Calvin's Legacy for Public Theology

Abstract

Many thinkers, of whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a prominent example, have expressed ambivalence regarding John Calvin's contribution to our understanding of a healthy civic order: while Calvin's political genius is undeniable, he and his followers are also known for intolerant attitudes and practices. Thus the image of "two Calvins" by a recent biographer of the Reformer. In this essay I lay out some relevant tensions in Calvin's political thought, while also identifying underlying themes that were later developed by his followers. Special attention is given to the ways in which the "neo-Calvinist" movement, initiated in the nineteenth century by Abraham Kuyper, both corrected and expanded upon Calvin's theology of public life. It is noted that while Kuyper's thought also influenced the Afrikaners' apartheid ideology, Reformed opponents of apartheid also appealed to elements in Kuyper's theology of public life. Although the results have been mixed, Kuyper and others did demonstrate the ways in which some basic elements of Calvin's thought can be used to address issues that are being given sustained attention today in broad-ranging explorations of what makes for a flourishing civil society characterized by a variety of "mediating structures."     

Speculative Realism and Public Theology: Explorations

Abstract

The paper argues that ideas emanating from the speculative realists can inform a new approach to public theology, one that is broadly consistent with Christian realism and opposed to that of radical orthodoxy. Linking the two disciplines through an exploration of the ethical consequences of speculative realism, it takes in particular the work of Latour, his concept of the "gathering," his distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern, and his questioning of the fact-value distinction, and through a lived example shows how the language of human and non-human offers a critique of reductionist approaches to the political.     

The Unquiet Frontier

Abstract

There are many different diagnoses of what constitutes the “post-secular.” My own view is that it constitutes the unprecedented and paradoxical coexistence of two supposedly contradictory social, religious, and cultural trends: on the one hand, the persistence of secular objections to public religion and on the other, the novel re-emergence of religious actors in the global body politic. John Caputo’s much quoted aphorism — that God is dead, but so also is the death of God — captures this agonistic model of the post-secular, in which what we are looking at is not the revival of religion, or the reversion of secular modernity into a re-enchanted body politic, but something more unprecedented and complex. Yet it also means there is little in the way of agreed discourse about the nature of the public square and the legitimacy of religious reasoning within it. This article considers one possible model, that of “post-secular rapprochement,” as one way of envisaging how newly-emergent forms of religious activism and discourse might be mediated back into a pluralist public domain.     

Theology and Democratic Futures

Abstract

The essays in this special issue of Political Theology engage in a vigorous and wide-ranging conversation between theology and theologically inspired forms of critical thought and the possible futures of democracy as an idea(l) and as a political practice. This collection seeks to provide some key coordinates for thinking through the linkages and disjunctures between the theological and the political in formulating new conceptual frameworks that obtain a critical purchase for understanding the multiple meanings of democracy in the (post)modern world. By posing the question, "What is the fate of theology in a post-theological moment?" this introductory essay focuses our attention on the contemporary configurations of intellectual and political power that animates so much of our discourse on the interrelationships between theology and politics and proceeds to provide a brief rehearsal of the essays included in this special issue.     

Public Faith and the Common Good A Radical Messianic Proposal

Abstract

The article inquires into the implications of Christianity not being a religious perspective among others in the contemporary Western debate on religious pluralism. A quick glance at a recent debate in Sweden serves to demonstrate how Christianity, although marginalized in its traditional forms, remains a dominating cultural interpretative scheme that continues to influence the majority’s view on private and public, individual and collective, rational and irrational. Against this background, the author argues, it is imperative that any Christian theologian who engages in the question of religion in the public sphere in the Western world, also must critically confront the question of Christianity’s particular status. Not least in light of contemporary right-wing rhetoric about the West as an exclusively “Christian civilization,” theologians need to reflect on how to avoid articulations of the Christian vision of the common good that manifest themselves at the expense of other religious traditions. The article ends by sketching a possible direction for such reflection.     

Andrew Shanks's Civil Theology

Abstract

This article aims to initiate discussion of the work of Andrew Shanks by expositing his unique form of civil theology and its relation to his Hegelian Christology. A comparison with Zizek and Milbank serves to highlight what is at stake in Shanks's own Hegelian Christianity.     

A Response to the Conference

Abstract

The question discussed in this article is whether Christian theology should influence contemporary political debates. The topic is discussed through two practical case studies: (1) technological advances in genetic engineering and (2) the just war tradition and the use of force. In the first discussion, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's unfinished Ethics is employed to demonstrate the importance of substantial theological categories to resist a reductionist technological utilitarian discourse about the body. Intrinsic human dignity is essentially God-given. In the second, Aquinas and Augustine add theological complexity and substance to secular discussions of war and peace. Human caring is more than the protection of the sovereign state. A peace that is only the absence of war can disguise many harmful situations. In conclusion, theological discussion brings nuance, richness and depth to secular political debates so long as theologians go beyond simplistic contributions such as ‘God demands’ or ‘The Bible forbids’.     

