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.
Bensaïd critiques political theology while defending Derridean sovereignty—itself theological—and the distance between the two theologies is short.
What does the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer contribute to political theology today?
“Neither of us would be allowed to do our jobs had we adhered to our practice of wearing a veil.”
Palm Sunday confronts every community that confesses Christ. The king who enters Jerusalem does not resemble the rulers people had learned to recognize. He does not arrive with armies or weapons. Instead, he embodies a kingdom grounded in humility, service, and reconciliation.
“Balthaser’s history is a helpful necessity. Without it the obligation has no shape, no lineage, no proof of its own non-marginality. But memory cannot be the ground of the obligation, only its occasion.”