s adventurous book on ecumenism and process theology. It’s wild. Yet compelling. The book is in German, but the review is in English.
