Search Results (37)

By exploring how Cone employs and emulates Black literary sources, this article argues that his theological writing can be understood as often translating and thereby making explicit the significance of the inner, emotional lives of Black folks, particularly Black rage, into Black theological thought. The argument, in other words, is that Cone’s writing is an ethical performance of rage and a literary process of reforming his rage. His performance of rage is ethical in that it is morally motivated by injustice and indifference. It is not a performance for its own sake or to simply blow off steam. The performance takes a literary form and becomes the means through which his rage is reformed. The aim of this article demonstrates how his theological writing copes with and transforms rage into ethical discourse. Full article

“If it wasn’t for the women” is a common refrain in Black Church culture, made most popular by Cheryl Townsend Gilkes’ sociology of religion work in the 1990s. As conversations grow around a perceived disconnection from the church—particularly among younger generations—many Black congregations and denominations are asking the following question: Where do we go from here? One possible response is to ask the women. Black women have long been central to the sustenance and theological framing of the Black Church. However, many contemporary Black women theologians and church-adjacent writers are reshaping religious discourse in ways that move beyond traditional ecclesial boundaries and into the interiority of Black womanhood. This turn should be considered essential in any reimagining of the Black Church. This paper employs content analysis to examine five contemporary works by Black women thinkers—Candice Benbow, Lyvonne Briggs, Tricia Hersey, EbonyJanice Moore, and Cole Arthur Riley—whose writings reflect Black women’s embodied spirituality, theological imagination, cultural meaning-making, and institutional critique within Black religious life. Rather than signaling a decline in moral or spiritual life, their work points to the search for sacred spaces that are more liberative, inclusive, and attuned to lived experience. Through a thematic analysis of Power, Authority, and Institutional Critique; Afrofuturistic Visioning of Faith; Sacred Embodiment and Spiritual Praxis; Language and Rhetorical Strategies; Gender, Sexuality, and Sacred Autonomy; and Liberation, Justice, and Social Transformation, this study contributes to the evolving conversation on Black women’s spirituality, leadership in religious spaces, and a possible iteration of the Black Church. Full article

This article draws on political theology to provide a history of sovereignty (law-generating power) and legality (law-maintaining power) across an overlooked early modern trilogy of historical events. (1) The Kingdom of Kongo voluntarily adopted Catholicism in the late 1400s and early 1500s. Catholicism became a core part of its political identity and a major way through which Kongo resisted Portuguese exploitation and enslavement. However, Kongo’s compromises with Portuguese power gave rise to a heretical movement that triggered conflict, reforms, and mass enslavement and deportation. Some of those deported found themselves in South Carolina. (2) Deportees may have been part of a ditch-cutting crew at Stono that led the largest slave uprising in England’s mainland American colonies. Their Rebellion has many Kongolese characteristics and may have partly been a Kongolese Catholic response to English Protestantism. This is especially so because the rebels apparently meant to reach sanctuary in Spanish Florida. (3) Escapees from enslavement by Protestant rivals inspired Spain to offer freedom to fugitive slaves who converted to Catholicism. While Florida had a racial hierarchy and practiced slavery, its versions of these was somewhat milder due to religious and legal influences. Free Black people, especially escapees from the English, proved loyal subjects and militiamen—and Spain reciprocated with protection and inclusion. Chronicling sovereignty and legality across these three episodes is important for telling the history of how early Americans found the heart they needed to make their world less heartless. Full article

Black Theology of Liberation, particularly in South Africa, has always been for Black people in the world and produced theological reflections through the lens of Black people. In the evolving scholarship on BTL, there has been challenges in its middle class positionality toward the Black poor and oppressed. The Church Land Programme in Pietermaritzburg was presented with a similar challenge on its positionality in its work on land reform. The CLP’s shift from an organisation working on behalf of the Black poor to working with them may provide suggestions for BTL’s methodology and positionality. This article analyses the Church Land Programme’s community-led publications and how these provide innovative methodological choices for Black Theology of Liberation scholars. Firstly, it explores the Church Land Programme’s history, strategic shifts, and publication partnerships within communities. Secondly, is analyses the publications’ use of stories from within communities. Finally, it discusses new methodological choices in Black Theology of Liberation through lessons from the Church Land Programme’s shift and resultant publications. The results reveal that narratives from below can be promoted in Black Theology of Liberation’s methodology. Full article

