Imaginaries and Normativities. Experimental Impulses for Digital and Public Theologies

Abstract

The article explores how Digital and Public Theologies, two separate but overlapping discourses, can combine empirical and normative efforts. The article highlights the role that the sensitivity for context should play in the development of each of these theologies. To better understand the role of the context, the category of the imaginary is outlined with reference to Charles Taylor and Cornelius Castoriadis. This category helps to describe and criticize imaginaries that determine the social, psychological, political, and contextual realities which theology reflects on – this will be called the reflective or critical task of theology. The category also helps to describe and criticize the imaginaries that determine theological thinking itself, the perspective of a given theology as well as the orientations it suggests. This is the self-critical task of theology. Furthermore, I will suggest to see it as a constant and remaining task of theology to make its imaginations explicit and open to critique because these imaginations are the source of orientations that theology articulates. This calls for theologies that understand themselves as dynamic, unfinished, and discursive.