Politics Of Grace Research Articles

The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Literature, By Deni Kasa

The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Literature, By Deni Kasa

Power, populism, and a policy of grace: Moral perspectives in The Tyranny of Merit and Cut Loose

We argue that the compelling critical perspective put forward by Michael Sandel in The Tyranny of Merit could benefit from the account of power that Cut Loose advanced in its earlier typology. First, the ways that principles of meritocracy serve the interests of particular social groups become clearer when we consider more fully the tensions that inherently exist between merit and other conceptions of the good. Second, the allure of these competing moral perspectives – above all, fraternal morality – helps us make sense of the turn toward nativist populism that we have seen in the United States and elsewhere. Amid the steady unraveling of religious and republican ties, a White working class has responded to its relative economic decline, in part, by seeking solace in ethnocentrism. Third, we argue that the morality of grace can offer an alternative source of existential meaning, which meritocracy – with its focus on contentless excellence – lacks, and which egalitarianism – with its materialist and secular viewpoint – often struggles to cultivate. Here, we turn to Sandel’s earlier book, What Money Can’t Buy, for inspiration, seeing grace as not just the absence of a meritocratic ethic of merciless competition, but a source of value, fulfillment, and connection in itself. We end our essay with a description of what such an economy and politics of grace might look like.

A Politics of Grace: Hope for Redemption in a Post-Christendom Context by Christiane Alpers, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018, pp. x + 229, £85.00, hbk

A Politics of Grace: Hope for Redemption in a Post-Christendom Context by Christiane Alpers, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2018, pp. x + 229, £85.00, hbk

Christiane Alpers, A Politics of Grace: Hope for Redemption in a Post-Christendom Context; Daniel Minch, Eschatological Hermeneutics: The Theological Core of Experience and Our Hope for Salvation

Christiane Alpers, <i>A Politics of Grace: Hope for Redemption in a Post-Christendom Context</i>; Daniel Minch, <i>Eschatological Hermeneutics: The Theological Core of Experience and Our Hope for Salvation</i>

On Roland Boer’s Marxism and theology

This piece aims to provide a synoptic introduction to Boer’s claims in the five volumes of Marxism and Theology. Obviously, such an account must miss many important nuances across the host of critical readings Boer assembles, guided by his broadly Jamesonian manner of reading the texts with a view to their biblical and theological claims. Nevertheless, by aiming at a synoptic view of a truly compendious contribution to scholarship, it is hoped that the piece will provide assistance to readers, and encourage them to test their own intuitions and thoughts against the original texts. The final part of the article stands back from this “standing back”: and asks questions concerning Boer’s treatments of biblical criticism, with and/or against theology; and concerning the role of what might be called (even despite Boer’s own protests) a kind of “secularised” Calvinism in Boer’s work and its interest in a post-Marxian politics of grace.

The Revolution Is Dissent

Underlying Giorgio Agamben’s and Alain Badiou’s disagreement over the apostle Paul we find common cause: following Paul’s deactivation of law, both Agamben and Badiou see the fixed identities necessary to the naturalised nomos of State politics as transfigured by a politics of grace. This transfiguration is differently rendered as either the emergence of a universal subject (Badiou) or the opening up of existing subjectivities (Agamben), but both the messianic vocation in Agamben and the universal subject in Badiou allow subjective possibility to that which is not in the present objectified order. Developing this theme of a basic emancipatory affinity, two moments of the political which exist in a difficult but necessary tension are identified: revolution and dissent. While revolution signals subjective possibility itself by determining that the truth of the event is for all, dissidence keeps that possibility alive by pointing to the human subject’s fundamental indeterminacy.

Foucault, Pollyanna and the Iraq Research Fellowship Programme: Political Grace and the Struggle to Decolonise Research Practice

The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics in the United Kingdom launched a specific programme called the Iraq Research Fellowship Programme (IRFP) in late 2006 at the height of an Iraqi assassination campaign against academics. Whilst the programme's aims are laudable and its results utterly worthwhile, this article explores, from the point of view of two British female academics, somewhat unexpected by-products in its power dynamics. The different cultural contexts of Iraq and the West mean that Iraqi and Western scholars find themselves differently placed with regard to privilege in their collaboration. The power relations between the Western academics themselves and the different roles they play within the IRFP are characterised by issues of gender and status hierarchy. The theoretical approach the authors take to understand the micropolitics of the IRFP is a post-structuralist feminist one, in particular the post-structuralism influenced by the work of Michel Foucault. The authors argue that the micropolitics of gender, status hierarchy, the West and Iraq present within the IRFP are those acted out in the macro context of Western and Middle Eastern politics. In doing so, the authors suggest, following Foucault's precept that ethics involves the praxis of ‘changing the subject’, that the deployment of a ‘politics of grace’ is a primary resource for transformative research fellowship in international collaboration and that, on this foundation, Iraqi re-engagement with research and teaching can be truly facilitated.

