On the intersections of power, critique, discourse and invention

Abstract

In spite of the impression of unconnected contents, there is a golden line running through this issue of Religion & Theology that creates a conceptual unity in the collected essays here. This issue of Religion & Theology revolves around issues of power, critique, discourse, and invention, and not as freestanding topics but as interweaving practices that, in concert, illuminate the processes of manufacturing religion.1 Hence the two section topics of “On Power, Contestations, Contextualisation, and Innovation: Perspectives from Africa,” with essays on the reception and interpretation of the Council of Nicaea and its Creed in Africa (by Teddy Sakupapa), contestations around the intrusion of Christian discourses and practices in traditional cultural contexts, in this case Cameroon (by Elias Bongmba), and the construction of a new religious movement in the hybrid Christian–African traditional religion of the Ibandla lamaNazaretha (Nazareth Baptist Church) by Isaiah Shembe (by Sibusiso Masondo); and “Power, Critique, Feminism, and Invention: Critical Perspectives on Religious Discourses,” with essays on Catholic discourses on the paranormal and practices of exorcism (by Nicole Bauer), conceiving of new directions in Catholic theology of human dignity as public theology (by Christiaan Hermans), New Materialism as a philosophical framework to engage the figure of Mary, the Mother of God, to reconceptualise divinity for feminist theology (by Calvin Ullrich), and the retrojection of Romanticism and its legacy cultural values on to the processes of inventive curation of those material artifacts that (now supposedly) constitute – for us – the cultural world of the Roman Empire (by Robyn Walsh).