Our hidden public lives

What would it mean to live publicly? We are incarnations of a public God, the God who said that “all the earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord.” But rulers dominate public spaces, spaces where we would fulfill our public callings and manifest God’s presence. Political Devotions helps us create public spaces. It helps us connect with Others who would join us in public spaces to establish justice and restore God’s temple, his earth.

Your public life starts with Political Devotions

As a subscriber to Political Devotions, you’ll encounter the Bible’s struggle towards political participation and justice. You’ll explore those struggles in fresh conversations among theologians and political theorists.You’ll find the courage to create local public spaces that disturb our selfish, privatized society. And in these public spaces, you’ll start answering your public calling. You’ll speak and act as a new and unabridged version of yourself.

Photo courtesy © Lloyd Wolf / Columbia Pike Documentary Project

Is my journey adjacent to yours?

• If you’re deconstructing an unsatisfactory Evangelical faith, would you like to explore some alternatives to white Evangelical politics?

• Are you hoping for a practice of politics beyond the dualistic, liberal-conservative model?

• Are you tired of another divide—the academic one between theologians and political scientists? Would you like them to inform one another more, at least in your reading?

• Do you enjoy exploring the Bible’s “full gospel” of religion, politics, economics, culture, semiotics, history, literature, and everything else?

• Would you mind discovering and exercising what William T. Cavanaugh calls our “theopolitical imagination”?

• Are you questioning the nation-state model and other structures that encourage plutocracy and authoritarianism?

• Do you want to instantiate—and perhaps even help to model—a just polity (what first-century Christians and some of their fellow Jews called the “kingdom of God”)?

I’ve written a manuscript for a book series called Political Devotions: A Year in Public Spaces. I’m trying out that series’s concepts here in the Political Devotions newsletter and the Public Spaces Blog & Podcast. Click here to read the manuscript’s introduction, which provides a deeper dive into my approach to political devotions. Click here for a sample devotion from the manuscript. Finally, click here to access a bibliography for the manuscript as well as for this Substack’s devotions.

I’m a former composition instructor, trial lawyer and pastor. (In the above picture, I’m in my classroom last year, watching student presentations on local community life.) Now I travel and write.

While I quote experts a lot, I approach these topics only as a fellow citizen and explorer. Experts testify, but we citizens make up the juries.

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