Category: Traditions

The United States Catholic bishops’ recent pastoral letter on racism shows how racism has been woven into the history of the US, and is honest about the Church’s past complicity in that racism. It says less about how Catholics today can combat systemic racism, but offers hope for fruitful dialogues throughout the country.

In Open Wide Our Hearts, the US Catholic bishops successfully describe how racism has historically been at the heart of American life, but the pastoral letter emphasizes personal conversion at the expense of structural transformation.

The US Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter Open Wide Our Hearts seeks to assuage white guilt rather than inspire a courageous stand against white supremacy.

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.

Part of our duty is to generate the publics that we want to inhabit, not simply to assent to the publics that are foisted upon us.

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.

Agonistic practices of lively contestation constitute a practical way to love enemies and thereby to do public theology.

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.