In a guest post at the Political Theology journal, John Perry provides some very useful background for his recently released book The Pretenses of Loyalty (which I must say is fantastic). Along the way he offers a very clear and perceptive description of, first, how the field of political theology has shifted over the past decade or two, and second, the sympatico of the up-and-coming scholars in places like Duke, Yale, Princeton, and the like [*].

With this conviction, I was predisposed, as it were, to be sympathetic to the work of modernity critics like MacIntyre, Hauerwas, Milbank, and Cavanaugh. (It matters here that I belong to that generation of Christian ethicists who came of intellectual age only after this critique was fully established; I was still in grad school when Stout’s Democracy and Tradition came out. I’ve often joked that I will someday write an article on the influence this all had on us, and call it, “The Children of [Resident] Aliens.”) Although seeing early modernity as a hinge point predisposed me to read that work sympathetically, there remained in the back of my mind the thought that it wasn’t quite alldownhill since Hume (as in MacIntyre), or Scotus (Milbank), or Locke (Cavanaugh), or Constantine (Hauerwas). I thus began with the assumption that something of this critique was deeply right, but also subtly wrong. Charles Mathewes seems to have something similar in mind in a previous contribution to this blog. He says that those who share this inclination are “attracted by both sides” and lists names like Eric Gregory, Luke Bretherton, and Jennifer Herdt. I suppose these are the “children of aliens” that I have in mind.

[*] Despite my preference for faux gothic over Jeffersonian neo-classicism, I ought to include UVA here as well.