The Spirit and the Common Good: Shared Flourishing in the Image of God

by Daniela Augustine, Miroslav Volf (Foreword)

A fresh vision of the common good through pnumatological lenses Daniela C. Augustine, a brilliant emerging scholar, offers a theological ethic for the common good. Augustine develops a public theology from a theological vision of creation as the household of the Triune God, bearing the image of God in a mutual sharing of divine love and justice, and as a sacrament of the divine presence.  The Spirit and the Common Good  expounds upon the application of this vision not only within the life of the church but also to the realm of politics, economics, and care for creation. The church serves a priestly and prophetic function for society, indeed for all of creation. This renewed vision becomes the foundation for constructing a theological ethic of planetary flourishing in and through commitment to a sustainable communal praxis of a shared future with the other and the different. While emphatically theological in its approach,  The Spirit and the Common Good  engages readers with insights from political philosophy, sociology of religion, economics, and ecology, as well as forgiveness/reconciliation and peacebuilding studies.

Genres: Theology, Justice

272 pages, Paperback

Published September 12, 2019

Reviews

[Darcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Building on the unique spiritual context of the church in Eastern Slavonia, refined in the fires of the Balkan war, Augustine merges Eastern Orthodox reflection with Pentecostal theology to produce a powerful vision of humanity transformed by the Spirit to be God’s healing presence in a broken and troubled world. Alleging that the gospel (through the Spirit) seeks to be visible (35), Augustine challenges the reader to recognize that our humanity is most evident in community and that “it takes a human community to image within the cosmos the divine protocommunity of the Trinity” (34). The vision challenges the reader to reflect on the intentional creation of diversity, The Eucharistic pathway of redemption, and the interplay of economics and reconciliation in the church as a witness to the intent of God for the flourishing of all creation. Augustine’s prose is dense. Each word, carefully chosen, carries a weight that is at once philosophical and theological—and beckoning for embodiment. The culmination of her work is the narrating of the several lives that witness, amidst the Balkan war, to being empowered by the Spirit and embodying the reality of the truth to which her theological reflection points. I also would be amiss not to mention the wonderful interview that led me to this book: the January 13, 2025 On Script podcast.