Postcolonial Religion and Theology in/as Practice

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.

• postcolonialism
• theology
• religion
• practice
• praxis