The presence of technological elites in the Vatican at the release of Magnfica Humanitas indicates a shift in perspective concerning democracy. Put bluntly, it is not just human labor that is at stake; democracy hangs in the balance.
To gain power, some leaders buttress their narratives with their institutional credentials, while others rely on intangible but often more powerful authority: the authority of charisma.
Scholar, activist, and minister Colin Bossen discusses his new book with Michael McLaughlin, shining light on how inclusive visions of populism can draw on religion to deepen democracy
Hugo Drochon, author of Elites and Democracy, discusses social movements, political transformation, democratic hopes, and populism with Maor Levitin
The democratic experiment of the last few hundred years is itself simply a promise: that a people can make decisions on how to live together.
The Kingdom of God – the kingdom pictured in Psalm 72 – seems a long way off, a dream growing more distant everyday as we move inexorably closer to the inauguration.
For me, “political theology” thus names the study of the ways that imagination is embedded in sentient, desiring bodies, instantiated in vernacular forms of life and ordinary (ritualized) practices, and conjured in mytho-poetic metaphors, images or representations that are formalized by literary genres and assembled into scriptures.
This post focuses on a no less important but less visible cluster of questions about the relationship between ethics and politics, what helps or hinders the formation of persons capable of undertaking liberative projects with and for others, and how the quality and character of relations between persons (for example, virtues such as hope, courage, or hospitality) directly shape the conditions for the possibility of democracy.
Transfiguration means to be challenged and governed by a different set of norms, in opposition to this world and the powers that disfigure the image of God in each one of us. Theologically, transfiguration is an eschatological vision that transforms and revolutionises our present.
In Florida and elsewhere, communities facing technological and environmental risks do well to adopt the ethics and politics of precaution.
Situated on this eschatological middle ground, political theology must reckon with how we live in a time when the kingdom of God is present, creating moments of transformation and rupture…To speak truthfully, political theology must also speak to the quotidian joys and everyday struggles that make up the ordinary time of our lives.
According to Luke Bretherton, theologians, in forgetting that prophetic critique presumes eschatological affirmation, have yet to understand what the work of theology comes to.