Religion and Power

Jione Havea

• Publisher: Fortress Academic
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781978784536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

Religion has power structures that require and justify its existence, spread its influence, and mask its collaboration with other power structures. Power, like religion, is in collaboration. Along this line, this book affirms that one could see and study the power structures and power relations of a religion in and through the missions of empires. Empires rise and roam with the blessings and protections of religious power structures (e.g., scriptures, theologies, interpretations, traditions) that in return carry, propagate and justify imperial agendas. Thus, to understand the relation between religion and power requires one to also study the relation between religion and empires.

Christianity is the religion that receives the most deliberation in this book, with some attention to power structures and power relations in Hinduism and Buddhism. The cross-cultural and inter-national contributors share the conviction that something within each religion resists and subverts its power structures and collaborations. The authors discern and interrogate the involvements of religion with empires past and present, political and ideological, economic and customary, systemic and local. The upshot is that the book troubles religious teachings and practices that sustain, as well as profit from, empires.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter One: Stand Down, Sit Up, and Talanoa
• Part I: DARE TO DISCERN
• Chapter Two: Rescuing Christian Faith Traditions from Empire
• Chapter Three: Transforming Discipleship: Faith, Love, and Hope after Empire
• Chapter Four: Turn to the World: A Mandate for Orthodox Theology
• Chapter Five: Appropriation of Religious Symbols as Political Capital
• Chapter Six: Empire, Deep Solidarity, and the Future of Resistance
• Part II: DARE TO DISTURB
• Chapter Seven: chanting down the shitstem: resistance with Anansi and Rastafari optics
• Chapter Eight: The Chicano Student Movement as Religious and The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán as Scriptural and Utopian
• Chapter Nine: Religion as the Ethico-Political Practice of Justice: Ambedkar as Guide
• Chapter Ten: Babblers to the Rabble, Prophets to the Powerful: Mission in the Context of Empire
• Chapter Eleven: (Global) Climate Crisis and (Detroit) Water Struggle: “Re-Schooling” Christianity through Indigenous Challenge
• Chapter Twelve: Redeeming Country: Indigenous Peoples under Empires and Nation-States
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors