Public Theology

Public Theology

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Public Theology
@publictheology.com

A network sketch can help identify gaps in care, but it cannot measure anyone’s worth. Behind every node is a neighbor.

publictheology.comMore than a Dot on a Map: Network, Care, and Public TheologyIn ministry, a connection can mean the difference between someone suffering alone and someone receiving a timely visit, a meal, or a word of encouragement. That is why network analysis interests me. It offers a way to examine relationships while raising a deeper question. What responsibilities come with making those relationships visible? Network analysis is a digital humanities method that studies how people, organizations, or other entities connect. These entities are called “nodes,” and their connections are called “edges.” A congregation’s ministries might be nodes, while referrals, communication, and shared service form the edges. The method can help us ask who connects different groups, where support concentrates, and who might be overlooked. For my network sketch, I propose a congregational care network linking pastoral leadership, the Pastor of Congregational Care and Ministry Services, deacons, bereavement volunteers, greeters, and households. Pastoral leadership connects with the care pastor and deacons; these groups coordinate support with bereavement volunteers. Greeters connect households to the care ministry, while households also connect directly with deacons. These overlapping relationships suggest that care should travel through several pathways. The sketch represents roles rather than naming individuals or revealing private needs. Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters provides a historical example of studying connections. The project uses visualizations to investigate networks of early modern scholarly exchange. Its strength is helping readers see patterns that would be difficult to recognize through individual letters alone. Scholarship emerges as something sustained through relationships across places and time. My critique concerns what such a map can leave invisible. Surviving correspondence does not represent every relationship that mattered. A prominent node may reflect extensive archival preservation as well as influence. People whose letters were lost, whose knowledge circulated orally, or whose work supported celebrated scholars may receive less attention. Absence from a visualization cannot establish absence from history. Brown, Whaanga, and Lewis emphasize relationality, reciprocity, accountability, and Indigenous communities’ authority over their data. Although their chapter addresses artificial intelligence, I take its principles as a challenge to network research: communities should help determine how their relationships and knowledge are represented. Indigenous protocols arise from specific communities and deserve more than being reduced to a generic checklist. Platform choices also carry ethical consequences. In “Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account at Academia.edu,” Sarah Bond argues that the platform’s commercial interests, monetization of scholarship, and status-oriented paid analytics conflict with open scholarly exchange. She identifies nonprofit alternatives, including Humanities Commons. For me, the contrast concerns whether a network serves shared learning or turns scholarly participation into a commercial asset. Yet openness still requires care; Boyles, Petersen, and Jacob explain that even open-source projects can depend on technologies that enable surveillance. Applied to ministry, this means a public care map could unintentionally expose someone’s vulnerability. As a pastor and public theologian, I must seek consent, protect confidentiality, acknowledge overlooked labor, and let participants correct representations of their lives. A network sketch can help identify gaps in care, but it cannot measure anyone’s worth. Behind every node is a neighbor. My responsibility is to ensure that making connections visible helps people receive care with dignity. ## Proposed congregational care network A sketch of communication, referrals, and coordinated support. * **Pastoral Leadership** — Pastor of Congregational Care, Deacons * **Pastor of Congregational Care** — Deacons, Bereavement Volunteers, Greeters * **Deacons** — Bereavement Volunteers, Households * **Greeters** — Households Reading the sketch: each role is a node; each connection is an edge. Connections represent communication and support, not authority or a person’s value. This is a proposed role-based sketch, not a record of private care needs. ## Sources * Bond, Sarah. “Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account at Academia.edu.” _Forbes_ , January 23, 2017. * Boyles, Christina, Andrew Boyles Petersen, and Arun Jacob. “Operationalizing Surveillance Studies in the Digital Humanities.” In _Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023_ , edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press, 2023. * Brown, Michelle Lee, Hēmi Whaanga, and Jason Edward Lewis. “Relation-Oriented AI: Why Indigenous Protocols Matter for the Digital Humanities.” In _Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023_ , edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press, 2023. * Stanford University. _Mapping the Republic of Letters_. Accessed October 24, 2026.
Public Theology
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What appears effortless on a screen may represent hours of intellectual, emotional, and technical work. If digitization is human labor, accessibility expresses care for the humans who encounter that labor.

publictheology.comDigitization Is Never Just a ClickOne important insight I took from Smith and Wheatley’s discussion of the labor of digitization is that digital projects do not simply appear because someone presses a button or scans a document. Digitization is human labor. Someone must select the material, prepare it, scan or transcribe it, describe it through metadata, correct errors, secure permissions, and determine how it will be presented to the public. What appears effortless on a screen may represent hours of intellectual, emotional, and technical work behind the scenes. The digital object, therefore, is never completely neutral. It bears the marks of the people, institutions, resources, and decisions that brought it into view. This insight connects powerfully with Tuskegee Literary Legacies. The project demonstrates that community-engaged public humanities should not merely extract historical materials from a community and place them online. It should invite communities to participate in interpreting, preserving, and sharing their own stories. Tuskegee is not simply a location from which information is collected; it is a living community whose members carry memory, knowledge, and interpretive authority. That distinction matters. A responsible digital project must ask not only, “What can we digitize?” but also, “Whose story is this, who should help tell it, and who benefits from its circulation?” As I began thinking about and writing my Humanities Commons site, I was surprised by how many decisions were hidden inside what seemed like a basic assignment. Choosing a title, organizing pages, selecting images, writing descriptions, and imagining an audience are all interpretive acts. What initially felt inaccessible was the technical language surrounding HTML, CSS, themes, blocks, and web accessibility. Yet I am learning that I do not have to become a professional web developer to create a meaningful digital space. I need to understand enough to make thoughtful and ethical choices. I imagine several audiences reading my site: scholars interested in public theology, students encountering my teaching, clergy seeking practical resources, members of the Black Church, and residents of the communities in which I serve. My portfolio should speak to all of them without assuming everyone has the same academic vocabulary, technological access, or physical abilities. My concrete commitment is to treat accessibility as part of the scholarship, not something added after the site is completed. I will use clear headings, readable fonts, strong color contrast, descriptive links, alternative text for images, and transcripts for audio or video content. I will avoid unnecessary jargon and explain specialized theological language when it is needed. I will also test my pages on a mobile device and invite someone else to navigate the site before I publish it. If digitization is human labor, then accessibility expresses care for the humans who encounter that labor. My goal is not merely to place my work online. It is to create a digital table with enough room and enough access for the academy, the church, and the community to sit together.
