Towards a Kairos theology

Crises and Crossroads in Ethiopia

The reception of the Barmen Declaration in South Africa

The article argues that it is not to be taken for granted that Christian churches have a public witness and that Christian theology should play a public role in South Africa today. Although many believers may indeed proceed from these assumptions without any self-critical awareness and reflection, there are simply too many unspoken assumptions embedded in these convictions that have become problematic in the eyes of many, both within and outside ecclesial and theological circles, also in South Africa. The article points to some of these critical considerations that are suggested by typically modern conditions, by the radical transformation of South African society to a secular democracy, and by the particular legacy of South Africa’s recent history and the role of church and theology during that history. The article achieves this by arguing that at least three clusters of questions should be separated from one another for careful consideration. In a first section it iterates and briefly motivates a cluster of questions all dealing with the necessity of public witness and theology. In a second section it briefly proposes a separate set of questions focusing on the content of any possible public witness and theology. In a third and final section it suggests a third cluster of issues all related to the practical question how such public witness and theology could and should take place under conditions prevailing in South African society today.1

A cultural lens, which is used to explore girlhood in the Southern African context, provides insight into traditional practices like virginity testing. The call for ‘retraditionalization’ of African youth, which is enacted through controlling and monitoring girls’ sexuality, is explored. Within this context, four teenage girls from schools in KwaZulu Natal, a province in South Africa, talk about how they understand their sexuality in ways that suggest that girls shatter and then reassemble the heterosexual terrain, through hypersexualized performativity, by ‘being girl’ in different ways. These teenage girls demonstrate hypervisibility and hypersexuality, and as they resist and subvert hetero-patriarchal cultural contexts, they go beyond projecting hyperfemininty and are largely driven by hedonistic behaviour. Through the use of innovative methodology, where girls are trained to serve as co-researchers to generate and analyse data, power is creatively deployed to enter the heterosexual matrix and find sites which reveal its pliable nature. Ways in which research participants actively resist or comply with heteronormative sexuality are analysed through the conceptual ideas of ‘moments of rupture’ and ‘sustained lines of flight’.

SUMMARY: This is a Russian (and slightly edited) translation of the introduction to the volume Empire Speaks Out: Language of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2009). The text traces the development of historical studies that, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, attempted to conceptualize the history of the Russian Empire as a space of domination, connexity, and diversity, and takes stock of the most recent attempts to theorize the problem of imperial government and the imperial space of social, religious, and cultural differences. The most recent trends under scrutiny include the rethinking of the history of the Russian Empire from the vantage point of borderland studies, confessional turn, and the comparative history of dynastic and composite imperial polities. Referencing the trends of historical study of empire outside of the Russian field and the revisionist trend of postcolonial studies in particular, the authors devise an approach from the vantage point of the cognitive turn. They suggest that the cognitive turn in nationalism studies advocated by Rogers Brubaker offers numerous insights for the field of studies of the Russian Empire. In particular, they note that the most popular historiographic models for understanding the Russian Empire (such as multinational empire) borrow the categories of imperial practice of the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century as categories of analysis. With reference to Ann Stoler’s critique of the comparative history of imperial formations based on the idea of discreet ideal types, the authors devise perspectives that can place the history of Russian imperial rule and the experience of diversity in multiple comparative contexts, bridging the gap between studies of coloniality and studies of multinational polities and nationalism. The published text is not a standalone piece. It references the main outcomes of the collaborative research project that takes the cognitive turn in studies of the Russian Empire further to the exploration of languages of self-description and the rationalization of imperial rule and experience of diversity. This project highlights the moments of rupture and crisis in the history of the Russian Empire as productive contexts for rethinking the imperial strategy and reframing the space of difference, and thus introduces an important counterpoint to the thinking about crises of empire in the teleology of “decline and fall.” The text of the introduction summarizes the studies of languages of rationalization of empire from the impact of modern instrumental knowledge and paradigm of human sciences to the practice of socioeconomic modernization in the context of imperial diversity. It suggests an interpretative model for understanding tensions and hybridity of the Russian Empire since the reforms of Peter the Great, and especially in the postreform period, as constitutive of an imperial strategy of domination and experience of diversity.

