From the Barth Center to you, we hope you had a Merry Christmas!
It amazes me how quickly time flies… in just a few days, we will be in a new year (2024)! As we prepare for the new year, here are a few pieces that we hope can bring encouragement and hope as we await the coming year. Read Catherine Tobey’s piece on the church’s task in an age of mass incarceration, Maxine King’s reflections on settler colonialism and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, and Morgan Bell’s insights into the possibility of covenantal living amid capitalist domination.
— Yanan Melo
God Here & Now is the online magazine of the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary
Catherine Tobey, Merry Christmas For Whom?: This Christmas, I wonder where we are engaged in a true celebration and where we have gotten stuck in a ceremonial rut. All too often it seems like we are barely making it from one season to the next. That’s certainly how many congregations feel, as they try to make time to walk alongside an incarcerated friend.
Maxine King, Scorsese’s Settler Gaze: Killers of the Flower Moon is a horrifying story; and for those of us living in the ongoing aftermath of North American settler colonialism, it is our horrifying story... God's solidarity with the oppressed in Jesus Christ is beyond all colonial limits of identification that are on display in the content and form of Killers of the Flower Moon. Any truly theological perspective—in film, theology, or otherwise—will instead begin with God and God's radical solidarity with Mollie, the Osage, and all the disinherited of the world, thus, with the alternative ways of being and living that this incarnate tradition of the oppressed teaches.
Morgan Bell, Capital or Covenant?: It is this world that the Church is raised up to serve. It is the covenantal God at the world’s center to whom the Church is raised to witness in the Spirit’s power. All that precedes, determines, and structures reality is God’s decision to be God for us in Jesus Christ and for us to be God’s people. Beneficence and gracious exchange, rather than avarice and debt, mark true creaturely relationality as we witness to the God of every good and perfect gift. To be faithful to its mandate, the Church of Jesus Christ must engage and be responsible to the world out of and for which God raises it as a community of witnesses. But to be a community of witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ’s fidelity and responsibility are contingent on speaking truth: that covenant alone is the graced esse of the world Christ Jesus has come to save. It is in such truth-telling that the Church rejects a business ontology as illegitimate and, in Jesus Christ, sets itself to the Father’s business (Lk 2:49).
Read Emanuel ‘Ricky’ Padilla’s reflections on the right to name oneself amid how oppressive structures seek to subdue such self-naming. Why does interreligious literacy matter? Brian Carwana writes that it is a necessary means to build spaces of belonging in a religiously diversifying United States. Regarding interreligious literacy, read Amar Peterman’s insights into how Diwali, Hannukah, and Advent all speak to the hopefulness of the season. Watch this year’s Carols of Many Nations service led by the Princeton Theological Seminary Choir, international students, and staff of PTS. And if we believe in miracles, then might extraterrestrial life be more possible than we think?
God Here and Now is an online magazine and newsletter from the Center for Barth Studies. If you would like to support our work, you can donate to the center here. All donations are tax-deductible. Questions? Ideas? Email us: barth.center@ptsem.edu