It’s over – An und für sich
When Elon Musk first bought Twitter, I intended to wean myself off of it. That proved more difficult than I anticipated. Twitter replacements such as Mastodon and Bluesky were poor substitutes, esp…| An und für sich
When Elon Musk first bought Twitter, I intended to wean myself off of it. That proved more difficult than I anticipated. Twitter replacements such as Mastodon and Bluesky were poor substitutes, esp…| An und für sich
I have decided to start a new solo blog entitled That Blog You Like Is Going to Come Back in Style. My first post is an attempt to set an appropriate tone. My reason for doing this is a sense that …| An und für sich
6 posts published by biqbal, Adam Kotsko, Marika Rose, and APS during May 2025| An und für sich
Yesterday, a friend I’d not seen in person in a while asked me how my back pain was doing. He asked because he follows me on Facebook, which I use as a personal diary, and I had mentioned back problems there frequently for the last several week. The odd thing about that is that I … Continue reading I’m not sick, but I’m not well| An und für sich
No matter how well-matched a couple is, every relationship brings with it some kind of compromise. In our household, one such compromise has resulted in me being a near scholar of the survival reality show Alone. I’ve hated camping for as long as I can remember and, in general, share Socrates’s preference for the city … Continue reading Alone and the Neoliberal Sublime| An und für sich
I hate generative AI. I hate how it’s destroying writing pedagogy and giving students even more excuses not to read (because they can just read a “summary”). I hate how whiny and defensive AI users are about the pathetic little ways they’ve integrated it into their lives. If I could push a button and permanently … Continue reading ChatGPT is going to kill God| An und für sich
[This paper was presented at the European Academy of Religion conference in Vienna on July 11, 2025, in a session entitled “Agamben’s Theological-Political Horizons: Reimaging Judaism, Christianity, and Messianic Potentiality,” organized by Libera Pisano, Federico Dal Bo, and Carlo Salzani. The topic of my paper drifted a bit from my original proposal, which was going … Continue reading Agamben Between Pauline Messianism and Institutional Christianity| An und für sich
This post is by Rajbir Singh Judge. As I wrote Prophetic Maharaja, I often recalled that libraries cull their collections. This common practice is called ‘weeding,’ which, as the American Library Association has it, “is critical to collection maintenance and involves the removal of resources from the collection. All materials are considered for weeding based … Continue reading Accurate, Current, and Relevant (Prophetic Maharaja Book Event)| An und für sich
Friends of the blog will definitely be interested to read this article by long-time contributor (and now independent blogger) Beatrice Marovich, drawing on interviews with an astonishingly wide range of contemporary theologians reflecting on the possible death of their field.| An und für sich
1. One of the things for which I have come to rely on Rajbir over the years is his unfailing attentiveness to the dynamics of loss: one that is unsentimental and non-indulgent. (Against the empire of trauma and the weaponization of victimhood, to say nothing of wounded attachments and left melancholia.) Of course, this is … Continue reading Non-redemptive Narration (Prophetic Maharaja Book Event)| An und für sich
This summer, I’m trying to get a reading group on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics going. I chose this book for a few reasons. Adorno has been a continuous presence for me, but I’ve never really dug into his work systematically. More broadly, I am interested in dialectical thought and am especially seeking to recapture the magic … Continue reading The Thing Itself| An und für sich
This is a guest post by Satbir Singh. Satbir grew up and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has a BS Biology from UCLA, and MD from the Medical College of Wisconsin. He completed general psychiatry residency at UCLA and child/adolescent fellowship at USC. He has been Clinical Assistant Professor in Psychiatry and … Continue reading Dandy (de)livery (Prophetic Maharaja book event)| An und für sich
What is it to read a text, to embark on the work of history, and to find ourselves reflected there? To read, to interpret, is always, as Judge so persuasively argues throughout his book, a work of …| An und für sich
[This paper was presented at the European Academy of Religion conference in Vienna on July 11, 2025, in a session entitled “Agamben’s Theological-Political Horizons: Reimaging Judaism, Christianity, and Messianic Potentiality,” organized by Libera Pisano, Federico Dal Bo, and Carlo Salzani. The topic of my paper drifted a bit from my original proposal, which was going to be an overview of Agamben’s approach to Christianity guided by the question of whether he embraced a “fall narrat...| An und für sich
In Shimer’s fine arts class, we typically do a unit on Cézanne that includes a selection of Rilke’s letters written after a particularly vivid encounter with an exhibition of Cézanne…| An und für sich
As part of our training, new faculty members at Shimer College sit in on one of the core curriculum courses that is outside our teaching comfort zone. In my case, it’s Humanities 1: Art and M…| An und für sich
Though I haven’t written much on neoliberalism lately, I still dip into the literature now and again. The next book in my queue, Robert McDonald’s Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric…| An und für sich
[The following is a conference presentation delivered at the American Academy of Religion’s annual conference in San Diego, under the auspices of the Political Theology programming unit.] The…| An und für sich
[I delivered this paper at the conference “Figuring the Enemy” at St. Andrews University, June 6-8. Thank you to Scott Kirkland for the invitation!] In this paper, I want to draw a comp…| An und für sich
In the wake of Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Kamala Harris’s shockingly rapid and decisive ascension, I have begun feeling emotions that I haven’t allowed myself to feel in…| An und für sich
For a long time, I’ve been reading comic books before bed. This habit kicked into high gear when I purchased an iPad — “officially” to help me organize my lecture notes and …| An und für sich
Once on Twitter, I mentioned that my lifetime had seen a world-historical calamity roughly once a decade: the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the one-two pu…| An und für sich
I allowed myself a more restful summer than usual. I didn’t have any major writing projects, and I broke with my usual neurotic approach to class prep and largely left it aside for most of th…| An und für sich
This summer I have been working on an article comparing Paul and the Qur’an, which will build upon a conference presentation I gave last year on the same topic. In many ways, despite the fact…| An und für sich
In the wake of the attempted assassination of Trump, a common trope has reemerged: that of martyrdom. In the Financial Times, for example, Edward Luce opined, “It is not just Donald Trump who…| An und für sich
The last decade or so has been marked by a global resurgence of the extreme right. Its most prominent avatars in the West are the Brexit campaign and the Trump phenomenon, while various right-wing …| An und für sich
Beatrice has a great post up today about what she calls the “theology of the now.” By this, she means the kind of rhetoric encapsulated in a well-known Flaming Lips song from around the…| An und für sich
A few years ago, I was part of an event commemorating Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. Obviously, I was brought in to represent the “against” position (and you can read a…| An und für sich
It’s been almost a year since I officially quit Twitter. Since then, I have been making do with Bluesky, which is basically a Twitter clone that is not directly owned by Elon Musk. Users of B…| An und für sich
We started Veronica Mars shortly before the pandemic, and in our hands it did not benefit from its status as an unintentional pandemic watch. We knew that this tale of a sassy teenage detective was…| An und für sich
One of the most rewarding side-effects of my teaching in the Shimer Great Books School has been the exploration of art that it prompted. I’ve written here before about how my teaching of the …| An und für sich
