Theological schools are currently facing a perfect storm of jeopardies that threatens their future prospects and even survivability. The squall is all the more menacing for free-standing seminaries that are not connected to a university, and especially for free-standing mainline Protestant or mainline denominational seminaries. This book brings together a stellar and diverse cast of administrators and professors working within different theological schools to reflect on the present crisis ...

Creating Ourselves is a unique effort to lay the cultural and theological groundwork for cross-cultural collaboration between the African and Latino/a American communities. In the introduction, the editors contend that given overlapping histories and interests of the two communities, they should work together to challenge social injustices. Acknowledging that dialogue is a necessary precursor to collaboration, they maintain that African and Latino/a Americans need to cultivate the...

BenjamÃn ValentÃn presents a substantive yet accessible introduction to the three central doctrines of Christian theology: God, humanity, and Christ. In an engaging style, ValentÃn offers an overview of each of these doctrines, delving into its tradition within the Christian community throughout history, from the writing of Scripture forward. He further explores what contemporary life tells us about this doctrine and how that compares to traditional understandings and then determines how w...

In the past, changes in behavior and in belief have been leading indicators for missionaries that Christian conversion had occurred. But these alone--or even together--are insufficient for a gospel understanding of conversion. For effective biblical mission, Paul G. Hiebert argues, we must add a third element: a change in worldview. Here he offers a comprehensive study of worldview--its philosophy, its history, its characteristics, and the means for understanding it. He then provides a det...

The split between the Gospel and culture is without doubt the drama of our time," wrote Paul VI in 1975. Since that time there has been an increasingly urgent awareness that inculturation is an indispensable task of the church. But inculturation, the dialogue between church and cultures, demands first of all that we who would enter into the dialogue understand what "culture" itself means and what dialogue entails. To that end, cultural anthropologist Father Gerald Arbuckle gives us this im...

This is the first book in English profiling the work of a research collective that evolved around the notion of "coloniality", understood as the hidden agenda and the darker side of modernity and whose members are based in South America and the United States. The project called for an understanding of modernity not from modernity itself but from its darker side, coloniality, and proposes the de-colonization of knowledge as an epistemological restitution with political and ethical implicati...

Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings...

Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santería and other religions related to Orisha worship—a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa—Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlant...

Indigenous Bodies, Maya Minds examines tension and conflict over ethnic and religious identity in the K’iche’ Maya community of San Andrés Xecul in the Guatemalan Highlands and considers how religious and ethnic attachments are sustained and transformed through the transnational experiences of locals who have migrated to the United States.Author C. James MacKenzie explores the relationship among four coexisting religious communities within Highland Maya villages in contemp...

The Basque language, Euskara, is one of Europe’s most ancient tongues and a vital part of today’s lively Basque culture. Reclaiming Basque examines the ideology, methods, and discourse of the Basque-language revitalization movement over the course of the past century and the way this effort has unfolded alongside the simultaneous Basque nationalist struggle for autonomy. Jacqueline Urla employs extensive long-term fieldwork, interviews, and close examination of a vast range of doc...

In Hope Sings, So Beautiful, award-winning author Christopher Pramuk offers a mosaic of images and sketches for thinking and praying through difficult questions about race. The reader will encounter the perspectives of artists, poets, and theologians from many different ethnic and racial communities.This richly illustrated book is not primarily sociological or ethnographic in approach. Rather, its horizon is shaped by questions of theology, spirituality, and pastoral pract...

Representing some of the most exciting work in critical ethnic studies, the essays in this collection examine the production of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference, and the possibilities for progressive coalitions, or the “strange affinities,” afforded by nuanced comparative analyses of racial formations. The nationalist and identity-based concepts of race underlying the mid-twentieth-century movements for decolonization and social change are not adequate to the tasks of critiq...