The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology

The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology
Author: Susan Frank Parsons
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2002-07-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780521663809

Feminist theology is a significant movement within contemporary theology. The aim of this Companion is to give an outline of feminist theology through an analysis of its overall shape and its major themes, so that both its place in and its contributions to the present changing theological landscape may be discerned. The two sections of the volume are designed to provide a comprehensive and critical introduction to feminist theology which is authoritative and up-to-date. Written by some of the main figures in feminist theology, as well as by younger scholars who are considering their inheritance, it offers fresh insights into the nature of feminist theological work. The book as a whole is intended to present a challenge for future scholarship, since it critically engages with the assumptions of feminist theology, and seeks to open ways for women after feminism to enter into the vocation of theology.

The Lord’s Prayer in the Ghanaian Context

The Lord’s Prayer in the Ghanaian Context
Author: Michael Wandusim
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2021-10-25
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 3110730642

This study explores the reception history of the Lord's Prayer in the Ghanaian context. After presenting the current state of research in the Lord's Prayer from an exegetical perspective, this book discusses a wide field of hermeneutical approaches, such as inculturation biblical hermeneutics, mother-tongue biblical hermeneutics, African feminist biblical hermeneutics, liberation biblical hermeneutics and post-colonial biblical hermeneutics. Taking the discussions of these approaches together, it was realised that the general hermeneutical setting in Ghana (and Africa as whole) is reader-centred, i.e. the readers play an active role in the hermeneutical process and the results of the hermeneutical process are aimed at the readers’ contexts and the transformation of those contexts.

Mother Tongue Theologies

Mother Tongue Theologies
Author: Darren J. N. Middleton
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1630879681

Recognizing that one-third of the world's Christians practice their faith outside Europe and North America, the fourteen essays in Mother Tongue Theologies explore how international fiction depicts Christianity's dramatic movement South and East of Jerusalem as well as North and West. Structured by geographical region, this collection captures the many ways in which people around the globe receive Christianity. It also celebrates postcolonial literature's diversity. And it highlights non-Western authors' biblical literacy, addressing how and why locally rooted Christians invoke Scripture in their pursuit of personal as well as social transformation. Featured authors include Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constantine Cavafy, Scott Cairns, Chinua Achebe, Madam Afua Kuma, Earl Lovelace, V. S. Reid, Ernesto Cardenal, Helena Parente Cunha, Arundhati Roy, Mary Martha Sherwood, Marguerite Butler, R. M. Ballantyne, Rudyard Kipling, Nora Okja Keller, Amy Tan, Albert Wendt, and Louise Erdrich. Individual essayists rightly come to different conclusions about Christianity's global character. Some connect missionary work with colonialism as well as cultural imperialism, for example, and yet others accentuate how indigenous cultures amalgamate with Christianity's foreignness to produce mesmerizing, multiple identities. Differences notwithstanding, Mother Tongue Theologies delves into the moral and spiritual issues that arise out of the cut and thrust of native responses to Western Christian presence and pressure. Ultimately, this anthology suggests the reward of listening for and to such responses, particularly in literary art, will be a wider and deeper discernment of the merits and demerits of post-Western Christianity, especially for Christians living in the so-called post-Christian West.

The Pauline Concept of Supernatural Powers

The Pauline Concept of Supernatural Powers
Author: Kabiro wa Gatumu
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2009-02-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1606084720

The study of supernatural powers is fraught with vexing hermeneutical challenges, which aggravate further in the African context. While on the one hand Western anthropology tends to discount the idea of supernatural powers by attempting to 'explain them away', on the other Western biblical scholarship has mainly worked from the premise of 'demythologizing' them. But none of these approaches make tangible sense to African scholars for whom supernatural powers constitute an integral component of their spiritual psyche. This book, based on an examination of over a thousand documentary sources (both classic and modern), attempts to address the issue of interpreting supernatural powers from an African worldview. The author analyzes, identifies, and critiques major hermeneutical errors and offers a 'bridging hermeneutic' using the method of reader-response criticism.

