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Postcolonial Networks brings together scholars, activists, and leaders with the urgency of a movement to foster decolonized relationships, innovative scholarship, and social transformation.

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JPN Reviews

Review of Vítor Westhelle’s After Heresy: Colonial Practices and Post-colonial Theologies.

September 15th, 2012|

Review of
Vítor Westhelle. After Heresy: Colonial Practices and Post-colonial Theologies. Cascade Books, 2010. xix, 181 pages, bibl., index.
Reviewer: Tink Tinker, ttinker@iliff.edu
Vitor Westhelle has added a delightful addition to the ranks of post-colonial theology. It becomes immediately a must-read for all of us interested in this important discourse. For theology students this book can serve […]

Review of Olúfémi Táiwò, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010),

August 17th, 2012|

This is a complex work, highly recommended to scholars of post-colonialism, that leaves one with the same feeling one has when one reads V. Y. Mudimbe: an enormous amount of research and thought that brings order to disorderly passages in the history of African ideas.

Review of R. Drew Smith’s Freedom’s Distant Shores: American Protestants and Post-Colonial Alliances with Africa

August 5th, 2012|

"The book is an excellent read for those interested in postcolonial US-African relations from an ecclesiastical viewpoint. The articles are of particular interest to scholars of Black Theology and Black Church studies. A subtheme in many of the chapters is the involvement of African American missionaries and their influence on US and African Christianity."

Review of Chris Shannahan’s Voices from the Borderland: Re-imagining Cross-Cultural Urban Theology in the Twenty-first Century

July 19th, 2012|

Voices from the Borderland demonstrates how interdisciplinarity is a necessary and efficient tool for a new urban theology. While it is an important reading to anyone engaged in the task of urban theology, it will be most interesting to scholars who explore the foundations, hermeneutics, and methods of the emerging theology of this globalized century.

Review of Christian Worship: Postcolonial Perspectives.

July 5th, 2012|

It seems that the mission of the book is to tease, to challenge, and perhaps to constructively irritate—in other words, to make readers impatient for more, or at least unable to forget one’s vexation. Even if this extremely accessible volume ends up among the exotic florilegia of a bread-and-butter mainline liturgical theology course at the end of a semester, the odds are high that it will change the way how people in the Euro-American theological orbit look at the lectionary, pray in their Sunday liturgies, and sing their favorite hymns.

Review of Mark Lewis Taylor’s The Theological and the Political & A World for All? by Storrar, Casarella, Metzger & Naidoo

June 18th, 2012|

“You remind us that our Wall Street Bull has become a false-idol, a golden calf, and a symbol of our spiritual poverty..."

Review of Royce M. Victor, 2010, Colonial Education and Class Formation in Early Judaism: A Postcolonial Reading Journal of Postcolonial Theory and Theology,Library of Second Temple Studies 72, London and New York: T&T Clark, pp. 224.

June 11th, 2012|

A revision of the author’s doctoral dissertation, this monograph has a two-pronged focus. First, drawing primarily from 1 and 2 Maccabees, it examines how “the Greek gymnasium established in Jerusalem in the second century BCE was used to educate the local elites to function politically, ethnically, and economically within the Greek Empire and particularly in Judea, by creating a separate class of ‘Hellenized Jews’ among the local Jewish population” (p. vii). As a second area of focus, Victor argues that the British education system in early nineteenth century India was employed in a similar way to create a class of Indians to serve in the British colonial system. As such, Victor’s work “makes an inquiry into how colonialism functioned and continues to function in both the ancient and modern societies” (p. vii).