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Inaugural Jesuit Lecture: Bill McCormick, SJ The Christian Structure of Politics: On the De Regno of Thomas Aquinas
In an age dominated by guilt and shame for historical complicity in violence and injustice, how are Christians to engage in public life?
This is the situation of political theology after the Holocaust: trapped between the desire to make public the claims of faith in the pursuit of justice and to heed the chastening history of injustices committed in the name of God. Yet this tension, if acknowledged properly, can become the basis for a fruitful political theology that is both public in its commitment to justice and humble in its awareness of the injustices that the pursuit of justice itself can cause.
McCormick proposes a reconceptualization of political theology that takes seriously the twin imperatives of responsibility and humility. This endeavor, I argue, can begin with a reexamination of the legacy of Thomas Aquinas’ political thought, a dominant figure in Catholic tradition. In his De regno we find concrete ways that political theology can inspire faith communities to both challenge and nourish political life. Adapted for our times, such a political theology would be necessarily interreligious in its desire for dialogue between persons of diverse religious traditions, communal insofar as it recognizes and cultivates the social forms that those religious traditions inhabit, and humble and responsible in its advocacy of political action, refusing to abdicate neither its social responsibility in the face of its complicity in historical injustices nor its humility despite its need to act in the world.
March 22, 2023
7:00-8:30 PM CDT
Information Commons, 4th Floor, LSC
This event was in-person and livestreamed. It is free & open to the public.
