Christian Paideia as Public Theology

Christian Paideia as Public Theology
Alcuin Fellowship, SCL October 2015

In our pursuit of a Christological synthesis in our classical schools, it is imperative that we recognize that all education is pursued and practiced within the context of a grand metanarrative that shapes and defines the rules, understandings, and goals that organize and govern society. In the last few decades, it has been the task of what scholars refer to as 'public theology' to articulate the specifics of a distinctively Christian metanarrative within the political, economic, and civic spheres of life, as well as critique competing metanarratives constitutive of alternative publics. By public theology, we refer generally to the application of the frames of reference specific to theology (which involves classically the knowledge and prayerful contemplation of God revealed in Christ) to the social and cultural dynamics constitutive of a collective, a consensus, a poplicus, a people collectively defined.

While the contemporary use of the term 'public theology' can be traced to the 1970s, its intellectual roots stretch far back into the OT vision of Israel as the people of God, the NT vision of the church as the Kingdom of God, and the Augustinian notion of the church as the City or Republic of God. Practically these civic frames of theological reference worked themselves out into various civilizational projects, such as the Byzantine doctrine of symphonia formulated by the Cappadocians in the fourth-century, Gelasius' conception of the two-swords theory in the fifth-century, Pope Gregory's reforms and the emergence of canon law in the eleventh-century, Luther's Two Kingdoms theory, and the bi-covenantal structure of Reformed theology.

However, with the rise of the modern nation state and its novel institutional reconfigurations, the relevance of theology to the public square began to wane. This was due in no small part to the establishment of the civil magistrate as the sole representative of national sovereignty as part of the Westphalian order of the seventeenth-century as well as the accompanying nationalization of universities in the eighteenth-century. These social reconfigurations elicited a dramatic transformation in the legitimation of knowledge. The practice of theoria, or contemplative knowledge that sought to understand the world in terms of divinely inspired wisdom and virtue, gave way to the primacy of scientia, the methodology of which was thought most conducive with the task of the bureaucrat and administrator, which placed a premium on control and management.

The universities were not the only institutions to go through a process of nationalization. Indeed, with the advent of the industrial revolution in the nineteenth-century and social democracies throughout Europe after World War I, there was in effect a massive recalibration of the totality of social and economic life around the state. According to economic historian Lars Magnusson, this was a social process wherein a 'particularist' state transformed into a 'territorial' state; the state that was once but one of a plurality of mediating institutions that organized and governed social order transformed into a territorial monopolist of regulation, taxation, and arbitration over the public square. Indeed, the change was so dramatic that German scholar Andreas Osiander suggests that what we now call 'the state' had no social reality prior to the nineteenth-century, such that terms like the English translation 'city-state' for the Greek polis are in many respects anachronisms.

And as political theologian Bill Cavanaugh has observed, it is here that secularism plays a key role, for it is through secularization that the state is able to perpetuate and protect its monopolization over the public square. Secularization is in effect a network of social strategies whereby the church is pushed out of public life and marginalized to the private sphere of life. And the primary mechanism by which such monopolization is maintained is the redefinition of religion: beginning in the eighteenth century, religion was re-conceptualized as something that one believes but cannot know. The state thus effectively marginalized the church by re-inventing our conception of faith and religion in accordance with its own secular norms: faith and religion are no longer civilizational expressions of divinely ordained social obligations, they are now little more than instrumental means by which individuals find personal meaning and purpose for their lives.

With the emergence of this new conception of public life, theological reflection on modern civic arrangements have fallen victim to two distinct yet interrelated impoverishments. On the one hand, modern public theologies have found themselves all too willing to uncritically accept these social permutations as somehow normative or privileged, and with the canonization of modern assumptions, scholars reduce theology to frames of reference foreign to the Christian gospel. In fact, this was the critique of sociologist Jurgen Habermas, who believed that modern public theology was a contradiction in terms, since theologians had to suspend their own distinctive claims to objective knowledge in favor of dominant values of the modern civic arena: namely public opinion rooted in rational inquiry. So, too, Religious Studies Professor Charles Mathewes: "Typically, public theologies are self-destructively accommodationist: they let the 'larger' secular world's self-understanding set the terms, and then ask how religious faith contributes to the purposes of public life, so understood." (A Theology of Public Life 1-2). In this sense, then, public theology simply acquiesces to the dominant ideological metanarrative that religious beliefs and practices have ceded authority to forms of truth and reasoning that no longer require religious grounding. With such public theology, the secularization story remains unchallenged in providing the one narrative of progress and competence in relation to which all spheres of Western life have been shaped and defined.

