Conventional wisdom holds that attempts to combine religion and politics will produce unlimited violence. Concepts such as jihad, crusade, and sacrifice need to be rooted out, the story goes, for the sake of more bounded and secular understandings of violence. Ted Smith upends this dominant view, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and others to trace the ways that seemingly secular politics produce their own forms of violence without limit. He brings this argument to life-and digs deep into the American political imagination-through a string of surprising reflections on John Brown, the nineteenth-century abolitionist who took up arms against the state in the name of a higher law. Smith argues that the key to limiting violence is not its separation from religion, but its connection to richer and more critical modes of religious reflection. Weird John Brown develops a negative political theology that challenges both the ways we remember American history and the ways we think about the nature, meaning, and exercise of violence.
"By providing a profound ethical meditation on Brown and his fellow raiders to challenge how people, particularly Americans, think about morality, [...] Smith illustrates how an ethical and philosophical reading of history can help us to better understand the world we live in, what we should do, and of the important of going beyond just what we out to do."
New Books in Christian Studies
"Smith's book is different, and immensely resonant, for it theorizes what might be at stake-ethically-for America's current political life [He] writes with clarity and precision, as well as with a storyteller's sense of narrative drive and detail."
Journal of American History
"John Brown is perhaps the most polarizing figure in America's past, 'the stone in the historian's shoe,' as scholars have acknowledged. Ted Smith's Weird John Brown removes the stone, as it were, and reframes the debate. It examines Brown on Brown's own terms, from the perspective of political theology. A brilliantly original and compelling book, it offers a new way to understand Brown, and its f
