Longing for a Broken Politics to Be Healed: A Book Symposium of Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics

Michael's Wear's 2024 book, The Spirit of Our Politics, inaugurates a unique and meaty symposium in the JSFSC that focuses on practical theologies of spiritual formation issues of public life. Wear's book delivers a discerning application of Dallas Willard's perspective to areas of political life. Symposium contributors include Michael Wear, Todd Hunter, Kyle David Bennet, Kaitlyn Schiess, and Chine McDonald. Guest Editor Joseph E. Gorra introduces the symposium, offers context on Wear, his book, and a call for further contributions in his Afterword. After Wear's book précis, Hunter, Bennett, and Schiess weave important themes of pneumatology, family spirituality, and ecclesiology as practitioner factors shaping the vitality of a Christian spiritual formation of public life. McDonald underscores the importance of incarnation, imagination, and invitation when leading institutions of public life. All contributors underscore how spiritual formation is central to civic renewal. Michael Wear's response integrates important themes among the papers, underscoring that Christian spiritual formation does not take place in isolation from actual contexts of public life.