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The Last Word: Berrigan's Eulogy for Stringfellow

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"Billy Hathorn at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons While finishing this post, I learned that the eminent German theologian – and truly gracious human being – Jürgen Moltmann had died. Early in his career, Moltmann’s Theology of Hope helped launch a new genre of political theology that sought to retrieve the doctrine of the resurrection to foster projects of liberation and social transformation. William Stringfellow – sadly, to my mind, without real critical engagement – expressed suspicions of the early political theologies of the 1960s, particularly in their dependence upon Marxist theory, but I do find a congruence between him and Moltmann in their respective affirmations of the power of the resurrection to renew the churches and the world at large. In this spirit of gratitude, I offer the following reflections. Like many modern Christian thinkers, William Stringfellow refused to speculate about the possibility of conscious personal existence after d