The second impoverishment involves the consequences of privatization for the church, specifically in the loss of its capacity to speak authoritatively on civic issues. This is because the public and private fields of life operate according to incommensurable social dynamics and metrics; what belongs to one does not necessarily belong to the other. Among many other differences, public life consists of the objective, while private life consists of the subjective. Public life involves the obligatory, while private life involves the optional. Public life involves rules that apply to all, while private life involves rules that apply only to some.

And so, to the extent that Christianity has been successfully reassigned to the private sphere of social life, the church has been robbed of her capacity to witness to truth, and this is because truth is public, not private; it is objective, not subjective; truth is obligatory, not optional; it applies to all, not merely some. Similarly, when we speak out in defense of classical Christian morality, whether in regard to the sanctity of life, or marriage or sexuality, we find out very quickly that our moral claims can no longer be socially sustained. This is because morality, like truth, requires the highly unambiguous, definite, invariant, and formal frames of reference that constitute public life. In order for something to be either right or wrong, true or false, it cannot be placed in the social equivalent of a food court that operates according to recreational, optional, and preferential dynamics. Indeed, having been relocated approximate to strip malls, our churches can no more declare definitive moral pronouncements to our wider society than can pizzerias or dry cleaners.

And we can see the dramatic effects of this privatization within our churches. It has been well documented particularly by Gordon-Conwell professor David Wells how every study on the internal life of the church shows that Christians are becoming increasingly less biblically literate and morally distinct.

Are twin impoverishments might be summarized thusly: the church all too often simply 'amens' the practices of the secular world, and the secular world could care less.

However, the recognition of these twin impoverishments of secular accommodation and privatization has set the stage of late for the emergence of public and political theologies that contest the legitimacy of the secularized public square. While such scholarship self-identifies by a number of paradigms, such as post-liberal, post-modern, or post-secular, what they all have in common is a challenge to the hegemony of secularized forms of knowledge, reasonings, and social arrangements. Titles such as After Secular Law and The Politics of Post Secular Religion or The End of Secularism reimagine secularism as itself a contested value system among others previously disenfranchised on the basis of their redefined 'religiosity'.

Within the trajectory of these studies, there are theologians today who are pointing to a very different conception of the public as articulated by Augustine in his City of God, xix. 24, where he writes that a public is "a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love." Scholars have noted that there are two important emphases in this definition. First, Augustine challenges the modern notion that the public is some kind of static space, a certain space-time given; rather, public space is dynamically configured and recurrently actualized in particular kinds of shared practices and arrangements. Here, practices are understood as human actions that orchestrate objects, people, things, and events in accordance with intrasubjective meanings, understandings, and goals, which collectively account for a particular vision of reality.

This practical conception of public life seems to have significant NT support, specifically in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, where he describes the Corinthians as sacred space, constituting the temple of God. In light of this ascription, Paul goes on to criticize the Corinthians for their lack of order, boundaries and proper ritual practices. Perhaps most interestingly is the distinction Paul draws in chapter 11, where he contrasts the Corinthians gathered together as the ekklesia in a home in v. 18, and their home life in v. 22, when he asks rhetorically: "Do you not have homes to eat and drink in?" (Okland 32) What might be domestically acceptable in mundane time is not necessarily acceptable in the public assembly of God's people as sacred "temple" (cf 11:17-22) (Neyrey 51).

It is further recognized that the term ekklesia carries significant civic import, in that it was not what we would call today a 'religious term' such as thiasos (worship of a particular deity), eranos (religious feast), koinon (fellowship), or synados (group following a particular teaching); ekklesia was in fact a civic or political term that designated the assembly of adult citizen males who had the ultimate decision making power in a city-state.

