Towards a Kenotic Identity Politics: Migration, Transformation & the Eucharist

I recently had the pleasure of being part of a symposium on Religion and the Humanitarian Challenge, organised round the arrival of my former doctoral classmate Assoc. Prof Erin Wilson, director of the Centre for Religion, Conflict and the Public Domain at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

The paper looked at the link between identity politics and the provision of humanitarian aid. More specifically it looked at the recent phenomenon where identity was deployed as a barrier to aid, and critiqued this thread in light of the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and Eucharistic theology of Aaron Riches and Creston Davis (who build on Alain Badiou’s conception of the Event).

A word of warning, the paper ended up being more theoretical than I would have liked, and I probably failed in my duty in giving a non-specialist academic audience a constant experiential reference point.

That said, I leave the podcast of this presentation for your consideration.