Expulsion from the state is approached as a crisis within both human rights and refugee studies, with Hannah Arendt proposing that the ‘loss of national rights was identical with the loss of human rights’ (Arendt 1976, p. 292). This analysis conceptualises the state as a protective structure and seeks to rehabilitate the refugee into the state system, whether within a reformed natal state (through return) or into a new state (through local integration or resettlement), ultimately restoring the refugee as ‘citizen’. This model is rooted in what Nira Yuval-Davis (1997, p. 119) terms ‘the “fraternal” enlightenment project’ and is both western centric and has a male, purportedly universal-imagined citizen at its heart. Postcolonial feminist scholars have articulated the many ways in which third world/non-western women’s relationships to the state are more commonly either distant or repressive. Expulsion from the state may not, for those who have held only notional or marginal citizenship, entail the ‘radical crisis’ of human rights (Agamben 1998, p. 126) that refugee studies and human rights that theories conceive. Moments of rupture and crisis that disrupt powerful sociocultural norms and break the alliance between constraining state and civil society structures (patriarchal ethnic and religious institutions) can also be moments of social transformation and opportunity. This paper explores the social practices and testimonies of refugees in transit in Indonesia to examine the assumptions underpinning citizenship and to question whether the social good that citizenship aims to deliver needs to be tied to the state.

While the emergence and global spread of modernity is a complex phenomenon, it is known that certain political, economic, and social developments led to its rise and spread. Looking closely at these factors, it is possible to say that the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and capitalism in the Western world are the five main historical developments that shaped modernity. On a historical continuum, these developments are interrelated. Some of them gave modernity its soul. Others made it much more influential and global. In this regard, it is arguable that the first three developments gave modernity its soul, while the last two gave it a much more effective scope. This study examines the first three historical developments using the descriptive research method based on these premises. It considers the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution as the developments that gave birth to modernity and gave it its soul. At the same time, this study argues that these are moments or developments that are intrinsically supportive of each other, seeing these historical moments as moments of rupture and crisis in the Western world. These moments and developments are crucial components of the problems and phenomena we currently discuss today. No literary, aesthetic, philosophical, or political criticism of the 20th century can be analyzed without taking these developments into account. In this respect, this study reconsiders, within a historical continuum, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution, which shaped modernity and its philosophy, modernism.

In this essay, aspects of the work of theologian W.D. (Willie) Jonker are reframed to complement current debates about �public theology� in South Africa. The introduction points out that Jonker worked during a crucial period in South Africa�s history and that his theology is intrinsically linked to the church struggle between 1955 and 1994. The second part reframes Jonker�s theology as a public theology from within the church by referring to his understanding of preaching, confessions and public witness. The last part attempts to move beyond Jonker in appropriating some of his ideas for a public theology in South Africa today.

South Africa’s struggle against apartheid was counter-instinctive in resistance and transition. It can test, retrospectively, whether covenantal pluralism can be relevant for today’s world, characterized not so much by the absence of democracy and rights, but by their perversion at the service of populist agendas. We are still on a journey towards a more perfect understanding of covenantal pluralism, but can identify some cornerstones, and elements of a toolkit for cross-cultural religious literacy. This chapter endeavors to discern from the anti-apartheid struggle such lessons that could today help realize covenantal pluralism. In doing so, it identifies three seminal moments that constitute a rupture—i.e., a moment of awareness, action, and acceleration—for the faith communities, and also society, that laid a strong foundation for religion to contribute to a South Africa that became home to all races and religions, where they could embrace pluralism. A moment of rupture was needed to ring the alarm bell, to activate the victims, to disturb the complacent and the beneficiaries, to threaten the status quo, to reimagine the alternative, to demonstrate our mutual inter-dependence, and to accelerate the momentum for change. Believers always desire rapture (i.e., delivery), but often without its precondition: Rupture.

