The University of Winnipeg’s Dr. Jane Barter has just published a monograph, Theopolitics and the Era of the Witness, for Routledge’s Transforming Political Theologies series.
This timely book focuses on witnessing in the aftermath of political atrocity or genocide. It offers a historical study of the relationship between theological forms of witnessing and public forms of witnessing in the 20th and 21st centuries.
I tried in this book to rehabilitate those theological traditions that offer a poetics rather than a triumphal politics of witnessing.
Dr. Jane Barter
“This was a very difficult book for me to write at this particular moment,” said Dr. Barter, who specializes in contemporary Christianity and Western political thought.
“I argued in the book that the misuse of witnessing can have terrible consequences politically because witnessing can far too easily try to vindicate or redeem the past in a violent or truncated way. Like religious witnessing, testimony to atrocity can harm or it can heal. I tried in this book to rehabilitate those theological traditions that offer a poetics rather than a triumphal politics of witnessing.”
The book shows the ways in which various witnesses to political atrocity and their mediators tacitly drew on religious themes of salvation to make sense of their suffering. This book makes a valuable contribution to the work of theopolitics, which claims that theology, despite its persistent misuse, can serve as a constructive and critical force within public life, albeit in a chastened key.
Dr. Barter, who is a Professor in UWinnipeg’s Department of Religion and Culture, has also published two earlier monographs of Christian theology: Lord, Giver of Life (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006) and Thinking Christ: Christology and Contemporary Critics (Fortress Press, 2011).
She has co-edited (with Doris Kieser, St. Joseph’s College, University of Alberta) a special volume of the Journal of Moral Theology on the 2022 papal visit and apology to survivors of Residential Schools in Canada.
In addition to her academic schedule and part of her scholarly work, Dr. Barter is editor of the Christology volume of The T & T Clark Encyclopedia of Christian Theology.