Public Theology
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At a Taylor Township hearing on a proposed data center, Matthew Lingafelt asks what Blair County gains, and argues for a community benefits agreement in the Altoona Mirror.

publictheology.comData center should earn its placeIn an op-ed for the _Altoona Mirror_ , Matthew Lingafelt, a PhD student at United Lutheran Seminary researching the ethics and policy of AI and robotics, writes from a packed Taylor Township meeting about the data center Terawatt wants to build there. Residents came to discuss an ordinance amendment meant to protect them, but no one was asking how the community should _benefit_. > Typically, when an industry moves in, people can see what they gain, which is why the good ones last. … And yet when Terawatt seeks to build a data center, we’re left thinking about how to best protect ourselves. Lingafelt points to community benefits agreements in Lancaster and Swatara Township. He argues that asking for one “is not a welcome mat”: the ordinance still needs a greater buffer, a guarantee that the data center carries its own electricity load, and stronger protections against noise and air pollution. “High standards protect the community whether the project comes or not.” Read the full op-ed at the Altoona Mirror
Public Theology
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Change happens to people without their partnership. Transition is something people build together. Most churches right now are living through change.

publictheology.comBetween the parade and the templeThe moments standing in the middle of Palm Sunday’s parade and the overturned tables in the temple are moments our church calendar never names. The crowd has shouted hosanna; the reckoning has not yet come. I’ve spent my ministry standing in that moment: at bedsides as a death doula, on a crisis line with the Trevor project, in coaching conversations about vocation, and through 21 years in the Navy. I have returned to United Lutheran Seminary to give it a name. My conviction is simple. Change happens to people without their partnership. Transition is something people build together. Most churches right now are living through change. Geographer Michael Broadway notes that weekly worship attendance nationally has fallen from 42 to 30% in two decades, and that median attendance in ELCA congregations dropped from 100 to 60 between 2000 and 2019. Tracing mergers and closers across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula back to 1966, he treats them as inevitable. I want to argue otherwise, and not about the numbers. Many churches have become rural in a deeper sense: they have pulled inward beneath what sociologist Peter Berger calls a sacred canopy, whether they sit on a country road or downtown. Geography is not what decides their future. Posture is: scarcity or abundance. And much of the help on offer, one fix for every church or fear sold as a product, takes away the very agency a congregation needs to discern what it wants to become. So this blog will look at churches as networks of trust. In digital humanities, a network is people or things (nodes) joined by relationships (edges). The sketch above draws 1 congregation twice. On the left, scarcity: a tight cluster that talks mostly to itself beneath the barrier while a ready made fix presses in. On the right, the same people keep every tie they had and begin building new ones with neighbors as trust allows. Some are formed; Some are still forming; Some neighbors have not yet Ben met and the invitation remains available. Diagrams and maps like this can mislead. Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters project charts thousands of enlightenment letters, but it cannot say what any tie meant, or who owed what to whom, the relational knowledge Brown, Whaanga, and Lewis insist on. A churches claim of “everyone is welcome” counts nodes. The Mama Bears, a community of mothers of LGBTQIA2S+ children, asks about edges instead: who may lead, whose weddings happen, whose names are used. ReconcilingWork’s Reconciling in Christ journey asks the same questions, and calls itself a journey begun from its “own unique context”, not a checklist. Expect posts on transition and trust; On queer inclusion, disability justice, and cultural justice; on what church records keep and miss; And on neighbors who, like Cornelius for Peter, turn out to be where God already was. This blog lives in two places on purpose, Humanities Commons and PublicTheology.com. Sarah bond warns that academia.edu, a for profit with an Edu name, profits from scholars who fill it. A nonprofit Commons answers to the people who use it, and I want this work to live where people are not the product. You do not need to tell me who you are to be part of this. Read quietly, or answer one of these in the comments: Where has your church been a protest march, and where a temple? Who has shown you God’s image where you did not expect it? I will listen before I build. We do not have to have arrived to be on the way together.
