Search Results (27)

“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

Many pastors, faith leaders, and community organizers are isolated and under-connected to communities of praxis that can accompany them as they go about their social change work, helping them to ground their organizing in their faith lives. There is a crisis of leadership development and training. This paper argues for a rethinking of leadership development as grounded in conceptions of relational power, value-based organizing, and deep solidarity. Leaders, it is often said, are those who have followers. This definition takes for granted models of leadership that were first developed in the 1940s in Alinsky-style networks and adapted in the 1980s and 1990s in the neo-Alinskyite movement. This article extends this approach to home in on what leadership development amounts to in broad-based community organizing so as to help congregations and faith leaders see how community organizing can be an enactment and expression of their faith lives. Organizing strategies of leadership development can sit at the heart of congregational development. Developing leaders is about transformative critical reflection on premises of meaning schema. Leadership development is connected to leaders developing in the sense of exploring new ways of seeing the world and acting on them. By refocusing the organizing strategy of leadership development around relational power and deep solidarity, pastors, faith leaders, and community organizers can build stronger institutions. Full article

This article explores Islamic Teacher Education through an autoethnographic account of the author’s experience with the Graduate Certificate of Education (Islamic Pedagogy) at the University of South Australia. It addresses the lack of research on how Islamic Pedagogy is taught, contributing to the growing scholarship on faith-based teacher education. Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that combines autobiography and ethnography, emphasising personal experiences to explore cultural communities. It is especially useful in studying emerging concepts like Islamic Pedagogy and faithful praxis. This approach challenges Western positivism, promoting epistemic reflexivity, and offering critical insights into marginalised perspectives and educational practices. This paper employs autoethnography to present the author’s faithful praxis journey as a transformative pedagogical shift, shaped by their experiences with Western and Islamic epistemologies, aiming to empower Muslim voices in education and challenge marginalisation, with the Graduate Certificate fostering epistemic reflexivity and providing a platform to reconcile Islamic and Western knowledge in the classroom. This paper also clarifies the distinction between Islamic Pedagogy and Islamic integration through autoethnography by highlighting their complementary nature as opposed to the author’s initial assumptions around their interchangeability. Whilst this article contributes to the growing Islamic Teacher Education scholarship through an autoethnographic perspective, further research to assess broader program efficacy is still needed. Full article

There has been a rise in Islamic schools in Australia, a trend similarly seen in other Western countries, and yet limited opportunities for teacher preparation on what it means to impart an Islamically grounded education. This study utilises qualitative research methods, specifically portraiture to shed light on the experiences of in-service Islamic school educators, with varied backgrounds and religious affiliations in a cohort of the Graduate Certificate in Education (Islamic Education) program in Australia. This faith-based teacher education program aims to foster “faithful praxis”, and recenter the Divine in teaching and learning. The research focused on analysing transformative affective shifts as reflected in the program’s final portfolios. Portraits of four participants reflect a reconceptualisation of education as a holistic process that aims to nurture the whole student: mind, body, and soul. The portraits also highlight awakening experiences that signify the role of reflexivity and self-reflection of the educator so that educational renewal is of the whole collective in the school community. Implications of this study signify the role of spirituality in teaching and learning and the importance of moving beyond conventional and secular models of teacher education programs. Full article

Practical theology has historically engaged in sustained theological reflection on the practices of the Church that intersect with the practices of the world. As field of study, it engages in interdisciplinary engagement that combines social and theological forms of reasoning and analysis. As a broader field of praxis, it seeks to support the conditions where people of faith are formed, and communities of faith may flourish. In both expressions, practical theology exists in a dynamic relationship to institutions (e.g., congregations, denominations, universities) and contributes research and praxis that supports the future of institutions and the faith they mediate. While institutions are often the source and site of practical theology, “institutions” are taken for granted as a clearly-identifiable social form and a fixed expression. However, transnational changes in congregations and related faith-based institutions require an account of the nature and role of institutions within practical theology. In this gap, this paper advances a two-part argument: first, institutions are sites of multimodal gathering, creating containers for various forms of encounter where individuals and communities gather around a shared context, shared stories, shared practices, shared resources, and a shared journey. Second, theology for institutions can be sustained by attending to five modes of institutional engagement and analysis that are marked by attention to shared context, narratives, practices, resources, and a journey. Three sections advance this argument. The first part introduces three different situations of institutional encounter to question the relationship between theology and institutions amid a changing organizational landscape. The second part engages Alasdair MacIntyre as an interpretive framework to identify the gap of institutions in the field of practical theology. The third part concludes by detailing the structure of a theological account that resolves this gap in the field and may attend to the forms of gathering institutions provide. Full article

