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Postcolonial Religion and Theology in/as Practice
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Postcolonial Religion and Theology in/as Practice

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444). This special issue belongs to the section "Religions and Health/Psychology/Social Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 December 2024) | Viewed by 3674

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Federico Settler

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Associate Professor, School of Religion, Philosophy and Classics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041, South Africa
Interests: religion, race, migration, postcolonialism; research methodology, sociology of religion
Dr. Jamall Calloway

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA
Interests: race; religion; black theology; African-American/black literature

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue of Religions, which seeks to focus on and theorize about contemporary postcolonial practices in religion and theology.

The overall ambition of the volume is to identify distinct posture and related practices that emerge from a postcolonial or a decolonial context, and the theories that are animated from these contexts of marginality. Informed in part by black and liberation theologies on both sides of the Atlantic (Cone 2011, Sobrino 2008 and Mosala 1993), as well as by the material (Houtman and Meyer 2012), quotidian (Tweed 2015) and decolonial turns (Nye 2019) in the study of religion, we wish to specifically look at the practices or theories of praxis (Walsh 2021) that have shaped and continue to shape religion and theology in postcolonial context. While theology continues to labor under the burden of the coloniality of dogma (Drexler-Dreis 2018), and as much of religion scholarship continues to rest on the binary of the sacred–profane that characterizes Western modernity (Bhambra 2013), postcolonial communities continue to think from, orient themselves and produce everyday practices that help them resist various matrices of power.

There is a great deal of postcolonial literature that shows how the colonial condition and context shaped theological disciplines and practices, such as Sugirtharajah (2003), Pui-Lan (2005), Lartey (2012), and more recently Carvalhaes (2015), West (2019), and Kim-Cragg (2022). However, as recent decolonial, feminist, and queer practices converged with and challenge postcolonial scholars to consider practice/praxis as a starting point for analysis (Walsh 2021), a series of postures oriented towards transgressing and transcending coloniality become visible. Where practices such as story-telling, and embodied experiences of dance, trance, self-silencing, and discomfort, for example, articulate postcolonial experiences of religious or theological otherness, new theories of knowing, doing, and being emerge.

In this volume, we hope to reflect on how postcolonial practice/praxis as method and posture inform current religion and theology contexts. Thus, we particularly invite contributions that take postcolonial practices/praxis as a starting point for theorizing about religion and theology, and contributions that seek to theorize religious and theological practices that seek to disrupt coloniality and Western normative modernity (within postcolonial contexts).

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–500 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors (settler@ukzn.ac.za) or to the Religions editorial office (religions@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review.

References

Bhambra, G K. 2013. ‘The Possibilities of, and for, Global Sociology: A Postcolonial Perspective’. Postcolonial Sociology (Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 24), pp. 295–314. Bingley: Emerald. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0198-8719(2013)0000024017.

Cone JH. 2011. The Cross and the Lynching Tree / James H. Cone. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Drexler-Dreis, J. 'The Entanglement of Christian Theology and the Coloniality of Power: The Possibilities of a Response', Decolonial Love: Salvation in Colonial Modernity (New York, NY, 2018) https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823281886.003.0003.

Houtman, D. & B. Meyer. 2012. Things: Religion and the question of materiality. New York: Fordham University Press.

Kim-Cragg, H. 2022. Postcolonial Preaching: Creating a Ripple Effect. Lexington Books.

Lartey, E Y. 2012. Postcolonializing God: New Perspectives in Pastoral and Practical Theology. London: SCM.

Mosala, I. J., & Horsley, R. A. 1989. Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa. The Use of the Bible. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Nye, M. 2019. Decolonizing the Study of Religion. Open Library of Humanities. 5(1): 43, pp. 1–45.  https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.421.

Pui-lan, K. 2005. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox.

Sobrino J. 2008. No Salvation Outside the Poor : Prophetic-Utopian Essays / Jon Sobrino. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Tweed, T. A. 2015. After the Quotidian Turn: Interpretive Categories and Scholarly Trajectories in the Study of Religion since the 1960s. The Journal of Religion, 95(3), 361–385.

Walsh, C. 2021. ‘Decolonial Praxis: Sowing existence-life in times of dehumanities’ in (De)coloniality and religious practices: liberating hope; edited by Valburga Schmiedt Streck, Júlio Cézar Adam and Cláudio Carvalhaes. Vol. 2 (2021). IAPT. Doi: 10.25785/iapt.cs.v2i0.189.

West, T. 2019. Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality. New York: New York University Press.

