Below is the statement I penned articulating my support for the October 2014 Month of Resistance, sponsored by the “Stop Mass Incarceration Network.” I will be speaking on the same theme at one of the Major Panels for the National Lawyers Guild’s 2014 National Convention in Chicago, this weekend, Saturday, September 6, 2014, 10:30 pm. […]
SPECIAL NOTE: August 3, 2014. As I combine an intense leave for writing with family vacation, Israel’s brutal and unjustified attack on the people and families of Gaza continues. (photo, left, from APA at the Electronic Intifada) I cannot now write on this latest Israel outrage, called “Operation Protective Edge.” But I find that my […]
By Mark Lewis Taylor My grandfather showed me the bullet hole in his knee from his soldier days of battle in World War I. That was back in the late 1950s when I was 6 years old. When he died, I was gifted with the ceremonial flag that draped his coffin. I used it for . […]
Today’s MORAL MONDAY Action
by Mark Lewis Taylor “Yuri Kochiyama has become an ancestor.” That is how Mumia Abu-Jamal commemorates Yuri Kochiyama in his audio recording this week, “Yuri Kochiyma: A Life in Struggle,” thus giving voice and remembrance to Kochiyama, the Asian-American participant in Afro-Asian and many other U.S. and global movements. Small of stature though she was, […]
by Mark Lewis Taylor As I was preparing for classes yesterday, I quickly squeezed out a reply to FOX News reporter, Joshua Rhett Miller, and his inquiry to me about the possible comparisons of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Martin Luther King, Jr. The reporter was preparing what proved to be a FOX News attack essay on […]
Historical studies of the practice of crucifixion show it to be a torture practice intrinsic to the politics of state violence (for one such study, Martin Hengel’s Crucifixion remains essential). In light of this, frequent talk by Christians of Jesus’ action on the cross as a necessary “saving action” is highly problematic, at best. At […]
© Mark Lewis Taylor (The following short paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Comparative Literature, at a session on “Deconstructing Capital Punishment: Analyzing Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminars, vol. 1, University of Chicago Press, 2013). Photo above right: Derrida on the death penalty at Robert Cardozo Law School. David Long, two […]
My new article, “Decolonizing Mass Incarceration: ‘Flesh Will Wear Out Chains’,” has just been released at the Journal of Culture, Religion and Theory, part of its special issue on “Decoloniality and Crisis.” The full article PDF is now available at the JCRT.
ON DISPOSSESSION AND DEPARTURE A Response to Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism by Mark Lewis Taylor A condensed version of the review printed below was presented on a panel treating Judith Butler’s book, Parting Ways, at the American Academy of Religion, Annual Meeting, November 25, 2013, in Baltimore, MD. The […]