Growth in forms of violence germinates from the abject soil of racism and colonialism. This article investigates religious racism in Brazil in the State of Rio de Janeiro through in-depth case studies and published data. First, I analyze how religious racism is utilized as a means to legitimize the demonization and consequent violence directed at Afro-Brazilian religions. Through an analysis of terreiro leaders’ discourses, I present a conception in which demonization and deliberate attacks imply the persecution of ways of being, existing, doing, and living of Black African origin. I use this lens to highlight the role that neo-Pentecostal churches and the theology of spiritual battle play in the resurgence of violence against Afro-religious people. Then, I problematize the harmful relationships between the demonization of terreiros and the extremely warlike conception of Christian faith. Ultimately, I argue that racist theological discourse of demonization manifests itself through verbal, physical, psychological, moral, and patrimonial aggression, putting the existence of terreiro peoples and communities at risk. Full article

Post-colonial Africa and its attendant challenges, including disillusionment during democratic dispensation and racial tensions among black and white people, constitute a problem that calls for interventions from all social actors. Theology, especially pastoral care, is challenged to broaden its vision and focus on health, healing, and human flourishing by adopting a public dimension. Thus, public pastoral care can emerge as a critical approach through which to make a meaningful contribution to fostering holistic personal care. This assumption prompts an examination of the place and role of pastoral care as a science and art of fostering social health and well-being. Public pastoral care practices are used to encourage, promote, and foster ‘coexistence’ and ‘being with’ other people in the same geographical spaces where tension and disillusionment exist. Using the South African lens, this article aims to pastorally address challenges emerging from post-colonial African public contexts by developing a public pastoral care approach. Pastoral care principles of empowerment care, prevention care, conversational care, and care by being with the other in shared spaces of coexistence are proposed. Full article

This paper uses Pope Francis’s Fratelli tutti to develop traditional Catholic depictions of human dignity in both theory and practice. Black sociopolitical thought and social movement organizing are brought into conversation with theologies and philosophies that reflect on what gives life integrity. I posit that the substantialist (ontological) interpretation of human dignity logically extends from individuals to collectives. Further, I suggest religious leaders in the United States should emphasize this collective form of substantialism alongside the relational (Trinitarian) and functional (creative) interpretations of human dignity, thus identifying collectives as thematizing divine likeness and separating the notion of human dignity from individualism. Full article

On the evening of 25 May 2020, White Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, killed George Floyd, a Black man, by kneeling on his neck for almost 10 min. Floyd’s death sparked one of the most significant protests in the US. Moreover, it forced a global conversation about reckoning with race, social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion in society. Sport was used as a platform to address many of the social ills that plagued humanity in the US and other nations. Floyd’s tragic death created an alarm for chaplains across vocational strands, including sports chaplains, to immerse themselves in painful and often awkward conversations surrounding race, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Three years after the demise of Floyd, the task that lies ahead is to continue compassionately the work of recognizing harm, promoting reconciliation, and engaging in the collective work of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Furthermore, advancing conversations about moral harm, fairness, relevant theologies, and culturally responsive caregiving strategies must be given primacy. Full article

Syncretism in the African section of South African Pentecostalism followed the emergence of the Ethiopian movement. The latter took the lead in promoting the syncretising of Christianity and African culture and practice (hereinafter referred to as Ubuntu). A similar syncretism emerged in the Christian Catholic Church in Zion in Wakkerstroom, the “black section of the Apostolic Faith Mission”, soon after the departure of Reverend Pieter Le Roux, who was appointed to lead the Apostolic Faith Mission in Johannesburg since John G. Lake was returning to the USA. This article intends to show that such syncretism did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, it was influenced by the interpretation of some portions of Scripture, the influence of John Alexander Dowie’s praxis and some dreams and visions of a leader of the Christian Catholic Church in Zion in Wakkerstroom. This form of syncretism later permeated subsequent sections of African Pentecostalism in the Apostolic Faith Mission, resulting in the emergence of two categories of African Pentecostalism in the church: namely, those who accept this phenomenon and those who abandon it. These past developments position the Apostolic Faith Mission as a prime example to use in analysing syncretism in Pentecostalism and how it could be addressed by taking cognisance of Ubuntu without committing syncretism. Hence, the following question arises: How can theological reflections on the past experiences of the black section of the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa contribute to promoting a biblical approach that takes cognisance of Ubuntu without committing syncretism? This article applies the Magadi research method conceptualised for practical theology to answer this question. It further demonstrates that it is possible to promote a biblical approach that embraces Ubuntu without committing syncretism. Full article