The moral status of soldiers as agent-instruments of polities has been long debated among Christians. Recognizing soldiers’ moral vulnerability, Stanley Hauerwas has argued for a pastoral rather than a missiological shape of what Oliver O’Donovan has called evangelical counter-praxis through a Christian’s participation in war. To reframe the complications of this dilemma, this essay argues that the Christian soldier has the potential to actively witness the love of Jesus Christ through a kenotic repudiation of one’s unwillingness to kill. Through an interpretation of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence, a correspondence between the Christian soldier and the apostate-cum-martyr Fr. Rodrigues is arguable through an act of paradoxical faith in Jesus, where killing the enemy becomes an imitation of his self-emptying on the cross for the sake of others. Christian soldiers may find self-understanding, healing, and forgiveness by naming their acts truthfully with the intention to move through confession to gratitude and a deeper love for God and neighbor. Full article

This article seeks to rethink martyrdom, suffering, and resurrection from the perspective of queer theologies within the Latin American context and in dialogue with the praxis of the first faith communities who witnessed Jesus’ martyrdom. Starting from the queer body of Jesus—which incorporates in its praxis an ethos without gender violence and discrimination—the theological reflection contributes to the recovery of the fundamental principles of human experience. To this end, the analysis begins by addressing the feminist contribution to the understanding of violence against women to then rethink the intersection of bodies, sexuality, and violence against queer individuals and communities as a theological locus. It concludes by recognizing that queer theologies configure a resistant theological community that empowers queer bodies as a territory of hope of resurrection and transformative political action that does not disregard the suffering and the injustices perpetrated against them. Full article

This paper aims to show a way of approximating between liturgical studies and sacramental theology, trying to undo a too formal separation between the two sciences. The paramount cause is to be found at the request of Sacrosanctum Concilium, starting from the link between the two to achieve a greater and more fruitful participation of those faithful to the sacraments. In the words of Card. Ratzinger, this request has not been fully met. The dichotomy and relationship between the notions of theoria and praxis in both sciences are presented as the need for a solid foundation or philosophical frame of reference with a metaphysical or realistic background, attending to the problems raised by the International Theological Commission in the document on “The Reciprocity between Faith and Sacraments in the Sacramental Economy” (1999). The pathway is open, some solutions are proposed, and an attempt is made to show the importance of this subject for the understanding of man himself and his Christian life. Full article

In this essay, I discuss the art of Missionary Mary Proctor, a contemporary folk artist from Tallahassee, Florida, in the context of the literary aesthetics of the renowned twentieth-century anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. In comparing these Southern-born African American women artists, I argue that both are rooted in an aesthetic praxis deriving from their shared womanist ethics. My goal in this inquiry is to highlight the faith-based aesthetic traditions of African American women and reveal the manner in which discourses of freedom intertwine with literary and visual aesthetics and faith-based practices in African American folk art and literature. To that end, I analyze the prevalence of themes of liberation within the spiritual discourses of Southern African American women artists such as Missionary Mary Proctor and theorize the manner in which a landscape of Black female liberation is envisioned within their works. 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

