Speaking at panel on Mumia Abu-Jamal and Palestine. Princeton University 2021.
NEW – Radio Interview on Revised & Expanded Edition of The Executed God
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Mark Lewis Taylor is Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. Taylor’s major interests are in the political philosophy of religious practices and theological discourse, particularly in Christian communities and also broader social movements. He has served as the Chair of the Religion & Society Committee at Princeton Seminary, and teaches numerous courses on political theory and theological discourse. His most recent book is The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (2011). Taylor received the Best General Interest Book Award for his earlier book, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (2001, 2nd revised and expanded edition in 2015), which proposed a Christian theology resistant to U.S. empire in light of the prison-industrial complex, police brutality and the death penalty.
He is also founder of Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal (EMAJ) a group of teachers from all levels of education, organizing since 1995 for a new trial on behalf of Abu-Jamal, a journalist on Pennsylvania’s death row for 30 years. Activist movements achieved a victory in 2011, securing Abu-Jamal’s transfer from death row into general population. Nevertheless, the struggle to free him from prison continues, as many join in support of Desmond Tutu’s call for his “immediate release.” The work of EMAJ is now being carried forward by Dr. Johanna Fernandez and numerous colleagues in The Campaign to Bring Mumia Home.
Taylor has also been an activist in other movements to end U.S. war (co-founder of the Coalition for Justice in Iraq, Princeton, NJ), for abolition of the death penalty, to end “the New Jim Crow”/mass incarceration, for immigration rights and reform, and for ending US exploitation and domination in Mexico and Latin America.
Among his other books are Religion, Politics and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Politics and American Empire (2005), and Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis (2005 edition, Fortress Press.), Reconstructing Theology (co-edited, 1994), Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries (1987), and Beyond Explanation: Religious Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology (1985).