Public Theology
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publictheology.comNetworking and Responsibility in Digital HumanitiesNetworking and Responsibility in Digital Humanities First’/’ it is important to understand what a network is. A network consists of people or other entities and the relationships connecting them. Digital technologies help us explore these relationships and share knowledge. However’/’ participation in a network also requires us to consider power and responsibility. Digital scholarship should therefore give careful attention to how we connect with others and represent their experiences. Network analysis is a method for studying connections among people’/’ institutions’/’ texts’/’ or places. These entities are called “nodes’/‘” while their connections are called “edges.” This method helps us examine how knowledge’/’ resources’/’ and influence move through relationships. For example, professors and students can be nodes’/’ while teaching’/’ guidance’/’ and shared learning form their edges. Similarly’/’ pastors and congregations can be nodes connected through spiritual support’/’ care’/’ and participation. Although their roles and resources differ’/’ each participant can contribute to knowledge production. Mapping the Republic of Letters provides an example of exploring scholarly relationships through correspondence. It helps readers understand connections among scholars and the circulation of ideas. However’/’ surviving letters offer only a partial picture. Knowledge shared orally’/’ contributions by unnamed people’/’ and records that were lost may remain invisible. Their absence does not mean they were unimportant. We should therefore avoid treating the most visible people as the only significant producers of knowledge. Brown’/’ Whaanga’/’ and Lewis’s discussion of Indigenous relational protocols reminds me that relationships should not be treated simply as data to collect. They carry cultural meanings and responsibilities. Their discussion encourages me to ask whose authority shapes the interpretation of knowledge. If scholars ignore community understanding, digital scholarship may reinforce colonial power by allowing powerful institutions to define the meaning of other people’s experiences. Bond’s critique of _Academia.edu_ also encourages careful attention to scholarly networking. A platform may appear to serve the public through easy access and connection while pursuing commercial benefits. We should ask who benefits from sharing scholarly work and how participants’ contributions are used. Finally, from my public theology perspective, people represented as nodes are more than sources of information. I carry responsibilities of care, honesty, and respect toward them. Making their relationships visible may create risks, especially for vulnerable communities. Therefore, I need to listen to those represented, seek their consent, and share authority over interpretation. Responsible digital scholarship should create space for people to speak for themselves and help decide how their knowledge becomes public.
Public Theology
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publictheology.comTitle: Digital Humanities as Public Ministry: Reimagining Formation Beyond Christian HegemonyDigital Humanities (DH) is often framed as a technical field — data, metadata, platforms, tools. But for those of us doing public ministry, DH is not simply a method. It is a **site of theological struggle** , a place where power, narrative, and community collide. When we bring DH into the DMin classroom, we are not teaching pastors how to “use technology.” We are teaching them how to **see the digital as a contested theological landscape**. Christian hegemony has shaped the digital world just as deeply as it has shaped our pulpits, seminaries, and denominational structures. The platforms we rely on — from search engines to social media to academic repositories — encode assumptions about authority, neutrality, and “the center.” DH gives us tools to expose those assumptions, to map them, and to imagine alternatives. In my own work, I turn to DH not as a novelty but as a **decolonial practice**. Network graphs become ways of visualizing whose voices dominate theological discourse — and whose voices are systematically excluded. Metadata becomes a theological question: _Who gets named? Who gets tagged? Who gets archived?_ Public-facing DH projects become pastoral interventions, creating space for communities to narrate themselves rather than be narrated by dominant traditions. For DMin students, this work is transformative. They begin to see that public ministry is not only preaching and teaching — it is **curating, interpreting, and challenging the digital ecosystems that shape their congregations’ imaginations**. DH becomes a way to practice liberation theology in real time: naming power, disrupting hierarchy, and building alternative networks of meaning. A DH-informed public theology refuses to accept the digital world as neutral. It insists that formation happens everywhere — in the feed, in the archive, in the algorithm. And it equips leaders to intervene with courage, creativity, and theological depth. This is the work of resisting Christian hegemony. This is the work of public ministry. This is the work DH makes possible.
Public Theology
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publictheology.comHumanities Coding in the Information AgeCoding has been consistently present in my life, particularly early on. In elementary school, my classmates and I programmed LOGOS turtles to move around a screen. I have written the traditional “Hello World!” introduction code in multiple computer languages. I copied video game code out of magazines to build fighting games or create programs to play music that I keyed in. In my junior year of college, I wrote a program to simulate the chaotic system of the driven, damped, pendulum, cranking through numerical solutions of differential equations. In graduate school, I routinely used Matlab code to analyze audio signals. As my kids grew up, I introduced them to platforms like Scratch where they could begin their own projects. One of those kids is now a software engineer. For me, coding has always been connected to the scientific endeavor, running calculations, digital signal processes, or other such work. Whether it is hubris or subject blindness, I will confess that website development hardly counted as coding in my eyes. It always felt perhaps more like a craft project people used to show off the sweaters they made for their cats. This misguided notion of mine was formed in the age of people pimping out their Myspace and geocities pages. In the development of an inherently online existence, coding is far more important in web design for engagement to be sure, but ever more the real power lay in one’s ability to access information. The access to information is one of the most powerful currencies in this information age. While companies and corporations want people to be able to access information in order to maximize their profit, projects that seek to inform and edify others for their own sake, are vital partners in the work toward such goals as the common good, solidarity and justice. These projects need solid coding to offer information as well as be able to create space for people to share what they know. This understanding is especially important in the humanities, as evidenced by the _Painting On Walls_ project. Erin Benay describes the project in her case study “Art History and Action In The Rust Belt.”[[1]](#_edn1) Benay worked in the Cleveland area, as what she called an “engaged art historian.”[^2] Cleveland, like many other Rust Belt cities that suffered decline with the crumbling of the steel industry, had a robust mural tradition. Abandoned buildings make excellent canvasses for murals, after all. Benay started a service learning course at Case Western Reserve University, in collaboration with LAND Studio’s Inter|Urban project, where students learned the history of murals and do something with that knowledge that went beyond traditional class work. Benay wrote, “I wondered how we might connect the longer history of mural painting with the more recent trajectories of urban development and public art-making that regularly appeared in Cleveland news. Even more significantly, I was curious to see if it was possible for students of art history to _do_ something with this knowledge, rather than to simply regurgitate it in neatly conceived seminar papers.”[^3] As the course progressed and students documented and learned about the murals, it became evident that passersby engaged the public art visually. That each of the murals was based on Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards went largely unknown. Students in the course wanted to provide access to background material and context for the murals. The murals could move beyond an object of visual engagement and offer something more. To accomplish this end, the students created informational text about murals and placed them in train and bus platforms. Additionally, they created QR codes that offered greater information about the art. Benay wrote, “Developing a better mobile app and more sophisticated digital mapping interface for Inter|Urban would, students believed, allow this content to be more accessible to the very underrepresented populations that the texts seek to address.” [^4] Among all of the art history, coding underlined the work that took the information to the people of Cleveland giving a broader view of the people who lived in the city. This work of coding moved this project beyond a class assignment and connected folks outside of academia. * * * [^2]: Benay, p. 96 [^3]: Benay, p.99 [^4]:Benay, p. 105 * * * 1. Benay, Erin, “Art History and Action in the Rust Belt” _The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship_. Routledge. 2024 ↩︎
