Decolonizing the Body of Christ


Book Description

The first book in the new Postcolonialism and Religions series offers a preview of the series focus on multireligious, indigenous, and transnational scholarly voices. In this book, the once arch enemies of Religious studies and Postcolonial theory become critical companions in shared analysis of major postcolonial themes.




Decolonizing Christianity


Book Description

“How curiously different is this white God from the one preached by Jesus who understood faithfulness by how we treat the hungry and thirsty, the naked and alien, the incarcerated and infirm. This white God of empire may be appropriate for global conquerors who benefit from all that has been stolen and through the labor of all those defined as inferior; but such a deity can never be the God of the conquered.” Echoing James Cone’s 1970 assertion that white Christianity is a satanic heresy, Miguel De La Torre argues that whiteness has desecrated the message of Jesus. In a scathing indictment, he describes how white American Christians have aligned themselves with the oppressors who subjugate the “least of these”—those who have been systemically marginalized because of their race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status—and, in overwhelming numbers, elected and supported an antichrist as president who has brought the bigotry ingrained in American society out into the open. With this follow-up to his earlier Burying White Privilege, De La Torre prophetically outlines how we need to decolonize Christianity and reclaim its revolutionary, badass message. Timid white liberalism is not the answer for De La Torre—only another form of complicity. Working from the parable of the sheep and the goats in the Gospel of Matthew, he calls for unapologetic solidarity with the sheep and an unequivocal rejection of the false, idolatrous Christianity of whiteness.




Decolonising the Study of Religion


Book Description

Decolonising the Study of Religion analyses historical and contemporary discussions in the study of religion and Buddhism and critically investigates representations, possibilities, and challenges of a decolonial approach, addressing the important question: who owns Buddhism? The monograph offers a case-based perspective with which to examine the general study of religion, where new challenges require reflection and prospects for new directions. It focuses on Buddhism, one religion which has been studied in the West for centuries. Building on postcolonial theories and supplemented with a critical analysis of identity and postsecular engagement, the book offers new possibilities and challenges to the study of religion. It critically investigates decolonisation in the study of religion, subscribing to a third way between ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ positions. Analysing the postcolonial and decolonial critique of the study of religion, with a particular focus on Buddhist studies in the West and in Japan, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Religious Studies, Buddhism, Japanese religions, anthropology, Asian Studies and those interested in religion and decolonisation.




Decolonizing Liberation Theologies


Book Description

The publication of this volume marks the Ten Year Anniversary of the Postcolonialism and Religions series. In intersectional and interdisciplinary perspectives, the chapters of this book constitute a complex whole: a volume that does justice to the justice-seeking origins of Latin American Liberation Theology, philosophy, and sociology as it emerged in the 1960s-70s and its development to the present. What drives this book is a common spirit and conviction: Liberation Theologies of the Global South remain relevant to the sociocultural and geopolitical contexts of today, which remain ensconced in the dynamics, exclusions, and resistances that gave rise to Liberation Theologies six decades ago. Today we may speak of interculturality, of borderlands, of in-betweenness, in ways that complicate, confirm, affirm, and interrogate the “underside of history”, and the spaces that are marginalized but de-centered centers of liberation struggle — within, alongside, underneath, over-against societal projects that claim and exclude them, and that represent some of the actual challenges and opportunities to liberation.




Decolonizing the Sodomite


Book Description

Early Andean historiography reveals a subaltern history of indigenous gender and sexuality that saw masculinity and femininity not as essential absolutes. Third-gender ritualists, Ipas, mediated between the masculine and feminine spheres of culture in important ceremonies and were recorded in fragments of myths and transcribed oral accounts. Ritual performance by cross-dressed men symbolically created a third space of mediation that invoked the mythic androgyne of the pre-Hispanic Andes. The missionaries and civil authorities colonizing the Andes deemed these performances transgressive and sodomitical. In this book, Michael J. Horswell examines alternative gender and sexuality in the colonial Andean world, and uses the concept of the third gender to reconsider some fundamental paradigms of Andean culture. By deconstructing what literary tropes of sexuality reveal about Andean pre-Hispanic and colonial indigenous culture, he provides an alternative history and interpretation of the much-maligned aboriginal subjects the Spanish often referred to as "sodomites." Horswell traces the origin of the dominant tropes of masculinist sexuality from canonical medieval texts to early modern Spanish secular and moralist literature produced in the context of material persecution of effeminates and sodomites in Spain. These values traveled to the Andes and were used as powerful rhetorical weapons in the struggle to justify the conquest of the Incas.




Unsettling the Word


Book Description




Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theologies


Book Description

Colonial Contexts and Postcolonial Theology focuses on what postcolonial theologies look like in colonial contexts, particularly in dialogue with the First Nations Peoples in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. The contributors have roots in the Asia-Pacific, but the struggles, theologies and concerns they address are shared across the seas.




What is Constructive Theology?


Book Description

This essential introduction to contemporary constructive theology charts the most important disciplinary trends of the moment. It gives a historical overview of the field and discusses key hermeneutical and methodological concerns. The contributors apply a constructive perspective to a wide range of approaches, ranging from biblical hermeneutics and postcolonial studies to comparative, political, and black theology. What is Constructive Theology? shows how diverse and interdisciplinary constructive theology can be by exploring key themes in the field. The contributors explore the porous boundaries between Christianity and other religions, reflect on contextual, liberation and constructive theologies from Africa and from Black British perspectives, explore the connection between embodiment, epistemology and hermeneutics, and take a constructive approach to the dangerous memories and theologies of colonial histories in Belgium and Native Americans in the United States. This sampler of the field will help you rethink theologies and find constructive alternatives.




Decolonizing Preaching


Book Description

Colonialism and imperialism continue to impact the personal and social identities of North American preachers and listeners. In Decolonizing Preaching, Sarah Travis argues that sermons have a role in shaping the identity and ethics of listeners by helping them formulate responses to empire and colonization. Travis employs postcolonial theories to provide important insights for the practice of preaching today. She also turns to the social doctrine of the Trinity to offer a vision of the divine/human community that effectively deconstructs colonizing discourse. This book offers preachers and other practical theologians a gentle introduction to colonial history, postcolonial theories, and Social Trinitarian theology, while equipping them with tools to decolonize preaching and strategies for preventing, resisting, and responding to colonizing discourse. Travis effectively casts a vision of a "perichoretic space" in which preacher and listener encounter the living God-in-Trinity and are transformed, reconciled, and sent out to others in the church and beyond.




Decolonizing Evangelicalism


Book Description

The increasing interest in postcolonial theologies has initiated a vital conversation within and outside the academy in recent decades, turning many “standard theologies” on their head. This book introduces seminary students, ministry leaders, and others to key aspects, prevailing mentalities, and some major figures to consider when coming to understand postcolonial theologies. Woodley and Sanders provide a unique combination of indigenous theology and other academic theory to point readers toward the way of Jesus. Decolonizing Evangelicalism is a starting point for those who hope to change the conversation and see that the world could be lived in a different way.