Along with the conception of a public actualized dynamically through practices, is the second observation made by Augustine: these practices which constitute public life have the psychological effect of ordering our affections and passions. For Augustine, the city of man is characterized by practices fostering the disposition of what he calls cupiditas (a self-aggrandizing love with a desire to control) in contrast to the city of God which is marked by caritas (a self-emptying love which desires to surrender), echoing the similar distinction made by Plato and other philosophers between eros and epithumia, love and lust. The formative nature of these practices has been most notably developed of late by Jamie Smith, who sees Augustinian anthropology as summarized in the phrase homo liturgicus. For Smith, liturgies are ritual practices that orient the heart towards an ultimate concern and are in fact ubiquitous to the variegated dynamics of social life.

Similarly, political theologian Bill Cavanagh suggests that an Augustinian 'public' is more like a public performance of an imagined social reality, which contests settled constructions of the public realm, be it those of the Roman Imperial order are those in our current secular arrangements ["From One City to Two: Christian Reimagining of Political Space"]. His thesis is that what passes for 'public' in modernity is inherently disruptive of the formation of the human person, in that the combination of market and state has the effect of disordering our loves away from God's economy of Goods, resulting in disordered loves, fragmented selves, and dysfunctional communities. (Martin 45)

And so now, for us, this rediscovery of the church as the location for a distinctive public theology, where an ecclesial social order is itself the theology, I believe can be developed fruitfully in the sphere of classical Christian education. And it is to this application that I now turn.

Education as Public Practice
That education can itself be understood as an extension of public life constitutive of desire-forming practices has been the topic of a recent study by University of California professor Peter McLaren entitled Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Toward a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures. What McLaren does is he uses ritual theory to analyze and interpret the various ways in which contemporary education cultivates students into citizens of the modern nation state.

Rituals, for McLaren, involve acts, utterances, beliefs, and practices that set apart certain visions of life that are considered absolute and unquestionable, and translate those enduring messages, values, and sentiments into observable action in the bodies of the ritual participants. McLaren observes: "Rituals do not possess a neutral opacity; they are invariably trace-ridden with ideological residues which point to the existence of a ritual substructure that reflects various social and cultural logics … Ritual knowledge [helps] to produce an inventory of taken-for-granted values and a framework of linked presuppositions and propositions about the way things are which, over time, becomes sedimented into a rigid ideological system – into commonsensical components of day-to-day activities and classroom exchanges." (205)

Here he follows the cultural anthropologist Roy Rappaport who argues that rituals are not merely symbolic but indexical or performative, and that they don't merely display symbolic meanings or states of affairs but instrumentally bring states of affairs into being. I have in mind here the rituals that transform a prince into a king, dub a knight, or pronounce newlywed status upon the betrothed; these rituals don't report a previously existing state of affairs but are rather the occasion for their coming into being in the first place.

What makes McLaren's work so interesting for me is how he focuses on the ritualized practices constitutive of schooling as indicative of wider social practices constitutive of modern industrial life and its entailed value systems and symbols. There is, he argues, a 'hidden curriculum' which suggests that the school serves as a form of 'workplace' where students rehearse role behaviors and develop competencies essential to participation in bureaucratic work settings.

Micro/Macro Rituals and Status Transitions
McLaren organizes his analysis in terms of two kinds of rituals: what he calls micro rituals, which are the individual lessons that took place in the classroom (what we might call classroom liturgies, thank you Jenny Rallens), and macro rituals, which is the aggregate of classroom lessons observed over a single school day. The micro rituals are in turn situated in relation to how they serve to mark three main status transitions that students go through each day: what he calls the streetcorner state, the sanctity state, and the student state.

The streetcorner state connotes the student's life in parking lots, hallways, lunch, recess – these involve entering into particular roles and statuses and behaviors indicative of what we would call 'downtime', but is contrasted with the 'student state', which characterizes most of the student behavior inside the classroom (listening to a lesson, taking notes, writing an exam, etc). (86) While in the streetcorner state, students are indulgently physical and exhibit an unfettered exuberance. (87) It's characterized by the subjunctive – it embraces pretend play, fantasy, experiment, hypothesis and conjecture.

The student state refers to an adoption of the gestures, disposition, attitudes and work habits expected of 'being a student'. … Youngsters in the student state are generally quiet, well-mannered, predictable and obedient. There is a pronounced systematicity of gesture. The mood of the state is 'indicative' –it communicates the world of actual fact.

