"Academic (finite) co-travellers who will dare to accept are invited in the ecotheological 'Anthropocene period' to journey together (without a roadmap), exploring the probing and unnerving question, 'What is God up to?' This question is exploringly posed and rigorously pursued in the book. The reader will find themselves enraptured by the breadth, depth, and height of a methodological approach to the uncharted landscape of the mystery of an (infinite) God, as well as sense-making narratives of our world--contextually and receptively and constructively, as well as sensitively." --Prof. Danie Veldsman, Department Systematic and Historical Theology, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa "Since we live on a 'planet in peril', this proposed ecotheology summa is both timely and significant. This book and the series as a whole engage the perennial themes of systematic Christian theology from the perspective of the multiple strands of ecological reflection. I look forward to reading all the volumes of the 'An Earthed Faith: Telling the Story amid the "Anthropocene book series." --Prof. Susan Rakoczy, St. Joseph's Theological Institute, Cedara, South Africa

Jesus is calling his church to be a multiethnic and missional people who listen and learn from the many voices of world Christianity. Graham Joseph Hill issues a moving call for churches to be missional by being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. Hill does this by exploring the thinking of twenty-five Asian, African, Latin American, Indigenous, African American, diaspora, Caribbean, Oceanian, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern pastors and theologians. These are as diverse as Melba Padilla Maggay, Emmanuel Katongole, Lamin Sanneh, Oscar Muriu, Ruth Padilla DeBorst, Pope Francis, Richard Twiss, Lisa Sharon Harper, Willie James Jennings, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Soong-Chan Rah, and Mitri Raheb. These voices show us the future of missional churches in world Christianity. When churches are conformed to Christ they make disciples, heal a broken world, and witness to Jesus and his gospel. Jesus forms us in his image and moves us to be a people of shalom, humility, character, justice, peace, wisdom, prayer, beauty, and witness. The church has had a Reformation but now it needs a Conformation. Hill explores biblical themes and the voices of world Christianity to show that a missional church is conformed to the image of the incarnate, crucified, resurrected, and glorified Christ. Conformity to Christ is the heart of missional ecclesiology and discipleship.

This third volume of the series on “An Earthed Faith” focuses on creation theology. The ten invited essays address the following core question: “What difference does it make to the story of cosmic, planetary, human and cultural evolution to re-describe this as the creative work of God’s love?” Inversely, what difference does it make to the story of God’s love to describe it in evolutionary and geographic terms? Addressing this question requires theological reflection on place (land, geography and landscape) and on evolution (cosmic, biological, hominid and human) as the story of such place. This entails a narrative reconstruction of the story where current interests, positions of power and fears are necessarily at stake (the place where the story is being told), often dominated by issues of race rather than by grace. How, then, is this story to be told, given such a sense of place? This volume will entail a highly constructive effort to address the classic tasks associated with creation theology at the cutting edge of contemporary ecotheology.

This first volume in the proposed series will address some preliminary issues that are typical of a 'prolegomena' in any systematic theology. It will focus on the following question: 'How does the story of who the Triune God is and what this God does relate to the story of life on Earth?' Or: 'Is the Christian story part of the earth’s story or is the earth’s story part of God’s story, from creation to consummation?' This raises many issues on the relatedness of religion and theology, the place of theology in multi-disciplinary collaboration, the notion of revelation, the possibility of knowledge of God, the interplay between convictions and narrative accounts, hermeneutics, the difference between natural theology and a theology of nature, and the role of science vis-à-vis indigenous worldviews.

Contributed research papers.

This book takes the concept of repetition beyond older anthropological debates over habit, structure, or cultural continuity and demonstrates its value in attempts to comprehend the temporal, spatial and ideological fields in which contemporary social scientists must operate. Repetition has an ambiguous value in human societies. It may contribute to desired social and cultural reproduction or, equally, represent experiences of being trapped in cycles of routine and stasis. In this book, six anthropologists demonstrate the capacity of repetition to open up fertile areas of comparative ethnographic and historical work. Focusing on religious case-studies drawn from around the world, contributors ask when and how repetition is observed by interlocutors or fieldworkers. In the process, they explore the ethical, political and experiential dimensions of repetition as it operates at numerous scales of activity, ranging from intimate ritual, to forms of religious dissent, to haunting forms of historical recurrence. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.