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Document Details : Title: Wat bezielt een samenleving? Subtitle: Over een theologie van (publieke) emoties vanuit een geëmotioneerde theologie Author(s): VAN STICHEL, Ellen Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 60 Issue: 4 Date: 2020 Pages: 375-388 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.60.4.3288894 Abstract : The confrontation with inequality, poverty and marginalisation on a worldwide scale and closer to home makes us want to think about our concept of individual social duties from a strong appeal to justice. But even the most extensive concept of justice does not offer an answer to the question as to what is needed to warm people up to cold solidarity and detached justice. Despite what proponents of a dichotomy between private and political life might think, solidarity and protest movements show that people do not leave themselves and thus neither their emotions behind when they act in the public domain. So, what is it that motivates people and how does this function? How can we comprehend negative political and public emotions on the one hand (and what do they tell us), and on the other encourage positive emotions and use those to achieve a good life for all? This is how the idea of developing a theology of the (public) emotions was born. For several decades now, we have seen an increased interest in the role and the import of emotions in public life, both in the social sciences and in philosophy. Whereas the social sciences are mainly focussing on a descriptive analysis, in philosophy authors like Martha Nussbaum and Elena Pulcini, and approaches such as that of care ethics are cautiously trying a normative approach. After all, we do not merely need to reflect on public emotions, we also need a normative approach that is not afraid to ethically qualify such emotions. Taking emotions seriously without lapsing into sentimentality requires a form of critique or at least a questioning of the Cartesian dichotomy between reason and emotion. Or rather, it requires a wider concept of what is reasonable that allows for both reason and emotion to be legitimate sources of knowledge and – by extension – of ethics. Theologically speaking this would mean not so much a theology of public emotion, but rather a theological ethics of public emotions. The flip side of this is, the author believes, that the demand for a theology of (public) emotions in turn will have to ask what the role of emotion is in theology if it wants to be inspired and inspiring. By exposing the affectedness and the vulnerability of theology and the theologian involved, theology will get a lot closer to what liberation theologian Jon Sobrino called ‘orthopathy’. The future of theology seems to be in not just substantively discussing vulnerability, relatedness and connectedness, but also in methodically exposing its own vulnerability. |
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