Description
Book SynopsisChristianity and Culture in the City: A Postcolonial Approach offers an introduction to the broad diversity of contemporary Christianities in a rich, complex, changing, and challenging city context. Cruz focuses upon a variety of changing communities with dynamic and striking cultural experiences, and the volume provides both scholarly and practical insights as to how Christianities in the city relate to and transform city institutions and communities that are undergoing dramatic shifts and invite opportunities for intentional study.This book offers a provocative interdisciplinary examination to shed light upon the ways in which diverse city communities appropriate Christianity to better engage their economic, cultural, political, and religious environment. A post-colonial theoretical framework will help inform how Christianity serves to empower and reinvent fragmented, oppressed, and struggling city populations. The reader is offered various conceptual, theoretical, and pragmatic insi
Trade ReviewCity life is complicated. Religious expressions within cities are even more difficult to ascertain. Cruz brings together scholars who explore marginalized religious spaces within cities to discover that what people claim to believe in theory, what they say about their faith, and how they live out that faith can be quite incongruent. Most religious scholars miss this because they fail to consider the complicated ethnic, cultural, and political realities of the everyday. As a corrective, this book provides us with a liberative critical reflection on the praxis of the disenfranchised. -- Miguel A. De La Torre, professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies, Iliff School of Theology
Samuel Cruz is a major prophetic voice who understands that urban Christian visions and witnesses constitute much of the best of our future! -- Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary
Table of ContentsIntroduction Samuel Cruz Chapter 1: The Use of Roman Catholic Material Culture, Ritual, and Devotional Practices in Haitian Vodou in the Greater Newark, New Jersey Area: The Urban Context. Peter Savastano Chapter 2: Between the Runway and Empty Tomb: Bodily Transformations and Christian Praxis in New York City’s House Ball Community. Edgar Rivera Chapter 3: Praying Aloud, in Spanish, in the South Bronx Nicolas Dumit Estevez Chapter 4: Troubling the Waters: Intimate Violence and the Church-Breaking the Hold of Shame and Secrecy Michelle L. Nickens Chapter 5: Revelation 12-13: A Guerilla Reading Charlene Sinclair Chapter 6: The Church, the City, and Its Mission in the 21st Century: A View from the Margins Elieser Valentin Chapter 7: Conclusion: A Praxis of Integral Liberation in a (Post) Colonial World A Critical and Compelling Conversation David Traverzo
