Postcolonial Theology Study: Who is interested?
After a brief conversation with Julie Lane, facilitator of the Teaching, Wisdom, and Knowledge Spirit Team, we decided to turn to postcolonial theology for our next offering in adult education. If you would like to participate in such a study please let Julie, me, or Jessica in the church office know. Once we know who is interested we can plan on when to start.
Postcolonial theology argues that most of the theology that many of us have learned over the years has been formed by the dominant culture. Thus, we need to decolonize our minds and free our understanding of Christianity from colonial biases and structures.
In Postcolonial Imagination & Feminist Theology (Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), Kwok Pui-Lan writes that “Through the mechanisms of council and creed, and excommunication and exile, the Christian church sought to maintain its symbolic unity and to marginalize ambiguous and polarizing differences” (pg.10). Encounters with other religions, particularly Islam, caused the church “to draw a clear boundary between those who were inside and those outside the Christian fold” (pg.12). Concern for the future causes us to challenge the Eurocentric tradition of the past, and find new ways to think about and understand the Christian tradition. This book is divided into two sections.
- Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Interpretation
- (1) Postcolonial Imagination: Historical, Dialogical, and Diasporic
- (2) Searching for Wisdom: Sources for Postcolonial Feminist Theologies
- (3) Making the Connections: Postcolonial Studies and Feminist Biblical Interpretation
- (4) Finding Ruth a Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Otherness.
- Postcolonial Feminist Theological Vision.
- (5) Postcolonial Feminist Theology: What Is It? How to Do It?
- (6) Political Theology: Voices of Women from the Third World
- (7) Engendering Christ: Who Do You Say That I Am?
- (8) Beyond Pluralism: Toward a Postcolonial Theology of Religious Difference
- (9) Mending of Creation: Women, Nature, and Hope.