Africa’s urban explosion presents a clear challenge to the way theological education in Africa is done today. The backdrop of this article is a collaborative research project that involved 15 theological institutions across the African continent, contemplating what theological education and formation should look like, considering Africa’s current and future urban realities. It proposes paradigmatic..
Read moreFaith-based agency and theological education: A failed opportunity?
After attending to shifts in the landscape of theological education at a public university in South Africa, this article explores the re-imagination of theological education as fostering faith based agency. With reference to the (potential) role faith-based organisations play in response to developmental challenges in local communities, it then suggests a deliberate retrieval of faith-based..
Read moreJames Cone, the Urban Church in South Africa, and Theological (Re)Education: A Personal Reflection
This essay uses as backdrop the work of James Cone, and is foregrounded by a personal reflection of epistemological and theological rupture. Through the lenses of Cone’s black theology of liberation, I lament the irrelevance of both black and white churches, as well as theological education, in relation to contemporary urban struggles in South Africa...
Read moreChange-making in a (post)apartheid city: An auto-ethnographical essay
We reflect on living and doing ministry in a (post)apartheid South African city, negotiating ongoing demographic and sociopolitical transitions and discerning appropriate faith responses. We speak about the inevitability of these transitions, but then suggest that a view of theology and ministry as change-making is not inevitable but a vocation and art to be acknowledged,..
Read moreUrban social movements in South Africa today: Its meaning for theological education and the church
In the past decade, significant social movements emerged in South Africa, in response to specific urban challenges of injustice or exclusion. This article will interrogate the meaning of such urban social movements for theological education and the church. Departing from a firm conviction that such movements are irruptions of the poor, in the way described..
Read moreTrans-disciplinary research on religious formations in urban Africa: Towards liberative methodological approaches
In this article, we are exploring a methodological approach to research on faith and religious expressions in urban Africa. We are committed to trans-disciplinary work that pursues research methods mutually liberating for researchers, co-researchers and community participants and that results in long-term benefits and strengthened agency on the part of the host communities. Our reflections..
Read moreTransforming curricula into the next century: Doing theology collaboratively with local communities
The FT at the UP celebrates its centenary in 2017. This coincides with a renewed urgency for free, decolonised education, fuelled by student protests on campuses across the national landscape but also by theoretical discourse. Considering the transformation of curricula in SA today, in all disciplines but also in theology, cannot be done in isolation..
Read moreDiversity: Negotiating difference in Christian communities
This article seeks to present challenges of negotiating difference and diversity in Christian communities in South Africa today. It reflects the intersectional nature of racial, gender, ethnic and economic difference, and ways in which land, capital and other power constructs continue to underpin and deepen exclusion. It then considers the status of diversity in Christian..
Read moreThe ‘good city’ or ‘post-colonial catch-basins of violent empire’? A contextual theological appraisal of South Africa’s Integrated Urban Development Framework
The Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF) was constructed as a ‘new deal’ for South African cities and towns. It outlines a vision with four overarching goals and eight priorities or policy levers meant to overcome the apartheid legacy through comprehensive spatial restructuring and strategic urban–rural linkages. This article is a contextual theological reflection ‘from below’,..
Read moreReading Psalms, and other urban poems, in a fractured city
This article was an attempt to (re-)read Psalms in the context of fractured cities, marked by socio-economic inequalities, woundedness, migration and exclusion. It explored urban motifs in selected psalms and considered their possible meanings in relation to both the socio-cultural contexts in which they were written but also how they could be read and understood..
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