Updates and new (soon-to-be) published work
Earlier this year, I left my role as a pastor in the Hamburg Mennonite congregation. It was not an easy decision, and the reasons for such a step are always complex. I will continue to serve as a volunteer preacher. On instagram I wrote this about it:
It's not working out. This summer I'll be leaving the role of pastor in the Hamburg Mennonite congregation. It's with a complicated mix of emotions that I got to this point, and I'm still figuring out what exactly it was and is.
One thing I do know is that I'm sad - I was excited about entering into this work. But I'm also sure that at least for now and here, this is the right choice, and I'm looking forward to having the time and mental space to be a parent, friend, and husband (and academic).
We'll stay in Hamburg, and we'll continue to frequent the congregation. Maybe see you there soon.
This summer, I joined the team at the Luxembourg School of Religion & Society as an affiliate researcher. Though this is not a salaried position, it will help me broaden my focus in my research and benefit from the academic diversity at LSRS.
Finally, I have a number of articles stemming from my ongoing research at the seminary that are coming out soon. You can see the unedited versions — so the text as it left my desk, before the editors did any work on it — on my academia.edu page. The papers overlap a little, as they all are interim results from the same project.
If Agamben suggests that in the oath, a type of relation between human beings, words, and things is established in such a way that it grounds the entire western sovereign order, to refuse the oath might likewise stand for a radical reorientation of that relation and of the kind of community it grounds. And indeed, the text we have been reading [the Schleitheim Confession] concludes a confession that in an important sense points away from itself, away from its text and its content, toward lived practices. Its articles do not describe propositional content of creed, but points toward faith as a form of life, describing techniques that make, gather and delineate a community belonging not only to a different (greater, stronger) sovereign, but to a sovereignty of a radically different kind. The truth of this confession is, after all, precisely not one of propositional content that may be affirmed or rejected, but a truth that manifests itself in the relationships formed in its ecclesiopolitical practice.
Of course, I do not intend to argue that this is what Schleitheim’s author or sixteenth-century readers had in mind. Yet the text they have left us appears to be open to a constructive reading of this kind: that to refuse the oath is to assert, at a very fundamental level, a certain openness or possibility, an awareness that humanity’s relation to the world does not need to be, perhaps never was, marked by dominion. Where the oath, both in its particular forms and as originary anthropogenic performative, seek to guarantee or fix the relation of words to things—seek, in a sense, to close down a sense of possibility in the future: this is what will happen—the type of affirmation Schleitheim instead envisions open up a future.
