Americans have long sacralized ordinary objects through memory work that reveals the power of the state, that transforms otherwise familiar,…
Borderlands of the sacred
immigration
Bringing fathers more fully into view
Christian theology has seemingly forgotten the Father’s ironic relationship with the Son, lost sight of the Father’s worry and concern…
Bordering the Kingdom
If the Kingdom of God has no borders, then this can be true only for those for whom borders do…
Trafficking as terror
The “war on terror” and the “war on trafficking,” two seemingly separate discourses, have become interwoven in recent years, castigating…
On In the Name of Women’s Rights
Femonationalism is the term I introduce to describe both how nationalist right-wing parties exploit feminist ideas within Islamophobic campaigns, and…
The Muslim Ban and academia
The Muslim Ban—in its current iteration as Proclamation 9645 and in its earlier forms—is certainly an egregious attack on the…
The geopolitics of the “shithole”
Secular modernity is marked by a persistent project of separating the modern body from its waste, masking excremental operations, and…
American carpe diem
When Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller adapted Thomas Mann’s 1896 short story Enttäuschung (“Disillusionment”) into the lyrics we know from…
“Drawing the line” and freedom of movement
Perhaps we have been so drawn to drawing and contesting lines between “religion” and the “secular” because this now-classic fight…
Understanding the president’s reality: Our unconscious, not his
The matter of the love-hate relationship between psychoanalysis and public life has an unexpected link to the complexities of secularism…