Mother Tongue Theologies

Recognizing that one-third of the world's Christians practice their faith outside Europe and North America, the fourteen essays in Mother Tongue Theologies explore how international fiction depicts Christianity's dramatic movement South and East of Jerusalem as well as North and West. Structured by geographical region, this collection captures the many ways in which people around the globe receive Christianity. It also celebrates postcolonial literature's diversity. And it highlights non-Western authors' biblical literacy, addressing how and why locally rooted Christians invoke Scripture in their pursuit of personal as well as social transformation. Featured authors include Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constantine Cavafy, Scott Cairns, Chinua Achebe, Madam Afua Kuma, Earl Lovelace, V. S. Reid, Ernesto Cardenal, Helena Parente Cunha, Arundhati Roy, Mary Martha Sherwood, Marguerite Butler, R. M. Ballantyne, Rudyard Kipling, Nora Okja Keller, Amy Tan, Albert Wendt, and Louise Erdrich. Individual essayists rightly come to different conclusions about Christianity's global character. Some connect missionary work with colonialism as well as cultural imperialism, for example, and yet others accentuate how indigenous cultures amalgamate with Christianity's foreignness to produce mesmerizing, multiple identities. Differences notwithstanding, Mother Tongue Theologies delves into the moral and spiritual issues that arise out of the cut and thrust of native responses to Western Christian presence and pressure. Ultimately, this anthology suggests the reward of listening for and to such responses, particularly in literary art, will be a wider and deeper discernment of the merits and demerits of post-Western Christianity, especially for Christians living in the so-called post-Christian West.

Recognizing that one-third of the world's Christians practice their faith outside Europe and North America, the fourteen essays in Mother Tongue Theologies explore how international fiction depicts Christianity's dramatic movement South and East of Jerusalem as well as North and West. Structured by geographical region, this collection captures the many ways in which people around the globe receive Christianity. It also celebrates postcolonial literature's diversity. And it highlights non-Western authors' biblical literacy, addressing how and why locally rooted Christians invoke Scripture in their pursuit of personal as well as social transformation. Featured authors include Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constantine Cavafy, Scott Cairns, Chinua Achebe, Madam Afua Kuma, Earl Lovelace, V. S. Reid, Ernesto Cardenal, Helena Parente Cunha, Arundhati Roy, Mary Martha Sherwood, Marguerite Butler, R. M. Ballantyne, Rudyard Kipling, Nora Okja Keller, Amy Tan, Albert Wendt, and Louise Erdrich. Individual essayists rightly come to different conclusions about Christianity's global character. Some connect missionary work with colonialism as well as cultural imperialism, for example, and yet others accentuate how indigenous cultures amalgamate with Christianity's foreignness to produce mesmerizing, multiple identities. Differences notwithstanding, Mother Tongue Theologies delves into the moral and spiritual issues that arise out of the cut and thrust of native responses to Western Christian presence and pressure. Ultimately, this anthology suggests the reward of listening for and to such responses, particularly in literary art, will be a wider and deeper discernment of the merits and demerits of post-Western Christianity, especially for Christians living in the so-called post-Christian West. List of Contributors: Isabel Asensio-Sierra Di Gan Blackburn Mini Chandran Evgenia V. Cherkasova John Estes Jack A. Hill J. A. Jackson Ellin Sterne Jimmerson Ymitri Mathison Catherine Winn Merritt Darren J. N. Middleton Mozella G. Mitchell Sinead Moynihan J. Stephen Pearson Eric J. Sterling

Paul's letter to the Galatians begins with a proclamation of deliverance from the present evil age and comes to a climax with the ringing cry "new creation " The letter moves from the Galatian believers' new identity in Christ to the implications of that identity for their life together. Susan Eastman here argues that Galatians 4:12 5:1 plays a key role in this movement: it displays the power of God's act in Christ, apart from the law, not only to generate the Galatians' new life in Christ but also to perfect it. Paul communicates to his converts the motivation and power necessary to move them from their ambivalence about his gospel to a faith that "stands fast" in its allegiance to Christ alone. Eastman argues that the medium and the message are inseparable. Paul's discourse or "mother tongue" -- packed with maternal images, vulnerable yet authoritative, and marked by personal suffering -- demonstrates the content of the good news.

Paul’s letter to the Galatians begins with the proclamation of liberation from destructive powers, and ends with the confident cry, “new creation!” Throughout the letter, Paul encourages his listeners to stand fast in the confidence that God in Christ will bring them from their beginning in the faith to their completion. His language is emotional, relational, and powerful, as he “uses the intimate imagery of family life to draw his converts back into the thread of conversation that mediates their life together.” This study investigates the powerful effects of Paul’s maternal imagery—his embodied, vulnerable, and authoritative “mother tongue”—in catalyzing and sustaining the communal life of faith.

Paul's letter to the Galatians begins with the proclamation of liberation from destructive powers, and ends with the confident cry, "new creation!" Throughout the letter, Paul encourages his listeners to stand fast in the confidence that God in Christ will bring them from their beginning in the faith to their completion. His language is emotional, relational, and powerful, as he "uses the intimate imagery of family life to draw his converts back into the thread of conversation that mediates their life together." This study investigates the powerful effects of Paul's maternal imagery--his embodied, vulnerable, and authoritative "mother tongue"--in catalyzing and sustaining the communal life of faith.

«Sino-Christian theology» usually refers to an intellectual movement emerged in Mainland China since the late 1980s. The present volume aims to provide a self-explaining sketch of the historical development of this theological as well as cultural movement. In addition to the analyses on the theoretical issues involved and the articulations of the prospect, concrete examples are also offered to illustrate the characteristics of the movement.

This monograph examines the ideological legacy of the the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” by historicizing their linguistic development. It shows how the early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race. This ideology invented myths of congenital communities that configured the national language in a symbiotic matrix between body and physical environment and as the ethnic and corporeal ownership of national identity and local organic nature. These ethno-nationalist gestures informed the philology of the early modern era and generated arboreal and genealogical models of language, culminating most divisively in the race conscious discourse of the Indo-European hypothesis of the 19th century. The philosophical theories of organicism also contributed to these ideologies. The fundamentally nationalist conflation of race and language was and is the catalyst for subsequent permutations of ethnolinguistic discrimination, which continue today. Scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to overextend biological metaphors in the study of language, as these can encourage, however surreptitiously, genetic and racial impressions of language.