CRUX: Spring 2013/Vol. 49, No. 1
Politics and Fatih: Who Will Put Humpty Dumpty Together Again?
613KB ∙ PDF file
The conference theme informing the essays of this Crux issue is "Politics and Faith in a Fractured World." When I was asked to contribute to the conference, I was quite pleased with the theme; after all, it's the kind of theme that allows speakers to say whatever they like on whatever topic they like. Each of the three main words in the title is suitably ambiguous. The first word is "politics." Anybody who has been around knows there's politics everywhere. There's politics in the workplace, there's politics in the church, there's politics in Ottawa. Everything is politics, so it would seem. The second term, "faith," is hardly less vague. It allows one to talk about faith commitments in general, about faith as it is reflected in each of the world's religious traditions, or about the most dearly held convictions that any given individual may hold in today's society. And the third term, too, is open to multiple angles. We live in a fractured world in the sense that we may be torn between family, research, teaching, speaking engagements, and so on. We live in a fractured world considering the at times grotesque social and economic inequalities in our society. The loss of social and cultural cohesion in Western society, something we often associate with the change from modernity to postmodernity, also implies a fractured world. And, as a Christian, I would want to say that the presence of sin since time immemorial means that everyone everywhere lives in a fractured world.
Download
