![]() ![]() From a Christian theological point of view, Kairos is “God time.”Appearing eighty-six times in the New Testament, Kairos refers to the “moment” when God acts, an opportune time for God’s intervention. Kairos means an appointed or opportune time. The former refers to chronological or sequential time, to time as a measurable resource. The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos and kairos. ![]() What is it about this time that calls for “prophecy”? And how can prophecy and the prophetic tradition help us to navigate a time when the very foundations of our social, cultural, political, economic and personal lives are threatened? The commission, he noted, “has the task of night watch, like the sentry, to perceive the dawn.” To respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, he says, “We need the concreteness of science, and we need prophecy and creativity.” The role of prophecy It is a similar prophetic plea that I sense in Dean Scott Appleby’s words in the first blog post of this series, when in describing COVID-19 as “The Big Reveal” warns: “Let us act now, for we may not be granted another such ‘revelation.’” Similarly, Cardinal Peter Turkson, while inaugurating the COVID-19 special commission for study and research, likened that commission to the role of the prophet. I draw attention to Guterres’ remarks for his allusion to the “core” of our lives and societies, and for his prophetic lament. To respond to the pandemic, we need science, prophecy, and creativity. On March 30, as the full reality of COVID-19 was only beginning to dawn on most of us, UN Secretary-General Ant ó nio Guterres noted the “disruption” of what he described as the worst crisis in the UN’s 75-year history: “a global human crisis that is killing people, spreading human suffering, upending people’s lives” and “attacking societies at their core.” More recently, with a slight change of metaphor, in a lecture honoring Nelson Mandela, he compared COVID-19 to an x-ray that has revealed “fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built.” The pandemic, he notes, “has laid bare risks we have ignored for decades: inadequate health systems gaps in social protection structural inequalities environmental degradation the climate crisis.” Chris Rice has rightly noted that in this speech, the UN chief sounds more like a biblical prophet than a UN chief as he laments the “lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all the fiction that unpaid care work is not work the delusion that we live in a post-racist world the myth that we are all in the same boat. ![]()
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