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks a reengagement with Doris Lessing's classic novel The Golden Notebook in relation to the concept of intermittency outlined in Andrew Gibson's recent theoretical work. Gibson argues that recent continental philosophy has broken with a linear reading of history in favour of the intermittent occurrence of Events: moments of crisis and rupture from which truth, politics, and justice emerge into the actual. Lessing's novel, praised for its honest depiction of women's experience at the dawn of the Sixties, is situated resolutely in a post-war world between Events, a time Gibson would depict as concrete in its non-Evental stasis. However, the vision of history which emerges in the novel is porous, ephemeral, one moment splintered between characters’ contested ideologies and the next fused in bodily interpellation. By returning to this work of considerable historical significance we can also contest Gibson's categorisation of literature as a ‘residue of events’. A paradigmatic rupture in the cultural framework forces a reengagement with the historical present with equal, if not superior force to the physical manifestation of the political. Lessing's novel, this paper argues, stages the Evental entrance of the permeable emotional body into a post-war British discourse dominated by ‘managed’ technocratic forms.

<p>El presente trabajo presenta el panorama y describe el desarrollo de las reflexiones y diagnósticos del pensamiento social y las ciencias sociales sobre y desde el estado de Tabasco; y las condiciones del entorno social local en el que se practican. En el trabajo se demuestra que la producción de este tipo de trabajos es perfectamente acorde a los momentos de crisis y por su tipo refleja perfectamente los momentos de continuidad y ruptura en la historia del estado a pesar de un entorno sociocultural poco propicio. Así, por ejemplo, las ciencias sociales son subsumidas a un papel de mera contabilidad social, legitimación y promoción durante el período del desarrollismo económico (1953-1970) caracterizado por la construcción de grandes obras de infraestructura y planes de desarrollo agropecuario territorial, o durante la expansión de las obras de exploración y explotación petrolera; pero son llamadas a encontrar explicaciones y alternativas cuando la población regional reacciona contra los excesos y resultados no deseados de tales desarrollos, como ocurre con la resistencia contra el Plan Chontalpa y posteriormente con la resistencia contra los impactos de la industria petrolera. En el momento de mayor auge económico petrolero y su crisis, se hace un esfuerzo por implantar localmente la enseñanza y la investigación de dichas disciplinas, a la vez que ofrecen un discurso alternativo de desarrollo endógeno. Posteriormente, a partir de mediados de la década de los 90 llama la atención que la planeación se realiza a nivel macroregional y los trabajos locales pasan de depender de proyectos institucionales a iniciativas personales de funcionarios locales que dan los espacios o promueven las investigaciones y publicaciones.</p>

Three basic themes played indispensable roles in Reinhold Niebuhr’s engagements with economic issues: (1) the foundational importance of a theological anthropology for his critical assessment of complex social, economic, and political issues; (2) his focus on two clashing theories of economic order: Adam’s Smith’s doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism and Karl Marx’s revolutionary vision for the collective ownership of property within a centralized state system; and (3) his endorsement of a realistic yet viable alternative to these two classic theories, one that involved pragmatic and incremental steps toward fostering economic justice through the public regulation and oversight of a free-market economy. These pragmatic measures included allocating government resources for vitally important public goods and services at federal, state, and local levels. Though Niebuhr was initially drawn to some form of democratic socialism, he embraced this incremental strategy within the context of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s implementation of his New Deal agenda. My analysis of Niebuhr’s contributions concludes with attention to new challenges confronting contemporary quests for economic justice in a post–New Deal era, one marked Soundings, Vol. 95, No. 4, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania state University, University Park, Pa di sc us sio n diussion

'South Africa' has long meant different things to different people. As a discursive construction, the term has traded on – and been influenced by – contending representations and performances across a range of media, the reception of which, both within the region and 'abroad', has necessarily had an effect on what this label is taken to name. Reception is always interested, influenced by ideological or psychological imperatives, whether by apologists for or subjects of empire, members of anti-colonial or anti-apartheid movements, exiles and émigrés, or by only apparently disinterested outsiders for whom the region's vicarious rewards have been – and are – many. Thus 'South Africa', once no more than a descriptive geographical term of convenience, has served for disaggregated global communities of interest variously to signify a site of adventure, sport or recuperation, a space marked by vitality or cruelty, reconciliation and redemption, and been mediated or contested as a kind of home. During the second Anglo-Boer or South African War, it named the location of one of imperial Britain's most serious moments of crisis, while simultaneously providing occasion for transnational identifications by such diverse groups as Irish nationalists and aristocratic tsarist Russians, who shared little with the proto-Afrikaner Boers besides opposition to the British Empire. For much of the second half of the twentieth century it served in a global imaginary largely as the domain of a white nationalist regime whose policies propelled the word 'apartheid' into the global lexicon.