The Spirit Renews the Face of the Earth

The Spirit Renews the Face of the Earth
Author: Amos Yong
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2009-04-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1630876836

This collection of essays was first presented at the 37th annual meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, held jointly with the Wesleyan Theological Society at Duke University in March 2008, under the conference theme, "Signs, Sighs, and Significance: Pentecostal and Wesleyan Explorations of Science and Creation." Along with a companion volume of Wesleyan essays published also by Pickwick Publications, the twelve chapters here represent both Pentecostal reflections/responses to the science-religion discussion and Pentecostal contributions to the ongoing exchange by biblical studies specialists, historians, and theologians, among those trained in other disciplines. Together the essayists model an actual dialogue in which Pentecostal scholarly reflection is impacted by science-religion discourses on the one hand, while Pentecostals reach deep into their own tradition to explore how their pre-understandings and commitments might enable them to speak with their own voice into pre-existing conversations on the other hand. This volume thus represents one of the first-hopefully the first of many-in which Pentecostals register their perspectives on a major issue of our time. In a world dominated by science, and at a time when theologies of creation that encourage and require care for creation and the environment are proliferating, The Spirit Renews the Face of the Earth provides a set of Pentecostal perspectives on these important matters.

Jesus Christ as Logos Incarnate and Resurrected Nana (Ancestor)

Jesus Christ as Logos Incarnate and Resurrected Nana (Ancestor)
Author: Rudolf K. Gaisie
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2020-10-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725252872

This book seeks to demonstrate the significance of Ancestor Christology in African Christianity for christological developments in World Christianity. Ancestor Christology has developed in the process of an African conversion story of appropriating the mystery of Christ (Eph 3:4) in the category of ancestors. Logos Christology in early Christian history developed as an intricate byproduct in the conversion process of turning Hellenistic ideas towards the direction of Christ (A. F. Walls). Hellenistic Christian writers and modern African Christian writers thus share some things in common and when their efforts are examined within the conversion process framework there are discernible modes of engagement. The mode of Logos Christology that one finds in Origen, for example, is an innovative application of the understanding of Jesus Christ as Logos (incarnate); a new key but not discontinuous with the Johannine suggestive mode or the clarificatory mode of Justin Martyr. African Ancestor Christology is at the threshold of an innovative mode and the argument this book makes is that this strand of African Christology should be pursued in the indigenous languages aided by respective translated Bibles; a suggested way is a Logos-Ancestor (Nanasɛm) discourse in Akan Christianity.

Kwame Bediako and African Christian Scholarship

Kwame Bediako and African Christian Scholarship
Author: Sara J. Fretheim
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498299059

In a departure from current theologically-focused scholarship on Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako, this book places him within the wider historical continuum of twentieth-century Ghana and reads him as a leading Christian scholar within the African study of African religions. The book traces a variety of influences and figures within this emerging African discourse in Ghana, including aspects of missions and colonial history and the voices of poets, politicians, prophets, and priests. Locating Bediako within this complex twentieth-century matrix, this intellectual history draws upon his published and key unpublished works, including his first masters and doctoral dissertations on Negritude literature, an abiding influence on his later Christian thought and an essential foundation for interpreting this scholar. This book also "reads" the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture as "text" by Bediako, revealing essential components of his intellectual and spiritual itinerary revealed in the Institute's community and curriculum. This approach challenges narrowly-focused theological scholarship on Bediako, while highlighting critical methodological divisions between African, Western, confessional, and non-confessional approaches to the study of religion in Africa. In doing so, it highlights the rich complexity of this emerging African discourse and identifies Bediako as a pioneering African Christian intellectual within this wider field.

African Biblical Studies

African Biblical Studies
Author: Andrew M. Mbuvi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2022-09-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567707741

Andrew M. Mbuvi makes the case for African biblical studies as a vibrant and important emerging distinct discipline, while also using its postcolonial optic to critique biblical studies for its continued underlying racially and imperialistically motivated tendencies. Mbuvi argues that the emergence of biblical studies as a discipline in the West coincides with, and benefits from, the establishment of the colonial project that included African colonization. At the heart of the colonial project was the Bible, not only as ferried by missionaries, who often espoused racialized views, to convert “heathens in the distant lands,” but as the text used in the racialized justification of the colonial violence. Interpretive approaches established within these racist and colonialist matrices continue to dominate the discipline, perpetuating racialized interpretive methodology and frameworks. On these grounds, Mbuvi makes the case that the continued marginalization of non-western approaches is a reflection of the continuing colonialist structure and presuppositions in the discipline of biblical studies. African Biblical Studies not only exposes and critiques these persistent oppressive and subjugating tendencies but showcases how African postcolonial methodologies and studies, that prioritize readings from the perspective of the marginalized and oppressed, offer an alternative framework for the discipline. These readings, while destabilizing and undermining the predominantly white Euro-American approaches and their ingrained prejudices, and problematizing the biblical text itself, posit the need for biblical interpretation that is anti-colonial and anti-racist.