The State of California has been a trendsetter in radical forms of penal policy and massincarceration in Western societies. As such California's prison state and its governance structures demand careful scrutiny. These governance structures are both formal and informal, manifesting different power structures at play within the system. Any proper theological account of such phenomena needs to reckon not only with these extant structures but also with the incarcerate ecclesia, the prison church. The present article aims to highlight the reality of this community within the California prison settings (with relevance to other penal contexts), a community that is locally supernaturally constituted, inter-racial, spatially transcendent and transformational, displaying the power of the gospel among its participants. In this way, the incarcerated church subversively fulfils the aims of the other formal and informal governance structures, both sanctioned by the State and manifest in prison gangs.
The Covid-19 pandemic presented enormous challenges for secular and religious institutions as well as religion scholars engaged in the critical study of religion. The unique opportunities for scholars of religion include questions about the very nature of our academic work. Inclusive of scholarly research and dissemination, along with the administrative work and service that facilitates this, is academic work to draw from the rich wellspring of the traditions we study and represent, or does it neglect them in the daily affairs of our work? With a particular regional focus, and despite traditional academic disciplinary conventions within the critical study of religion, this article argues that religious traditions and the critical appropriations of their wisdom and ongoing actions provide an important reckoning with the reality of the ever-changing and often terrible conditions in the contemporary world. They provide a critical feature of what it means to cultivate an ecology of ethical responsibility and care.
This article considers the nature of public theology by assessing essential features of western public space and precisely how Christian confession takes shape in those contexts. In doing so the article argues that instead of understanding theology as something done primarily from the church to the world, perhaps it is best acknowledged that theology is done within the setting of common societal structures, in particular locations and in situations where believers are enabled to confess the hope within them. An understanding of this dynamic nature of Christian confession and the variegated expositions of theological reflection corresponds to the dynamic expressions of faith, in word and deed, which correspond to the Christian missionary impulse.
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