If political theology refers to shared archives and imaginative slippages between political and religious ways of organizing the world, then memory is a crucial medium where these slippages materially occur. Memory shapes the way sense becomes perception and leads to judgment; collectively, memory supplies a shared background against which appeals to authority and experience can become persuasive. As such, memory is always also performative: rather than a transparent record of the past, memory is a medium for the sense-making in the present in view of a certain kind of future. These papers critically engage the media through which memory is invoked and materialized to teach and form a certain kind of public. They look variously at film, video games, and higher education as varying sites of pedagogy engaged in the curation of collective memory and the cultivation of a kind of human community, often through a correlative strategy of forgetting.
In this paper, I primarily attend to practices of forgetting, particularly in relation to institutions of higher education. I do so, first, to make sense of the current theo-political context and second, to raise two considerations for reflection if colleges and universities seek to continue in their role as keepers and sustainers of collective memory. Although colleges and universities often emphasize their role in the preservation of memory, I start by sketching a legacy of forgetting to better understand present realities. I then explore a couple of Presidential Executive Orders which witness troubling enactments of remembering and forgetting. Finally, I turn to James Crockford’s 2022 article, “Contested Memorials and the Discipleship of Christian Memory,” to think through the role of higher education in relation to memory, attentive to current challenges and perennial moral obligations.
What is the role of higher education in the current theo-political context? This paper offers a constructive, political-theological vision of higher education as a locus for the negotiation and clarification of collective thoughts and memories that can both build up and transform the contours of existing communities. A better appreciation of epistemological pluralism and the power dynamics of knowledge-production requires going beyond reflexivity, enacting substantial institutional reforms that more strongly embeds scholarship within local communities while also providing the space for transformative encounters that can reconfigure the tensions and bounds of those communities. I present this vision as a contrast to the "liberal university" and the particular politics of knowledge that it instantiates in both its 'dogmatic' and 'critical-reflexive' modes, highlighting the significance of religious studies in particular by means of a counter-reading of a key figure at the foundation of the discipline and the modern university: F.D.E. Schleiermacher.
In his late political vision, Pier Paolo Pasolini declared the foreclosure of all outsides to capitalist developmentalism. It followed for Pasolini that socialism had suffered a seemingly final defeat and the Italian State no longer needed the Catholic Church to secure hegemony among a population of otherwise divided peoples. Even so, in a series of articles on the Church, Pasolini concedes a persistent ability of the Church to conjure excessive and shocking feelings when it “address problems that the community is familiar with.” How can an irrelevant and marginal institution still shock? The language of excess is a throughline between Pasolini’s Catholic articles, his earlier writings on aesthetics and cinema, and key texts from his major influences: Erich Auerbach, Georges Bataille, and Norman O. Brown. These thinkers share an association between this excessive experience and what Steven Ozment calls “the permanent possibility of historical novelty” in Mysticism and Dissent.
Drawing on hauntological insights, this paper examines the abuse of specters—the practice of domesticating and reproducing the stories of the dead for display and consumption. This problem is exacerbated by the rapid development of technologies for virtual spaces, which not only mediate but also create and distort narratives. With attention to youth radicalization across the globe, this paper focuses on a case study of the gaming company Roblox to illuminate how the abuse of specters shapes moral agency. The player-generated content “Gwangju of the Day” reconstructed a distorted narrative of the 1980 South Korean pro-democracy movement in Gwangju city. By drawing on hauntology, theological ethics, and scholarship on artificial intelligence, this paper offers guidelines for cultivating ethical relationships with the dead. The paper facilitates a conversation about how religious educators and faith communities can contribute to the formation of moral agency to engage counter memory for a liberatory future.