Papers by Fannie Bialek
Journal of Religious Ethics, 2023
Religious ethics was founded on a commitment to inclusion, welcoming projects from and about diff... more Religious ethics was founded on a commitment to inclusion, welcoming projects from and about different religious and philosophical traditions. This paper argues that the increasing welcome of feminist ethics in the JRE also reveals a tension in the field between inclusion and critique: where feminist ethics is included as another tradition of ethical inquiry, its critical claims can be escaped by appeal to difference from the traditions it seeks to engage. The response to feminist critique should not be to applaud its inclusion without responding to its claims. Where this occurs, religious ethicists must renegotiate the terms of inclusion and the borders of difference. Feminist critique thus requires a return to founding questions of this journal, and the field, about the terms on which different traditions can be discussed and engaged in a common, critical conversation of religious ethics.
Political Theology, 2023
Wounds teach us what we were vulnerable to and what vulnerabilities we may yet bear. But wounds a... more Wounds teach us what we were vulnerable to and what vulnerabilities we may yet bear. But wounds are often met with doubt and disbelief, suggesting that their lessons may be hard to learn. Through an analysis of advocacy movements to believe victims of sexual assault set in conversation with Caravaggio’s Incredulity of Thomas, this paper argues for an understanding of vulnerability as part of a process of learning from wounds that is sometimes marked by emotional incredulity, an expression of doubt or denial of what one knows to be true because of the way its realization feels. Emotional incredulity in these circumstances is not a denial of vulnerability that pretends to mastery, but one that expresses the challenge of learning, together, how much we do not know of ourselves.
Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, 2022
Modern Theology, 2017
The term is being used here wittingly as inviting a paradox. The ritual and restraint of the trad... more The term is being used here wittingly as inviting a paradox. The ritual and restraint of the traditional Christian icon seems to contrast with the luxuriant excess of the modern occidental imagination. The Icon is the product of a hierarchical ancient structure of God, Man, and Nature, and dedicated to 'the Lord's Glory.' The 'imagination,' as the term is habitually employed in modern parlance, is the fruit of the Copernican-Romantic liberation from such ancient restraints. The use of the imagination in the modern sense serves to reinforce the Promethean dimension of a humanity liberated from the fetters of religion. 1
Exploring Vulnerability, edited by Heike Springhart and Gunther Thomas, Sep 29, 2017
Short Pieces by Fannie Bialek
Political Theology Network, 2022
for the Critical Theory for Political Theology 2.0 series
Political Theology Network, 2020
The structure of Title IX actually bears the right shape of how sexual violence should be address... more The structure of Title IX actually bears the right shape of how sexual violence should be addressed, if not the language or content sufficient to address such a horror.
An interview on care ethics on the occasion of Pope Francis's 2015 U.S. visit.
Part of the Syndicate Theology Symposium on Sarah Coakley's God, Sexuality, and the Self
Conference Organizing by Fannie Bialek
Books by Fannie Bialek
The University of Chicago Press, 2025
Love, like any temporal experience, is composed of moments of not knowing what will happen next. ... more Love, like any temporal experience, is composed of moments of not knowing what will happen next. We do not know how our beloveds will respond to us, how they will change through time, or how our own lives will be changed by spending our time with them. As finite beings, we cannot know how the future will proceed. What we desire, at least in part, is time spent with our beloveds seeing how it goes.
Love in Time argues that love is a particular orientation toward our uncertain futures, an experience of finite beings necessarily understood in time. Many Western philosophical and religious accounts of love imagine it otherwise, as an escape from the vulnerabilities of finite life into eternity or another transcendental ideal. Others try to escape love’s uncertainties within this world, with careful definitions that would exclude anything less than stable from counting as love, or as a love worth praising. But eliminating uncertainty in love, for finite beings, requires love to end. And lovers seem to want love to continue—to continue to be with their beloveds, learn about them, discover who they are and who they will become. Whether our beloveds are good for us or we are good for them cannot be answered definitively. Our questions in this vein must be continuously negotiated, as every attempt to know an answer fully will be defied by the possibilities of what happens next.
This book engages a series of classical and contemporary accounts of love in Western philosophy and Christian thought to examine that each pursue strategies of securing love against the uncertainties of its temporal existence—and suggest the importance of time to their discussions where they run aground.
Dissertation submitted to the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University, 2015
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Papers by Fannie Bialek
Short Pieces by Fannie Bialek
Conference Organizing by Fannie Bialek
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Books by Fannie Bialek
Love in Time argues that love is a particular orientation toward our uncertain futures, an experience of finite beings necessarily understood in time. Many Western philosophical and religious accounts of love imagine it otherwise, as an escape from the vulnerabilities of finite life into eternity or another transcendental ideal. Others try to escape love’s uncertainties within this world, with careful definitions that would exclude anything less than stable from counting as love, or as a love worth praising. But eliminating uncertainty in love, for finite beings, requires love to end. And lovers seem to want love to continue—to continue to be with their beloveds, learn about them, discover who they are and who they will become. Whether our beloveds are good for us or we are good for them cannot be answered definitively. Our questions in this vein must be continuously negotiated, as every attempt to know an answer fully will be defied by the possibilities of what happens next.
This book engages a series of classical and contemporary accounts of love in Western philosophy and Christian thought to examine that each pursue strategies of securing love against the uncertainties of its temporal existence—and suggest the importance of time to their discussions where they run aground.
Link: https://politicaltheology.com/call-for-papers-the-worldly-weil-simone-weil-and-political-theology/
Love in Time argues that love is a particular orientation toward our uncertain futures, an experience of finite beings necessarily understood in time. Many Western philosophical and religious accounts of love imagine it otherwise, as an escape from the vulnerabilities of finite life into eternity or another transcendental ideal. Others try to escape love’s uncertainties within this world, with careful definitions that would exclude anything less than stable from counting as love, or as a love worth praising. But eliminating uncertainty in love, for finite beings, requires love to end. And lovers seem to want love to continue—to continue to be with their beloveds, learn about them, discover who they are and who they will become. Whether our beloveds are good for us or we are good for them cannot be answered definitively. Our questions in this vein must be continuously negotiated, as every attempt to know an answer fully will be defied by the possibilities of what happens next.
This book engages a series of classical and contemporary accounts of love in Western philosophy and Christian thought to examine that each pursue strategies of securing love against the uncertainties of its temporal existence—and suggest the importance of time to their discussions where they run aground.