This study explores the theological contributions ofAruna Gnanadason, a leading feminist theologian and ecumenical activist, focusingon her efforts to integrate gender justice and environmental stewardship within the Indian context. It examines how Gnanadason's ecofeminist theology, informed by Indigenous wisdom, critiques the patriarchal and anthropocentric limitations of traditional theological frameworks. The work highlights her significant role at the World Council of Churches, where she advanced women's rights within Christian communities, particularly in areas such as ordination and addressing gender-based violence. Gnanadason has consistently advocated for a theology that transcends patriarchal binaries, emphasizing the interconnectedness of women's liberation and ecological sustainability. This essay argues that her work represents a critical methodological intervention in feminist and postcolonial theology, offering an alternative theological framework that is rooted in Indian feminist experience, Indigenous cosmology, and contextual ecological ethics. By centering the lived experiences of women, especially in India, this essay presents a holistic vision of liberation theology that combines feminist insights with a profound respect for the divine presence in nature, thereby challenging eurocentric theological norms and proposing a new model of justice that holds gender and ecological liberation together.
This essay reconsiders the South Korean Protestant experience of modernity by complicating the widely accepted view that Protestantism marked a clean rupture from traditional society and religious culture. While often portrayed as a symbol of Western modernity and individualism, Korean Protestantism continues to preserve and refract enduring elements of Korea's pre-Christian religious ethos. Drawing on literature in global/world Christianity and ethnographic research with Korean Protestant immigrants in the United States, I argue that Protestant modernity in Korea emerges not as a total break but as an entangled process shaped by tensions between old and new religious identities. Migration, to the U.S. in particular, has served as a meaningful avenue through which many South Korean Protestants seek both religious and social salvation. These lived experiences highlight how Western modernity is reinterpreted and localized within Korean religious life, offering a more nuanced understanding of religious change in the global context.
This essay examines four major interfaith declarations-Nostra Aetate (1965), Dabru key sites where religious leadership negotiated the tension between tradition and change. Rather than assessing their effectiveness, this study uses these declarations as a lens to explore how religious leaders navigate authenticity, sincerity, and representation in a globalized world. Despite emerging from distinct religious traditions and historical contexts, all four declarations grapple with the challenge of balancing theological authority with adaptation to contemporary political and social realities. The analysis demonstrates how religious leaders leverage these texts to assert legitimacy both within their own communities and in broader interfaith discourse. The essay concludes by examining how recent shifts toward religious particularism and the retreat from universalistic frameworks present new challenges for interfaith engagement, requiring innovative approaches that reconcile religious distinctiveness with meaningful dialogue. By contextualizing these declarations within broader transformations in religious authority, this study highlights the dynamic interplay between and among institutional power, competing forms of authority, and evolving communal recognition in shaping contemporary interfaith engagement.
This essay examines howAbraham Kuyper (1837-1920), Dutch Neo-Calvinist theologian and statesperson, and Kadir M & imath;s & imath;ro & gbreve;lu (1933-2019), Turkish Islamic apologist and polemicist, deployed the concept of "worldview" as a framework for resisting secular modernity. Rather than a set of doctrines, both presented "worldview" as a comprehen-sive system ordering knowledge, society, and politics. Through comparative textual anal-ysis of Kuyper's Stone Lectures (1898) and M & imath;s & imath;ro & gbreve;lu's 2000 study, & Idot;slam D & uuml;nya G & ouml;r & uuml;& scedil;& uuml; (Islamic Worldview), which shows that, while both rejected the neutrality of reason, Kuyper channeled this stance into pluralist institutional reform, whereas M & imath;s & imath;ro & gbreve;lu advanced revelatory absolutism and called for civilizational rupture. Kuyper's model emphasizes confessional scholarship, sphere sovereignty, and pillarization; M & imath;s & imath;ro & gbreve;lu's insists on tawhid as the sole epistemic axiom and the restoration of Sharia as public law. The findings highlight two contrasting modalities of religious response to modernity: reformist continuity and revolutionary replacement. The essay contributes to political theology and comparative religion by offering a typology of these modalities and reas-sessingsecularism's claim to universal legitimacy.
