The Spirit and the Common Good: Shared Flourishing in the Image of God

A fresh vision of the common good through pnumatological lenses

Daniela C. Augustine, a brilliant emerging scholar, offers a theological ethic for the common good. Augustine develops a public theology from a theological vision of creation as the household of the Triune God, bearing the image of God in a mutual sharing of divine love and justice, and as a sacrament of the divine presence. 

The Spirit and the Common Good expounds upon the application of this vision not only within the life of the church but also to the realm of politics, economics, and care for creation. The church serves a priestly and prophetic function for society, indeed for all of creation. This renewed vision becomes the foundation for constructing a theological ethic of planetary flourishing in and through commitment to a sustainable communal praxis of a shared future with the other and the different.

While emphatically theological in its approach, The Spirit and the Common Good engages readers with insights from political philosophy, sociology of religion, economics, and ecology, as well as forgiveness/reconciliation and peacebuilding studies.

 

Miroslav Volf is director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School. His other books include Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation.