Questioning Our Faith in Practice

Contents

Acknowledgements

1 Questioning One’s Own Faith

 1 Defining Whiteness and White Supremacy

 2 Salvation beyond White Supremacy

 3 Why “Questioning”?

 4 “You’ll Lose Your Faith”?

 5 How to Read This Book

2 Questioning Practice

 1 Practice and the Transmission of Virtue

 2 Practice and Symbolic Violence

 3 Accounting for the Ambivalent Nature of Christian Practice

 4 Innocence, Purity, and Complicity: Reimagining White Christian Practice

3 Questioning Education

 1 Teaching as Universal Mandate for Conversion

 2 Education, Civilization, and Imperial Force

 3 Pedagogical Eternalities and the Education of Children

 4 Education with Humility

4 Questioning Intervention

 1 The Role of Intervention in Practical Theological Reflection

 2 Agency, Assumed Control, and the White Savior

 3 Intervention as Religious Meaning-Making

 4 The Myth of Progress and Salvation as Whiteness

 5 From Intervention to Design for Collective Flourishing

5 Questioning Leadership

 1 On Leaders and Followers

 2 From Corporate Rock Star to Interdependent Co-collaborators

 3 The Paradox of Servant Leadership

 4 Decolonizing and Liberating Leadership

 5 Fragment Workers and Poetic Imagination

6 Questioning Congregations

 1 The Prominence of the Congregation in White Christianity

 2 Congregations as Institutions of Whiteness

 3 Decolonizing Community and Moving beyond Congregations

7 Questioning the Apologetic and Affiliative Function of Practical Theology

 1 What Are Apologetics, and How do Practical Theologians Get Drawn into Them?

 2 When Describing Practice Becomes Advocating for Practice

 3 Demand for Institutional Loyalty and Assimilation

8 Questioning Christianity

 1 Christian Privilege and the Racialization of Religious Identity

 2 Struggling with Normativity and Universality in White Theology

 3 Interreligious Practical Theology and Multiple Religious Belonging

 4 A Somewhat Less-Christian Practical Theological Reflection Cycle

9 Questioning Anthropocentrism

 1 Refuting Theologies of Human Domin[at]ion

 2 Restoring Connection to All Our Relations

 3 Legacy Fears of Heresy and Syncretism

 4 A Somewhat Less-Christian Practical Theological Reflection Cycle

Epilogue: Living the Questions

 1 Original Sin, Shameful Hiding, and Right Repentance

Bibliography

Index