02/07/2026 15:00
- 19:30
HALL: Parenzo - A14
Contact:
Macelaru M.
Chair:
Macelaru M.
This panel approaches marginality as a critical reimagining of Christian existence in light of a Christological horizon. Christianity has long occupied positions of cultural dominance and institutional power, often sustained through political proximity and participation in hegemonic arrangements. Against this background, the panel aims to articulate a Christian public theology that disrupts such alignments with power.
We hope to explore public theology from the margins, not as a theology emerging from socially marginalised groups, but as a mode of theological reflection shaped by non-conformity to dominant political and cultural orders, as well as to their symbolic logics. In this sense, marginality functions as a theological epistemology: a way of knowing and speaking that emerges when Christian identity is reoriented away from privilege and toward a cruciform logic marked by vulnerability and critique. Such an epistemological shift challenges dominant modes of public reasoning that rely on claims of neutrality, abstraction and institutional authority, and instead foregrounds how theological knowledge is conditioned by proximity to power.
Within this framework, the panel also addresses inequality as a structural and symbolic reality that public theology must interpret and contest. Inequality is sustained not only by economic and political systems, but also by moral narratives, cultural imaginaries and religious legitimations that normalise exclusion. Public theology shaped by a reimagined, Christologically grounded marginality seeks to expose these dynamics while articulating alternative visions of public life that resist sacralised power and hegemonic religion.
By bringing these perspectives into conversation, the panel contributes to debates on religion and inequalities by proposing marginality not as a sociological label, but as a critical theological stance through which Christian engagement with the public square may be ethically reconfigured.