Public Theology
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publictheology.comWhose Public? Which Theology?: On What We Mean by Public TheologyWhose public do we mean when we say public theology? Which theology? I will argue that public theology is theology done in public, for the public, and answerable to the public; that it matters now because the public itself is in trouble; and that it is at its best when it is inclusive, interreligious, and ecumenical. We can either lament what lacks or we can create what we wish to see in the world. Therefore, I will also make the case for publictheology.com and Ebenezer: A Journal of Public Theology as a digital public spheres. ## What is public theology? The term has a birthday. Martin Marty coined “public theology” in 1974 to distinguish the work of theologians from the “civil religion” Robert Bellah had described, a national faith that borrowed religious symbols while belonging to no tradition (Kim and Day, _A Companion to Public Theology_ , 2017). David Tracy gave the term its structure in _The Analogical Imagination_ (1981): every theologian addresses three publics, the academy, the church, and the wider society. Most theology speaks to the first two and forgets the third; public theology remembers. E. Harold Breitenberg Jr., surveying the field in 2003, found enough consensus to offer a working definition: “theologically informed public discourse about public issues, addressed to the church, synagogue, mosque, temple or other religious body, as well as the larger public or publics, argued in ways that can be evaluated and judged by publicly available warrants and criteria.” I take that definition as my own, with one gloss. Ronald Thiemann (_Constructing a Public Theology_ , 1991) worried that Tracy’s demand for warrants acceptable to “all rational persons” would strip theology of its particular convictions before it ever reached the square. Following Thiemann, I argue that public theology does not translate itself into neutral speech; it speaks from a tradition, in terms a neighbor can contest. ## Why it matters now Public theology matters today because the public is in trouble, and theology is implicated in the trouble. Christian nationalism in the United States is a public theology; so is the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, which still sits in federal Indian law (_Johnson v. M’Intosh_ , 1823, remains good law) and still shapes who counts as a people with rights to land. Theology never left public life; it stopped being argued there and started being asserted. The lacuna is not between religion and politics; the lacuna is between assertion and argument. When theology is only asserted, the public shrinks to whoever already agrees. When theology is argued, with reasons that can be weighed by those outside the tradition, the public widens. Public theology is the practice of widening. Kim and Day describe public theology as “theology for others and done with others,” and they name dialogue (self-critique, transparency, accountability) as one of its defining marks. A theology of domination fails every one of those tests, and secular argument alone will not answer it. It must be answered theologically, in the open, by people who know the texts. ## At its best: inclusive, interreligious, ecumenical Public theology is at its best when it is inclusive, interreligious, and ecumenical, and the three terms are not synonyms. Inclusive means that the “public” in public theology is the whole public, not the churched public. Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas (“Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 1990) applies with full force: a single bourgeois public sphere has always excluded women, the enslaved, the colonized, and the poor, and the excluded have built counterpublics of their own. Benjamín Valentín (_Mapping Public Theology_ , 2002) takes up Fraser’s “subaltern counterpublic” to connect Latino/a and liberation theologies to a broader public project; Rosemary Carbine and Jennifer Baldwin do similar work from feminist and activist locations. A public theology that cannot hear the counterpublics is a parochial theology with good branding. Interreligious means that the public is multireligious, and the theology must be too. Breitenberg’s definition already names the synagogue, mosque, and temple. The questions that matter (land, water, war, the dignity of persons, what we owe the dead and the unborn) are not Christian questions. They are human questions on which Haudenosaunee thinkers, Muslim jurists, Jewish ethicists, and Buddhist teachers have said things the rest of us need to hear. A cosmovision (Philip P. Arnold’s term) is a whole account of how the world hangs together, and one tradition’s account is never the only one in the room. Ecumenical means that within Christianity the conversation crosses the lines denominations draw. The _T &T Clark Handbook of Public Theology_ (2022) devotes a full section to “the ecumenical scope of public theology” because the Catholic, the Lutheran, the Baptist, and the Pentecostal are arguing about the same public even when they are not talking to each other. A public theology that speaks for one confession is a confessional theology that has wandered outdoors. ## Capacious and creative Against those who would police the field, I affirm that public theology is capacious and creative. Hübenthal and Alpers observe that since 1974 the discipline has moved in a “centrifugal rather than centripetal direction.” Good. Capacious means there is room for the systematic theologian and the organizer, the legal scholar and the poet, the preacher and the podcaster. The form of the work is not what makes it public theology; the address is. Creative means the public changes and the theology must keep up. A public theology of 1974 took the newspaper and the pulpit as its venues; a public theology of 2026 must take the feed, the stream, and the group chat as seriously as any pulpit. In “America,” popular culture is not an illustration of public theology; it is where most public theology happens, and the scholar who ignores it ignores the primary source. ## Holding space for a digital public sphere Jürgen Habermas, in _The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere_ (1962; English 1989), located the modern public sphere in the coffeehouses, salons, and periodicals of the eighteenth century, where private persons reasoned together and where, at least in principle, the better argument rather than the higher rank carried the day. Habermas was writing an elegy; he thought mass media had colonized that sphere. He was not wrong, and he could not have imagined what came next. publictheology.com and Ebenezer: A Journal of Public Theology are an attempt to hold space for a digital coffeehouse, with Fraser’s corrections built in. The blog is the periodical: short, timely, argued, open to reply. The journal is the slower conversation: peer reviewed, open access, and committed to the idea that argument about public life should itself be public rather than paywalled. Neither is a pulpit. Both are tables. The criterion for a seat is not confession but the willingness to give reasons and to hear them. Such an ambition is modest and, at present, rare. Whose public? Everyone’s. Which theology? Those commited to love, justice, inclusion, and the work of the prophetic. Gather round.