There are many political and historical studies of Christian Zionism. However, scholars have largely ignored the religious writings of Christian Zionists, and especially their biblical interpretations, though these contain the most explicit presentations of their views. I analyze writings by prominent contemporary Christian Zionists in order to understand their arguments and their hermeneutical and theological assumptions. I show that, despite expressingstrong opposition to supersessionism, these writers have all sharply circumscribed the biblical covenant(s) with the Jews. They value the continuing existence of Jews as Jews (against supersessionism) and employ a so-called literal hermeneutic (reading biblical references to "Israel" not as allegorical references to the Christian church). However, they are narrowly and almost exclusively interested in theAbrahamic covenant and its land promise. They effectively negate other aspects of Jewish identity because of their aversion to the Mosaic covenant, their universalization (and effective abrogation) of the biblical promises, and their endorsement of the Jews' conversion. These authors resist any reckoning with traditional Christian theologies that encouraged negative perceptions of Jews and Judaism, despite their claims to have done that.
This essay examines how modern Muslim thinkers-particularly Muhammad A'bduh, A'bd & uuml;lahad D & acirc;v & ucirc;d, and other late Ottoman intellectuals who were deeply influenced by nineteenth-and twentieth-century European thought-reinterpreted the history of Islamic revelation and the role of prophetic miracles through the combined lenses of Enlightenment notions of linear progress, modern rationalism, and positivism. While the qur'& amacr;nic worldview and classical Islamic tradition often emphasized cyclical or chronologically nonprogressive conceptions of history, these scholars selectively engaged with Western philosophies of evolution, morality, human development, and empirical science. By integrating these frameworks, they recastprophetic history into a linearly progressive schema and explained miracles in ways consistent with modern scientific and rationalist principles. The study situates this theological transformation within the broader cultural ambition of the late Ottoman and Arab modernist contexts, achieving civilizational modernity without abandoning Islamic identity, encapsulated in the ideal of "remaining Muslim while becoming European." The idea of "becoming European/Western while remaining Muslim" appears to be the central framework-the most vital thread- of contemporary Turkish and Islamic thought ... From religion to politics, from law to education, from architecture to literature, from historical consciousness to ethics and everydaylife-virtually all other domains and discourses can find a place under this overarching vision and claim. -& Idot;smail Kara, from the "Preface" to M & uuml;sl & uuml;man Kalarak Avrupal & imath; Olmak
The most shocking aspect of the Eastern Orthodox Church for many Western Protestant outsiders is their use of icons. Nothing is more diametrically opposed to a growing stream of minimalist Protestant worship aesthetics than the seeming "maximalist" aesthetic of the Eastern Orthodox Church space. To these Protestants, the Eastern Orthodox aesthetic focus may seem alien at best and anti-biblical at worst, but icons and iconographic thinking are integral aspects of the Eastern Orthodox way of being Christian. For those who wish to continue fostering ecumenical conversations in an increasingly divided and hostile world, especially in terms of building bridges between Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy, one must understand the theology behind Eastern iconography. There is no doctrine more important than that of icons to understand the Eastern Orthodox because icons lie at the foundation of their theological and spiritual self-conception.
This essay examines Korean women missionaries within global evangelical mission infrastructure using a critical-disaster-studies framework. It interrogates what missionaries seek to "save," how disasters are defined, and how these definitions justify missionary presence. Moving beyond genealogical narratives that cast Korean women as heirs to Anglo-American foremothers, the analysis situates their work within Cold-War-era U. S.- South Korean evangelical alliances, neoliberal Christian expansion, and a shared soft-power project. Using the 2024 Lausanne Congress in Seoul as a representative case, the essay argues that Lausanne functions as a masculinist infrastructure that frames catastrophe as a moral summons, mobilizingvisible crises to consolidate authority, while leaving chronic inequities intact. Korean women missionaries are central to field operations yet excluded from theological authorship and decision-making.
