Marginalisation, Manchester and the Scope of Public Theology

Abstract

Reflections on contemporary national and global change, including its implications for marginalisation, are developed through an appreciation of Manchester as a fulcrum of such processes, and in critical conversation with Ronald Preston's social theology. The reflections also suggest key features of a contemporary public theology. These are elaborated in the second part of the article with references to an emerging substantive public theology agenda through reflections on a bias for inclusivity, the nature of the human, and the procedures for religious interventions in the public square. The article concludes with a brief consideration of Manchester's central role in developing such a public theology, and the latter's emerging character as promoting connections.I t is a privilege to be asked to give a Ferguson Lecture in this University of Manchester, not least because it immediately takes us into important aspects of the marginalisation problematic in terms of the manufacturing, wealth-creating Fergusons and their links to Nonconformity and Manchester. It was a conversation between Engels and a business colleague on Deansgate in the centre of Manchester in the mid-nineteenth century, which necessarily takes that connection further. Commenting on the appalling conditions in many of the mills, Engels was sharply reminded that they also created the wealth of Manchester, and indeed of Britain, and, not least, funded Engels' and Marx's great endeavours in addressing marginalisation through a reformulated political economy.These stories immediately illustrate how I value being located at the heart of north-west England. It is an experience paralleled by Ackroyd's review of Duffy's account of the village of Morebath in

Missional Churches in Secular Societies: Theology Consults Sociology

“…Further, Casanova's deprivatized religion supplies academic public theology with what B. Lonergan designates a 'general category' shared with other disciplines, in distinction from a 'special category' unique to theology. 44 In the image of Jacob's ladder, general categories ascend from human experience seeking understanding, true judgments, and responsible decisions while special categories descend from divine contact with the human. Theology dwells at their meeting mid-way on Jacob's ladder.…”