The Postcolonial Roundtable 20-22 October 2010, Massachusetts
Co-hosts: Dan Russ, Director of the Center for Christian Studies; Joe Duggan, Postcolonial Theology Network
The Postcolonial Roundtable responds to a growing evangelical interest in the postcolonial as manifested by the work of Rev. Dr. Mabiala Kenzo at Ambrose University in Canada who Brian McLaren has given credit for raising his postcolonial awareness, the Amahoro annual meeting in Africa for pastors and a growing interest on blogs. One of the most significant segments of membership on the Postcolonial Theology Network on Facebook are evangelical graduate students and faculty from around the world but especially in the United States and India.
Apart from this growing interest in the postcolonial, there appears to be very few evangelical theologians contributing scholarly works through academic publishing that specifically name postcolonial theorists or other theologians writing in this area. Postcolonial work has been done to critique neo-colonial empire, for example, the October 2008 book, Evangelicals and Empire: Christian Alternatives to the Political Status Quo; but much less scholarship is available that offers self-critical evaluation and revisioning the relationship between evangelical theology and mission.
The Postcolonial Roundtable co-sponsored by Gordon College's Center for Christian Studies and the Postcolonial Theology Network is intended to be a first step towards fostering scholarship in this literature gap area of theological reflection, research and teaching. It is the hope of the organizers that The Postcolonial Roundtable will foster individual and collaborative publications and a conference in the next three to five years. Our end goal for this meeting is to articulate an evangelical specific postcolonial theological direction for future research based on shared questions, definitions and concerns.
Greg Carmer Dean of Chapel, Gordon College
Sawabh Dube Professor of History, Center for Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de Mexico, author of Colonial Stitches In Time: Colonial textures and Postcolonial Tangles
William Dyrness Professor of Theology and Culture at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, USA
John Franke Lester and Kay Clemens Professor of Missional Theology at Biblical Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, Manifest Witness: The Plurality of Truth (Abingdon Press, 2009), Due out in October 2009
Jehu Hanicles Associate Professor of Christianity and Globalization at Fuller Theological Seminarys School of Intercultural Studies in Pasadena, California, USA, author of Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration and the Transformation of the West
Mabiala Kenzo Professor of Systematic Theology at Ambrose University College in Ottowa, Canada, co-author with John Franke, The Future of Evangelical Theology in an Age of Empire: Postfoundational and Postcolonial in Evangelicals and Empire
Jaychitra Lalitha Lecturer in New Testament at Tamilnadu Theological Seminary, Madurai, India, author of A Postcolonial Feminist Biblical Interpretation: Mary Magdalene and Canonization in Bangalore Theological Forum, Vol. XXXVIII, No.1 (June, 2006)
Tapiwa Mucherera, Associate Professor of Pastoral Counseling at Asbury Theological Seminary and author of Meet Me at The Palaver: Narrative Pastoral Counseling in Postcolonial Contexts (January 2009)
Malcolm Reid Anglican priest, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Gordon College, and Board Member of the Ugandan Christian University
Kurt Anders Richardson - Professor in the Faculty of Theology McMaster University, author of Reading Karl Barth and Political Complexities of Pneuma and Imperia in Evangelicals and Empire
Nicholas Rowe -- Head, School of Humanities and Education
St Augustine College of South Africa
Richard Twiss - author of One Church: Many Tribes and doctoral candidate at Asbury Theological Seminary