Adam Kotsko, Political Theology: A Reading List

Some Facebook friends have asked me about my personal “canon” of political theology, and I decided it would make a good idea for a blog post. This list, like any attempt at a canon, does not simply reflect the state of a field but aims to change it. It is about what political theology is and also about what it could and should be. While some of my choices are presumably obvious, others reflect my conviction that political theology must grapple with questions of economics, race, gender, and sexuality, that our contemporary neoliberal order is an order of political theology, that political theology is a genealogical discipline, and that the root of political theology is not the homology between politics and theology but the problem that motivates both — in political terms, the problem of legitimacy, and in theological terms, the problem of evil. In other words, this could be taken as a reading list to understand the style of political theology I practice in The Prince of This World and Neoliberalism’s Demons. But more broadly, it is an attempt to group together a body of works that can be productively read with and against each other.