Postcolonial Preaching

Postcolonial Preaching
Author: HyeRan Kim-Cragg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2021-02-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1793617104

In Postcolonial Preaching, HyeRan Kim-Cragg argues that preaching is the act of dropping the stone of the Gospel into a lake, making waves to move hearts and transform the world wounded by colonial violence. The ripple effect serves as a metaphor and acronym to guide to preaching that takes postcolonial concerns seriously: Rehearsal, Imagination, Place, Pattern, Language and Exegesis (RIPPLE). Kim-Cragg explains each “ripple” in this approach and exercise of creating and delivering sermons. The author delivers fresh insights while drawing on some traditional homiletical perspectives in the service of a homiletic that takes the reality of racism, migration, and environmental degradation seriously. Moreover, Kim-Cragg demonstrates the postcolonial sermon in action by including annotated homilies. This book contributes to the very first wave of the application of postcolonial scholarship in preaching. Given the continuing extent and influence of colonial worldviews and legacies, this approach should become a staple in preaching over the next generation.

Postcolonial Homiletics?

Postcolonial Homiletics?
Author: Wessel Wessels
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2024-03-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 166673487X

This book pursues the question of consciousness and thought through the art of preaching in a postcolonial era. Indeed, the past has bestowed upon the present the legacy of colonization and, in the South African context, apartheid. However, the endeavor of postcolonizing theology and homiletics is a contentious space that has not been settled. This book promotes a counterargument to the prevalent directions of decolonization by focusing on three themes of importance—consciousness, perspective, and identity—through the insights of primary postcolonial sources.

Decolonizing Preaching

Decolonizing Preaching
Author: Sarah Travis
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2014-11-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1630876623

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.

Preaching Jesus

Preaching Jesus
Author: Eunjoo Mary Kim
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2024-05-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1538192071

How can postcolonial approaches make a difference in preaching Jesus? The many postcolonial approaches used in this book will help preachers reinterpret the stories, metaphors, and characters in the Bible and create new images of Jesus rooted in his historical identity as a colonized person. Preaching Jesus with new images that are totally different from the traditional colonial ones, not only challenges listeners to reconsider their individual and communal identities as followers of Jesus, but also provides them with theological and ethical guidance for living out those identities in daily life. Ultimately, preaching Jesus through postcolonial approaches is a prophetic ministry that awakens listeners and their communities to seek reconciliation between colonized and colonizers, and suggests a common ground of faith and hope for the life-enhancing future of all people living in the twenty-first century. The five chapters of this book employ diverse postcolonial hermeneutical and homiletical methods across a broad disciplinary spectrum. This range includes intersectional and interdisciplinary studies with historical, literary, and cultural approaches, in dialogue with phenomenological philosophy, a postcolonial practical theological method, postcolonial feminist interpretation, postcolonial biblical hermeneutics, and postcolonial intertextuality. All these approaches invite the colonized and their descendants to be conversation partners and reflect their lived experiences in the reimagining the identity of Jesus. Moreover, the theological and homiletical insights gained through such postcolonial approaches will help preachers invite their listeners into a partnership with the triune God in order to participate in God’s reconciling work. The postcolonial approaches used in this book contest the dominance of traditional assumptions and practices of preaching Jesus, and propose a new homiletical paradigm that makes it possible for Christian preaching to contribute to the transformation of our present world into a life lived together in justice and peace, with the new images of Jesus as postcolonial self, postcolonial song, postcolonial child, postcolonial body, and postcolonial friend.

Unmasking White Preaching

Unmasking White Preaching
Author: Andrew Wymer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2022-04-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1793653003

This book examines the impact of white racialization in homiletics. The first section, Racial Hegemony, interrogates the white, colonial bias of Euro-American homiletical practice, pedagogy, and theory with particular attention to the intersection of preaching and racialization. The second section, Resistance and Possibilities, contributes diverse critical homiletical approaches emerging in conversation with racially-minoritized scholarship and racially subjugated knowledge and practice. By reading this book, preachers and professors of preaching will encounter alternative, non-dominant homiletical pathways toward a more just future for the church and the world.

Decolonizing Preaching

Decolonizing Preaching
Author: Sarah Travis
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2014-11-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1625645287

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.

