TMTC Associate and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Max Kennel has published his first book entitled Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time (Palgrave McMillan, 2021). The book explores how contemporary approaches to the meaning of time and history follow patterns that are simultaneously political and theological. Even after postsecular critiques of Christianity, religion, and secularity, many influential ways of dividing time and history continue to be formed by providential narratives that mediate between experience and expectation in movements from promise to fulfilment. In response to persistent theological influences within ostensibly secular ways of understanding time and history, Kennel revisits and revises the concept of periodization by tracing powerful efforts to divide time into past, present, and future, and by critiquing historical partitions between the Reformation and Enlightenment. Developing a postsecular critique of theopolitical periodization in six chapters, the book questions how relations of possession, novelty, freedom, and instrumentality implied in the prefix ‘post’ are reproduced in postsecular discourses and the field of political theology.
If you're interested in reading more, Max was recently interviewed about the book on the Anabaptist Historians website.
TMTC hosted a launch symposium for this book on March 3, 2022. The symposium, which was recorded and is now avaialbe to view online, featured engagements from Michael Driedger (Brock Univesity), Pamela Klassen (University of Toronto), Travis Kroeker (McMaster University), Jennifer Otto (University of Lethbridge), and a response from Max.
