Editorial

Luther hanging ninety-five theses on the Wittenberg Castle Church door five hundred years ago has come to symbolize a revolutionary call in ways more than one. It engendered shifts in the course of Europe's economic political and social life. And in the history of Christianity, it was a clarion call for radical change in the Church and in theological thinking. That call resounds also in this issue of the Toronto Journal of Theology, containing essays that fall into three clusters and are bridged by two more essays: altogether twelve essays and fifteen reviews of recently published books.

The opening essay, in a cluster of three, echoes that call by advocating for revolutionary love. It suggests that a pluralizing of the two words may underscore their intersections and offer an opening to responding to the shock of Trump's victory in the US presidential election and to American exceptionalism as an organizing principle in the story of America and as a grounding of Christian hatred. A second essay contends that Christianity does not have a monopoly on revolutionary love, that it admits to two other specifications: Hindu and Buddhist. The third essay locates theologically and philosophically the political defiance for love. In doing so it takes into consideration border theory as well as queer theory to reconfigure the hyphen in Jean-Luc Nancy's "being-with."

A bridge to the next cluster, the fourth essay is about discerning divine guidance and the trials of governance. These cannot be faced without God's help, according to Kierkegaard. The essay argues for seeing his text The Point of View of My Work as an Author as belonging to the genre of confessional autobiography in Christian history.

The next three essays take up suffering—theodicy. One proposes the novel Lila, from Marilynne Robinson's acclaimed Gilead saga, as a literary meditation on suffering and grace. The other, on art for practical theodicy, considers the work of Berlin artist Käthe Kollwitz. In her focus on the oppression of workers, women, and children, she exposes an underlying spiritual form of affliction associated with compassion and in a way that may impart a sense of the mystical. A biting response to the two essays follows in the third essay. A revolutionary call, it draws on autoethnography to make the point that such theodicy stacks the deck—the house always wins; a genuine theodicy has to leave open the possibility of God failing.

The other bridge is an essay on the personalism of Maritain. It sheds light on a Christian understanding of liberation and redemption for the twenty-first century as a corrective to the postmodern critique of modernity. Cues for addressing its range of concerns, including human subjectivity and love, come from engaging thinkers such as Gutierrez, Bell Jr., and Deluze.

Over to the last cluster, comprised of four essays. It has a revolutionary impulse in urging for Latin American decolonized theological thinking. By a veteran Global North theologian, one of the essays identifies for the decolonizing theology the historical contexts and defining insights of the last half millennium. It considers that struggles over the future of life on this planet may depend very much on how we respond to religious questions. Mestizaje as a critical category in a radical reframing of decolonized thinking is the direction of another essay. Seeing modernity as predicated on domination and colonization, the essay contends that the term mestizaje in theology predates its articulation. The third essay of the cluster focuses on hymns and songs as a liberating praxis with respect to knowing and doing decolonizing theology. The last essay considers the Catholic Canadian context in unmasking colonial theology, especially the "how and why" of evangelizing and civilizing projects among the Indigenous people of Canada. Doing theology after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's work has to take a decolonizing turn. To unmask and advance its proposal, the essays relies on insights from research work among Chiapas in Mexico and the author's colonial encounters as a Middle Eastern Christian immigrant in Canada.

For more intellectual treats, turn to the reviews of fifteen recent books. See what they say, for example...