Abstract:
By resorting to the spiritual autobiography of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, an important religious
and cultural personality of the 20th century, the author tries to emphasise the aspects of
political theology that defined her way of acting and thinking and to show how she understood
the relationship between religion and politics. Topics like poverty, love, giving, peace, sacrifice
or responsibility are presented as keywords in the understanding of a complex vision with
interdisciplinary relevance, while the two levels of poverty, namely the material one, often
accompanied by physical pain, maladies and other types of suffering, and the spiritual one,
that is not necessarily related to the lack of basic material needs and can be found even in
developed countries like the United States of America or Japan, are seen through the lenses of
political theology. The author shows that, by finding practical bridges between spirituality and
politics and by using as sources of inspiration not only Christian thinkers, but also thinkers
from other religions, like Ghandi, the Albanese militant accomplished her vocation and also
offered important and perennial principles which can help in the understanding of the
contemporary world and in finding solutions to some of its crises. Although her message is a
sort of combination between theology and social life, the political accents, sometimes
theoretical, at other times practical, are important and can be used today for the development
of a sustainable discourse for both the theological and the political sphere.
CONTRIBUTION : The article brings into attention a spiritual autobiography that was not valorised
properly by the contemporary research and in the same time offers an inter-disciplinary
approach with ecumenical value.
Description:
Rev. Iuliu-Marius is
participating in the research
project, ‘Political Theology’,
directed by Dr Tanya van
Wyk, Department of
Systematic and Historical
Theology, Faculty of Theology
and Religion, University of
Pretoria.
