This winter’s edition of the Anglican Theological Review (ATR) features a number of incisive articles circling around issues of land, colonialism, race, and political theology. While they were not specifically solicited, and are not explicitly in conversation with each other, there are numerous generative echoes and connections that may be found in reading them together.
We begin with Jesse Zink’s exploration of place and land in Anglican theology. It is often observed that Anglican theologies, perhaps more than most, emphasize the importance of place—often in the face of its perceived diminished importance in modernity, with globalization, long distance travel, instant communication, and the internet. Zink begins with a survey of works on place by Anglican theologians John Inge and Andrew Rumsey. To these voices, Zink adds another critical set of voices: namely, indigenous perspectives on land, particularly looking at Vine Deloria, Jr. and Ray Aldred. Zink works to show that these indigenous theological perspectives on land can enrich and correct thinking about place and are generative for pastoral practice, especially in regard to the Doctrine of Discovery and ownership of property.
Picking up on theological considerations of land, Andrew Ronnevik, a Lutheran pastor and professor at Martin Luther Seminary in Lae, Papua New Guinea, interrogates the implicit theology of land present in the thought and practice of Episcopal Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple, who had significant relations with the Native Americans of Minnesota. Drawing on the work of black theologian Willie James Jennings, Ronnevik examines and sharply critiques Whipple’s conceptuality, before beginning to sketch a different theology of land, one informed by distinctly indigenous voices and calculated to contribute to a renewed vision and imagination.
We turn next to Ryan Scott Felder of Yale Divinity School, who offers an incarnational critique of the 1967 General Convention’s Special Program (GCSP) intended to remedy racial injustices, in “Sacramental Action in Response to ‘Urban Crisis’: An Incarnational Critique of the General Convention Special Program.” For Felder, these seemingly “well-intended” programs failed to challenge the church’s imbrication with “colonial racial capitalism.” The program’s vision for “sacramental social action” failed because it ultimately rejected the “sacramentality of the world” and thus “magnified death.” Felder points to the program’s failure to seek black Episcopalians’ consent and involvement in developing the GCSP and its inability to comprehend the depth and full scope of the so-called “urban crisis.”
The final of the articles features the latest installment in our series of Brief Introductions to Anglican Theology. With his essay “Anglican Political Theology,” Luke Bretherton of Duke University accounts for diversity and divergence in the range of Anglican Political Theology (APT), pointing to the absence of a coherent or singular intellectual tradition or even a founding figure or unique, identifying practice. Instead, APT is best regarded as a “therapy for the ways we live.” As a product of modernity, APT focuses on a vision for “good order” and right relation among the church, state, and nation. The historical context is front and center here, including Anglicanism’s colonial and imperial history, its imbrication with Atlantic slavery, and its global reach at the height of the British empire. Embedded in this historical nexus, Anglicanism has tended toward a providential rather than apocalyptic view of history and the church’s place in it.
Reflecting its modern orientation, APT has refused the fixedness of natural law theology, instead opted being grounded in more open and evolving ideas about creation and cosmos. Given its colonial and imperial history, APT has had to move beyond state-centric theological orientations. To date, APT has not included a discussion of power (critical or otherwise) but rather “assumes the possession of power.”
We are also excited to feature a roundtable discussion of James Kyung-Jin Lee’s recent monograph, Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority (Temple University Press 2022). Lee is a professor (and former chair) of Asian American studies at the University of California-Irvine and a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. This powerful, interdisciplinary study stands somewhere at the intersection between practical theology (as the work’s theoretical origins are in the experience of Clinical Pastoral Education), critical theory, and theology (with concerns for the body politic and for theorizing racialized narratives as religious myths). Lee extends the critique of the idea of Asian Americans as a model minority but here focuses on the body, individual and corporate, and in particular, the idea of a wounded body. This consideration is extended with responses from Kwok Pui-Lan of Emory University, Suejeanne Koh, also of UC Irvine, Thomas Kam Chu, a New York attorney and member of Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, and Patrick B Reyes of Auburn Theological Seminary, New York.
These essays and roundtable are augmented by a range of reviews in depth and book reviews, as well as a well-chosen selection of poetry.
JASON A. FOUT
JENNIFER S. HUGHESFeast of St. David