And then there is what he calls the sanctity state. McLaren's study interestingly and ironically centers on field research conducted at a Catholic middle school in Toronto, Canada, and so he does add this state that punctuates the day by prayer, where the key identifying mood of this state is one of reverence and subservience … The major theme of this state is 'we are Christians'." 92

The macro ritual
From an aerial view, the school day involves a macro ritual: "The macro ritual is composed of a variety of micro rituals and ritual segments which span the entire school day." (95)

There is a general pattern to this ritual in the upper school when we view it from these social states that involve how time is punctuated throughout the day:


Invocation
Segment Transition Activity
Segment 1 streetcorner state to student state parking lot to school building

Segment 2 student state to streetcorner state trips to locker/prepare for morning prayer

Segment 3 streetcorner state to sanctity state morning prayer

Segment 4 sanctity state to streetcorner state move to or prepare for class

Liturgy of the Classroom (morning)
Segment 5 streetcorner state to student state class instruction
(often preceded by sanctity state)

Segment 6 student state to streetcorner state move to or prepare for class

Liturgy of Communion
Segment 7 student state to streetcorner state preparation for grace

Segment 8 streetcorner state to sanctity state grace before meal

Segment 9 sanctity state to streetcorner state lunch

Liturgy of the Classroom (afternoon)
Segment 10 streetcorner state to student state class instruction
(often preceded by sanctity state)

Segment 11 student state to streetcorner state move to or prepare for class

Dismissal
Segment 12 student state to streetcorner state dismissed and leave school
(could be preceded by sanctity state)


"The students spend approximately 76 minutes of the school day in the streetcorner state, 4 minutes in the sanctity state, and 298 minutes in the student state." (100)




Now, what McLaren does is he examines not only the public ideology that is taught in the classroom proper, he's also interested in how public values organize the interrelationship between these various statuses, these states. For example, he noticed that being a good Catholic at this school was consistently identified by the teachers with being a good worker. And this had the effect of separating Catholic identity from the streetcorner state. IOW, when the students were playing or eating, they were engaged in the least-Catholic behavior, whereas the hard work associated with the student state was fidelity to the Catholic vision of life. So he found that the very organization of the status roles conveyed and reinforced the privileged status of industrial values: you are here to learn skills in order to become a worker. And play has nothing to do with that. And our Catholicism is at the service of this industrial ideology.

In terms of the micro rituals, McLaren was very interested in the messages communicated by the teacher's body and speech. He noticed the way the teachers stood in front of the class: "With eyes narrowed, arms akimbo, and legs spread out slightly to give the impression of a firmly balanced body that is capable of repelling any struggle or attempted subversion (a kind of dressed down 'horse stance' that you find in the martial arts), the teachers move their heads in a steady, rotating fashion, much like the automatic surveillance cameras in department stores." (103)

McLaren notes that the way in which information and meaning is imparted to the student by the teacher is highly revealing. The teachers he observed communicated information and meaning primarily through lecturing, what he called 'sacred talk'. He sees the lecturing as highly performative, meaning that the acts and utterances in the lecture bring a state of affairs into being. And because these states of affairs are brought about in a classroom setting, where we are dealing with facts and reality as over against the play and fantasy of the streetcorner state, these states of affairs brought about by the teacher's speech are imbued with a sense of normalcy and naturalness. In this case, McLaren notes, what is endowed with normalcy is the teacher as competent professional, and thus through sheer lecturing the students are taught the industrialized values of management, information, and expertise.

Along with the sacred talk is what Rappaport referred to as the office of acceptance on the part of the student. In other words, by just being in the classroom, the student's body becomes a transmitter of the spatio-temporal arrangements ritually conveying these values. And so the student necessarily conforms to the value system conveyed in the classroom rituals. What's crucial here is that conformity is not the same as belief. The student may not believe in and by quite cynical towards the values being taught, but he is accepting them, in that his body situated in the classroom helps to bring these states of affairs into being.

And because these states of affairs are given a privileged status of reality as part of the classroom state, governed by the indicative and the factual, the idea here is that eventually acceptance and conformity translate into desire. This of course has been explored in detail by Jamie Smith, particularly in his development of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus, which involves analyzing the interrelationship between the habits, inclinations, and dispositions of the individual with the social and institutional structures that shape those habits, inclinations, and dispositions all the while being reproduced by them. In Smith's words: "I need the community and social body to enable me to perceive the world; however, the social body needs my body to instantiate its vision and practice" (82). Again, in a wonderful turn of phrase: "I learn how to constitute my world from others, but I learn how to constitute my world. The 'I' that perceives is always already a 'we.'" (84).