Riots and modernist theatre go hand in hand. Modernist novels, less of a spectacle in themselves, provoke less spectacular reactions, their controversies often played out in courts of law rather than in the street. This chapter proposes a contrapuntal examination of Ulysses, an epic of decolonization, and the re-emergence of decolonial thinking and political action in South Africa in the last ten years. It begins with a reflection on the experience of teaching modernism in South Africa, and identifying the ambivalent politics of Leopold Bloom as they are most prominently displayed in a brief flashback to Bloom’s experience of being caught up in a protest/riot against the South African war. From there, the chapter moves to the Rhodes Must Fall protests in South Africa in 2015/16 by way of The Fall, a devised stage play about the student protests in which one of the protestors/characters recalls feeling alienated in a first-year English lecture on E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Drawing these threads together, the chapter asks how the study of modernism, that self-proclaimed moment of violent rupture, can learn from and be energized by contemporary political protest and anger. It also considers how scholars might negotiate our desires for textual transhistoricism and the realities of a world, forged in riot and political protest, in which European modernism can no longer be taken for granted as a guide to the future.

Walder, Dennis. 2011. Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation, and Memory. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures. New York: Routledge. $125 hc; $39.95 pb. 204 pp.In Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation, and Memory, Dennis Walder asserts rosy, sentimental glow most commonly associated with nostal- gia is certainly not the most telling of the story his study claims to reveal (3). Here, Walder explores instead and in considerable depth the many ways writers shaped by empire and/or colonization represent the dynamics of traumatic individual experiences in relation to wider, collective pasts of family, society, and history (2). In moments of crisis, as Walder explains, the sweeping activities of dominant powers play their crucial roles, as do unpredict- able changes in the human heart. Walder finds a common caveat, or implicit admonition, in all of the writing he examines: it is the ineluctable importance of remembering the radical evils marking the long histories of empire and coloniza- tion, a part of our contingent sense of who we are in the present (167).The writers on whom Walder concentrates-V. S. Naipaul, a spectrum of indigenous South African authors, Doris Lessing, W. G. Sebald, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and J. G. Ballard-all testify, Walder shows, to the daunting complexity of memories of individual colonial experiences and to the ensuing ethical challenges such compromised unavoidably pose to personal values. The expressive power these postcolonial writers acquire by exploiting the oscillating present/past/present motions of nostalgia within their narrative designs authenticates their representations, making them aestheticall and historically compelling and attractive (164). As Walder observes, without the element of reflexivity, or self-analysis, the [recollected] past becomes a dis- torting fiction, lacking the crucial connection to the general experience (164). And he pulls no punches in identifying many novels and film scripts by other writers that distort the past, sentimentalizing or sensationalizing the relations between the powerful and the powerless (165). Postcolonial Nostalgias is an ambi- tious and riveting work of literary criticism, spanning more than a century of realistic writing and thematically connecting postcolonial representations of Trinidad/West Indies, the Islamic world, India, Japan, England, South Africa, Germany, Nigeria, and China-historically, psychologically, and aesthetically.Yet, in spite of its topical density, Walder's book is a triumph of brilliant exposition because it simplifies nothing. Readers are led sensibly, stylishly, and authoritatively through the thickets of relevant postcolonial and psychological theory, relevant twentieth- and twenty-first-century colonial history, and the focal narratives themselves. The book's introduction clearly outlines its scope, defines key terms, reviews the medical and psychological conceptions of various types of as phenomena, surveys ways of connecting longing to histor y and politics, and introduces the turbulence, even nightmare, conditions the 'tough aesthetic' of postcolonial nostalgias (12). In each of the chapters follow, Walder historicizes his focal texts and highlights their subtexts through close readings. Walder's tone is engaging throughout-conversational and relaxed, while no less perspicacious than one might expect of a mature scholar whose immersion in the subject goes back to his early life in South Africa, his university studies in Cape Town and Edinburgh, and a distinguished career in Britain as a professor of postcolonial literature.In the chapter titled How Is It Going, Mr. Naipaul? Walder concentrates on The Enigma of Arrival but deconstructs Naipaul's treatment of the discrep- ancies between 'identification' and 'identity' in the light of Naipaul's other bio- graphical and travel writings. …