Perhaps this parable is not about stewardship of resources, in the sense of asking the maximum effort to produce the maximum gains, but is rather about revealing and denouncing unethical behavior that reinforces oppressive structures of the past and the present.
It is important to notice the ways in which economic language seeps into theology and to be attentive to the ways in which interpretations of scripture can either reinscribe exploitative harm or help imagine alternative possibilities for human flourishing.
Before the COVID pandemic, low-wage workers were already living in precarious circumstances because these jobs often lack benefits necessary to provide for health care and additional income necessary to build things like emergency savings and retirement funds.
While even his closest associates would lean towards dismissing the people to fend for themselves, [Jesus] invites the community of the wilderness into a divine economy of care. Sharing, as a physical manifestation of that care, requires a suspension of the belief that scarcity is the only reality available in the moment of want.
I have argued that economic theology should lead to political praxis and change. Economic theology has to open a space for emancipatory politics that resists the capitalist future.
A second expression of relationality is covenant. It is a bond between distinct parties where each gives for the flourishing of the other. Unlike contract, which protects interests, covenant protects relationship.
Rendering to God what was God’s meant offering our lives as living sacrifices of worship to God, as one would offer coins as tax and tribute to one’s sovereign. The human was theologically monetized—or coined—in the name of dedication to God.
I am interested in exploring and critiquing the discursive implications of designating this area as wilderness, given the history of this idea and its role in dispossessing Indigenous communities.
While not often recognized as political theology proper, environmental justice movements have for decades been sites of normative creativity. Sometimes overlooked as conventional rights-based complaints against locally unwanted land uses, these movements have in fact depicted ecologies of white supremacy while deploying rights, sacralizing land, and reimagining the human in ways that would utterly reconstruct the basis of politics.
We appear isolated. Yet, over the years that we have brought our farm into our family, I have come to see ourselves as part of a worldwide imagined community of small farmers.
When did the discourse on climate change begin? How was it related to colonialism? And in what way did it serve political objectives in Israel/Palestine throughout the 20th century?
From an economic perspective, what we are all experiencing is as simple as it is painful: what we are experiencing is the voluntary and forced breaking down of the relationships we rely on to flourish as social creatures.