Public Theology
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publictheology.comWelcome to Public TheologyPublic Theology opens today. Martin Marty coined the term in 1974 to mark the difference between theology done in public and the “civil religion” that borrows religious symbols while belonging to no tradition; David Tracy later named the three publics every theologian addresses: the academy, the church, and the wider society. Most theology speaks to the first two and forgets the third. This publication exists for the third. We publish three kinds of things. Public theology, meaning argued writing about how faith shows up in public life (in law, in markets, in schools, on screens, on the land). Public witness, meaning the testimony of people who do that work in their own communities and who rarely get the platform the loudest voices enjoy. Shared resources, meaning syllabi, bibliographies, and tools, added as they prove useful rather than on a schedule. Two commitments shape what appears here. First, public theology is at its best when it is inclusive, interreligious, and ecumenical; the synagogue, mosque, and temple belong at the table alongside the church, and the Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, and Pentecostal are arguing about the same public whether or not they talk to each other. Second, argument about public life should itself be public. The blog is the quick conversation; journal.publictheology.com is the slower, peer-reviewed, open-access one. Neither is a pulpit. Both are tables. All are welcome whether you are baptized or not, believe a little or a lot, or not at all. There is not much here yet, and the emptiness is on purpose. The RSS feed is the way to subscribe; you can also find us on X, Facebook, and Instagram. Welcome.
Public Theology
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publictheology.comTheologians Without Passports: Towards a Cosmopolitan Public TheologyWhose land do you live on, and whose neighbor are you? I will argue that public theology, if it is to be inclusive and interreligious rather than merely tolerant, needs a cosmopolitan grammar, and that Namsoon Kang supplies the best one we have. I will make the case by reading Kang’s “Toward a Cosmopolitan Theology: Constructing Public Theology from the Future” (in _Planetary Loves_ , 2011) through two fellow travelers she names, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Jacques Derrida, and by showing where each adds something to her account. ## Kang: public theology from the future Kang’s argument is that cosmopolitan theology is “a new form of public theology.” The phrase matters. She does not offer cosmopolitanism as a branch of ethics or a mood of world citizenship; she offers it as a way of doing theology in public, and she grounds it in a double diagnosis. On one side, our context of “cross-cultural interaction and multiple-layered identities” calls for a theology that moves across boundaries without diminishing the particular identities people actually live in. On the other, we live amid “unprecedented inequality between nations, regions and people,” which calls for a theology that crosses borders in order to practice “impartial neighborly love” and to stand with those on the margins. Cosmopolitan theology holds both: it is boundary crossing and it is partisan for the oppressed. From that diagnosis Kang develops five commitments. 1) Trans-identity: a move from the politics of single identity to “multiple solidarities across various identities,” without abandoning the attachments one holds dear. 2) Radical affirmation of the other, which she glosses as radical neighborly love for the racialized, gendered, sexualized, religious, and ethnic other. 3) Trans-religious solidarity, grounded in an ethic of transformation rather than an ethic of balance. 4) Counter-empire, a scrutiny of hegemony that includes “our own abuses of power,” not only the abuses of others. 5) Boundary-transcending solidarity, a planetary solidarity for “all living beings.” The third commitment is where Kang earns her keep for public theology. Traditional interreligious dialogue, she argues, has rested on “an ethics of tolerance.” Tolerance eases antagonism between religions, which is a real good (I do not want to be glib about it). It also leaves untouched “the very fundamental issues of injustice that each of our religions has practiced and perpetuated,” and it typically neglects gender justice, sexuality, the theological construction of the other, violence, and the cooption of religion by empire. Kang wants dialogue to become a process of “re-visiting, re-challenging, and re-constructing the very foundations of each religious discourse” from the standpoint of justice as it lands on ordinary lives. The theologian who does this work is, in her memorable figure, a “theologian without a passport.” Such a theologian names their identities as present without treating them as the final word on who they are, and “intentionally dissociates” from any discourse that files a person into a stereotypical box. ## Appiah: universality plus difference Kwame Anthony Appiah’s _Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers_ (2006) gives Kang’s first commitment a philosophical spine. Appiah’s formula is “universality plus difference”: we owe obligations to every human being, and we take seriously the particular lives, practices, and beliefs that give those human beings their meaning. He calls the cosmopolitan a “partial cosmopolitan,” one who refuses the choice between rootless universalism and defensive localism. Kang’s trans-identity is this partiality rendered theologically; her refusal to make people abandon their attachments is Appiah’s refusal to make the cosmopolitan homeless. Appiah adds one thing Kang’s account needs. He insists that cosmopolitan conversation does not require agreement on first principles. People live together, he observes, long before they agree about why; we can share practices and judgments while our justifications differ. For an interreligious public theology this observation is liberating. The Haudenosaunee, the Lutheran, and the Muslim need not resolve their cosmovisions before working together against a pipeline or a deportation. The conversation (Appiah’s preferred word) is the practice, not a preliminary to it. Where Appiah falls short of Kang is in the fourth commitment: his cosmopolitanism is light on empire. Kang’s counter-empire supplies what Appiah’s genial universalism leaves out, namely that the strangers in his title are often strangers because someone’s border made them so. ## Derrida: hospitality and the aporia Derrida takes the border itself as his object. In _On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness_ (2001) he recovers the medieval “cities of refuge” and asks what an unconditional hospitality would look like: a welcome offered to the arrivant before any question of name, papers, or passport. He knows the answer. Unconditional hospitality is impossible as policy, because every actual