Jonathon S Kahn
Biographic Data
| ID | 3672270 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathon S Kahn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathon S |
| FAMILY NAME | Kahn |
| SIGNATURE | KAHN J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vassar College |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0977-9543 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Secularism
Students at the college where I teach—a nondenominational, liberal arts school in the northeast—have certain assumptions about the secularity of the United States. First, they broadly assume that the Constitution installs a wall of separation between church and state. Second, they assume that this wall ensures that governmental entanglement with religion—whether by its citizens giving voice to politics in explicitly religious terms, or by the gov…
When the Westboro Baptist Church Came to Vassar College
In 2013, the Westboro Baptist Church announced plans to picket Vassar College. This article recounts the quixotic attempt by student activists and myself to organize an embodied and affective form of counter-protest: a campus-wide act of foot-washing. Students were drawn to foot-washing because it represented an alternative model of knowledge formation based on awakening the affects of interaction and not achieving rational sovereignty. Despite f…
The Conversion and the Rehabilitation of the Penal System
In 2015, when Michelle Alexander, the acclaimed author of The New Jim Crow (The New Press, 2012), resigned her position as a professor at The Ohio State University law school to become a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary, she did not simply decide to stop teaching law. Her move amounted to a change in epistemological frames. For over two decades as a law professor, the knowledge that Alexander relied on to diagnose and then combat …
Pragmatism, Messianism, and Political Theology after Ted Smith’s Weird John Brown
How do we imagine our political lives, practices, and communities otherwise? This sort of question preoccupies folks who like to come together at the intersection of racial justice, religion, and philosophical thought. At one point in time, pragmatism would have been resoundingly spoken in these settings. Now, political theology is a language that is finding fresh expression among critics with these concerns. Is there a way for pragmatists to rej…
Hope Draped in Black
Reviewed by: Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress by Joseph R. Winters Jonathon S. Kahn (bio) Winters, Joseph R. Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016. Sayida Hartman's work on the afterlife of slavery—on the continuing way "black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago" (6)—has beco…
The Virtue of Democratic Faith
Democratic faith may seem like an ill-advised concept when the ills of democratic life are so glaring. This article claims that it is possible, even necessary, to recover and reinvigorate a notion of democratic faith that grapples with the flaws and intractabilities of the democratic condition. Conceived of as a virtue that inhabits uncertainty, I argue that democratic faith is well-tailored for democratic exchanges — particularly those involved …
Race and Secularism in America
This anthology draws bold comparisons between secularist strategies to contain, privatize, and discipline religion and the treatment of racialized subjects by the American state. Specializing in history, literature, anthropology, theology, religious studies, and political theory, contributors expose secularism's prohibitive practices in all facets of American society and suggest opportunities for change. (Publisher
The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois
Against the normative view of W. E. B. Du Bois as hostile to and uninterested in religion, this book argues that religion furnishes Du Bois writings with their distinctive moral vocabulary. Du Bois's work is a rich world of sermonic essays, jeremiads, biblical rhetoric, and prayers all of which are devoted to the overarching goal of fighting for the spiritual, political, and social conditions of those who "live within the Veil." This book argues …
W. E. B. Du Bois
Reviewed by: W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet Jonathon S. Kahn (bio) Blum, Edward J. W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. The classic biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois have alternately pronounced him irreligious, antireligious, unreligious, anticlerical, agnostic, or atheistic. Francis Broderick (1959) and Elliot Rudwick (1960) first crafted this narrative on Du Bois and religion, and it has been influentia…
Religion and the Binding of The Souls of Black Folk
No prominent works on this page.
Religion and the Binding of The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois
Reviewed by: W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet Jonathon S. Kahn (bio) Blum, Edward J. W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. The classic biographies of W. E. B. Du Bois have alternately pronounced him irreligious, antireligious, unreligious, anticlerical, agnostic, or atheistic. Francis Broderick (1959) and Elliot Rudwick (1960) first crafted this narrative on Du Bois and religion, and it has been influentia…
The Religious Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois
Against the normative view of W. E. B. Du Bois as hostile to and uninterested in religion, this book argues that religion furnishes Du Bois writings with their distinctive moral vocabulary. Du Bois's work is a rich world of sermonic essays, jeremiads, biblical rhetoric, and prayers all of which are devoted to the overarching goal of fighting for the spiritual, political, and social conditions of those who "live within the Veil." This book argues …
The Virtue of Democratic Faith
Democratic faith may seem like an ill-advised concept when the ills of democratic life are so glaring. This article claims that it is possible, even necessary, to recover and reinvigorate a notion of democratic faith that grapples with the flaws and intractabilities of the democratic condition. Conceived of as a virtue that inhabits uncertainty, I argue that democratic faith is well-tailored for democratic exchanges — particularly those involved …
Race and Secularism in America
This anthology draws bold comparisons between secularist strategies to contain, privatize, and discipline religion and the treatment of racialized subjects by the American state. Specializing in history, literature, anthropology, theology, religious studies, and political theory, contributors expose secularism's prohibitive practices in all facets of American society and suggest opportunities for change. (Publisher
Hope Draped in Black
Reviewed by: Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress by Joseph R. Winters Jonathon S. Kahn (bio) Winters, Joseph R. Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016. Sayida Hartman's work on the afterlife of slavery—on the continuing way "black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago" (6)—has beco…
Pragmatism, Messianism, and Political Theology after Ted Smith’s Weird John Brown
How do we imagine our political lives, practices, and communities otherwise? This sort of question preoccupies folks who like to come together at the intersection of racial justice, religion, and philosophical thought. At one point in time, pragmatism would have been resoundingly spoken in these settings. Now, political theology is a language that is finding fresh expression among critics with these concerns. Is there a way for pragmatists to rej…
The Conversion and the Rehabilitation of the Penal System
In 2015, when Michelle Alexander, the acclaimed author of The New Jim Crow (The New Press, 2012), resigned her position as a professor at The Ohio State University law school to become a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary, she did not simply decide to stop teaching law. Her move amounted to a change in epistemological frames. For over two decades as a law professor, the knowledge that Alexander relied on to diagnose and then combat …
When the Westboro Baptist Church Came to Vassar College
In 2013, the Westboro Baptist Church announced plans to picket Vassar College. This article recounts the quixotic attempt by student activists and myself to organize an embodied and affective form of counter-protest: a campus-wide act of foot-washing. Students were drawn to foot-washing because it represented an alternative model of knowledge formation based on awakening the affects of interaction and not achieving rational sovereignty. Despite f…
Secularism
Students at the college where I teach—a nondenominational, liberal arts school in the northeast—have certain assumptions about the secularity of the United States. First, they broadly assume that the Constitution installs a wall of separation between church and state. Second, they assume that this wall ensures that governmental entanglement with religion—whether by its citizens giving voice to politics in explicitly religious terms, or by the gov…
Philosophy (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Law (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Theology (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Race, History, and American Society (4 works) · Art (3 works) · History (3 works)