Theology In Britain Research Articles

Back to the future: intercultural, postcolonial and inter-religious streams in practical theology

ABSTRACT This paper draws upon postcolonial studies in highlighting historic persons, places and trajectories of British Practical Theology. Reference is made to Daniels Ekarte, J. Michael Wilson and Ken Leech as exemplars of practical theology in Britain. Locating the city of Birmingham and the University of Birmingham specifically as the birthplace of an intercultural paradigm of pastoral care and counselling, mention is made of the inter-religious, multicultural and international environment in which this birthing took place. A call is made for practical theologians to return to the rich heritage of multi-cultural and multi-religious thought and life out of which a vibrant practical theology emerges. Such practical theology holds in creative tension faith and life, theory and practice, and the private and public dimensions of communal life.

Do Black Lives Matter in Post-Brexit Britain?

This article speaks to existential challenges facing Black people, predominantly of Caribbean descent, to live in what continues to be a White dominated and White entitled society. Working against the backdrop of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement that originated in the United States, this article analyses the socio-political and cultural frameworks that affirm Whiteness whilst concomitantly, denigrating Blackness. The author, a well-known Black liberation theologian, who is a child of the Windrush Generation, argues that Western Mission Christianity has always exemplified a deep-seated form of anti-Blackness that has helped to shape the agency of Black bodies, essentially marking them as ‘less than’. This theological base has created the frameworks that have dictated the sematic belief that Black bodies do not really matter and if they do, then they are invariably second-class ones when compared to White bodies. In the final part of the article, the author outlines the ways in which Black theology in Britain, drawing on postcolonial theological and biblical optics, has sought to critique the ethnocentrism of White Christianity in Britain in order to assert that ‘Black Lives Do Matter’.

Now you see me, now you don't: subjectivity, blackness, and difference in practical theology in Britain post Brexit

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the intersection of Black Liberation theology and Practical theology, wrestling with the complexity of human subjectivity and epistemology. Practical theology has often been at the forefront of exploring the relationship between lived experience and knowledge production, often in terms of gender and sexuality. Yet, like other forms of theological articulation, the impact of Whiteness has rarely been explored particularly in relation to the converse visibility of Blackness and its paradoxical absence in the British theological academy. This paper seeks to open up that discussion. The latter part of the paper offers a theological exploration of the underlying forces and concerns that gave rise to the Referendum vote to leave the European Union. In what ways has the phenomenon of Whiteness helped to shape the Brexit vote? What might it mean for Practical theology in Britain if Whiteness was acknowledged, especially in our post-Brexit epoch?

Father Zimmermann (1871–1950): the first Brazilian diatomist

This paper describes the scientific life of Father Zimmermann, Brazil's first diatomist. Father Zimmermann, a Jesuit priest born in Ehingen, Germany in 1871, studied theology in Britain in the early 20th century. His scientific life began in Portugal where, with other Jesuits, he founded the scientific journal Brotéria, for which he wrote several papers on diatoms. After the fall of the Portuguese monarchy in 1910, several conservative priests, including Zimmermann, immigrated to Brazil. In Brazil, he became a teacher at the Padre Antonio Vieira School in Salvador in the state of Bahia, where he taught a myriad of disciplines. In addition to his teaching and religious activities, along with his fellow priests, Zimmermann continued to edit Brotéria. By the end of his career in Portugal, Zimmermann had described a total of 69 new but not all valid diatom names. In 1913, Zimmermann began a series of articles entitled ‘Contribuição para o estudo das diatomaceas dos Estados Unidos do Brazil’ (Contribution to the study of diatoms of the United States of Brazil), in which he described two new genera and 49 new species from rivers, lakes, wetlands, reservoirs and beaches in the states of Bahia, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul. In addition to his taxonomic descriptions, Zimmermann who was an accomplished naturalist, also wrote about diatom movements and evolution. His diatom studies were compiled in a book entitled Diatomées, which has never been published. Father Zimmermann's contribution to the study of diatoms deserves proper recognition. This paper aims to serve such purpose. Farther Zimmermann died in Salvador in 1950.