city has laws, and laws condition. Yet the conditional hospitality of visas and quotas is only intelligible against the unconditional demand it betrays. Hospitality is aporetic; one must act within the aporia rather than resolve it. Kang’s “theologian without a passport” is a Derridean figure whether or not she flags it. The passport is the conditioning document par excellence; to set it aside, even provisionally, is to practice the unconditional within the conditional. Derrida also sharpens Kang’s second commitment. Radical affirmation of the other is not a warm feeling; it is a structural impossibility that must be attempted anyway, and the attempt is where ethics lives. In this way Derrida keeps cosmopolitan theology from becoming a program. It remains a practice of the impossible, which is what a theology of neighborly love has always been. ## What a cosmopolitan public theology asks of us Following Kang, and extending her with Appiah and Derrida, I argue that a cosmopolitan public theology makes three demands on a publication like this one. First, it must hold particular traditions and planetary obligation together rather than trading one for the other; the writer who speaks only from the tradition is parochial, and the writer who speaks from nowhere is a tourist. Second, it must move interreligious work past tolerance toward mutual critique, which means letting the Muslim jurist name the Christian history of sin and letting the Christian name her own. Third, it must count empire, including the empire that still sits in the law of the land where most of us read these words. Kang ends with a line from Paul Celan: _Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin_ (I am you, when I am I). The chiasmus is the whole argument. I become capable of you only when I am most fully myself, and I am most fully myself only in the crossing. A public theology worth the name will carry no passport, and it will still know where it is from.
Public Theology
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publictheology.comProfessors Without Passports: A Cosmopolitan Public Theological PedagogyIn the last post I argued, following Namsoon Kang, that public theology needs a cosmopolitan grammar. Here I take the argument into the classroom. I will argue that a cosmopolitan public theology requires a cosmopolitan pedagogy, and that such a pedagogy proceeds by dis-location: it unsettles the vertical classroom, it makes the professor a theologian without a passport, and it treats student knowledge as a public rather than an audience. I make the case with Kang again at the center, with Kwame Anthony Appiah and Jacques Derrida alongside, and with Paulo Freire and Denise Taliaferro Baszile as the pedagogical interlocutors they need. ## The vertical classroom The classroom has traditionally been imagined as a vertically integrated space. Knowledge is made elsewhere (the archive, the laboratory, the seminar table) and carried down to students, who receive it. Freire named the model half a century ago: the professor as banker, depositing content into accounts that passively accept it (_Pedagogy of the Oppressed_ , 1970). Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s term for the structure the banking model serves is kyriarchy, the interlocking rule of lord over servant, male over female, colonizer over colonized, one that no single axis of identity exhausts. The vertical classroom is kyriarchal not because any individual professor is a tyrant but because the architecture assumes that knowledge flows one way and that the person at the lectern is its source. A public theology that criticizes domination in the square while reproducing it in the seminar room has a credibility problem. Kang’s fourth commitment, counter-empire, asks us to scrutinize “our own abuses of power,” not only those of others. The classroom is where theologians hold the most power with the least scrutiny. ## Dis-location, or being out of place Kang’s cosmopolitan theology moves “across boundaries without diminishing the relevance and value of particular identities.” Translated into pedagogy, I call this dis-location: a deliberate practice of being out of place. Three sources converge here. Transnational feminism supplies the insight that identities are hybrid and liminal, lived along axes (gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, religion) that rarely line up. Queer theory supplies the suspicion that “the normal” in any institution is an achievement of power rather than a fact of nature, and that knowledge production itself can be queered. Kang supplies the theological warrant: the one who is “from everywhere and from nowhere” is not rootless but trans-identified, holding multiple solidarities at once. Appiah keeps dis-location honest. His “partial cosmopolitan” refuses both the view from nowhere and the retreat into the local; his formula is universality plus difference. A dis-located classroom therefore does not pretend the professor has no location. It names the location (my own: a white, Christian, settler scholar teaching on Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous lands) and then declines to let that location be the final word. Appiah’s further observation, that people live together long before they agree about why, is a pedagogical principle in disguise. Students need not share first principles to share a practice of inquiry. The conversation is the course. ## The professor without a passport Kang’s figure of the “theologian without a passport” becomes, in the classroom, the professor without a passport. A passport is the document that conditions welcome: it says who may enter, for how long, and on what terms. The syllabus is a passport. So is the rubric, the canon, the register of acceptable prose, and the unspoken knowledge of which questions are “really” theological. Derrida’s analysis of hospitality (_Of Hospitality_ , 2000; _On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness_ , 2001) names the aporia precisely: unconditional hospitality is impossible as policy, because every institution has conditions, yet the conditional welcome of the actual classroom is only intelligible against the unconditional demand it betrays. The professor without a passport works within that aporia rather than resolving it. In practice this means several things. The professor dissociates, as Kang puts it, from any discourse that files a student into a stereotypical box (the “diversity” student, the “conservative” student, the student who is “not a strong writer”). The professor treats the arrivant, the student whose question does not fit, as the one who may reorganize the course rather than the one who has misunderstood it. The professor keeps conditions (there are deadlines; there is a canon to be read before it is argued with) but holds them as conditions, revisable and owned, not as nature. ## Student knowledge as a public Public theology, in Tracy’s formulation, addresses three publics: the academy, the church, and society. A cosmopolitan pedagogy