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The State of California has been a trendsetter in radical forms of penal policy and mass incarceration in Western societies. As such California’s prison state and its governance structures demand careful scrutiny. These governance structures are both formal and informal, manifesting different power structures at play within the system. Any proper theological account of such phenomena needs to reckon not only with these extant structures but also with the incarcerate ecclesia, the prison church. The present article aims to highlight the reality of this community within the California prison settings (with
relevance to other penal contexts), a community that is locally supernaturally constituted, inter-racial, spatially transcendent and transformational, displaying the
power of the gospel among its participants. In this way, the incarcerated church subversively fulfills the aims of the other formal and informal governance structures, both
sanctioned by the State and manifest in prison gangs.

Features of the "missional" conversation revolve around discussions of the ecclesial and divine mission. Largely an intra-Evangelical debate, with relevance to other traditions, this conversation has lacked representation from systematic theology. This article argues that the aim for diversity and listening to other voices that missiology excels at often stops short of seeing things as systematic theology might render them. The integrity of systematic theology's voice as an exposition of the church's confession renders structures that mark the manner of how gospel-exposition and mission really
work insofar as the gospel defines things as they really are. As Christian theology claims Jesus' lordship over all created realities, then, it functions to co-labor with the God of the Bible who is missionary and brings his people to participate in his action. Systematic theology then is missional in form, content, and aim, suggesting that mission is entirely what systematic theology is about.

This article reconsiders and reformulates the nature of public theology by assessing essential features of Western public space and precisely how Evangelical Christian witness takes shape in those contexts. Instead of understanding theology as something done primarily from the church to the world, it argues that theology that is properly public is best understood as done within the setting of common societal structures, in particular locations and in situations where believers are enabled to confess the hope within them. An understanding of this dynamic nature of Christian witness, and the variegated expositions of theological reflection, corresponds to the dynamic expressions of faith, in word and deed, which corresponds to the Christian missionary impulse. As such, there is a more robust understanding of public witness befitting to a properly public theology than has been rendered by Evangelical public theologians heretofore.

Among various carceral governance structures meant to punish, educate, and rehabilitate is the carceral governance structure of the church with its dynamic structure operative in the reconstitution of prisoners' humanity. Presenting an interdisciplinary theological vision of this phenomenon found in the material content of personal faith, this paper presents preliminary results of twenty-four interviews of former prisoners who participated in the incarcerated church, interpreting the ethnographic data in dialogue with the ecumenical creed. Thus, it reinterprets in-depth interview data so as to begin presenting a coherent theological vision of what the members of the prison church both are and could increasingly become within the carceral context.

Veli-Matti Karkkainen's five-volume work offers a literary smorgasbord of the traditional doctrinal loci in over 2,000 pages. It does this in conversation with significant interlocutors while engaging some of the most pressing questions Christian theology must grapple with in the early twenty-first century. Several English-speaking evangelical theologians have set out to complete, and some have even finished, major systematic projects of a multi-volume breadth (the late Tom Oden's three-volume systematic theology and Alister McGrath's A Scientific Theology, for example), and several more have attempted major tasks only to leave them incomplete. The latter include the late John Webster's ambitious multi-volume work, which should see publication of the posthumous second volume in 2019, while perhaps most ambitious was the proposed six-volume series by Stanley Grenz, which only barely completed volume two, also posthumously published. However, Kakkainen has actually completed the longest and most perambulatory treatment of the systematic loci that has ever been produced in English. English is not Karkkainen's first language. He started his career in Finland and spent three years in Bangkok. It is difficult to say just how much the Finnish context, his own evolving Lutheran and Pentecostal ecclesial identities (not to mention Catholic and ecumenical), and his arrival to teach at Fuller Seminary in California shaped his outlook on theology, as well as providing the opportunity and inspiration for such an extensive and masterful project. I would venture that the multicultural context of Los Angeles, and the exploratory openness of Fuller in

Recent suggestions have been made that theology may have more to offer on matters related to the subjects of punishment, corrections, and rehabilitation than has often been acknowledged in the scholarly literature. This essay sets out to explore the merits of such claims with regard to how they might assist ongoing efforts to address mass incarceration, including the theological dimensions of punitive justice along with other potentially redemptive realities that theological reflection may illuminate and make more visible. Consideration will be given to the ongoing role that religion plays in the life of the prison before giving consideration to the ontology of the church as a social actor, especially as locally-constituted within the prison-the ecclesia incarcerate, or the prison church. The theological rationale for the basic existence of such an actor is explored along with the effects of such a vision for this kind of transformation the church may experience along with both promises and potential challenges that come with the church having its own ontology, not as a given, but as a creature of grace.

The Covid-19 pandemic presented enormous challenges for secular and religious institutions as well as religion scholars engaged in the critical study of religion. The unique opportunities for scholars of religion include questions about the very nature of our academic work. Inclusive of scholarly research and dissemination, along with the administrative work and service that facilitates this, is academic work to draw from the rich wellspring of the traditions we study and represent, or does it neglect them in the daily affairs of our work? With a particular regional focus, and despite traditional academic disciplinary conventions within the critical study of religion, this article argues that religious traditions and the critical appropriations of their wisdom and ongoing actions provide an important reckoning with the reality of the ever-changing and often terrible conditions in the contemporary world. They provide a critical feature of what it means to cultivate an ecology of ethical responsibility and care.