Editor’s Preface

Abstract

This issue of Religion&Theology appears at the end of an extraordinary year in world history. First, therewas the long simmering racial discord that gave rise to the Black LivesMattermovement that, since July 2013,mobilised the American public against police violence towards black people (but whichmovement also reverberated and found iterations in other countries – “Black LivesMatter” has now become the worldwide iconic image of protest against racism and racial discords). It came to a head on 25 May 2020 with the killing of George Floyd in police custody in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, which led to rolling millions-strong protests in the streets of American cities that in some cases erupted in violence, like the mostly peaceful protests in Portland, Oregon, that flared later into vandalism, arson, and militarised government agency interventions to suppress the protests. Countered in multiple locations by demonstrations by heavily armed right wing extremists, scenes regularly played out of very tense stand-offs, extrajudicial actions and (in some cases) lethal violence. Public and social media were flooded by images of protest and violence. “Systemic racism” has become one of themost circulated phrases and concepts in 2020. All of this was exacerbated by the heightened tensions and divisions occasioned by the presidential election in the United States of America with the current President, Donald J. Trump, and then Republican Party candidate for the 2020 election, openly supporting right-wing extremism. Second, 2020 is also the year of the Covid-19 pandemic. First identified as a new outbreak of a coronavirus epidemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the endof 2019, it very quickly spreadworldwide to other countries inAsia, Europe, North America, Africa, and South America. The rapid escalation of infections and resulting deaths (a number of online sites host Covid-19 counters that are daily updated), together with the first months of frantic attempts to understand the virus (sars-CoV-2, or novel coronavirus) and its origins, its way of transmission, its effects on the human body, and how to contain its spread and treat the infection (for the first few months the science was changing by the day), changed the world overnight. The pandemic interrupted “normal” life as