adds that the classroom is itself a public and that students are not its audience but its members. Kang’s trans-religious solidarity rests on “an ethic of transformation” rather than an ethic of balance; dialogue should revisit and reconstruct the foundations of each participant’s discourse. The classroom version is a set of transgressive practices that revalue who gets to make knowledge: counterstories (Baszile’s term for narratives that talk back to the majoritarian account), captured notes that circulate student thinking as course text, multiple modes of speaking (the paper, the thread, the podcast segment, the sermon), and the integration of praxis with theory so that the field placement and the seminar are one conversation rather than two. None of these practices is novel on its own. What makes them cosmopolitan public theology is the end they serve. Kang’s fifth commitment, boundary-transcending solidarity for “all living beings,” means the classroom is not training students to join a guild; it is forming theologians who can cross borders in order to practice neighborly love and to stand with those on the margins. Counterstories are how the margins enter the room. ## What this asks of us Following Kang, and extending her with Appiah and Derrida, I argue that a cosmopolitan public theological pedagogy asks three things. First, name the location and then dis-locate it: the professor speaks from somewhere and refuses to make that somewhere the measure of all knowledge. Second, hold the conditions of the classroom as conditions: keep the passport in a drawer, know it is there, and be willing to let the arrivant rewrite it. Third, treat student knowledge as public theology in its own right, which means the counterstory is primary source, not anecdote. Whose land does your classroom sit on? Which identities does your syllabus privilege and which does it exclude? A public theology that cannot answer those questions at home has no business asking them in the square.
Public Theology
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publictheology.comWhich Passport Do You Travel Under?: Toward a Borderless Public TheologyIn November 2013 I sat in a convention center in Busan, South Korea, at the Tenth Assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC), praying for the “visible unity” of the church while my own country built a wall along its southern border and kept Indigenous nations on reservations. Which side was I on? To whom did I pledge allegiance? Which passport did I travel under? Those questions became a paper for the Global Ecumenical Theological Institute, “Theologians Without Borders,” and they are the questions I want to bring to public theology here. I will argue that a public theology worth the name must be borderless: it must refuse the nation-state as its organizing frame, start from difference rather than unity, and treat the border itself as a theological problem. I make the case through my experience in Busan, Namsoon Kang’s “ecumenical taboo,” and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “new culturalist alibi.” ## The nation-state at the ecumenical table The WCC describes itself as a space for “breaking down barriers between people.” In Busan I watched barriers reassert themselves in the gentlest possible way. The host committee’s cultural plenary told the history of Korea through the violence it suffered under China and Japan; those were the only mentions of China or Japan in any plenary, though Chinese and Japanese churches sat in the hall. The China Christian Council’s response ran in the assembly newspaper in simplified Chinese only. The Korean prime minister delivered the customary head-of-state welcome. None of this was malicious, and I do not single out Korea; the pattern repeats wherever Christians gather internationally. The point is structural. The first question at any such gathering is “where are you from?” (often followed by “where are you from originally?” when the answer does not match the questioner’s racial expectations), and the answer files a person under a flag before it files them under a confession or a cosmovision. Christianity’s great gift, as I understood it then and understand it now, is its capacity to bring people together across the boundaries of the nation-state. Yet the Peace Train that was meant to carry the assembly’s hope for Korean reunification could not cross the thirty-eighth parallel, and the Christ at the Checkpoint conference my GETI colleague Munther Isaac helped organize takes its name from a wall. Where is the prophetic witness of the church when it succumbs to the nation-state? Public theology inherits that question, because public theology addresses “society,” and in practice society is almost always imagined as a national society. A public theology that takes the nation as its public has already conceded the border. ## Unity conceals difference The language of “visible unity” has a second cost. Unity tends to be found by locating a truth claim everyone can affirm, then distilling it until it is inert. Peace, justice, and reconciliation become, as Derrida warned, signifiers without referents; each party signs the document and assigns the words different content. The Lima text on Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry brought real convergence and still names the differences that remain. Unity imposed from above is imperial and yields no true consensus, and it does not work at all for interreligious dialogue, where no shared theological concept is available to unify around. Following Luce Irigaray, I proposed in 2014 that ecumenical work start from difference, and I make the same proposal now for public theology. Difference affirms the singular plurality of persons; it treats the ways sex, gender, race, class, and place shape our thought as a frame for thinking through problems rather than a problem to be overcome. Consensus built from difference is slow. It is also the only consensus that holds, because people’s theologies and practices are the starting point of the work rather than what must be bracketed to reach a universal. ## The ecumenical taboo and the culturalist alibi Kang names the mechanism by which unity does its concealing. The “ecumenical taboo” is the unwritten rule that topics may be engaged only at their most banal level and that critique and disagreement must be tabled to preserve the idea of unity. Tolerance has achieved real goods; Kang does not deny it and neither do I. But the taboo keeps the legacies of injustice off the agenda, and public theology, which exists to put injustice on the agenda, cannot operate under it. Kang’s remedy is a shift from “as-a-discourse” (speaking as a woman, as a Korean, as a Baptist, in an ever longer list of markers) to “with-discourse,” a politics of solidarity that is rooted in race and class and attentive to how they mingle with sex, sexuality, and the rest. Spivak supplies the warning that keeps difference honest. The “new culturalist alibi” insists on the continuity of a native tradition