Ola Sigurdson

Political Theology: Nordic Voices

This is a special issue on political theology in the Nordic countries. The Nordic countries represent a region in Northern Europe and the North Atlantic and consists of five countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Nor way and Sweden, including their associated territories, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Aland. Around 25 million people live in an area of 3.5 million km 2 . Although there are significant differences between the countries, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that they also share a common history, including similar societal structures, cultures and religious heritage. Linguistically, they all, with the exception of Finland and the Sami people (that inhabit Finland and Norway as well as Sweden), belong to the same language group, and throughout history there has been a constant exchange, sometimes of a more war-like and sometimes of a more friendly nature. In the fifteenth century, all of the Nordic countries were united in the Kalmar Union; it was not until the twentieth century that all five countries that we now have were independent from each other. Politically, Denmark, Norway and Sweden are constitutional monarchies with a parliamentary system, whereas Finland and Iceland are parliamentary republics. Iceland and Norway do not belong to the European Union, whereas the other three do. Religiously, Christianity has been the dominant religion in the Nordic countries for more than a thousand years, and the latter were all part of the Lutheran reformation in the sixteenth 1. Ola Sigurdson is professor of systematic theolog y and director of Centre for Culture and Health at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The author of more than fifteen books on systematic theology, political philosophy, theology and culture and political theology, his most recent publication is Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Emancipation as a Matter of Style

Abstract This article will focus upon the relationship between humour, politics and theology. More precisely, it will inquire whether there is some kind of correlation between style of humour and political standpoint in two contemporary Marxist authors that also have an interest in theology, the British literary critic Terry Eagleton and the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek. If Eagleton’s style is characterized by the strategic use of wit, influenced by the late Dominican friar and philosopher Herbert McCabe, Žižek’s use of humour in his philosophy is more about the telling of jokes that supposedly illustrate a political predicament, thus creating a humorous disidentification on behalf of the reader with her or his circumstances. The article ends with the suggestion that there is indeed a relationship between humour, politics and eschatology in Eagleton and Žižek, but that their different senses of humour also correspond to differing political agendas. But one should beware of generalizing this insight, as all authors might not be as stylistically gifted as those two.