Dr. Federico Settler
Dr. Jamall Calloway
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

 

Keywords

  • postcolonialism
  • theology
  • religion
  • practice
  • praxis

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 258 KiB  
Article
Has Methodism’s ‘White History’ Determined Its ‘Black Future’? African Traditional Healing and the Methodist Church of Southern Africa
by David Elliott
Religions 2025, 16(4), 513; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16040513 - 16 Apr 2025
Viewed by 497
Abstract
Postcolonial discourses on religion have extensively explored the intersections of race and religion. Particular research within such discourses has been conducted to explore the intersection of Whiteness and Christianity in postcolonial contexts. The Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA) is an example of [...] Read more.
Postcolonial discourses on religion have extensively explored the intersections of race and religion. Particular research within such discourses has been conducted to explore the intersection of Whiteness and Christianity in postcolonial contexts. The Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA) is an example of a postcolonial Christian denomination that seeks to assert itself as ‘authentically African’ whilst having a distinctly colonial, missionary history in Southern Africa. This article explores the enduring intersections of Whiteness and Christianity in the MCSA through analyzing the methodology and theoretical framework of a discussion document produced by the MCSA to explore the relationship between Methodism, ukuthwasa, and African Indigenous Religion. I contend that the MCSA structurally and epistemically, albeit unintentionally, reproduces Whiteness through privileging seemingly universal Methodist methods, theories, and concepts for producing theological knowledge that are colonially produced and continue to underscore the infrastructure of MCSA ecclesiology. The stubborn persistence of colonially inherited epistemologies is particularly evident when we see how a potentially groundbreaking document on ukuthwasa (calling) is subjected to the constraints of the very epistemic traditions it is intended to dislodge. Furthermore, I argue that, through the persistence of this epistemology, the MCSA moves to domesticate and civilize the African Indigenous in Southern Africa. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Postcolonial Religion and Theology in/as Practice)
15 pages, 226 KiB  
Article
Religious Complexity in Postcolonial South Africa: Contending with the Indigenous
by Federico Settler
Religions 2025, 16(1), 60; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16010060 - 9 Jan 2025
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 867
Abstract
The history of religions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been closely tied to the classification of Indigenous religions. However, recent scholarship in the field of religion has increasingly drawn on the work of subaltern and postcolonial historiography as a way [...] Read more.
The history of religions during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been closely tied to the classification of Indigenous religions. However, recent scholarship in the field of religion has increasingly drawn on the work of subaltern and postcolonial historiography as a way of disrupting the European canon and dislodging Indigenous and non-western ways of knowing and being from the tyranny of the classical taxonomies of religion. Recent approaches to religious diversity have been challenged for reproducing imperial hierarchies of religion—assuming an accommodationist approach to Indigenous religions while also rendering invisible the internal diversity, fluidity, and adaptive orientations within Indigenous religions. In this paper, I contend that in the postcolonial context, Indigenous religions uncouple themselves from traditional taxonomies of religion, and, in particular, I propose religious complexity as a suitable framework and approach for accounting, contending with, and reporting on religious change in postcolonial South Africa. I explore questions about how to account for, ‘classify’, or ‘measure’ change related to everyday African Indigenous religious efforts and practices in the aftermath of and in response to colonialism, where conventional ideas about religious authority and affinity are displaced by Indigenous practices that can variously be described as simultaneously vital, viral, or feral. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Postcolonial Religion and Theology in/as Practice)
12 pages, 289 KiB  
Article
“Das Eine Ist Verbunden Mit Gott, Das Andere Aber Auch”: Service Provision as Part of Religious Life in an Eritrean Orthodox Community in Berlin, Germany
by Susanna Trotta
Religions 2024, 15(12), 1471; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15121471 - 3 Dec 2024
Viewed by 957
Abstract
Despite a growing body of academic literature on religion and migration, there is limited focus on the roles of migrant religious communities and on how religious everyday practices intersect with migration and its implications. This study seeks to address these issues from a [...] Read more.
Despite a growing body of academic literature on religion and migration, there is limited focus on the roles of migrant religious communities and on how religious everyday practices intersect with migration and its implications. This study seeks to address these issues from a post- and decolonial perspective, through the analysis of the activities of the St. Georgis Eritrean orthodox church in Berlin. It draws on material collected through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and primary text analysis between 2023 and 2024. Some of the main findings include the fact that the church provides a range of services to its members, e.g., family conflict resolution sessions and specific meetings for families with children with disabilities, which address some of the issues that the community itself chooses to prioritise and that are not addressed by other service providers. Analysing the establishment of the church and its social activities, this article focuses on the agency of the congregation and how it challenges Northern/Western religion and migration frameworks, with a specific focus on its religious dimension. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Postcolonial Religion and Theology in/as Practice)
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