Theses

May 16th, 2006 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

I am taking (most of) today off, because I spent the whole day yesterday in the library finishing two really big papers. Here are the titles and theses from these respective papers.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Emergence of Latin American Liberation Theology

The emergence of liberation theology in Latin America in the early 1970s was certainly inevitable. Latin America, along with the Latin American Catholic Church, had been experiencing many crises and changes within its diverse socioeconomic and sociopolitical spheres. Much like the maturation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own theology in response to problems with which he was intimately involved, there was a growing sense of urgency in the 1950’s and 1960’s regarding the problems plaguing Latin America.

An Exegesis of Mark 12:28-31 in Light of Alain Badiou’s Reading of Paul and Romans 13:8-10

Badiou further illustrates this paradoxical relationship between love and the law. He makes the distinction between a “legalizing subjectivation, which is a power of death, and a law raised up by faith, which belongs to the spirit and life.”¹ In the setting of faith, love names a “nonliteral law” or, perhaps, a “law written on the heart,”² which actually does the work of creating postevental truth. This truth is “postevental” because for Badiou, “the Truth-Event is simply a radically New Beginning; it designates the violent, traumatic, and contingent intrusion of another dimension not ‘mediated’ by the domain of terrestrial finitude and corruption.”³ If this is the case, perhaps Jesus in Mark is far more revolutionary than our watered-down, millennia old ticket-to-heaven.

If you’d handed me the second paper a few years ago and told me I wrote it I would have just laughed at you. Or thrown up.

1. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: the Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003. 87. ↩
2. Romans 2:15 ↩
3. Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. New York: Verso, 1999. 146. ↩