This essay reads two poets as theologians of liberation: Kim Chi ha, writing under Korea's 1970s dictatorship, and the North Indian bhakti poet-saint Ravidas. Taking Kim's satirical Ojeok [The Five Bandits] and Ravidas's utopian Begumpura as primary texts, it brings Minjung and Dalit perspectives into conversation. The central claim is straightforward: Poetry can bear theological argument; han and pathos, though sourced from different histories, can move wounded feeling toward shared agency; and satire and hymn work together-the first stripping power of its moral sheen, the second schooling the imagination in a just common life. I outline a reparative arc by showing how Ojeok names structural sin in the entanglement of state, capital, army, and media, how communities convert grief into solidarity, and how Begumpura gives a usable picture of a casteless city that sustains practice and hope. I also register two tensions that recent scholarship has made impossible to ignore: critiques of Minjung discourse, especially around gender and essentialism, and the controversy surrounding Kim's later conservative endorsements. Even with these cautions, the poems still do theological work on the ground. They unmask, they gather, they keep hope from running dry. The methodological consequence for comparative theology is simple: To hear how the oppressed tell the truth about God and the world, we must attend not only to elite prose but also to vernacular poetics-lament, satire, hymn, testimony-where theology is already beingmade.
This essay analyzes how Ishimure Michiko's Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow confronts the tragedy of Minamata Disease. EmployingRob Nixon's concept of "slow violence," it examines how Ishimure exposed the systemic injustices underpinning this environmental and humanitarian disaster that rendered Minamata villagers "unimagined communities" under Japan's postwar industrialization. This essay argues that the form of resistance that Ishimure enacted in Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow is deeply spiritual, appealing to the local religious traditions as a vital resource to cultivate resistance and resilience againstthe slow violence of Minamata. Specifically, it argues that two principles central to Ishimure's portrayal of Minamata villagers-(pre)animism and Tariki [Other-Power]-gesture toward a relational framework that the author terms "(pre)animistic ecological solidarity." This framework not only enables the reclamation and transformation of victims' subjectivity but also offers a counter-framework to slow violence and an alternative way of being that are insightful for responding to the entangled environmental, social, and spiritual wounds of the modern world.
This essay examines the 1923 Kanto Massacre of Koreans in Japan alongside the biblical narrative of the Gibeonites through a hermeneutics of "mnemonic solidarity" informed by postcolonial studies. Both narratives of catastrophe, though separated by time and tradition, reveal how sovereign powers construct the Other, enabling violence under states of exception-whether through martial law or divine command. Drawing on Hee-Jin Jeong's critique of linear, progress-oriented historiography, this study frames catastrophe not as a one-time event to be resolved by political actors but as a site of memory work that disrupts dominant temporalities and foregrounds silenced voices. Ultimately, it argues that the inclusion of the Gibeonites' story in the canonized scripture calls for an unfinished interpretation attentive to a "temporality of anticipation," one that reimagines overlapping suffering between text and life.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, "There is no final theology," by which he meant that every theology is partial, possibly expressing a valuable truth but never encompassing the totality of the truth. For Tutu, the way wego about navigating conflicts, in theology and beyond, involves a recognition that we have neither the first word nor the last word. We are always already participatingin an ongoing dialogical interaction. By comparing Tutu's ideas with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, this essay argues that the metaphor of "not having the last word" provides a framework for responsibly engaging in disagreements about ethics, politics, and theology.
The church is called to be an alternative community that promotes reconciliation-that is, missio dei or the mission of God, but how well has the church conducted that mission, and are there examples of ecclesial communities that are faithful in that mandate? This essay answers that question with a case study from Columbus, Ohio. Whereas the construction of the Interstate 70 highway, part of which cuts across an African American community, was meantto benefit the residents in the larger Central Ohio area, the results were the opposite. Communities were divided physically while their social and economic activities were seriously disrupted. Thankfully, J. Jireh Church, a small ecclesial organization, has addressed this challenge by promoting reconciliation in this community, thereby setting an example worth emulating.
