Research News

Religion and Culture Professor completes a monograph

Dr. Jane Barter, who specializes in the area of contemporary Christianity and Western political thought, has recently completed a monograph titled “Theopolitics and the Era of the Witness,” which is being published by Routledge Press’s “Transforming Political Theology” series. Theopolitics and the Era of the Witness focuses on the witnessing in the aftermath of political atrocity or genocide. It offers a diachronic study of the relationship between theological forms of witnessing within the Jewish and Christian traditions and public forms of witnessing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book explores the ways in which various witnesses to political atrocity and their mediators tacitly drew on religious themes of salvation to make sense of their suffering. It investigates survivor testimony and the use made of it through scholarly interpretations of testimony within the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and theological and philosophical traditions within Judaism and Christianity. The chapters move from a consideration of the early post-Shoah writings of Paul Celan and Primo Levi through to a discussion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of South Africa and Canada. The author makes the case for a “weak messianism” or remnant witnessing as an antidote to overdetermined and politicized uses made of survivor testimonies. The book makes a valuable contribution to political theology and in particular as a work of theopolitics, which claims that theology, despite its persistent misuse, can serve a constructive and critical force within public life, albeit in a chastened key.