Towards Friendship-Shaped Communities: A Practical Theology of Friendship

Bridge: Shifts in Vision

This brief transitional section serves as a bridge between Parts II and Part III, highlighting pivotal shifts in vision in the Western world in the late medieval and early modern period that negatively impacted personal and civic expressions of friendship in and beyond that world. While Indigenous peoples continue to value attunement, processes of colonization have sought to transform Indigenous place into commodity space. Modernity has fostered isolating practices; neoliberalism, which elevates materialist values over relational values, is also a deterrent to relationships of attunement, friendship, and trust. This chapter describes crises of displacement and disengagement, identifies the marginalization yet tenacity of friendship, acknowledges the potential for friendship to provide us with the social imagination necessary for constructing a more just and hopeful world, and identifies potential conversation partners for the development of such an imagination.

What is lost when friendship, in its various forms, is devalued? What is gained when the potential of friendship to inform an alternative stance to the cosmos and to one another is realized? In this brief transitional section, which serves as a bridge between Parts II and III, and thus between the late medieval period and the twenty-first century, I describe crises of displacement and disengagement, identify the marginalization yet tenacity of friendship, acknowledge the potential for friendship ...