So McLaren argues that it is through acceptance and conformity on the part of the student that political visions are inscribed into the very DNA of the student, and are thus laden (sp?) with a sense of natural immediacy, since nothing is more naturally immediate to me than my own body. This is how the normalcy of social conditions are established, and why they are so easily believed in by their practicioners. To question the belief is in effect to question physical tangible reality.

And so, I find that McLaren's study overall provides a highly illuminative taxonomy that can shed fresh light onto our educational practices and their relation to the wider social practices constitutive of a distinctively Christian public rooted in the shared life world of the church. And so it is here that I want to conclude by reimagining classical Christian education as a locus for public theology.

Christian Paideia as Public Theology
The conceptual relationship between civic life and education in antiquity was of course bridged by the Greek conception of paideia. Flourishing in the fourth-century BC, the goal of paideia was the formation of a particular kind of human that embodied distinctively Greek culture in the shared lifeworld of the polis or city state. Central to this project was the formation of a balanced soul concomitant with the order of the cosmos, which in turn entailed a balanced civic life considered the prerequisite to political social flourishing. Therefore, Werner Jaeger, in his first volume of his massive work on Paideia, observes that the central integrating question for Greek curriculum was: "What type of education leads to arête?" (1:286) What kind of education fosters those dispositions, inclinations, and actions that harmonize with the divine obligations inherent in the cosmos and manifested in the civic space of the polis?

And so, while the conceptual link between classical civic life and education has been well explored, it is the practical or liturgical links that I'm particularly drawn to here. Again, if the church is a distinctive public through the sharing of particular practices, then what kinds of practices in our schools orient our students toward that distinctively Christian public?

The first observation we made with McLaren's study was his observation of the divide that existed between the streetcorner state and the student state, which he saw as a major impetus for training students to see themselves as workers, as embodiments of the sanctity of bureaucratic industrialized society. As those who seek to be faithful to Paul's exhortation in 1 Cor 10:31: Whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do it all to the glory of God," such a bifurcation is simply not an option. There are I believe two attributes to paideia that can effectively eclipse the divide McLaren witnessed between our Christian identity and the streetcorner state. First, there is the emphasis on what the Greeks called gymnastikē, or what we would call gymnastics. AMogn other things, the practice of gymnastics sought to cultivate the virtue of engkratia or self-mastery, self-control. Paul draws from this in 1 Cor 9 when he says, "Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control." In fact, engkratia, is one of the fruits of the Spirit in Gal 5:23. And so we see here that sports are not extracurricular; they are intrinsic to the development of a distinctive conception of the human person. For more on that, I recommend David Diener's work on Plato.

Secondly, both Chris Perrin and Devin O'Donnell are doing some wonderful work on the coattails of Joseph Pieper, reminding us that the classical imagination, particularly evident in Book 8 of Aristotle's Politics, that education was rooted in σχολη, or leisure. Through the practice of leisure, we find no other end or goal but pleasure in itself, which can have the effect of reorienting us towards our world in such a way that work is relativized to rest and not the other way around. McLaren noted that the students at the Catholic school were being taught that we rest in order to work, such that our resting is recast as a vacating of reality, our position in industrial life. But classically, life begins in worship, in the communion with the end goal of all things, and then spills out into cultural pursuits and vocations that awaken the divine meaning of the cosmos and thereby voice creation's praise. So I think the idea of education as σχολη, where classroom liturgies transform into communion and study transfigures into prayerful contemplation, is a very important corrective to the secular industrialized classroom, integrating the subjunctive and indicative, play and work, rest and labor, into a coherent whole, thereby glorifying God in all things.

In terms of the relationship between teacher and student in the classroom, which McLaren saw as a key mechanism for the transference of social values, paideia entailed its own teacher/student relationship in what is called sunousia, which technically was the term for an 'association' between an older man with a younger boy. Now, while the term could be associated with homosexual relationships, sunousia refers more to the special kind of friendship which is illustrated beautifully in Charlotte's Web. Charlotte mentors Wilbur; she tells him bedtime stories and sings him lullabies, she teaches him etiquette and manners, and prepares him for life when she is no longer around. And yet, Charlotte is always beyond Wilbur's reach, high above in her web. So their friendship involves a status differentiation but it is nevertheless a true friendship. And through this friendship, the teacher and student embody a communion that is a microcosm of the larger cosmic communion that is the ideal of Greek civic life.

