ABSTRACT In this article, the concept of history in Benjamin's philosophy is explored. Benjamin criticizes simplistic views of the past and the future, rejecting “eternal questions,” against which he proposes the concept of “time now,” an abbreviation in human history. However, according to Benjamin, history is always under the threat of the “enemy,” and so he discusses the need for a concept of history that allows for the creation of a true state of exception against fascism. The text underlines Benjamin's idealistic understanding of history and the Messiah; because of the lack of concreteness in the meaning of these categories, they lose all real content. In summary, the article provides an exploration of Benjamin's philosophy with an emphasis on the need to understand history as a dynamic and contingent, but above all, human process.

ABSTRACT This essay develops a distinction between “major” and “minor” revolution through Amaryah Armstrong’s interventions in Black theology and Saidiya Hartman's intervention in the Black radical tradition. Major revolution—exemplified by Marxist historical materialism and liberation theology—imagines emancipation as a promised cataclysmic event. Such models, however, inadequately address racial and sexual subalternity. This is either because of their allegorical/analogical construction, or due to the selectiveness and incompleteness of God's redemptive gestures. Indeed, Armstrong’s wayward reading of Hagar reframes her as a limit figure who exposes the contradictions of redemption and allegorical universality. Hagar’s ambivalent naming of God underlines the violence of freedom-as-promise. An isomorphic ambivalence lies in Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “revolution in minor key," which recasts revolution as nonevental, fugitive, and recurrent. This is a minor revolution that foregrounds survival in brutal conditions, where structural liberation remains unrealized but a freedom as otherwise material conditions is discernible.

ABSTRACT This article treats the thought of Emmanuel Levinas as an intervention into a Jewish-Christian theological framework. It begins by reading Levinas’s secular ethics as theorizing a distinction between what I call “self-other” relations characteristic of a violent totality, and “I-Other” relations through which one takes ethical responsibility for another. The paper then maps this distinction onto a Christian-Jewish difference that, I argue, Paul and the rabbis structured as unbridgeable, and that prefigured the Jew as something of a Christian scapegoat. Levinas’s intervention is to universalize the Jewish figure’s responsibility, and he conceives of this universalization as a solution to totalized violence and to Jewish scapegoating. Levinas’s gesture thereby bridges the Christian-Jewish difference, but it simultaneously infinitizes the exceptional value of the Judaic. The paper argues this ultimately has the effect of creating a Jewish exceptionalism more extreme than even the rabbis (or Paul) intended.

ABSTRACT This article explores badaliya—a theology of Christian/Muslim substitution—as reinterpreted by the Italian priest Father Paolo Dall'oglio amid the devastation of the Syrian War. At the heart of the article is the tension between dialogue (hewar) and evangelization in Dall'oglio's ministry at the Deir Mar Musa monastery near Damascus, where dialogue with Islam became inseparable from the Christian vocation to witness and atone. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 2023-25 in Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Iraq, and Italy with monks and nuns of Dall'oglio's monastic community, the article situates badaliya within the political and moral catastrophes of the contemporary Middle East. It argues that Dall'oglio's disappearance in Raqqa in 2013 while attempting dialogue with Da‘ish was the teleological culmination of his theology—a sacrificial act that blurred the boundaries between mission and martyrdom. The article frames badaliya as an ethical field in which interfaith love, substitution, and atonement converge amid war.

ABSTRACT Working with the concept of “the edge,” and its relationship to boundaries, spaces and distinctions, I consider what inviolable beliefs and values surfaced during the first phase of Coronavirus. As people were exposed to new risks and dangers, sent into isolation by their governments and forced online, how was the sacred impacted, and what places and boundaries became significant? I draw on theories from urban design, cognitive linguistics and anthropology to situate the “sacred” as a category boundary before undertaking an interpretive exploration of three cases: the domestic secular sacred, alternative spirituality and evangelical Christian practice. These illustrate the production of the sacred in a period of crisis, with new boundaries acquiring significance, and established but also novel rituals employed to reify non-negotiable beliefs. But two verities hold true. People remained concerned to protect those things they deemed sacred, and they sought the solace of community and solidarity with others.

ABSTRACT The article addresses a common objection against Marxism, as formulated by Carl Schmitt: that it may be able to criticize the bourgeois state, but that it remains unable to formulate a political theory of its own. As Schmitt’s criticism is based in his pessimistic view on human nature, the article counters this objection by reconstructing a philosophical anthropology in the writings of the mature Marx. It argues that he had a productive concept of human nature, which on the one hand conceptualizes the human being as essentially historically constituted, but on the other hand as not simply a tabula rasa to be rewritten at will. Finally, it argues that this productive philosophical anthropology delimits which kind of political institutions we are able to imagine.

ABSTRACT In the United States, progressives and conservatives have renewed strong arguments for parental rights over their children’s upbringing, sometimes rooted in religious freedom, with special focus on public education. Their contradictory demands yield chaos for school districts and households. Robust legal theorization of children’s rights seems to be a solution. However, this essay argues that debates of absolutist, individualist accounts of rights fail because they smuggle in undiscussed goods. Procedurally, a focus on commonly prized goods that lie behind rights arguments – for example, collaboration and communication among parents, teachers, and other school staff for the sake of children’s secure support – is a more promising way to mend the broken conversation.