Forging an Understanding of Black Humanity through Relationship: An Ubuntu Perspective

This article argues for the African concept of ubuntu as an alternative way of conceptualizing and understanding what it means to be Black and human within the context of Black theology in Britain. Crucially, identity formation according to this paradigm or world-view is constructed through relationship and as such is an ongoing process. It assesses how the Black experience is focused on within the field of Black British theology in order to show how ubuntu can contribute to this field and the way in which it could potentially be used to forge a renewed relationship with the "other" and in so doing re-cast what it means to be a person in a Black skin.

Nature as adversary: the rise of modern economic conceptions of nature

This article problematizes the reliance of ecological economics on neo-classical economic analysis by revealing an adversarial conception of nature in modern economic ontology. It traces the rise in post-classical economics of this adversarial conception, which superseded the idea of a natural moral economy in classical political economy. The origins of this transformation in the conception of nature are located in the breakdown of the long-standing project of natural theology in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century, precipitated by the geological controversies of the 1820s and 1830s.

Exploring the Workings of Black Theology in Britain: Issues of Theological Method and Epistemological Construction

This essay outlines two contrasting methods for undertaking Black theology in Britain, namely the respective work of Robert Beckford and that of the author of this article. The article is offered as a contribution to the wider development of urban theology in Britain. The author, who is one of the leading Black theologians in Britain, offers this work as a means of unpacking some of the methodological and epistemological concerns of this developing mode of largely Christian inspired Black theological reflection in Britain.

Review Article: A Reader to "Read" the British Reader: Teaching and Learning by Means of Black Theology

This article reviews a new collection of essays (Black Theology in Britain: A Reader, eds Michael N. Jagessar and Anthony G. Reddie, 2007) where exponents of Black Theology are offering an innovative educational approach which can potentially be incorporated into the scholarship of teaching and learning. If taken seriously, it would serve to highlight the unique disciplinary dimension that Black Theology brings to the study of theology and religious studies generally. For if such study is meant to contribute towards the elimination of racial discrimination, promotion of tolerance and respect, and social cohesion, students stand to benefit from having their learning experiences enhanced by new theological approaches as developed in the Reader.

Black Theology in Britain

This article provides a summary for the definition, development and future direction of Black theology in Britain. The author seeks to outline the character and intent of Black theology in Britain, comparing and contrasting the nature of this enterprise with the established theory and praxis of this discipline within the United States of America. The article concludes with a brief assessment of the future direction of Black theology in this country. Given that Black theology is still in its infancy within the UK, this work offers an important introduction to the nature and intent of this discipline.

More Dread: 10th Anniversary of Jesus is Dread: Black Theology and Black Culture in Britain

This brief essay seeks to reflect on the contextual background and cultural milieu that surrounding the writing of Jesus is Dread, the first fully articulated Black theology text in Britain. The author, who is now an accomplished and respected film maker and television presenter, was the first Black person to teach Black theology as a fully fledged, academic discipline within theological education and ministerial training in Britain. This essay offers some nascent thoughts on the construction of this text, highlighting the reasons for its development, and the influences that enabled it to come to life. The latter part of the essay outlines the author's subjective analysis on the continuing developments in the Black theology in Britain movement since the emergence of Jesus is Dread in 1998.

People Matter Too! The Politics and Method of Doing Black Liberation Theology (the Ferguson Lecture—the University of Manchester, 18th October, 2007)

This essay is adapted from a public lecture given by the author on the occasion of the 2007 Samuel Ferguson Lecture, at the University of Manchester, on 18th October, 2007. This essay outlines an approach to undertaking Black theology in Britain by means of a participative methodology than is drawn from the wider practice of practical theology (Christian education in particular). This approach to Black theology is one that seeks to work, predominantly, with White students in theological education in Britain, in an inductive fashion in order to raise the critical consciousness of these participants in their preparation for authorized, public ministry. The author argues that in beginning with contextual narratives and case studies, this particular approach prioritizes the lived experiences of ordinary people as opposed to the dictates of abstract theory.

