Christianity and Culture in the City

A Postcolonial Approach

Contributions by Peter Savastano, Edgar Rivera, Nicolas Dumit Estevez, Michelle L. Nickens, Charlene Sinclair, Elieser Valentin, David Traverzo Edited by Samuel Cruz

Publication date:

13 December 2012

Length of book:

192 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

236x160mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739176757

Christianity and Culture in the City: A Postcolonial Approach offers an introduction to the broad diversity of contemporary Christianities in a rich, complex, changing, and challenging city context. Cruz focuses upon a variety of changing communities with dynamic and striking cultural experiences, and the volume provides both scholarly and practical insights as to how Christianities in the city relate to and transform city institutions and communities that are undergoing dramatic shifts and invite opportunities for intentional study.

This book offers a provocative interdisciplinary examination to shed light upon the ways in which diverse city communities appropriate Christianity to better engage their economic, cultural, political, and religious environment. A post-colonial theoretical framework will help inform how Christianity serves to empower and reinvent fragmented, oppressed, and struggling city populations. The reader is offered various conceptual, theoretical, and pragmatic insights and knowledge for better interpreting, affirming, and engaging diverse Christianities in the city in a postcolonial era.
City life is complicated. Religious expressions within cities are even more difficult to ascertain. Cruz brings together scholars who explore marginalized religious spaces within cities to discover that what people claim to believe in theory, what they say about their faith, and how they live out that faith can be quite incongruent. Most religious scholars miss this because they fail to consider the complicated ethnic, cultural, and political realities of the everyday. As a corrective, this book provides us with a liberative critical reflection on the praxis of the disenfranchised.