untouched by the West and thereby “legitimizes the very thing it claims to combat.” Difference fetishized becomes an alibi: a reason to refuse engagement, a license to let sexism or homophobia pass as culture. The alibi also preserves a paternalism in which the West plays progressive while “the rest” plays authentic. Edward Said made the same point from another direction; no one is just one label, and to reduce a person to one is to reproduce the logic of empire. Borderless public theology therefore walks a narrow path. It affirms difference against unity and refuses the alibi that difference can become. ## Theology without borders, theologians without passports Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes of a “feminism without borders” that attends to “the simultaneous plurality and narrowness of borders and the emancipatory potential of crossing through, with, and over these borders in our everyday lives.” I want a public theology without borders in the same sense. Borders divide and wound; they are also, as Mohanty insists, real, and the task is to think through them rather than wish them away. The partition of the Indian subcontinent, the thirty-eighth parallel, the wall at the checkpoint, the lines that divide Indigenous nations across what is now the US–Canada border. Each makes the invisible visible on the land and on bodies; each is a theological datum as well as a political one. The theologian who does this work travels without a passport, in Kang’s figure, which is to say the theologian names their location and declines to let it be the last word. Mine is specific: a Baptist formed by the Wesleyan-Holiness and peace church traditions, a US citizen, a scholar on Haudenosaunee land. I cannot shed any of that, and I should not try. What I can do is refuse to let the flag organize the conversation. Sara Ahmed observes that we only know which way to turn once we know which way we are facing. Borderless public theology faces the other, body to body, across whatever line has been drawn between us, and asks what the two of us can do from there. Perhaps the most important part of public theology, as of ecumenical theology, is disorientation.
Public Theology
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publictheology.comNetworking Across the Brokenness**What might a quick sketch of my personal network of relationships and connections in the broken global Body of Christ look like?** While my extended family represents many denominations, I pastor in a local United Methodist Church in the USA while serving with neighbors in our town’s ecumenical council of churches. I also presently study in a Lutheran Seminary. When I start sketching the relationships and nodes, I quickly see the mounting complexities and crisscrossing of our historical and theological connections. It’s always encouraged me that **my tradition started as a network of people from multiple denominations.** In the 1720s a couple of Anglican brothers at Oxford were cultivating a small ecumenical gathering to grow in grace and for “watching over one another in love.”[1] Calvinists, Moravians, and more joined those Anglicans tenaciously holding one another accountable regarding their discipleship and active involvement in Christ’s Body and work in the world. So tenacious, in fact, they were soon mocked for their “methods” and their “Holy Club.”[2] Across the Atlantic from that first ecumenical network of “methodists,” **Methodism was institutionalized as a denomination** in 1784. But like so many in the ongoing saga of the Body of Christ across history, America’s “Methodist Episcopal Church” developed it’s own history of fractures too. New to the world of digital network diagramming, **I come curious to explore ways the broken global Body of Christ could look representing us digitally across our history and divisions.** There are a variety of graphic digital projects online that venture into this diagramming. I see straightforward charts like the “Christian Denominations Tree” from Scrollchart to narrated and interpretive mapping such as Christian Johnson’s Prezi “Mapping Denominational Splits in Christianity.” While exposing our broken Body, these examples demonstrate how easily we can flatten the nuances of the conflicts that have lead to the exponential divisions. In fact, neither makes the radical splintering graphically explicit. However, the Scrollchart piece has a subtle but significant note near the bottom: “~45,000 denominations exist today.”[3] **Mapping that messiness could help us begin wrestling with what this brokenness must look like to heaven’s eyes.** CS Lewis said, > _“If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing–rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.”_[4] The rapidly increasing division and separations within the Body of Christ would likely map as a terrible converse, perhaps an _upside down_ tree. But capturing the roiling historical conflicts and politicization, network diagramming has a potential for actualizing a sense of the dynamic motion of fragmentation while at the same time maintaining the reality of our connection to Christ. More digital network analysis may lend language and concepts that can prompt us to take on better work between the nodes, on the edges, even substantial relationship work where we are. **Technology and AI cannot replace the relational work we must learn to attend across this broken Body.** But even these tools are birthing conversations that can help us with better incarnational work on the ground across our differences. For example, notice some of the magnanimous language and practices born from recent “Indigenous Protocol and AI (IP-AI) Workshops. Guidelines include * Systems of engagement are designed in partnership with specific communities * There is a circle of relationality and reciprocity when communities are engaged * A primary concern for responsibility to one’s community is honored * There is an ongoing respect and support for traditional understandings of trust and care[5] While these guidelines are meant to shape AI systems’ engaging with indigenous communities, they articulate powerful ethical approaches to which we can aspire to embody as we network across the edges and between the nodes of our fractured Body of Christ. ## Endnotes * * * 1. Ashley Boggan and Christ Heckert, _Calling on Fire : Reclaiming the Method of Methodism_ (Abingdon, 2025). 38. ↩︎ 2. Ibid., xvii. ↩︎ 3. “(Pew / Center for Study of Global Christianity estimate). Eastern Orthodox: ~260M. Catholic: ~1.3B. Protestant: ~900M.” https://scrollchart.com/diagram/christian-denominations ↩︎ 4. C.S. Lewis, _Mere Christianity_ (Macmillan, 1967). 156. ↩︎ 5. Michelle Lee Brown, Hemi Whaanga, and Jason Edward Lewis, “Relation Oriented AI: Why Indigenous Protocols Matter for the Digital Humanities” in Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, ed., _Debates in the Digital Humanities_ (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2023).78-80. ↩︎

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