James K.A. Smith Quote
One of the responsibilities of the pastor as political theologian, then, is to help the people of God read the festivals of their own polis, whether the annual militarized Thanksgiving festivals that feature gladiators from Dallas or the rituals of mutual display and haughty purity that suffuse online regions of social justice. Our politics is never merely electoral. The polis doesn’t just rear to life on the first Tuesday of November. Elections are not liturgies; they are events. The politics of the earthly city is carried in a web of rituals strung between one occasional ballot box and the next. Good political theology pierces through this, unveils it—not to help the people of God withdraw but to equip them to be sent into the thick of it.
One of the responsibilities of the pastor as political theologian, then, is to help the people of God read the festivals of their own polis, whether the annual militarized Thanksgiving festivals that feature gladiators from Dallas or the rituals of mutual display and haughty purity that suffuse online regions of social justice. Our politics is never merely electoral. The polis doesn’t just rear to life on the first Tuesday of November. Elections are not liturgies; they are events. The politics of the earthly city is carried in a web of rituals strung between one occasional ballot box and the next. Good political theology pierces through this, unveils it—not to help the people of God withdraw but to equip them to be sent into the thick of it.
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