Time Immemorial, Here and Now

Reading Maxwell Kennel’s Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time was a fascinating journey across time and texts. From Augustine’s Confessions to Melville’s Moby Dick, and with stops along the way to consider how historians of the “Radical Reformation” have attended to (or ignored) the Dutch Collegiant groups and why Dorothée Sölle espoused a willingness to wait, Kennel makes an argument about the politics of periodization anchored by the concept of the “postsecular.” In his words: “it is time to work against the forward facing implications of its prefix and turn the postsecular towards the past while asking what a postsecular history might entail.” In this brief response, I follow the contours of Kennel’s provocative argument, reflecting on the questions it prompted for me as I read. I take Maxwell Kennel’s argument to be rooted in a wider conversation that seeks to understand the ongoing power of “secularized theological concepts” in contemporary political life in Europe and North America, while insisting that that this is not only a “modern” concern (hence his discussion of the Dutch Collegiant groups). For Kennel, periodization is always political. He writes: