The Church and the Public Sphere - A Relational Theology of Humanity (Paperback)

This book is about churches in societies in transition, with case studies on South Africa, Mozambique, Brazil and South Korea, and references to Indonesia and the Philippines. Its fulcrum is the momentous historical ‘turning point’ in 1989-90 that signaled the end of the Cold War, the end of ‘real socialism’; and the beginning of ‘neoliberal’ globalism as we now know it. Mixing rich political theory about transitional societies with detailed histories and sensitive attention to the self-understandings of the key religious actors, the essays highlight the conundrums that macro-social changes have brought to the fore for public forms of Christian theology and practice. Frequently significant players in periods of resistance and struggle, churches and other organized forms of religion have subsequently found themselves on the defensive, unsure of their role and place, unable easily to shift the rhetoric and practices that defined their self-understanding in times of resistance to fit the new conditions, with a loss of their sense of identity and of their social leverage, especially in emerging democratic and constitutional orders. This is the context of this set of highly informed, deeply researched and carefully articulated essays. They offer a potent resource for rethinking and resituating a public faith in the contemporary world.