Jane Barter – författare

In July 2022 Pope Francis travelled to Canada on what he called a “penitential pilgrimage,” apologizing for the Catholic Church’s role in the Indian residential school system. One of Francis’s most symbolically charged interventions, the visit has been understood as an attempt to align his broader legacy of pastoral humility, attention to the margins, and critique of colonial power with concrete acts of repentance. The Journey Presses On brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and church leaders to examine what this apology did and did not accomplish. Rather than offering a single judgment, this collection of seven essays traces the apology’s reception across diverse communities and traditions, revealing both moments of genuine encounter and the persistence of colonial structures within church and society. Positioned at the intersection of political theology, decolonial studies, and public ethics, the book situates Francis’s act within longer histories of ecclesial apologies, settler colonialism, and reconciliation efforts in Canada. The contributors analyze the apology’s language, gestures, silences, and institutional aftermath, including debates over responsibility, the Doctrine of Discovery, and the gap between symbolic repentance and material justice.Placing sharp critique alongside cautious hope, refusing to harmonize perspectives, The Journey Presses On explores the moral legacy of religious leadership in an era of historical reckoning and considers ways the Catholic Church in Canada might open pathways toward genuine reconciliation.

Theopolitics and the Era of the Witness focuses on witnessing in the aftermath of political atrocity or genocide. It offers a diachronic study of the relationship between theological forms of witnessing within Jewish and Christian traditions and public forms of witnessing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book explores 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. It investigates survivor testimony and the use made of it through scholarly interpretations of testimony within the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and theological and philosophical traditions within Judaism and Christianity. The chapters move from a consideration of the early post-Shoah writings of Paul Celan and Primo Levi through to a discussion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of South Africa and Canada. The author makes the case for a "weak messianism" or remnant witnessing as an antidote to overdetermined and politicized uses made of survivor testimonies. This book makes a valuable contribution to the work of theopolitics, which claims that theology, despite its persistent misuse, can serve a constructive and critical force within public life, albeit in a chastened key.