Dear Colleagues,

It is now beyond question that 2020 is likely to be, in the words of the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, ‘the toughest year of our lives’. What began, in early January, as an apparently isolated outbreak of a new strain of coronavirus in regional China, has become the worst global pandemic since the Spanish Flu of 1918. With more than 15 million cases, and almost 1 million deaths to date, COVID-19 has also decimated the world’s economies. Then, in May 2020, George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis sparked a worldwide outpouring of anger at the entrenched systems of racial injustice, and a surge of support for the Black Lives Matter movement. And, in the midst of it all, climate scientists published new and alarming evidence of the acceleration of catastrophic global warming.

In this context, it might well be strange to ask what relevance Karl Barth’s theology still has. What possible value could there be in exploring the theological insights of someone—no matter how influential—whose times were so other than these? Nevertheless, this is precisely what this Special Issue of Religions will do. Noting not only that Karl Barth lived, worked, and thought theologically in a time of global turmoil—the catastrophes of the First and Second World Wars, the Great Depression, the myriad wars for independence from colonial rule through the 1960s, and the establishment of the State of Israel in the aftermath of the Sho’ah—this Special Issue also recognizes that Barth’s theology was, however implicitly and even unwillingly, shaped by such events. Without suggesting that Barthian theology provides any sort of panacea to the world’s current crises, this Special Issue does invite explorations of the ways in which Barth’s thought intersects with, and illumines, the challenges of global modernity.

For this Special Issue, papers are invited that wrestle with these issues. Some topics that papers might explore are:

• Karl Barth’s doctrine of providence
• Karl Barth and the problem of evil
• Karl Barth and the contextuality of theology; or, should we do theology ‘as if nothing has happened’?
• Karl Barth’s crisis-ecclesiology: what is the task of the Church in times of crisis?
• Karl Barth on race relations
• Karl Barth on creation-care

Prof. Dr. Mark R. Lindsay
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• crisis
• providence
• evil
• eschatology
• creation
• race
• ecclesiology
• contextuality