Sociology and theology reconsidered

This article explores the relationship between theology and sociology on two levels. The first is in terms of the general disciplinary closure that has marked much of their coexistence, despite the many topics on which they potentially meet. The second level is more specific and concerns the tension in Britain between religious sociology, in which sociology is put to serve faith, and the secular sociology of religion, where religion is studied scientifically. This tension has been addressed before with respect to the history of sociology in France and the United States, but the British case, hitherto relatively unknown, illustrates the potential there was for a more fruitful relationship between sociology and theology in Britain that went undeveloped as the secular sociology of religion eventually replaced early religious sociology. The existence of religious sociology has been written out of the history of the discipline in Britain, such that when theology and sociology began a more serious engagement in the 1970s in Britain and elsewhere, particularly as biblical studies discovered sociology and as theologians and sociologists first met jointly, this earlier dialogue was entirely overlooked.

Black Theology in Britain—One Decade On

In 1993, a conference on Black theology was held in Sheffield, England. More than a decade on, it is perhaps time to look at where Black theology in Britain is today and how it got there. We will do this by carrying out a sociological/historical analysis of this theology. We will look at some of the key milestones in its development, analyse the social factors that have been at the roots of its rise, consider the benefits it has been to British society and, finally, discuss some of the concerns that have been raised about its theological validity.

Wordsworthian Science in the 1870s

In the first half of the nineteenth century, theology in Britain usually meant natural theology, the investigation of what the physical might reveal about its Creator. That the had a Creator then seemed undeniable; all respectable British scientists at the time were theists, for whom religion remained the primary stimulus for scientific investigation and provided the intellectual context in which the discoveries of science were understood and evaluated. Most of them had had little difficulty reinterpreting or ignoring the Biblical creation account when discoveries in geology and paleontology made a literal reading of Genesis untenable. The old concept of an initial creation by divine fiat of everything that now exists had given way easily enough to an understanding of creation as a gradual process in which the cosmos evolved slowly according to a plan preconceived by the Creator. By 1850, the concept that creation operated by intelligible, predictable of was generally acknowledged. The only question concerned how these laws were implemented. Were they executed once for all at the beginning of time and set to continue operating mechanically and inevitably, or were they a continuing manifestation of divine power that exerts itself at every moment in all the processes of nature? Repelled by what they considered a deistic conception of an absentee divinity whose relationship with life on earth was completed at the beginning of time, a number of scientists affirmed their belief in a providential Deity who remained immanent and active in his creation--a position that their critics condemned as pantheistic. This pantheistic conception of nature is what I am calling Wordsworthian science. For a time, mostly in the 1870s, a conception of nature resembling Wordsworth's and specifically credited to him became a respected scientific theory, one that enabled its adherents to reconcile belief in God with new developments in physics, chemistry, and biology. Wordsworth was highly esteemed as a natural philosopher in the later nineteenth century. In a culture that produced few prominent theologians, he emerged as one of the most influential religious thinkers of the century. In 1898, nearly fifty years after Wordsworth's death, the Reverend Richard Acland Armstrong, a prominent Unitarian preacher and writer, told his Liverpool congregation: Wordsworth's] greatest utterances are so great that in their kind they are absolutely unrivaled in the world's literature; they are wholly unique; they are prophecies in a new Scripture; they are a new evangel for mankind; they are the Bible of a new and larger faith ...; they constitute, perhaps, the mightiest single intellectual influence of the nineteenth century; the only possible rival being that illuminating and penetrating conception associated with the splendid name of Darwin (26). Note the comparison with Darwin as an intellectual influence possibly as great as that of Wordsworth. It was not uncommon at the time to find these two names linked in discussion. They had come to represent two important complexes of ideas about the natural world. To those who could not accept Darwin's vision of nature, Wordsworth stood as the alternative or the antidote (that word was used), an authority whose life-long experience of nature, whose credentials as a naturalist, were as imposing as Darwin's. Wordsworth was brought into the argument not only as aesthetically sensitive, but as scientifically respectable. Science had apparently verified Wordsworth's intuitions about the divine presence in Nature. The Reverend Armstrong was identifying the poet with recent tendencies in science when he said of Wordsworth. He tolerates no longer the idea of God as a Creator outside Nature, but sees the Divine Energy and love in every throbbing fibre of the universe (42). Respectable theorists of the time understood as hard science what sounds like nature mysticism. …

