Tinyiko Maluleke
Professor, Faculty of Theology and Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria
South Africa
A new world is being born, beyond the graveyard, the prison and exile
The only thing worse that the death-dealing world of COVID19 is a post-COVID19 world that returns to business as usual. It is bad enough for us to wallow in the nostalgia of a pre-COVID19 world. But to try and return to that world, would be treasonous, in the cosmic sense of that word. Worse still would be to model the future in the image of a pre-COVID19 world. The Coronavirus has not only exposed the frailties of our bodily immune system, but it has exposed the rot in our living arrangements as human beings on earth, the deadly shortcomings in our relationship with the environment as well as the poverty of our relationship with God.
In this paper we shall highlight the bankruptcy of any form of return to ‘business as usual’, analyse some of the many ways in which the Coronavirus has unmasked the world of its innocence, even as it has forced us to wear new and fragile masks, as well as analyse how the Coronavirus is exploiting several socio-economic vulnerabilities that have been with us and therefore neglected for a long time. On the basis of this analysis, we shall tentatively propose how we may go about constructing a post-Covid19 global society and church.