Luther’s Behemot: The Politics of Grace between Paul and Badiou

The discourse of universal grace is employed as revolutionary theo-politics by many of the readers of Paul’s letters. Alain Badiou is one such reader of Paul, who finds in Paul the possibility of a new radical egalitarianism based on the constitution of a subject committed to the truth of a grace-like event. This paper examines the compatibility of Badiou’s politics and his reading of Paul in his book St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism through a comparison with another politically radical reading of Paul, that of the German theologian and reformer Martin Luther. Like Badiou, Luther is a prime example of the way in which theology, philosophy, and politics are intimately connected. But more than that, Luther occupied a position from which he was able to, and did, affect the social and political implementation of his ideas. Thus, he provides a means of analyzing the results of the coordination of power and a Pauline universalism of grace. This paper concludes not only that Badiou’s attempt at a materialistic appropriation of Pauline grace is incommensurable with his political vision but that it has, to borrow Slavoj Žižek’s phrase, a hidden perverse core.Le discours de la grâce universelle est utilisé en tant que theo-politique révolutionnaire par plusieurs des lecteurs des lettres de Paul. Alain Badiou est un tel lecteur de Paul, qui trouve en Paul la possibilité d’un nouvel égalitarisme radical basé sur la constitution d’un sujet investi dans la vérité d’un événement de grâce. Ce document examine la compatibilité des politiques de Badiou et sa lecture de Paul dans son livre St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism au moyen d’une comparaison à une autre lecture politiquement radicale de Paul, celui du théologien et réformateur allemand Martin Luther. Comme Badiou, Luther est un exemple typique de la manière dont la théologie, la philosophie, et la politique sont reliées intimement. Mais plus que ça, Luther a occupé une position dans laquelle il pouvait affecter et a affecté l’exécution sociale et politique de ses idées. Ainsi, il fournit des moyens d’analyser les résultats de la coordination de la puissance et d’un universalisme Pauline de grâce. Cet essai conclut que la version de grâce matérialiste avancée par Badiou est non seulement incommensurable avec sa vision politique mais qu’elle a-pour emprunter l’expression de Slavoj Žižek-un Ž noyau pervers caché.

The Politics of Grace: On the Moral Justification of Executive Clemency

† Attorney-Advisor, Office of the Pardon Attorney, United States Department of Justice. J.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1991); M.A., Philosophy and Social Policy, American University (2003). The views expressed in this essay are solely my own opinions and do not reflect the official position of the Justice Department or the Office of the Pardon Attorney. I would like to thank Deirdre Golash, Lucinda Peach, Jeffrey Reiman, and Jason Specht for their many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own. 1. Ex parte Wells, 59 U.S. (18 How.) 307, 310 (1856). 2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition 237 (1958). 3. According to Andrew Brien, “[t]he earliest recorded instance of an institution permitting an authority to forbear from acting against another’s interests appears in the law code of Hammurabi.” Andrew Brien, Mercy Within Legal Justice, 24 Soc. Theory & Prac. 83, 83 n.2 (1998), citing G. R. Driver & J. C. Miles, 1 The Babylonian Laws xxiv-xxv, 281-82, 348-49 (1955); see also 3 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Attorney General’s Survey of Release Procedures: Pardons 1-53 (1939).

Machiavelli and the Politics of Grace

The simplicity of Machiavelli's complexity is established in unprincipled expediency. This is bluntly expounded in Il principe concerning antithetical qualities that traditionally evoke praise or blame. These are generosity and miserliness, benefaction and avarice, cruelty and compassion, faithlessness and faithfulness, effeminacy and cowardice versus ferocity and courage, courtesy and pride, lasciviousness and purity, guilelessness and craftiness, stubbornness and flexibility, gravity and frivolity, religiosity and skepticism. 1 The lack of parallelism, the rhetorical disorder that presents now a virtue, now a vice, first in each antithesis signals his intention of upsetting their usual evaluation. Machiavelli scrambles their status perversely to counsel an evaluation that is valueless. An option about piety concludes the list emphatically: religiosity and skepticism. This is a false antithesis. In only a decade the humanist Erasmus will both religiously and skeptically deliberate divine grace and human choice. Indeed, he will propose that in disputed questions skepticism is piety. The conflicting methods of treating that question, whether deliberatively or assertively, will have violent, divisive, irreversible political effects. 2 Although Machiavelli does not venture to explain his false antithesis, he [End Page S224] designates it the most important. His meaning is inferable from his exposition of other pairs. 3

Machiavelli and the Politics of Grace

The simplicity of Machiavelli's complexity is established in unprincipled expediency. This is bluntly expounded in Il principe concerning antithetical qualities that traditionally evoke praise or blame. These are generosity and miserliness, benefaction and avarice, cruelty and compassion, faithlessness and faithfulness, effeminacy and cowardice versus ferocity and courage, courtesy and pride, lasciviousness and purity, guilelessness and craftiness, stubbornness and flexibility, gravity and frivolity, religiosity and skepticism. 1 The lack of parallelism, the rhetorical disorder that presents now a virtue, now a vice, first in each antithesis signals his intention of upsetting their usual evaluation. Machiavelli scrambles their status perversely to counsel an evaluation that is valueless. An option about piety concludes the list emphatically: religiosity and skepticism. This is a false antithesis. In only a decade the humanist Erasmus will both religiously and skeptically deliberate divine grace and human choice. Indeed, he will propose that in disputed questions skepticism is piety. The conflicting methods of treating that question, whether deliberatively or assertively, will have violent, divisive, irreversible political effects. 2 Although Machiavelli does not venture to explain his false antithesis, he [End Page S224] designates it the most important. His meaning is inferable from his exposition of other pairs. 3