Redeeming Mulatto


Book Description

His theology is one for all people, offered through the lens of a particular people, not for individual possession but for redemption and transformation into something new.--Timothy Jones, Ph. D. student, Boston University School of Theology "Homiletic"




Augustine and Contemporary Social Issues


Book Description

This book focuses on applying the thought of Saint Augustine to address a number of persistent 21st-century socio-political issues. Drawing together Augustinian ideas such as concupiscence, virtue, vice, habit, and sin through social and textual analysis, it provides fresh Augustinian perspectives on new—yet somehow familiar—quandaries. The volume addresses the themes of fallenness, politics, race, and desire. It includes contributions from theology, philosophy, and political science. Each chapter examines Augustine’s perspective for deepening our understanding of human nature and demonstrates the contemporary relevance of his thought.




A Theology of Race and Place


Book Description

In a world marked by the effects of colonial displacements, slavery's auction block, and the modern observatory stance, can Christian theology adequately imagine racial reconciliation? What factors have created our society's racialized optic--a view by which nonwhite bodies are objectified, marginalized, and destroyed--and how might such a gaze be resisted? Is there hope for a church and academy marked by difference rather than assimilation? This book pursues these questions by surveying the works of Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter, who investigate the genesis of the racial imagination to suggest a new path forward for Christian theology. Jennings and Carter both mount critiques of popular contemporary ways of theologically imagining Christian identity as a return to an ethic of virtue. Through fresh reads of both the "tradition" and liberation theology, these scholars point to the particular Jewish flesh of Jesus Christ as the ground for a new body politic. By drawing on a vast array of biblical, theological, historical, and sociological resources, including communal experiments in radical joining, A Theology of Race and Place builds upon their theological race theory by offering an ecclesiology of joining that resists the aesthetic hegemony of whiteness.




The Pentecostal Hypothesis


Book Description

The Pentecostal Hypothesis is the capacity to resist conventional wisdom in social actions. On a daily basis Pentecostals deploy or enact this capacity through the use of the formula: "It does not make sense, but it makes spirit" in their decision-making processes. This is an alternate way of knowing that is keyed to a particular interpretative understanding of Jesus Christ as constitutive of and normative for the good decisions relevant to human flourishing. The book offers a critical-philosophical analysis of the social-ethical implications of this hypothesis intended for private decisions and social actions. This text is ultimately a critique of Pentecostal reason. In this book Wariboko explores the epistemological dimensions of everyday Pentecostal Christology, their interpretation of Jesus's character and nature as epistemology. For Pentecostals Jesus did not have an epistemology, but the story of his life as a whole is an epistemology. For them the validity of a truth claim is always (in)formed by the story of Jesus that claims them, the story that gives them the meaning and courage to affirm their decisions without fear of being contradicted by Enlightenment rationalism. What kind of normative sway does this orientation to modernity have over Pentecostals' pattern of thought? This book configures the response to this question with profound insights into the convergence of epistemology and Christology within the impelling matrix of a provocative social ethics. The epistemological in this book is not about the that of knowing, but the how (the performative dimension) of knowing, which is affective, emotive, and an embodied practice. The Pentecostal Hypothesis is the capacity to resist conventional wisdom in social actions.




Redeeming Mulatto


Book Description

The theological attempts to understand Christ's body have either focused on "philosophical" claims about Jesus' identity or on "contextual" rebuttals--on a culturally transcendent, disembodied Jesus of the creeds or on a Jesus of color who rescues and saves a particular people because of embodied particularity. But neither of these two attempts has accounted for the world as it is, a world of mixed race, of hybridity, of cultural and racial intermixing. By not understanding the true theological problem, that we live in a mulatto world, the right question has not been posed: How can Christ save this mixed world? The answer, Brian Bantum shows, is in the mulattoness of Jesus' own body, which is simultaneously fully God and fully human. In Redeeming Mulatto, Bantum reconciles the particular with the transcendent to account for the world as it is: mixed. He constructs a remarkable new Christological vision of Christ as tragic mulatto--one who confronts the contrived delusions of racial purity and the violence of self-assertion and emerges from a "hybridity" of flesh and spirit, human and divine, calling humanity to a mulattic rebirth. Bantum offers a theology that challenges people to imagine themselves inside their bodies, changed and something new, but also not without remnants of the old. His theology is one for all people, offered through the lens of a particular people, not for individual possession but for redemption and transformation into something new.




