Boulder, CO — August 28, 2026 — The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) is pleased to announce the publication of Volume 25, Issue 2, a collection of ten essays spanning political theology, ethics, ecological thought, Christian materiality, consciousness studies, metamodernism, Augustine, Sufism, rhetoric, and religion in public life. The complete issue is now available online through JCRT’s open-access archive.
Across the issue, contributors ask how religious and philosophical ideas become consequential in the world. Transcendence appears here not as an escape from material or political life, but through interruptions of law, obligations to other beings, contested objects and images, neural and quantum relations, literary performance, mystical inheritance, public rhetoric, and the difficult recovery of wonder.
Interruption, fidelity, and political responsibility
The issue opens with two essays on political theology after violence and defeat. Diako Alikhani places Walter Benjamin’s divine violence in conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, asking how resistance might interrupt mythic law without sacrificing the concrete Other to another sovereign project. Yiu Ming Cheung brings Slavoj Žižek’s fidelity to lost causes together with John D. Caputo’s theology of the event. Their encounter produces a theology of insistence and interruption in which emancipatory hopes can remain active without hardening into nostalgia, domination, or resignation.
Both essays treat rupture as an ethical problem. Political transformation matters, but so do the forms of responsibility that determine what transformation becomes.
Materiality, ecology, and interdependence
A second constellation turns toward the material world and the communities formed within it. Bennett Gilbert distinguishes the fact of interdependence from the moral labor required to build community with human and other-than-human life. Joshua M. Hall develops a transgender ethics of “holding green commons” through Vandana Shiva, ecofeminist thought, dance, and the forest defenders of the Chipko movement. Aaron T. Lockhart traces the philosophical separation of matter from transcendence and offers a Christian defense of icons and material veneration.
Together, these essays resist the idea that matter is passive or spiritually empty. Forests, bodies, communities, images, and sacred objects become sites where responsibility is practiced and where relations exceed possession.
Consciousness, performance, and mediation
Several contributions examine the forms through which experience and authority are produced. Carl A. Raschke connects quantum entanglement, ephaptic coupling, neurotheology, and transcendental semiotics to reopen the study of consciousness and spiritual experience beyond reductive physicalism. Paige Spencer reads Augustine’s Confessions through voyeurism and performance, pressing the text’s prayerful form against its own critique of spectatorship and pleasure in suffering. Reginald Bell Jr. uses Edwin Black’s second and third personas to analyze how Joel Osteen’s refusal of a formal presidential endorsement nevertheless constructs a politically legible ideal audience while leaving others unheard.
In each case, mediation is active rather than neutral. Brains, texts, performances, interviews, and audiences shape what can appear, who can speak, and how religious meaning enters public life.
Inheritance, transformation, and renewed wonder
The issue also follows religious traditions as they are inherited and remade. Philipp Valentini shows how Senegalese Sufi master Ibrāhīm Niasse draws upon and transforms Ibn ʿArabī, shifting emphasis from the unity of Being toward divine generosity, Muḥammadan paternity, and initiatory reintegration. D.A. Shane argues that postmodern deconstruction need not end in nihilism: by exposing the limits of the autonomous modern subject, it can prepare a metamodern “hermeneutic of credulity” capable of critical openness to transcendence, mythology, and wonder.
These essays do not propose a simple return to inherited certainties. They ask how fidelity can remain creative—answerable to history, critique, and forms of life that exceed established categories.
Inside Volume 25, Issue 2
- Diako Alikhani, “Bare Life and Divine Violence: Benjamin, Levinas, and Ethics of Interruption”
- Yiu Ming Cheung, “Specters of Lost Causes: Caputo’s Theology through the Žižekian Lens of Fidelity and Haunting”
- Bennett Gilbert, “On the Interdependence of All Things”
- Joshua M. Hall, “Holding Green Commons: Vandana Shiva’s Spirit-Lanterned Guardians”
- Aaron T. Lockhart, “Beyond the Material: Toward a Proper Understanding and Engagement with the Material in Christianity”
- Carl A. Raschke, “Spooky Cognition: Quantum Entanglement, Ephaptic Coupling, and the Transcendental Frontiers of Consciousness Studies”
- D.A. Shane, “From Deconstruction to Re-Enchantment: Postmodernism, Metamodernism, and the Re-Emergence of Wonder”
- Paige Spencer, “Caught in the Act: Voyeurism and Performance in Augustine’s Confessions”
- Philipp Valentini, “Ibn ʿArabī’s Role in Ibrahim Niasse’s Thinking: From the Unity of Being to Muḥammad’s Names-of-the-Father”
- Reginald Bell Jr., “Artfully Dodging a Presidential Endorsement: How Joel Osteen Uses Rhetoric to Build an Audience for Political Gain”
About JCRT
The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to interdisciplinary scholarship in religious studies, theology, philosophy, cultural theory, and related fields. JCRT is published by Whitestone Publications.
