The lived practices of Afro-Bolivian farmers invite not only a philosophical reinterpretation of vulnerability but also a rethinking of Catholic social thought. Their adaptive and relational forms of life disclose a theological reconfiguration of Catholic political theology.
By revisiting the myth of Joan of Arc, Daniel Bensaïd endows his political militancy with a potential theological scope: that of a de-phallicized thinking of the divine.
Saving ourselves is not about creating an escapist bubble of churchly naivety while the world crumbles around us…
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.
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.
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.
Debt forgiveness was not an act of discretionary charity but a matter of divine justice — a God-ordered liberation of persons and families crushed by debt and indentured to creditors.
Daniel Bensaïd reinterprets Marxism as a Jewish messianism of “patient impatience,” in which political defeat, exile, and even anti-Semitism become the paradoxical sites from which a non-statist, heretical, and universalist revolutionary agency can re-emerge.
Those of us who weep with Mary also hear the assignment she was given–to turn to her community and remind them of the unconquerable truth of God’s love.
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 problem of how to resolve the tension between private property and the universal destination of goods, perhaps, obscures a deeper problem in CST. I contend that Catholic social teaching tends not to perceive its own entanglements in modernity and its hidden side of slavery, genocide, and unprecedented ecological waste.