The task of theology, as Karl Barth maintained throughout his life, is to talk about God, but who this God is will invariably conjure up conflict with political power aspirations. Barth’s positioning of theology has always been contested—as too political by some, as un-political or anti-political by others–and his concrete theological commitments as well as his concrete political stances have been problematized in a variety of ways.

The aim of the conference is simple and momentous: to engage the contested and the disruptive in both the theological and the political. Major scholars working in different areas of political theology will test and contest Barth as a resource for political theology, broadly construed, and enter into critical and constructive conversation with Barth. The conference will foster new conversations on Barth and political theology, generate creative space for critical engagement, and explore the potential for an explicitly theological stance in complex and difficult social and political contexts.

Barth understood theological judgments to be entangled with political judgments. Barth was acutely aware of death-dealing political theologies that emerge from religious nationalism and its programs. Certainly, every biography of Barth references his commitment to socialism, his preaching to struggling blue-collar workers, and the fervent objection to his teachers for their political illusions. That Barth was immersed in the political cannot be refuted. The aim of the conference is to read Barth out of the box together with those who are not by name or profession “dedicated Barth scholars” because we agree with Barth, that “the Christian community is of ultimate and supremely political significance.” The aim is to read Barth squarely situated in his context because we think his context may be relevant to the “prevailing present”—current religious forms of nationalism in the United States make Barth’s context a little closer to home than we might like to think. Conference participants were selected because they each agree we ought always to attend to the most urgent questions of theology. Reading theology through the prism of Barth’s political commitments is heuristic for considering theology as a site of resistance and as prophetic witness.