RSS 1.0Theology and Religious Studies
The Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Chester is a community of scholars addressing cutting edge questions concerning theology and the nature and place of religions in the world from a wide range of perspectives. We are dedicated to excellence, both in our student-centred teaching and learning and in our research.
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How do Ugandan secondary school teachers from diverse Christian traditions and tribes speak about their faith within the Luwero triangle?This thesis contends that there is a gap between the theological priorities of a school's teachers and theologies that inform White mission, postcolonialism, focused on binary distinctions and aspects of Uganda's ecclesial theology. This puzzle emerged from traumatic experiences that confronted my hitherto propositional faith. The research accessed Ugandan storytelling through a co constructed research methodology to address this vacancy. The ultimate objective was to unveil the teacher’s everyday theology through attentive listening. This empirical data modestly continues the postcolonial conversation with Ugandan voices at the fore. The research context is an educational community in rural Uganda, where I have had continual involvement since 2005. The school was resuming normal activities after a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. My Whiteness and the activities I pursue as an NGO Director create a fluid outsider–insider dynamic. Reflexive attentiveness remained paramount. To inform my self-reflections, I analysed contextually relevant literature and maintained a research journal. This reflexive pursuit was critical because experientially, neither the themes of Whiteness nor colonialism would manifest overtly in the participants' accounts. That did not mean they would not be discovered hidden in their stories if I looked diligently. The teachers’ stories are captured using ten face-to-face interviews and a Talking Circle to cede narrative knowledge. The participants’ selection of ‘Key Informants’ to represent them was crucial in maintaining their voice. Data analysis identified eight interconnecting themes. These unveiled a peaceful and relational local theology. Together, they emphasise the collaborative nature of the “ordinary” miraculous whereby Christian communities participate in the saving actions of God. In addition to their transcribed stories, the teachers wanted a creative ‘takeaway’ from the research, which resulted in an unexpected aesthetic drift. We crafted a short poem to represent each motif using a hybrid Afriku-portraiture methodology. This achieved the aim of developing a theological cycle for ongoing community use. Such poetic knowledge challenged my experience of White missional theology and doctrines, where objectivity readily negates experience. Instead, the poems are a theological source open to creative imaginings. Whilst arguing that this research contributes relatable knowledge, participant numbers, context, and my subjective experience limit this claim. Further studies using a replicable approach would progress this research's findings.
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Cyborg or goddess? Religion and posthumanism from secular to postsecularThis article works on the premise that critical posthumanism both exposes and calls into question the criteria by which Western modernity has defined the boundaries between nature, humanity, and technology. Yet the religious, cultural and epistemological developments of what is known as the ‘postsecular’ may signal a further blurring of another set of distinctions characteristic of modernity: between sacred and secular, belief and non-belief. Using Donna Haraway’s famous assertion that she would ‘rather be a cyborg than a goddess’, I consider whether critical posthumanism’s valorisation of cyborg identities is also capable of negotiating this ‘final frontier’ between immanence and transcendence, secular and sacred, humanity and divinity. In essence: is there space for a religious dimension to visions of the posthuman?
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Philosophy of religion as a way of life: Askesis and ethicsPhilosophy as a way of life has been undergoing a revival in recent years. This essay explores how the central idea of the spiritual exercises can be used to develop an account of philosophy of religion as a way of life. It details some of the contemporary uses and trajectories of philosophy as a way of life. Through engaging the religiously inflected philosophies of Karl Jaspers and Simone Weil, this paper argues that their thought can present an account of philosophy of religion as a way of life that is both ethically and transcendentally oriented.
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The extraordinary and the ordinary: The possibilities and problems of Eberhard Jüngel's HermeneuticsEberhard Jüngel insists on the absolute transcendence of God and on human language as the vehicle for that transcendence. In doing so, he makes claims both about the power of language and the limits of humanity in relation to language. In exploring this tension, the essay will examine whether Jüngel successfully navigates the tension between transcendence and hermeneutics, looking at the ways forward he provides, as well as the questions raised by his solutions. The essay will note the influence of the New Hermeneutic and Heidegger's late work on Jüngel's understanding of metaphors and speech‐events, and bring his insights into critical dialogue with the post‐structuralism of Jacques Derrida and the stress on ordinary language in relation to the divine in Rowan Williams. I will argue that Jüngel's stress on the passivity of the human in relation to the freeness of divine language can challenge Derrida's argument that language is always deconstructive, and that Williams's use of Wittgenstein can bring Jüngel's thought back to the ordinary in productive ways. Both that freeness and that groundedness in language can then allow for more interaction between hermeneutics and transcendence to enable us to think with, but beyond, Jüngel's hermeneutics.
