T&T Clark Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society and Subversion

Product Description Review Not enough contemporary constructive theology takes seriously the post-colonial situation. Grau has given us a text of great significance not only for its depth of analysis of that situation, but also for its breathtaking conceptual range. Here we have one of the strongest arguments to date for a theological cosmopolitianism grounded in abiding soteriological concerns. Her reading of early church and medieval contexts in relation to nineteenth century church dynamics on crucial colonial sites as well as her engagement with contemporary theological and other disciplinary voices is creative and insightful. If Christian theology must now begin to take seriously its own colonial history and its colonial sites for grasping the full range of its identity, then Marion Grau has given us an inviting theological map with which to find our way.Religious Studies ReviewThis book makes a significant contribution to a disparate but slowly coalescing 'field'. What are we to make of 'mission' in a thoroughly postcolonial world, particularly when 'the colonies' are talking back? Marion Grau's contribution is significant in that it refuses to turn away from the 'mission' terrain, as many progressive scholars have, thereby surrendering the field to conservative voices. Instead she identifies the mutiplicity of borders and boundaries that constitute the postcolony and then explores what it means to 'do theology', progressively, across this disputed territory.Journal of Postcolonial NetworksWhat an unpredictable adventure into the far places and pressing questions of the "Postcolony"! The theology that unfolds along its itineraries - carrying the trickster sprit and transdisciplinary rigor of Grau's first book - has an alternately exciting and erudite, tragic and hilarious energy. Brilliant in its critical compassion for the complex ambiguities of Christian mission, this work of "salvific subversion" and "entangled reciprocity" offers the first monographic test-case of a new and unapologetically polydox theology. About the Author Marion Grau is Associate Professor of Theology at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, a member school of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.