Liberating Mission: When Gospel meets Culture (CT3332Y)

Content

The unit explores approaches to theologies and practices of cultural meeting and understanding. By examining a range of theologies of culture and inculturation, students explore the challenges, complexities, and issues associated with mission attuned to cross-cultural engagement and the contextualisation of Christian practice and belief.

Learning outcomes

Pedagogy

Synchronous and asynchronous tutorials and lectures

Indicative Bibliography

[According to the University's UNIT DEVELOPMENT AND REVIEW PROCEDURE 2.1, this is no longer to be a part of a Unit Record - the UMS system has not been updated to align with the Policy and Procedure changes in late 2025.]

• Adeney, Frances. Women and Christian Mission: Ways of Knowing and Doing Theology. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2015.
• Andraos, Michael, Bernadeth Caero Bustillos, Geraldo de Mori, eds. Christianities and Indigenous Peoples. London: SCM Press, 2019.
• Athanasiou, Athena and Butler, Judith. Dispossession: The Performance in the Political. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2013.
• Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Anette Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
• bell hooks. Black Looks: Race and Representation. 2nd Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
  
• bell hooks. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. New York and London: Routledge, 2015.
• Bevans, Stephen and Katalina Tahaafe-Williams, eds. Contextual Theology for the Twenty-First Century. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011.
• Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
• Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. London and New York: Routledge, 2004.
• Butler, Judith. What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2022.
• Connolly, William E. Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008.
• Copeland, M. Shawn. Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010.
• Eagleton, Terry. Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016.
• Ezigbo, Victor I. The Art of Contextual Theology: Doing Theology in the Era of World Christianity. Eugene: Cascade, 2021.
• Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox, New York: Grove Press, 2008.
• Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1967.
• Foucault, Michel. ‘What is Critique?’. In What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Edited by James Schmidt. Translated by Kevin Paul Geiman. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996: 382-398.
• Freud, Sigmund. Civilisation and its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton. 1961.
• Giroux, Henry A. Breaking into the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
• Giroux, Henry A. The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.
• Giroux, Henry A. Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
• Grenham, Thomas, G. The Unknown God: Religious and Theological Inculturation. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005.
• Kolakowski, Leszek. Toward a Marxist Humanism: A Leading Polish Philosopher Re-Examines and Reinterprets Marxism. Translated by Jane Zielonko Peel. New York: Grove Press Inc., 1968.
  
• Harrison, Peter. Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
• Lash, Nicholas. The Beginning and the End of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• McDowell, John C. Identity Politics in George Lucas. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2016.
  
• McDowell, John C. Theology and the Globalized Present: Feasting in the Presence of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019.
  
• McDowell, John C. The Politics of Big Fantasy: Studies in Cultural Suspicion. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2014.
  
• Miller, Vincent J. Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture. New York and London: Continuum, 2005.
• Oborji, Francis A. Concepts of Mission: The Evolution of Contemporary Missiology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2006.
• Pocock, M. The Changing Faces of World Missions: Engaging Contemporary Issues and Trends. Grand Rapids MI: Baker Academic, 2005.
• Ross, Cathy and Stephen B. Bevans. Mission on the Road to Emmaus: Constants, Context and Prophetic Dialogue. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2015.
• Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin Books, 1978.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ In Can the Subaltern Speak? Edited by Rosalind C. Morris, 21-78. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
• Tan, Jonathan Y. Christian Mission among the Peoples of Asia. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2014.
• Schmemann, Alexander. The World as Sacrament. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973.
• Tanner, Kathryn. Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.
• Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Mass., and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Taylor, Charles. Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Thakur, Gautam Basu. Postcolonial Theory and Avatar. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
• Wiesel, Elie. Evil and Exile. Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
• Williams, Rowan. Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement. London and New York: T&T Clark, 2000.
• Žižek, Slavoj, Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.
• Žižek, Slavoj. Heaven in Disorder. New York and London: OR Books, 2021.

Assessment