How is the future imagined, secured, and reproduced—and what theological assumptions underwrite these efforts? This panel examines how political projects organize life in the name of futurity across contexts including early modern natural philosophy, Nazi racial ideology, transpacific messianism, and AI-driven climate governance.
Central to these accounts is the role of reproduction—biological, social, and conceptual—in sustaining visions of collective destiny. Whether through racialized family, scientific metaphor, or persistent messianic expectation, the future emerges as something to be cultivated and redeemed. At the same time, contemporary governance increasingly translates life into objects of prediction and management, reframing vulnerability as risk.
Taken together, these papers show that projects of futurity depend on theological imaginaries of life, purity, and redemption—even when they appear secular—and invite critical reflection on what forms of life such futures demand.
While the Nazi’s eugenic program in both its genocidal and natalist forms has long been acknowledged as a centerpiece of the regime, the theological resonances of this future-orientation are often subordinated to explanations citing social, biological frameworks. Using Hitler Youth “Home Evening” training booklets and ego-documents, this paper interrogates the function of family for the Nazi project and its relationship to a religiously-coded future, particularly as messaged to and experienced by so-called “Aryan” children in Nazi Germany, but also as withheld from those labeled enemies. Ultimately, I argue that family as discursive concept and as practice played an essential––if ambivalent––role in Nazi Germany: we find simultaneously a strategic, exclusionary mobilization of family for reproductive ends and a fracturing of the family as social unit, all in the name of a redemptive future purity undergirded by an ontological network of sacrality.
This article revisits the 2008 debate on Francis Bacon’s wedding metaphor in Redargutio philosophiarum, 1608. Unlike historiographic salvagism and feminist environmentalism, I consider the religious intent of the text, thus resisting the secularist reading of the scientific revolution. I argue for framing this cosmic wedding (connubium) as a political theology, an enchanted concept of family employed to domesticate the scientific project and guarantee the reproduction of future scientists. To establish my argument, I will contextualize Bacon’s theology within the English Reformation. Following Katharine Park’s cues, I will then discuss the late medieval Royal Marriage tradition, framing its pulse with what queer scholars have called “repronormativity.” Third, I shall discuss with Social Reproduction Feminism the role of Nature in this marriage: a wife whose task is to produce the “offspring of heroes.” The conclusion foregrounds the significance of the political theology of family in contemporary discourses of ecology and earth future.
This article examines twentieth century Hmong messianic movements as a transpacific political theology. The central thesis contends that failed messianisms of twentieth century Hmong in Vietnam and Laos do not signal the death of Hmong messianism but its transmutation into Hmong American contexts. The essay has three movements: (1) descriptive messianisms, (2) failed messianisms, and (3) contemporary messianisms. In descriptive messianisms, I offer anthropological and historical accounts of Hmong messianism. The dialectic of the political state broker and the messianic figure emerge as key tropes. In assessing failed messianisms, I draw from Walter Benjamin’s notion of the Messianic that is tensive with world history. That messianic movements persist despite their failure points negatively to their eschatological horizon. To posit contemporary messianisms, I employ a transpacific method unveiling messianism’s transmutations from Asia to America. This section contends that the logic of messianism remains operative in new forms as "secularized theological concepts."
Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in global climate governance, shaping early-warning systems, risk analytics, migration forecasts, and disaster prediction. These technologies are often framed as instruments of climate justice, promising more efficient protection of vulnerable populations through anticipatory governance. Yet AI also redistributes power by determining whose vulnerability becomes visible and whose suffering becomes actionable. Engaging debates on AI “alignment,” this paper argues that the deeper issue is not simply whose values guide technological systems but what conception of life and vulnerability they presuppose. Within climate governance, climate harms are translated into predictive models and risk indicators that render vulnerability measurable and manageable. This translation rests on an ontological assumption that life is primarily something to be secured as risk. When ontology is misconstrued in this way, ethics becomes procedural and policy becomes managerial. Drawing on phenomenology, the paper advances an ethics of vulnerable flesh that reframes climate governance around relational exposure, interdependence, and the conditions of livability.