#  Dissertation and Research 

 



Research Areas: Political theology; sacramental theology; modern European intellectual history; psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, relation, and vulnerability; race and nationalism; mourning; religion and literature

My dissertation, *The Renunciation of God: Political Theology and Theological Resistance in Georges Bataille, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Simone Weil*, analyzes how a diverse array of interwar writers understood fascism as a Christian theological phenomenon, one that had to be resisted on theology's ground. Specifically, I focus on how three such writers — Bataille, Bonhoeffer, and Weil — resisted fascism's political theology and its fantasies of innocence and eternal stasis by cultivating religious postures of repentance, silence, and consent to death, postures articulated through explicitly theological themes like the vulnerability of incarnation, the eucharistic image of the mystical body, and the death of Jesus. My dissertation also argues that the theological antifascisms of twentieth century Europe provide resources for contemporary theology to address the intersecting crises of the twenty-first century: the decline of liberal democracy and the ascendance of authoritarian white nationalisms, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the accelerating catastrophe of the climate crisis.

My current book project, *He is Not Here: A Political Theology of Mourning*, offers a theological critique of the will to permanence structuring politics today, from far-right "Great Replacement" paranoia, to fossil capital's fantasy of eternal growth, to postliberal and integralist appeals to an everlasting yet always endangered tradition. I read this insistence that a particular form of life must endure forever — what Freud called "a revolt against mourning" — as a misguided political theology, in which transience and loss are temporary embarrassments from which divine power redeems us. Against this, I read creation, incarnation, and resurrection as acts by which God withdraws and affirms the difference of creation from a distance, grounding a counter-political theology in which we echo this divine dispossession by likewise ceding space to others and letting them be in all their difference.

I am also working on a book project analyzing how various forms of climate anxiety and denial are overdetermined by the politico-theological figure of the child as fragile innocence and providential savior: in far-right fearmongering about declining "birthrates," fossil capitalism's promises that the next generation will save us with miraculous carbon mitigation technologies, or the neoliberal reframing of the political project of decarbonization as a private moral delimma of whether to have children. To challenge this political theology, I read theologies of baptism and nativity, recent literary depictions of infancy, and queer theoretical critiques of reproductive futurism, to argue birth and infancy are not signs of futurity, but signs of death.