Interrupting the Church's Flow


Book Description

How can we develop and embody an ecclesiology, in contexts of urban marginality, that is radically receptive to the gifts and challenges of the agency of our non-Christian neighbours? Drawing on resources from political theologies, and in particular conversation with Graham Ward and Romand Coles, this book challenges our lazy understanding of receptivity, digging deep to uncover a rich theological seam which has the potential to radically alter how theologians think about what we draw from urban places. It offers a game changing liberative theology rooted not in the global south but from a position of self-critical privilege. Full Text – Description for sales people (Text)




Being Interrupted


Book Description

Beginning with a ‘Street Nativity Play’ that didn’t end as planned, and finishing with an open-ended conversation in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, "Being Interrupted" locates an institutionally-anxious Church of England within the wider contexts of divisions of race and class in ‘the ruins of empire’, alongside ongoing gender inequalities, the marginalization of children, and catastrophic ecological breakdown. In the midst of this bleak picture, Al Barrett and Ruth Harley open a door to a creative disruption of the status quo, ‘from the outside, in’: the in-breaking of the wild reality of the ‘Kin-dom’ of God. Through careful and unsettling readings in Mark’s gospel, alongside stories from a multicultural outer estate in east Birmingham, they paint a vivid picture of an 'alternative economy' for the Church's life and mission, which begins with transformative encounters with neighbours and strangers at the edges of our churches, our neighbourhoods and our imaginations, and offers new possibilities for repentance and resurrection.




Let It Go


Book Description

Shares uplifting advice about the virtues of forgiveness, offering strategic and biblically based advice on how to achieve peace and personal fulfillment by letting go of past wrongs.







Deconstructing Whiteness, Empire and Mission


Book Description

What happens when ‘go, make disciples’ meets ‘Black Lives Matter’? Arising from the Council for World Mission’s “Legacies of Slavery” project, this book offers an unapologetic exploration of Christian Mission and its history, and the ways in which this legacy has unleashed notions of White supremacy, systemic racism and global capitalism on the world. Contributors reflect on the past and consider the future of world mission in an age of renewed understandings of empire and its impact. Contributors include Mike Higton, David Clough, Eve Parker, James Butler, Cathy Ross, Jione Havea, Peniel Rajkumar, Victoria Turner, Carol Troupe, Michael Jagessar, Paul Weller, Jill Marsh, Kevin Ellis, Rachel Starr, Kevin Snyman, Al Barrett and Ruth Harley.




Pharaohs on Both Sides of the Blood-Red Waters


Book Description

After the civil rights and anti-apartheid struggles, are we truly living in post-racial, post-apartheid societies where the word struggle is now out of place? Do we now truly realize that, as President Obama said, the situation for the Palestinian people is “intolerable”? This book argues that this is not so, and asks, “What has Soweto to do with Ferguson, New York with Cape Town, Baltimore with Ramallah?” With South Africa, the United States, and Palestine as the most immediate points of reference, it seeks to explore the global wave of renewed struggles and nonviolent revolutions led largely by young people and the challenges these pose to prophetic theology and the church. It invites the reader to engage in a trans-Atlantic conversation on freedom, justice, peace, and dignity. These struggles for justice reflect the proposal the book discusses: there are pharaohs on both sides of the blood-red waters. Central to this conversation are the issues of faith and struggles for justice; the call for reconciliation—its possibilities and risks; the challenges of and from youth leadership; prophetic resistance; and the resilient, audacious hope without which no struggle has a future. The book argues that these revolutions will only succeed if they are claimed, embraced, and driven by the people.







The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption


Book Description

Bringing together philosophies of the maternal with digital technology may appear to be an arbitrary pairing. However, reading them intertextually through select creative practices reveals how both encompass an aesthetics of interruption that becomes a novel means of understanding subjectivity. EL Putnam investigates how the digital performances of certain artists, creators, and technologists rupture existing representations of the maternal, taking advantage of the formal properties of digital media. What results are interruptions of visual and aural constructions through an immanent merging of the performing body with digital technologies. Putnam bases her analysis on close examinations of the way certain makers use the formal properties of digital imagery, such as the gap, the glitch, and the lag, as means of rendering images of the maternal uncanny in order to challenge mediation, constituting an aesthetics of interruption. The result is a radical critical strategy for engaging with digital technology and subsequent understandings of the subject that defy current modes of assimilation.




Artibus Et Historiae


Book Description




Word Made Global


Book Description

A groundbreaking work of ethnography, urban studies, and theology, Mark Gornik's Word Made Global explores the recent development of African Christianity in New York City. Drawing especially on ten years of intensive research into three very different African immigrant churches, Gornik sheds light on the pastoral, spiritual, and missional dynamics of this exciting global, transnational Christian movement.