The following proposal is for an Author Meets Critique (AMC) session. The author is Carl Raschke, Professor of Philosophy of Religion and University Lecturer at the University of Denver. Raschke is a distinguished international scholar and author of the recent book Sovereignty in the 21st Century: Political Theology in an Age of Neoliberalism and Populism. As Prof. Kurt Appel, Professor of Philosophy and Fundamental Theology at the University of Vienna writes ,the book is "a passionate plea for a new concept sovereignty in the face of neoliberal constraints and identity logics that determine the political events of our time." The book carries Carl Schmitt into the new millennium and shows how what the author calls the current "Manichean struggle" on the world stage between populism and a fading neoliberal global order is driven by profound religious tensions and motivations that cut across national borders and map the international political terrain for the foreseeable future. Prof. Raschke's new book is the third and culminating piece of a trilogy that includes Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy (Columbia UP, 2015) and Neoliberalism and Political Theology: From Kant to Identity Politics (Edinburgh UP, 2019). Critics include Michel Staudigl (UVienna), Kieryn Wurts (Humboldt U, Berlin). They will offer their different takes on certain key theses of the book. For example: 1) the nation-state is no longer the locus for the idea of sovereignty, as it has been since the early modern era 2) the question of sovereignty, which is simultaneously a political and a theological question, must be radically reframed in light of critical-theoretical and decolonial inquiries 3) the great transnational conflicts nowadays are not between authoritarianism and democracy, but between neoliberalism and populism, the latter of which harbors a wholly new construct of political agency, and hence a new model of "popular" sovereignty.

Religious Studies, Politics, Philosophy