Maxwell Kennel

Maxwell Kennel is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto where he is currently working on a book project called Critique of Conspiracism. He completed his PhD in May 2021 in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University where he has taught courses on religion and violence and approaches to the study of religion. His dissertation is titled "Ontologies of Violence" and it uses violence as a diagnostic concept to interpret Jacques Derrida’s essay “Violence and Metaphysics,” Mennonite pacifist epistemologies, and Grace M. Jantzen’s trilogy Death and the Displacement of Beauty.

He has published articles on time and history in Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses, Political Theology, rhizomes, and Telos, and articles on Mennonite topics in Literature & Theology, the Mennonite Quarterly Review, the Journal of Mennonite Studies, and Hamilton Arts & Letters. In 2017 he edited Mennonite historian Robert Friedmann’s manuscript Design for Living: Regard, Concern, Service, and Love (Wipf & Stock), and in May 2021 he served as a guest editor for a special issue of Political Theology focusing on interdisciplinary expressions of Mennonite Political Theology. January 2022 saw the publication by Palgrave Macmillan of his book Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time.