The vocation of the public theologian is to testify to their faith and in doing so to further the good news of Jesus in all our publics. At the same time, the aim of this public theological discourse ought not be to colonize other publics for Christianity.
To be a public theologian does not mean to do theology for everybody. It is not a matter of speaking from the particular to the universal, but of dwelling within multiple, overlapping particularities and finding theological meaning there.
Is this nation ultimately facing a precipice of desoulation? Or could this also be the dark abyss out of which to ensoul itself rather than to continue erecting the towers of indignity that proudly shadow its border-history?
We have a call to responsibility regardless of whether you love or respect or agree with or feel in any way comfortable with your neighbor. It is the call to protect your neighbor even if you hate her.
How can community be grounded, if neither in force nor in love? To find out, we must reckon with Arendt’s reading of Augustine, for whom love and force were intimately intertwined.
If we are to attend to, much less celebrate, the difference between the who and the what – as we hope to do in our work – then love may be more trouble than its worth.
In a white supremacist culture, one crucial precondition of any true and faithful theological speech is repentance. True theology is not light but fire.
The Second Amendment should not become just one more issue of irreconcilable hyperpartisanship. Whether one finds themselves on the political right or the political left, one should realize that the question of gun violence ultimately comes down to the health of the polis.
Does political theology offer strategies for resisting injustice? Or should political theology itself be resisted (because it is part of the problem)? Of course, the answer is yes.
Given the magnitude of the challenges we face the task of resistance remains a communal, provisional, necessarily (ie meaningfully) contradictory, broken labour shared between sites of theory and practice.