An Augustinian Christology


Book Description

In An Augustinian Christology: Completing Christ, Joseph Walker-Lenow advances a striking christological thesis: Jesus Christ, true God and true human, only becomes who he is through his relations to the world around him. To understand both his person and work, it is necessary to see him as receptive to and determined by the people he meets, the environments he inhabits, even those people who come to worship him. Christ and the redemption he brings cannot be understood apart from these factors, for it is through the existence and agency of the created world that he redeems. To pursue these claims, Walker-Lenow draws on an underappreciated resource in the history of Christian thought: St. Augustine of Hippo's theology of the 'whole Christ.' Presenting Augustine's christology across the full range of his writings, Joseph Walker-Lenow recovers a christocentric Augustine with the potential to transform our understandings of the Church and its mission in our world.




Theology and Race


Book Description

This study develops a Christian theological response to the problems of race and anti-black racism in conversation with black theology and womanist theology. It provides a detailed introduction to multiple voices, developments, and tensions in these two theological traditions over the last half century. It offers an overview of James Cone’s arguments and their reception. It considers turns toward pragmatism and genealogy in black religious scholarship, focusing on Cornel West, Peter Paris, Dwight Hopkins, Victor Anderson, Anthony Pinn, Bryan Massingale, J. Kameron Carter, and Willie Jennings. It analyzes womanist theological treatments of intersectionality, narrative, and embodiment through Jacquelyn Grant, Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, Emilie Townes, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kelly Brown Douglas, Diana Hayes, and M. Shawn Copeland. Finally, it suggests some open questions related to hybridity, sexuality, and ecology. Ultimately, it argues that the credibility of Christian theological witness depends significantly on the quality of Christian theology’s response to anti-black racism.




Disciplined by Race


Book Description

What does it mean to be Asian American? Should Asian American identity be construed primarily in cultural terms or racial terms? And why should contemporary theology care about such questions? Disciplined by Race: Theological Ethics and the Problem of Asian American Identity reveals the critical importance of Asian American experience for contemporary theological debates on race. The book challenges readers to move beyond conventional perceptions of Asian Americans as model minorities and to confront the ways in which Asian Americans are socially restrained by whiteness. Rather than being insulated from the logics of white racism in the modern United States, being Asian American is tragically defined by those logics. Coming to grips with how Asian Americans are disciplined by race reveals the prospects for Asian American self-determination and raises the question of whether resistance to the social demands and allure of whiteness is realistically possible, for Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike. ""Joining the growing voices of scholars in Asian American Christian ethics, a nascent discipline within Asian American theology, Ki Joo Choi offers a fresh and highly nuanced social analysis and in-depth ethical reflection on nebulous topics of Asian American identity, race, and culture. Adding new insights and clarity in understanding Asian American experiences of racialization, this book is a wonderful resource for religious scholars and students who are interested in critical race theory."" --Hak Joon Lee, Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics, Fuller Theological Seminary ""Disciplined by Race is provocative and challenging--also personal, eloquent, and inspiring. White people may recognize our culture of 'white supremacy, ' but fail to 'get' how it really works. Obvious 'anti-blackness' feeds off the myth of a 'model minority' that homogenizes and distances Asian-Americans. Choi calls to all marginalized by whiteness, calls out white 'tolerance, ' and calls forth a new kind of solidarity against our country's entrenched racism. A unique and powerful book!"" --Lisa Sowle Cahill, J. Donald Monan Professor, Boston College ""In this highly readable book, a leading Asian American Christian ethicist, Ki Joo Choi, offers a definitive answer to the question: What does it mean to be Asian American in a deeply racialized society? Readers will discover a thoughtful, authentic, and courageous voice, which Asian Americans are called to live out in their everyday struggles, challenges, and joys. This book is an impressive achievement, full of insightful stories and critical reflections."" --Ilsup Ahn, Carl I. Lindberg Professor of Philosophy at North Park University Ki Joo Choi is an associate professor of theological ethics and chair of the Department of Religion at Seton Hall University.




The Liturgy of Politics


Book Description

A generation of young Christians are weary of the political legacy they've inherited. Could it be that the church's politics are shaped by its habits and practices? Contending that we must recognize the formative power of the political forces around us, Kaitlyn Schiess urges the church to recover historic Christian practices that shape us according to the truth of the gospel.




Sex, Gender, and Christianity


Book Description

Should women be priests? Should women submit to their husbands? Is premarital sex okay? Inflammatory questions such as these have splintered Christianity and polarized the church. In Sex, Gender, and Christianity, a cadre of seasoned college professors offers the modest proposal that honest, fruitful conversations about these questions will take place only if we develop the ability to deal with sex, gender, and the Christian faith with the academic rigor and perspectives of our various disciplines. This volume contributes an unprecedented collection of first-rate articles from a variety of disciplines--from the social sciences to history, from literary criticism to theology--that will challenge college administrators, professors, and students to address fractious questions in an atmosphere of scholarly inquiry.