Hashtag movements, also amongst contemporary student movements, present a new charge towards decolonization. This also happens at the Faculty of Theology of Stellenbosch University. The group also identified as a Black collective. This contribution argues that this charge is therefore at a deeper level, directed at older generations of Black theologians, and this is assessed critically through a reading of some proponents of third-generation South African Black theologians. It is concluded that there needs to be a conscious nurture of creative tension and challenge, transformative encounters to decolonize theological education in Africa. Full article

The antiblack violences of this world are harsh and unrelenting, and the assaults are gratuitous. It remains a difficult task for many Black adults to get out of bed every day and to face both the expected and the unforeseen horrors of the day. How much more might this be true for our children? And how might they already be leaning into their own formations of spiritual action in response? Taking seriously, then, how Black children utilize imagination, creativity, and play, I use this meditation to think alongside children as epistemological sources for Black faith, and I turn to questions about how these spiritual technologies might be read as practices of conjure. Full article

This paper explores the critical intersection of transformative pedagogies, especially the work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal, as it encounters Black theology. The nexus of these epistemological frameworks is then reflected on further, in order that a Black participative mode of theological reflection can be explicated as a newer, more critical form of intellectual enquiry. The development of this work, I argue, can then be used as a means of improving the praxiological intent of Practical theology in South Africa. In the final part of the paper, I outline how South African Practical theologians have responded to the radical intent I am outlining in this article. Full article

This article posits Georgia Gilmore and the “Club to Nowhere”—a crucial fundraising arm of the Montgomery Bus Boycott—as a critical vector in a larger tradition in the U.S. In Black movements for Black liberation, food and food production are engaged as a communal pedagogy for constructing agency, behavioral reform, economic power, resistance, and sustainable social transformation. While Montgomery preachers made speeches, activists strategized, and male leaders debated the place of women in the Black liberation project, Gilmore and her cadre of Black women domestics secured thousands of dollars to fund the movement by selling soul food staples. Through their labor, “The From Nowhere” transformed the socio-political and epistemological positionality of Black domestic women into a valuable intellectual resource for generating a movement for social change. Consequently, Gilmore reminds contemporary and future liberation theologians that interrogating and re-envisioning our epistemologies is essential to sustainable revolutionary social praxes. Working at the juncture of history, ethics, and critical theory, I look to Gilmore and “The Club from Nowhere” for historical reflection on the intersections of food, race, gender, and the future of liberation theologies. Full article

Rolf Zerfass’s operational scientific model for correcting Christian-ecclesiological praxis has been utilised in practical theological research for a considerable time at the North-West University. However, this situation changed with the adoption of Richard Osmer’s four practical theology tasks of descriptive, interpretive, normative, and pragmatic as the guiding practical theology approach. The question is this: to what extent does the Osmer approach and its application in research at NWU address African contextual issues? To progress beyond being ‘reactive’ and ‘pushing back’ on Western practical theology approaches, the NWU practical theology approach is evaluated, followed by proposing an approach that attempts to incorporate African contextual realities anchoring by the principles of ‘listening, observing, weaving, and offering’. Full article

The theme of suffering is intimately tied to the possibilities of the blood as redemptive in theology. Potentially considered a universal pathway to salvation and racial transcendence for people of African descent, “Da Blood of Shesus” asks: Is there redeeming power in the blood for people of African descent? Turning to Womanist and lyrical theologians to postulate an African theological framework which explores redemptive suffering not glorified as inevitable and intricate to the historical Black experience and the church. Lyrical theologians affirm Jesus’ redemptive power of the blood in Hip Hop portraying the ways in which the cross reveals the attributes of God. Womanist theologians challenge the “classical” interpretation of redemptive suffering, illuminating the ways it contributes to Black oppression and wretchedness. Arguably, Womanist and lyrical theologians conjointly point towards liberatory and alternatives to examine redemptive suffering for people of African descent by offering sites to scrutinize and nuance the blood as an indispensable pathway to redemption. An African theological perspective decenters the logics of anti-Blackness proposing suffering is inevitable to Black life and the historical Black experience. Full article