Building on previous studies on a mid- and late-twentieth-century recasting of Islam’s doctrine of monotheism, or tawhid, as a distinctly Islamic framework for liberative praxis, this article considers the interplay between the particular and the universal in the tawhidic paradigms of Iranian lay theologian Ali Shariati (1933–1977) and African-American pro-faith and pro-feminist theologian amina wadud (b. 1952). The article proposes that although it was developed in a distinctly Islamic register by means of Quranic exegesis and intrareligious conversations, the tawhidic paradigm has always been conversant with a range of non-Islamic liberative paradigms, and these conversations have been integral to the negotiation of a more inclusive concept of tawhid. To continue to recast tawhid in a more inclusive register, the article further argues, requires taking account of the non-Muslim ‘other’ as an equal moral agent in liberative struggles and embracing Islam’s theological and ideological ‘others’ as equally significant repositories of liberative potential. Full article

The paper examines the tenability of a project for Islamic liberation theology by exploring the religious lives of Egyptian prisoners—with an emphasis on their encounters with the Qur’an, devotional and contentious contemplation, and theodicy. It employs an ethnographic approach to the study of Islam in Egyptian prisons by interviewing former political prisoners incarcerated after the 2013 military coup. By examining the work of key liberation theologians Farid Esack (b. 1959), Hamid Dabashi (b. 1951), and Asghar Ali Engineer (b. 1939), I ask: can a justice-oriented hermeneutics, concerned with pluralism and breaking down binaries, be a meaningful starting point to those struggling under oppression? I posit that the concern with developing hermeneutics can potentially limit the praxis whereby the faithful struggle with the text in the very moment of suffering. It shows how Egyptian prisoners’ devotional (and contentious) contemplation (taddabur) of the Qur’an—rather than reading liberation into the Qur’an—allowed for emancipatory embodiments of scripture. Furthermore, I show how prisoners stripped of their agentic power come to understand human action and divine action in history and how the metaphysical responses to human suffering inevitably shaped how they view both structures of inequality and domination as well as their potential liberation from it. Full article

The problem of empire has been a key theme in Islamic Liberation Theology (ILT). However insightful, ILT’s engagement with the category of empire has generally presumed a particular colonial configuration in which Muslims are located on the receiving “end” of power, being occupied by an external, non-Muslim force. But what about the presence of Islam within settler colonies, in which voluntary Muslim migrants are structurally complicit in the ongoing disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples? Focusing on the Canadian context, I ask: How can we decolonise Islam in the settler colony? That is, how can Muslims address their own complicity with the settler colonial project, standing in solidarity with native peoples and revisiting their own faith tradition in the light of that praxis? I argue that decolonising Islam entails three hermeneutical moves: (I) gaining a critical understanding of the socio-historical context, namely, the history of empire on the land; (II) deconstructing the boundaries between “migrant” and “settler”, which actually serves to vindicate the former group, releasing them of accountability and responsibility; and (III) engaging in bold theological reflection on the Islamic tradition. This final theological step, I maintain, is a two-fold dynamic: expounding Islam as both a radical subject that decolonises and a problematic object requiring decolonisation. Full article

This essay offers a Latin American perspective of theological ethics developed from the preferential option for the poor, marked by dialogue and encounter with the poor in their reality. Considering the theological diversity of the region, the author focuses on a theological ethics developed in Brazil, especially the dialogical methods of Brazilian Catholic ethicists gathered by the Brazilian Society of Moral Theology. This essay presents an account on dialogue in theological ethics as a means of creation and liberation from the encounter with the poor in their reality and with other partners in a praxis of faith and struggle for justice. Then, the author stresses their reality as a theological locus and their voices as interlocutors for developing theological ethics, showing an experience of this method from below in theological bioethics and global health challenges. Full article

This article examines the Bahá’í approach to the equality of women and men, the education, advancement, and rights of women and girls; their application within the Bahá’í community; and the efforts of the Bahá’ís to influence the international discourse on women. Focusing on significant and interrelated social issues—the education of girls; leadership and participation in decision-making, and violence against women and girls—the article explores these through Bahá’í texts, accounts, and examples of how these have been operationalized by Bahá’í institutions, communities, and individuals; individuals; and in public statements made by Bahá’í institutions. Full article