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Monastic avoidance: Piety and ambivalence in pre-2016 TurkeySince the failed coup attempt in 2016, much academic attention has been devoted to the shadowy and now defunct political alliance between the AKP and the Hizmet community. Yet this scholarship only considers Hizmet as the level of its leadership and overlooks the core followers of Fethullah Gülen—mostly hard-working provincial schoolteachers and administrators. How did these individuals experience the movement’s controversial political dimensions (which were public for some years in advance of 2016) and make sense of it in the context of their daily lives of piety and hard work? In this paper, I present retrospective ethnographic observations from fieldwork undertaken in a Hizmet community in Turkey between 2013 and 2015 and argue for their relevance in understanding the community’s trajectory up to and including the present day. Specifically, I observe a tension in the lives of individuals who were committed to ethical Muslim living but were also implicated—if only through association with Fethullah Gülen—in Hizmet’s pre-2016 political agenda. Recent debates in the anthropology of Islam concerning the place of moral ambivalence in Muslim lives provide a starting point (Schielke 2010, Schielke and Debevec 2012, Fadil and Fernando 2015), whereafter I analyse Hizmet as a monastic community and argue that monastic practises allowed my interlocutors to balance competing empirical realities and maintain ethical coherence in their daily lives. I use the term ‘monastic avoidance’ to explain how Hizmet affiliates embedded themselves in tight-knit communities of piety in order to deflect their complicity in larger politico-religious projects that were associated with deception and illegality.
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Finding faithfulness: how might telling stories of faithfulness generate practices of faithfulness?This thesis is a response to recognition of implicit ethnic values in my multiethnic context, and the challenges they make for flourishing communal relations, especially across our ethnic divides. I develop and test a facilitation model to encourage communication that honours the other/Other in their difference in a church congregation. Finding faithfulness describes this journey towards relational community. It is a practical theology research project in an urban multiethnic congregation in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. It connects scripturally themed questions, an appreciative stance and world café’s hospitality-based facilitative form to create WisdomCafé. Its contribution to the field of practical theology is a methodological framework where substantial engagement with scripture is woven through qualitative empirical research in a unique way. WisdomCafé facilitates discipleship and spiritual growth in multiethnic communities through storytelling and reflection. This search for faithfulness engaged with the judgment parables (Mt. 24:36-25:46),1 stories where all are called to give account to Christ on his return as Judge, found faithful or unfaithful, and invited into or excluded from more responsibility and relationship. From my hermeneutic of relational faithfulness, I identify themes of relational and ethical accountability, which I develop into the questions, stories and reflections for WisdomCafé conversations. These in turn connect with the quest for relational flourishing within and beyond the borders of congregations in multiethnic communities. Results from this small yet rich database saw laypeople taking surprising initiatives to engage in their communities from the ground up. In its mix of scripture, structure, story and reflection, WisdomCafé offers a practical response to questions of relationality, power, creativity, identity and voice. Through its indirect communication style, it bypasses defences to share power and validate voice, renewing personal, communal and cultural dynamics as it encourages recognition of the sacred in one another and in daily practices of life. The original communication model that this thesis describes is of interest to those working to strengthen relationships across boundaries, particularly ethnic and generational, in conversation with experience and scripture. Its framework is applicable to other passages of scripture and methods of interpretation. It offers insight from the margins of cultures into the challenge of welcoming minority voices to speak and provoking the majority/colonial culture to listen.
