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Norwich remained the second largest city in England until the eighteenth century. Its history over the last 450 years is of exceptional interest. Norwich since 1550 is a full account of the post-medieval history of the city and covers all aspects of Norwich life, including its population, housing, churches and chapels, politics, work, education, arts, architecture and medical care. It brings out Norwich's individuality and shows how it became the city it is today. While it changed and developed in many ways over the centuries, its textiles could not compete with those of the northern boom towns of the Industrial Revolution. Instead it settled into its role as a regional and banking capital.
Settler churches across North America have committed to the work of conciliation and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Worship is a space in which these commitments are expressed and nurtured. As we are embraced by God’s reconciling love in worship, we are equipped to carry that reconciling love into our relationships beyond the worship space. Worship equips us for the work of conciliation, but the liturgy itself needs to be decolonized if it is to truly honor Christian commitments to God and neighbor. This book explores the reformed liturgy in its pattern of Gathering, Word, Table, and Sending, searching it both for colonial vestiges, and spaces of new possibility. Unsettling Worship invites the reader into a conversation about reformed worship in a setting of ongoing colonization. Worship should both unsettle us, and equip us for the essential work of making things right with Indigenous neighbors.
What if Christian worship took place as a conversation at a round table spread with elements of earth’s gifts of nurture and beauty? This book describes such a practice—Roundtable Worship—and lays out a fresh and challenging theological foundation for it. Central to this foundation is the struggle to reconstruct the images of governance and justice that have always lain at the heart of a worship shaped by biblical traditions. Drawing on the practice of circle conversations at the heart of movements for reconciliation and restorative justice, Everett presents a theological vision rooted in biblical covenant-making, a social image of the Trinity, and an understanding of the church as “the covenanted public of Christ’s Spirit.” Roundtable worship provides a hospitable setting where people can begin to give deeper voice to their life, listen appreciatively to each other’s longing for reconciliation, and anticipate in imagination and action a renewed public life beyond the angry and violent polarizations of our age.
Where is the hope? What does it look like? Is the Christian church providing a hope that materializes in the grounding of people’s thriving? These questions posed the catalysts of this work where the author sets up a journey that parses the definition of hope within Christian theology as an ontological category of the human experience. Through ethnographic research and ecclesial study of diverse congregations in Puerto Rico the work moves from an articulation of context, hope, practice, and future to reveal its aim of liberation through a hope that can be sustainable in time and space. She analyzes the operations of political systems that suppress hope in the island. Weaving the theme of a theology of hope, with the fields of ecclesiology, memory studies, postcolonial and decolonial theory, liberation theology, and the study of social movements she builds a model that puts hope at the center of socio-economic practices and moves toward a recipe for a hope that is sustainable in practice.
This book surveys a broad panorama of Christian and African traditions to discover and assess the components that will illuminate and motivate a Christian and African ethic of women’s political participation. The author’s primary lens for diagnosing the problems faced by women in Africa is Engelbert Mveng’s concept of “anthropological poverty” that results from slavery and colonialism. It affects women in unique ways and is exacerbated by the religious and cultural histories of women’s oppression. The author advocates an interplay between the sacredness of every individual’s life, a salient principle of Christian ethics, and the collective consciousness of solidarity distinctiv...
Preaching and Social Issues: Tools and Tactics for Empowering Your Prophetic Voice equips preachers to craft sermons that help congregations talk about topics of public concern based on strong ethical, biblical, and theological foundations as well as prudent sermonic strategies. Informed by years of research with clergy and congregations, Leah D. Schade provides practical and pastoral guidance for preachers to find their prophetic voice for their context with integrity and wisdom. Preaching and Social Issues offers an assessment tool for gauging risk and capacity for preaching about social issues and suggests three approaches—Gentle, Invitational, and Robust. This book includes case studies and sermons that illustrate different approaches for preaching about contemporary topics.
This book argues that “race” and “whiteness” are central to the construction of the modern world. Constructive Theology needs to take them seriously as primary theological problems. In doing so, Constructive Theology must fundamentally change its approach, and draw from the emerging field of Philosophy of Race. Christopher M. Baker develops a genealogy of race that understands “whiteness” as a kind secular soteriology, and develops a counternarrative theological method informed by resources from Philosophy of Race. He then deploys that method to read science fiction cinema and superhero stories as cultural, racial, and theological documents that can be critically engaged and redeployed as counternarratives to dominant racial narratives.
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 stan...
The interpretation of the Bible is intricately interwoven with the history of and rhetoric of European colonization. During the modern era, the traditions of biblical interpretation played a crucial framing role in the emergence of industrialized nation-states, the capitalist mode of production, and the colonial enterprises of European powers. While the Bible has been used to justify the power of ruling classes and dominating nations, it has also been a source of liberative and resistant political discourse. In this book, Niall McKay uses the tools of literary materialism to read the gospel of Mark and build upon the representational epistemology and patterns of interpretation of the rich Marxism of the Frankfurt school. This reading is framed against and around the liberative biblical movements of late colonial and post-colonial South Africa in order to develop “ways of reading” which are generative of liberation. As a consequence, the author makes a valuable contribution to an ongoing politics and practice of resistance that is attentive to issues of religious collaboration, liberation, colonialism, and the ends of late capitalism.
From a major scholar, a postcolonial perspective on key current and historical issues in Anglicanism, foregrounding the voices of theologians and church leaders from the Global South. In recent years, the Anglican Communion has been consumed by debates about gender, sexuality, authority, and biblical interpretation, which have frequently divided along North/South lines. Much of these controversies stem from the colonial history of Anglicanism. Written by a pioneer in postcolonial theology, this groundbreaking volume challenges Eurocentrism and racism in the Anglican Communion by highlighting the voices of theologians and church leaders from the Global South. The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective scrutinizes Anglican theology and history to advocate for the decolonization of the Church. It examines controversies on Christianity and the social order, economic justice, worship, gender and sexuality, women’s leadership, and the Church’s mission in a religiously pluralistic world.