The question is not only whether Catholics and Calvinists can understand one another better doctrinally. It is whether they can think together about concrete political questions and their entanglement with power, authority, and the conditions necessary for a more just and peaceful society.
Inspiration comes from previously off-limits traditions, just as emotions once dismissed as despairing gain untold potentials: this is the turn from leftist melancholy to melancholy politics.
The world is impossibly complex now, and will only continue to be so. We must learn to adapt to this complexity, to dance with it and to allow it to be what it is.
For African Political Theology to be Christian, African, and praxis-oriented, its concern must be Africans; Africans in a universal and “Afropolitan” sense, that is, all of those Africans gifted with God’s image, and as such, God’s children.
Hope can persist even when things seem impossible. This affinity with the miraculous, rupturing the force of prevailing law, gives hope its extra-rational power.
The essays gathered here seek to critically assess the content and form of Catholic Social Teaching and envision what a catholic political theological engagement might look like beyond an emboldening by magisterial teachings, instead seeking movements, mystics, and people on the margins to exemplify what “catholic” could contribute to larger conversations on political theology.