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Eldritch theology - A comparative study of Lovecraft as theologianThis study aims to build a cohesive and considered picture of the implicit theology present within Lovecraft’s fiction, using comparative methods of study that value the contrast between Lovecraft’s work and the work of major existential theologians. Arguing along thematic lines, the study looks at five different aspects of Lovecraft’s thought in order to develop an ‘Eldritch Theology’. This theology considers Lovecraft’s presentation of the divine and the idea of ‘Gods’ as both transcendent and fundamentally other as the base of his theology, and Lovecraft’s method of using divine characters as symbols upon which both worldbuilding and major theological beliefs are grounded. This study further considers the nature of religious experience as often confronting and fearful, both within Lovecraft’s presentation and within the experience of real believers, yet nevertheless leading to glimpses of ultimate truth. Religious experiences of this kind not only build a very distinct sense of connection to truth, but also drastically influence the lives and praxis of those individuals who undergo them. Taking into account both the reality of religious experience within Lovecraft’s work and the lives which spring forth from those experiences, the final chapters of this study consider the question of human proximity to truth. To wit, Lovecraft presents our access to truth as at once a pressing and immanent need as well as a futile endeavour which will never see fulfilment. Nevertheless, the human separation from ultimate truth as expressed within his work is a useful and powerful critique of the religiosity of Lovecraft’s day and a continually relevant dialogue partner in our own, suited for the refining and development of theology and religious thought in a pessimistic modern world.
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Gathering Young Children’s Unfiltered Thoughts about DisabilityWebinar presented to Virginia University Center for Excellence in Disabilities & Pediatrics. Aim: to examine children’s early understandings of disability and consider approaches that early year’s and primary/elementary practitioners can use to engage children in discussions around concepts of disability.
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How much History is in the Passion Narratives? Violence, Ideology, Historicity, and the Seditious Jesus HypothesisThis article reviews Fernando Bermejo-Rubio’s monograph, They Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha (2023). This book is the latest publication arguing for the ‘seditious Jesus’ hypothesis, the idea that Jesus was an armed revolutionary. It is argued that the volume rightly critiques some theological tendency in New Testament scholarship to downplay or ignore violence inherent in the Jesus tradition, but the argument that the men crucified with Jesus were either some of his disciples or sympathetic to his violent cause fails to convince. Despite arguing for historical minimalism in relation to the Gospel material, Bermejo-Rubio builds his case on the material he judges to be historical, but that is better explained by the imagination of the evangelists.
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Theodicy and Hope in Hans Frei's TheologySusan Neiman has argued that the problem of evil in modern European philosophy concerns the absence of intelligibility, meaning and justice that threatens the trust in the world we need to understand it and act in it. In light of Frei's reading of H. Richard Niebuhr's theology as theodicy in similar terms, we may read Frei’s own Christological understanding of providence as a kind of theodicy, at once sombre, hopeful and restrained, with a practical, political force.
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Book Review: George Hunsinger - The Legacy of Hans W. FreiHans W. Frei (1922-1988) was a widely influential historical and constructive theologian who was Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. In this volume, George Hunsinger has gathered a range of pieces that make the case for different aspects of Frei’s theological achievements and clarify and interrogate his arguments. These are highly valuable expositions, assessments and it is helpful to highlight them in this volume. One wonders, however, what Frei’s legacy looks like to scholars from backgrounds further removed from his own kind of institutional and social setting.