From a classical Christian vantage point, this sunousia can be fostered by what we might call 'classroom communion' between teacher and student, which could involve Socratic methodology that evokes the active participation of the students, shared inquiry discussions and conversation, and what Josh Gibbs has been calling a cruciform lectern, the lectern as confessional. The important point here is that we as educators need to be aware of what the hows of our teaching are communicating; are we embodying practices that sanctify the values of a modern secular industrialized society (competency, professionalism, management), or are we communicating the values of a distinctively Christian public, such as communion, mutuality, confession, and penitence.

In terms of the student's acceptance or conformity, paideia entails the practice of mimesis, or the Latin, imitatio. Specifically, mimēsis involved the student's learning how to interpret the poet's tone or voice in order to present a dramatic performance of the sacred texts. And so the student imitated the text through memorizing passages of poetry, and interpreting and reciting the texts, and with the advent of progymnasmata in the third-century (BC), the student performed their own exposition of virtuous themes, such as courage, prudence, piety, and honor. Further, mimesis was considered an extension of sunousia in that the teacher served as the exemplar of such mimesis. The key distinctive to a Christian appropriation of mimēsis is of course 'imitatio Christi.' We see in a number of places in Paul's letters where he presents himself as the exemplar of this mimēsis, most particularly 1 Corinthians 9. Paul twice exhorts the Corinthians to "be imitators of me," as he imitates Christ.

The important thing here is that this stress on the relationship between teacher as exemplar and student as mimēsis or imitation signifies that the virtues were more caught than taught, as it were. Very much like music instruction, imitation does not involve so much the impartation of information but rather a discipling process of formation, specifically the formation of a particular kind of body. When we tell a child, 'Don't pick your nose in public,' we are more than merely passing on information to that child; we are shaping and cultivating the child's body and behavior, and hence fostering the child's dispositions and inclinations to act a certain way in public.

The psychological effects intended by such paideutic practices were termed morphosis, which involved the transformation of the student into a particular kind of human person (Jaeger, 1965, 86-7). Through morphosis, the student's dispositions, inclinations, habits, and orientations, are harmonized with the moral order of the universe. And with the values of a society inscribed in the body of the student, he takes his place among the citizenship of the polis to live in harmony with the gods and his fellow man.

From a Christian vantage point, this morphosis is central to Paul's exhortation to the Roman church:

Romans 12:1-2 Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. 2 And do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed (metamorphosis) by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect (or in classical paideutic terms, true, good, and beautiful).

Notice in this passage the emphasis on the body and the mind, the senses and the imagination reoriented back toward God. Paul is concerned about a consecrated body and sanctified mind, which prepares the Roman church for his discussion on self-emptying love as the primary disposition towards one another in chapters 13-15. And so the transformation that we are really looking for in our students, I would argue, is a love for the church as the body of Christ, the shared lifeworld that is a new civilization, or in Augustine's words, a republic, the city of God, that through word and sacrament witnesses to the entire world that the totality of the cosmos has been incorporated into the transformative life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

And so, in conclusion, reimagining Christian paideia as an extension of public theology provides an important corrective to the privatized tendencies of the modern church that imperil the maintenance of its moral and veridical identity, all the while providing a rich tapestry of practices and resources that can awaken us to a distinctively Christian vision of redeemed society, within which the ardent desires of teacher and student alike are reoriented toward the restoration of Paradise in Christ.


Martin Marty's (1974) article entitled "Reinhold Niebuhr: Public Theology and the American Experience," Journal of Religion 54. I'm indebted to the history of research provided by Gerard Mannion, "A Brief Genology of Public Theology" and Martin Levesque, "Political Theology versus Public Theology: Reclaiming the Heart of Christian Mission."
Lars Magnusson, Nation, State and the Industrial Revolution: The visible hand (London: Routledge, 2009).
I would place here liberal theology, liberationist theologies, feminist theologies, etc.