My work centers around questions of religion, secularity, political theology, temporality, and moral imagination in contemporary Israel/Palestine (and increasingly in the United States). It explores how secular conceptions (and experiences) of history and time inflect political theologies to give moral imagination under secularity a distinctive shape, how this shape prompts rethinking of sovereignty, political economy, and coloniality, and how such rethinking opens onto an anthropology beyond secularity.
Lod Alight
My monograph under preparation, Lod Alight: National-Religious Activism, Moral Imagination, and the Limits of Reflection, is a study of the moral imagination of a national-religious “social settlement” group: the “Torah seed” group of Lod in central Israel/Palestine. Torah seed groups emerged in the wake of Israel’s post-1967 settlement projects and the ascendance of national-religious society into Israel’s new middle class of knowledge professions. These groups intervene in cities within the Green Line through founding and strengthening institutions of Jewish identity and practice, cultural programming, food distribution, infrastructural and educational investments, municipal appropriation, and more, and by size and reputation the group in Lod is most successful among them. While observers of national-religious society, Israeli settlements, and recent Israeli politics often view Torah seed groups as expressions of confidently ascendant national-religious triumphalism, my ethnography demonstrates that “social settlement” arises rather from a deep sense of national-religious unsettlement and discomfiture. My monograph plumbs such discomfiture to trace the group’s moral imagination of its theologico-political interventions and effects. In so doing, it draws out the temporal assumptions undergirding such imagination and anxieties, and notes the discomfiting continuity of such assumptions across the group and its various political opponents. At core, Lod Alight is an ethnographic exploration of how concrete realities (other people, other ideas, other possibilities, etc.) are constituted and maintained as moral-imaginatively invisible (rather than merely morally opposed).
Living in Sacred Times
My second project is a comparative exploration of the interface of narrative history, temporal experience, and moral perception since October 7, 2023 across contemporary national-religious Israeli Jewish political theologies, and political theologies operative within American Jewish anti-Zionist discourses and activism. The project builds on Lod Alight in approaching this comparison of deeply opposed political theologies not primarily through a political analysis, salient as that is, but through a temporal and moral analysis. It asks how different ways of emplotting Jewish histories as Jewish History (itself within History) shape moral perceptions of both events and what counts as an event itself. It investigates the degree to which any of us live, phenomenologically, in the empty, narrative-less “time” of History, and it aims to provoke a disciplinary return to the question of “when” a given ethnographic situation is unfolding. In so doing, it works to attune us not to a colonialist reading of a shared temporality of civilization and enlightenment, but rather to the overlapping cacophony of “sacred times” in which distinctive moral perceptions arise.
Selected Publications
Atwell, Andrew K. 2026. “Resuscitating Torah: ‘Judaization,’ Moral Imagination, and National-Religious hesed in Central Israel.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy. (In press)
Atwell, Andrew K. 2022. “Religion, Authority, Grammar: The Scholarly Legacy of Secular Concepts.” In Buddhist Violence and Religious Authority: A Tribute to the Work of Michael Jerryson. Ed. Margo Kitts and Mark Juergensmeyer. United Kingdom: Equinox Publishing Ltd.
Book Reviews
Review of Shlomo Fisher, Expressivist Religious Zionism: Modernity and the Sacred in a Nationalist Movement. New York: Routledge, 2025. (review manuscript for Jewish Review of Books — anticipated completion Summer 2026)