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The Vatican's adaptation to new media: an exploration of the strategies, benefits and impacts on the local churchThis thesis investigates how the Catholic Church has adapted to the emergence of new media, its strategies, benefits, and impacts on the local church. Religious institutions such as the Catholic Church have entered the world of new media in an effort to achieve their aims and objectives, emphasizing the power of new media as ‘new spaces for evangelization’. This situation requires a reorganization that takes into account the historic development of the Holy See’s structures of communication, unified integration, and management. As a result, the Dictionary of Communications was created to respond to the current demands of communication by factors of convergence and interactivity. To assess how the new Dicastery of Communications has fared in the face of recent changes, the study traces the historical evolution of the Church’s attitude towards the media, from one of outright hostility in the early decades of the twentieth century to a much more open and progressive stance today. Generally, the study aims to explore how the Vatican has adapted to new media and the strategies, benefits, and impacts on the local church. Specifically, the study identifies how the Vatican uses new media strategies to engage existing audiences and to market to potential adherents; to explore how the new Dicastery for Communications is taking full advantage of the benefits and opportunities presented by the new media and engagement paradigms; to examine the barriers to and dangers of the Vatican's adoption of new media strategies to engage existing audiences and to market to potential adherents; and lastly, to consider how new media strategies from the center cascade and impact local churches. The study employed the use of qualitative research methods, with the elite interview used as the medium of data collection in the research. Interviews conducted with nine elites, including three each of the members of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communications, local Church officials in the developing world, particularly the Archdiocese of Ibadan, and independent experts with knowledge about the Vatican's media, serve as major data employed to discover how successful Pope Francis and the Catholic Church as a whole have been in this endeavor of strategic communications and synodality. The initial stage of the data analysis procedure involved transcribing the interviews, prioritizing the objectives of precision and ethical reporting in documenting the participants' remarks. The transcribed data were further analyzed using thematic data analysis techniques. The study finds that the new media strategies adopted by the Vatican have succeeded in terms of enabling a more coherent internal communications structure but have largely failed to attract new converts to Catholicism. Overall, the findings suggest the church is still finding its way in the new media sphere. Conceptually, the church is on the right track. Its challenge now lies in implementing the practical steps necessary if the digital sphere is truly to become a modern space for evangelisation.
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Missional Capital: Volunteering and Faith CommunicationIn this thesis, I identify missional capital, which is a form of social capital comprising theological capital, bridging capital, and linking capital, collectively underpinned by bonding capital to explain how volunteering provides lay Christians with confidence they can participate with God in mission. Based on qualitative interviews and participant observation, I find that the experience of volunteering can give lay Christians assurance about sharing their faith commitments in their workplaces and communities, despite their general anxiety about sharing their beliefs with non-Christian peers. My participants believe that stories of their volunteering experiences are welcomed by their friends and colleagues and tell these in order to initiate discussions about their Christian beliefs. My research arises from my professional practice as volunteer and leader at a Christian witness and service project I pseudonymously name “The Chapel”. The Church of England recognises the importance of witness and service projects, such as The Chapel, to help address its crisis of declining attendance (Church of England Research and Statistics, 2020; The Church of England, 2022, Oct 22). However, since existing volunteer studies typically focus on recruitment and retention (Wilson, 2012), there has been little research into how Christian witness and service projects might also help the Church of England to equip lay Christians to communicate their beliefs beyond their faith community. My research shows how practices of prayer, listening and storytelling employed by The Chapel leverage the liminality and communitas inherent in volunteer witness and service projects to facilitate theological play. This play strengthens volunteers’ conviction that they can identify and participate in God’s existing activity in visitors’ lives. The attitudes and practices arising from this integrate belief and action creating missional capital. The church is usually conceived as either gathered in worship or scattered in witness and service to the world (Van Gelder & Zscheile, 2011). This study illustrates the service-learning potential of witness and service projects, such as The Chapel, which combine elements of corporate worship with individual witness. I suggest similar practices could be tested in other Christian witness and service projects to teach other lay Christian volunteers to communicate their faith more effectively.
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Book Review: Theology and the Public: Reflections on Hans W. Frei on Hermeneutics, Christology, and Theological Method. By Daniel D. ShinReview of Daniel Shin's study of the theme of publicness in Hans Frei's theology.
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‘Meeting God in an ordinary place’. What can we learn from Coffee Shop Sunday about meeting God using the internet to encourage and develop fellowship?All are welcome at the ‘common table’ to enjoy the ‘table talk’. How does Coffee Shop Sunday (CSS) (Coventry and Nuneaton Methodist Circuit Project) reflect that alongside pointing people to Jesus? CSS began a worship service in a Coventry Costa Coffee Shop in December 2019, this was severely disrupted with covid-19 restrictions and their concept of ‘meeting God in an ordinary place’ moved online. The internet through Facebook and Zoom became the ordinary place they met God. Since March 2020, the online work has grown from initially meeting four days a week to daily activities with participants from five continents. Two of the principles of CSS are encouragement and fellowship. The paper will explore (1) How the internet became the ‘ordinary’ place to meet God for people from different denominations and cultures. (2) How fellowship is experienced, using Russell’s ‘round table ecclesiology’ model where those present participate in a way which reflects their own journey of ‘faith and struggle’. (3) How does CSS point other people to Jesus through its activities. Barth emphasises that churches or a Christian’s activities should not focus on themselves but ‘point to Jesus’. By reviewing CSS activities, I will demonstrate that they point others to Jesus.
