Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony

Reviews / Votes

This 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. -- Gerald West, Director of the Ujamaa Centre for Community Development and Research School of Religion and Theology University of KwaZulu-Natal Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. 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. -- Willie James Jennings, Associate Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies, Duke Divinity School, Durham NC, USA. What 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. -- Catherine Keller, Professor of Constructive Theology, Drew University, USA. Author of Face of the Deep: a theology of becoming and On the Mystery. Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony remains a well researched and, due its circumambulatory method, refreshingly non-linear monograph... Grau has produced a valuable book that will be of interest to those concerned with historical and contemporary expressions of Christian mission. * Journal of Postcolonial Networks * Grau's book offers a bold postcolonial proposal for Christian mission in the aftermath of genocide, repression, colonialism, and changing global sociopolitical and religiocultural relations...the author does well in siding with an approach that recognizes a kaleidoscopic nature of truth, thus avoiding a colonial presentation of God...[Grau] offers missiologists and theologians, especially contemporary African theologians of reconstruction, a timely contribution to the field. -- Mathieu S. Gnonhossou * Religious Studies Review * Marion Grau draws on constructive theology, missiology and history, as well as ethnography, cultural anthropology, indigenous theories, and feminist, liberation and postcolonial studies, in order to engage questions of how mission has been practiced historically and how it needs to be transformed in the context of postcolony ... Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony is a thought-provoking volume. -- Darren Cronshaw, Baptist Union of Victoria, Australia * Missiology *