Blondel,the Philosophy of Action and Liberation Theology

Abstract

Maurice Blondel's philosophy of action and concrete political theology provide foundations for modern theologies of action. By commencing with the reflective subject, Blondel compensates the deficiencies of collectivist Marxist social analysis. He did not live to complete his account of the social, political and economic implications of his philosophy, but they are realized in the work and witness of others: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Yves de Montcheuil, Henri de Lubac and John McNeill. Liberation theologians of diverse persuasions need especially to acknowledge their debt to Blondel in an era when, in Western societies, the fundamental context of action is no longer material but intellectual, spiritual and interpersonal. The abstract nature of his thought means that he frequently opens suggestive paths into further reflection rather than prescribing complete solutions to specific practical questions.     

'Giant Strides' in Documentaries, 'Ascents' in Archaeology: Nautical Archaeology's Relationship with and Place within Popular Culture

This article covers 30 years of the representation of nautical archaeology on television. It criticises and positions current research, then develops an objective methodology for examining television documentaries. The relationships and similarities between television documentaries and academia and the wider professional and amateur discipline is debated. Original research, which argues for a structure that is ever-present in nautical archaeology as in popular culture and academia, is deconstructed, and the implications reviewed. A sequence of images is defined and it is demonstrated that this forms a 'unique selling-point' used by both television and the academic discipline.
© 2008 The Author     

There is Something of One (God): Lacan and Political Theology

Abstract

For both Lacan and Badiou, Plato's Parmenides is a primary locus for the question of the One. Moreover, for both Lacan and Badiou, the One ultimately takes on political valence, as key to the problematics of representation and the discursive conditions of collectivity. However, unlike Badiou, Lacan's exploration of the question of One also passes through theology— through what I am calling "something of One God"— and I want to argue that it is only by bringing the One into explicit relationship with those monotheistic issues that we can fully understand its implications for analytic discourse and political life. Lacan's thinking on the "something of One" takes a necessary swerve back through a theological problematic, and in the process articulates the terms of a political theology, an essential conjunction of political and religious understandings of sovereignty, subjectivity and collectivity.     

Hannah Arendt's Political Theology of Democratic Life

Abstract

In this essay, I explore Hannah Arendt's suggestion that we conceptualize human power and freedom polytheistically if our aim is to understand the challenges and requirements of democratic self-governance. Although it is not clear that politics must always be understood through theological grammars, if it is to be, polytheism affirms that there may be multiple sources of value and of right, offering both a metaphysical counterpart to value pluralism and a vision of how to create political practices and institutions that mirror and honor both the equality and distinction of human beings.     

Responding not Believing: Political Theology and Post-Secular Societyzxht

Abstract

In the past decade social theorists and Continental philosophers have returned again to an engagement with Christianity and the legacy of Christian belief. This is framed in the context of a Europe seen in transition to a post-secular identity and, often implicitly, against what is seen as an encroaching Islamic presence within Europe. This move has often brought together Marxist, post-Marxist, and Catholic-legacy philosophers, together with philosophical Protestants in an attempt to recover what I term a political theology of response. Response, in opposition to belief, signals an alternative post-secular turn of attempted inclusion out of a perceived shared cultural legacy. This essay asks if, in such a cultural-philosophical turn, the alternative post-secular turn of a political theology of response signals that belief remains within the private sphere as we seek to engage in a public conversation of non-believing "response"?     

Children and Print Visual Culture During the Chilean Popular Unity Government

This article analyses the visual figuration of children during the Chilean Popular Unity government (1970–1973) in a diverse archive of photographs, posters, album covers, magazines, and comics. First, it reads the realist representation of children in photography, which emphasises the dramatics of poverty as a form of establishing a photographic “civil contract” (Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 2008). Second, it interprets posters and texts concerning the Allende government’s Plan de Leche (Milk Plan) as an affirmative biopolitics. It concludes by showing that the children on illustrated posters are the idealised version of childhood projected by adults as a way of imagining a coming community.     

大众文学与日本“近代”“国民”

日本大众文学是日本“近代”“民族国家”确立过程中的有机组成部分。日本“近代”大众文学可分为两个时期：第一时期,大正末年到昭和十年（1935）,作家多将时代背景设置在幕府禾期至明治初期,实质是通过文学的方式对近代民族国家的“大日本帝国”的历史的再发现;第二时期,昭和十年至1945年战败,作家大多表达了作为“大日本帝国”国民一员的自豪感和归属感,体现了日本知识阶层的“国民化”,这一时期的《宫本武藏》更被认为是日本国民自我的确认之作。然而,从战时的《宫本武藏》到2010年时代小说《天地明察》的畅销,我们仍能透视出内在的历史连续性。     

On Dittmer's Popular Culture,Geopolitics, and Identity as a classroom resource

In this intervention, four geographers, all of whom have used Jason Dittmer's book, Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity, in their classes, assess its status as a teaching resource. All have had considerable success using Dittmer's book, alongside other resources, to cultivate critical thinking and critical knowledge production in a wide range of classes.     

Towards a Political Theology of Vulnerability Anthropological and Theological Propositions

Abstract

Recent experiences of terror, violence, and catastrophe, such as the terror attacks in Norway in 2011 or the Peshawar School Massacre leaving 132 children and nine staff dead on December 16, 2014, strengthen the sense of the fundamental vulnerability in human existence. In this article, it is argued that political theology, in responding to such experiences, should aim at perceiving and protecting vulnerability as a value. For this purpose, basic propositions for a theological anthropology of vulnerability are put forward. Likewise, propositions for interpreting God as vulnerable are presented, criticizing the traditional theistic concept of God as immutable and hence unable to suffer. The relevance of these propositions for political theology is finally addressed.