The link between personhood, ownership, and property is a modern one that initially had its link to theological understandings of the self. Bryan Stone in his 6th chapter of Evangelism after Christendom, writes that, “It is only as bearers of these inalienable property ‘rights’ that persons…come to recognize one another in public, thereby giving rise to new forms of political, social, and economic order that will preserve these intrinsic and unrestricted property rights in relation to other persons or to secular society itself” (142).

Stone goes on to note that society is not good at teaching us what rights we ought to have, etc. But I want to take it one step further and say that sometimes religion’s insistence that it knows which rights are worth having leads to false conclusions held with overconfidence.

What does this connection between personhood, ownership, and property teach us about slavery and settler colonialism, and what does this tell us about religion’s (specifically Zionism’s) role in oppression, past and future?