Preaching the Manifold Grace of God, Volume 2

Preaching the Manifold Grace of God, Volume 2
Author: Ronald J. Allen
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2022-07-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725259648

Preaching the Manifold Grace of God is a two-volume work describing theologies of preaching from the historical and contemporary periods. Volume 1 focuses on historical theological families: Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Anglican/Episcopal, Wesleyan, Baptist, African American, Stone-Campbell, Friends, and Pentecostal. Volume 2 focuses on families that are evangelical, liberal, neo-orthodox, postliberal, existential, radical orthodox, deconstructionist, Black liberation, womanist, Latinx liberation, Mujerista, Asian American, Asian American feminist, LGBTQAI, Indigenous, postcolonial, and process. In each case, the author describes the circumstances in which the theological family emerged, describes the purposes and characteristics of preaching from that perspective, and assesses the strengths and limitations of the approach.

Lament-Driven Preaching

Lament-Driven Preaching
Author: Eliana Ah-Rum Ku
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2024-03-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1666774316

This book challenges Christian communities to engage in lament—a mode of existence characterized by impassioned expression, witnessing, and personal or social protest in the face of evil and injustice, reflecting a profound yearning for God’s saving presence. Divine lament responds to, and expresses solidarity with, human suffering, unveiling multiple facets of God’s image and demonstrating a profound sense of divine compassion. Drawing on the Book of Lamentations, Korean concepts related to suffering (han and hanpuri), the Paschal Triduum narratives, and recent homiletic discourses on suffering, the author investigates how complex issues related to grief and hope can be addressed in preaching without diminishing the harsh reality of affliction. Designed to assist preachers, this book encourages a more intentional approach to addressing suffering, specifically by advocating for lament as a transitional space between affliction and hope. Furthermore, readers are invited to contemplate the significance of the church, which, within a world in decline, embodies the body of Christ, manifesting both the demise and resurrection of God.

International Handbook of Practical Theology

International Handbook of Practical Theology
Author: Birgit Weyel
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 586
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110618397

Practical theology has outgrown its traditional pastoral paradigm. The articles in this handbook recognize that faith, spirituality, and lived religion, within and beyond institutional communities, refer to realms of cultures, ritual practices, and symbolic orders, whose boundaries are not clearly defined and whose contents are shifting. The International Handbook of Practical Theology offers insightful transcultural conceptions of religion and religious matters gathered from various cultures and traditions of faith. The first section presents ‘concepts of religion’. Chapters have to do with considerations of the conceptualizing of religion in the fields of ‘anthropology’, ‘community’, ‘family’, ‘institution’, ‘law’, ‘media’, and ‘politics’ among others. The second section is dedicated to case studies of ‘religious practices’ from the perspective of their actors. The third section presents major theoretical discourses that explore the globally significant diversity and multiplicity of religion. Altogether, sixty-one authors from different parts of the world encourage a rethinking of religious practice in an expanded, transcultural, globalized, and postcolonial world.

Stand-Up Preaching

Stand-Up Preaching
Author: Jacob D. Myers
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2022-10-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1666702803

Few vocations share more in common with preaching than stand-up comedy. Each profession demands attention to the speaker’s bodily and facial gestures, tone and inflection, timing, and thoughtful engagement with contemporary contexts. Furthermore, both preaching and stand-up arise out of creative tension with homiletic or comedic traditions, respectively. Every time the preacher steps into the pulpit or the comedian steps onto the stage, they must measure their words and gestures against their audience’s expectations and assumptions. They participate in a kind of dance that is at once choreographed and open to improvisation. It is these and similar commonalities between preaching and stand-up comedy that this book engages. Stand-Up Preaching does not aim to help preachers tell better jokes. The focus of this book is far more expansive. Given the recent popularity of comedy specials, preachers have greater access to a broad array of emerging comics who showcase fresh comedic styles and variations on comedic traditions. Coupled with the perennial Def Comedy Jams on HBO, preachers also have ready access to the work of classic comics who have exhibited great storytelling and stage presence. This book will offer readers tools to discern what is homiletically significant in historical and contemporary stand-up routines, equipping them with fresh ways to riff off of their respective preaching traditions, and nuanced ways to engage issues of contemporary sociopolitical importance.