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A Practical Theology of Religious Difference: the lived experience of Anglican Christians in a religiously plural UK contextThis project constructs a practical theology of religious difference from qualitative research into the everyday lived experience of Anglican Christians in one of the UK’s most religiously plural contexts in Leicester. All too often, and not only in Christian circles, ‘religious diversity is imagined as a problem, even when there is ample evidence of successes – of people working out difference on the ground, in everyday life’ (Beaman, 2017, 3). This project seeks to attend to precisely that negotiation of religious difference in everyday life. The theology of religions discourse, and in particular the exclusivist-inclusivist-pluralist typology, has dominated Christian approaches to religious difference for several decades. It has been robustly critiqued by feminists and postcolonial thinkers for its oversimplification, its treatment of religions as monolithic entities and its lack of attention to hybridity. While alternatives have been suggested, few foreground the practices and everyday lived experience of those living in a religiously plural context other than anecdotally. I used semi-structured interviews with seventeen participants from two of Leicester’s Church of England congregations to generate narratives and reflections concerning their everyday encounters with those of other faiths. Through close reading and coding of the data, I then drew out the practical wisdom of those living with religious difference, bringing it into conversation with existing literature on interfaith engagement, in particular from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. From this process emerge insights on intersectional and intrareligious difference, the polarization of difference and sameness with their outworking in attitudes to conflict and pluralism, and finally the possibility of living with contradiction and mystery, and the role of epistemic humility. These insights, rooted in lived experience, make a valuable, and previously undervalued, contribution to both the theology of religions debate as well as challenging the wider church’s practice in its handling of religious difference today.
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Does GOD not also speak through us? Developing a new pedagogy for the formation of women who preach in the Church of EnglandThis thesis explores the formation of women preachers in the Church of England. My research was carried out with a particular group of women preachers, lay and ordained, who attended a conference in 2018 called Women’s Voices. The data generated suggests that theological education and ministerial formation fail women in two ways. First, ministerial training excludes, minoritizes and silences those who are perceived as ‘other’ than a White, male norm. Among other minoritized voices, women’s voices are absent from classrooms, reading lists and theological critique. Second, I argue that for women, the absence of these voices results in them entering ministry ill-informed about preaching about Bible women or from their own experiences, and ill-prepared for the sexism and misogyny they will encounter. Based on my exploration of these failures, I make some specific proposals about how preachers might be taught, how women ordinands and trainees might be prepared for the ministry they are to embark on, and how Theological Education Institutions might facilitate the flourishing of marginalised groups. I propose that preaching classes should not only include information about developments in preaching, but also practical sessions in which students explore how to preach from their own experiences and understandings. In line with the women who took part in my research, I propose that spaces be made available where women can support each other. My participants perceived a cycle in which women received support and acceptance from each other, realised that they were being silenced and released each other to resist oppression. I suggest that such spaces be opened up in the classroom so that women are better prepared for ministries that will be marked by sexist reactions to their presence and their preaching. In making proposals that I see as life-giving and disruptive of the status quo, I draw on the Hebrew prophet Miriam who was a leader of Israel alongside her brother Moses. She both led women to freedom and challenged male domination. As a result of her challenge to Moses, “does God not also speak through us?” she is afflicted with leprosy and banished from the camp. I believe that Miriam’s experience echoes that of many women in the church who are silenced when they challenge male domination. My research opens up other areas of inquiry I have not had space to pursue, particularly how women’s intersectional experiences might impact their ministerial experiences. My findings among a particular group of women preachers contribute to curriculum development work and to the ways in which women ministers are formed.
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Postmodernism and evangelical theological methodology with particular reference to Stanley J. GrenzAbstract available in hard copy
