We need not lose sight of the last four hundred years of political theological debate when searching for new ways to deliberate amidst diverse viewpoints and backgrounds.
The ongoing government shutdown comes with significant personal cost to government workers and harm to the public good. It is a tragic reminder of the dignity of government work and its contribution to the common good.
The Senate resolution calling for an end to US military aid to Saudi forces in Yemen is a rebuke to both the Trump administration and Saudi Arabia justified by just war principles.
There seems to be, then, a road not yet taken by political theologians in North America and Europe: to participate with Arab thinkers in the work of writing comparative political theologies that decolonize knowledge and seek a more just alternative to the world as it stands.
It seems that only a certain kind of public theologian, touting a certain kind of theology, is recognizable to the religiously unaffiliated as being, well, religious.
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.
President Donald Trump has engaged in false rhetoric about the migrant caravan making its way through Mexico, appealing to the narratives many Americans hold about foreigners and migrants. Christians must appeal to a counter-narrative of welcoming and hospitality that better accounts for the facts.
Giovanni Battista Montini’s chaplaincy of the Italian Catholic Federation of University Students transformed him from an academic in retreat from the world to a confident Christian witness against fascism.
The ongoing sexual abuse crisis has damaged the Catholic Church’s credibility as a witness to the Gospel, but the church should not abandon its social witness. Rather, it must re-think its approach.