The Early Reception of Karl Barth's Theology in Britain: A Supplementary View

One of the axioms of modern church history in Britain is that whereas Anglo-Saxon thought was on the whole impervious to the appeal and achievement of Karl Barth, it was among the Scots alone that the Swiss theologian's theories found any real resonance and creative response. Stephen Sykes in a 1979 volume of studies in Barth's theological method, mentions the somewhat bewildered response to his publications in Britain and the United States between 1925 and the mid-1980s and goes on to say that ‘from now onwards it is in Scotland that Barth is taken with the greatest seriousness in the English speaking world’. In a later volume of centenary essays, R. H. Roberts traced the reception of the theology of Karl Barth ‘in the Anglo-Saxon world’ by quoting the evidence of such late 1920s and early 1930s figures as J. H. Morrison, John McConnachie, H. R. Mackintosh, Norman Porteous and A. J. MacDonald to claim that ‘it is clear from an early stage that enthusiasm for Barth's work … was primarily a Scottish attribute’. In another essay in the same volume, Colin Gunton contrasted the usual English attitude to Barth with that of theologians from other lands: ‘For the most part and despite exceptions’, he claimed, ‘the English find it difficult to come to terms with the theology of Karl Barth’, while in a companion volume Geoffrey Bromiley noted that this was hardly the case for theologians and pastors ‘in such diverse lands as Switzerland, Germany, France, Holland, Hungary, and Scotland’. Again and again, it is Scotland which is emphasised as being the place within the British Isles where Barth's ideals took root.

Catholic Theology in Britain: the Scene since Vatican II

A good place to begin this survey of the post-conciliar Catholic theological scene in Britain—which means, overwhelmingly, in this context, England—is the symposium on theology and the Catholic Church in this country, held at Downside under the presidency of Dom Christopher Butler in 1963. Though, as that date indicates, the papers were written and published while the Second Vatican Council was still in session (they were the product of the sixth of a series of Downside symposia on matters of intellectual interest to Catholics beginning in the later 1950s), the majority of the authors consciously looked forward to what would be, they imagined, the setting and general direction of Catholic theology in Britain after the Council. In various respects, to be examined shortly, the Catholic contributors were right in their predictions, but not in all. The historian will note the role of Christopher Butler as inspirer of the Downside symposia in general and author in particular of the opening essay in Theology and the University. An Ecumenical Investigation. As abbot of the only English monastery with a substantial scholarly tradition, a writer of distinction on the Gospels, ecclesiology, spiritual theology and apologetics, as well as a nationally known radio personality through the panel programme Any Questions, his attendance at the Council as that rare bird a theological peritus with voting rights— owing to the accident that he was at the time abbot president of the English Benedictine Congregation—gave him the opportunity to become the single most influential interpreter in England of the Council’s devices and desires, especially when he was made a bishop auxiliary to Cardinal Heenan with, in effect, a special portfolio for doctrine and theology.

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices

Some Features of Philosophical Theology in Britain: 1939–1960

Some Features of Philosophical Theology in Britain: 1939–1960