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Empires rise and expand by taking lands and resources and by enslaving the bodies and minds of people. Even in this modern era, the territories, geographies, and peoples of a number of lands continue to be divided, occupied, harvested, and marketed. The legacy of slavery and the scapegoating of people persists in many lands, and religious institutions have been co-opted to own land, to gather people, to define proper behavior, to mete out salvation, and to be silent.
The contributors to People and Land, writing from under the shadows of various empires-from and in between Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Oceania-refuse to be silent. They give voice to multiple causes: to assess and transform the usual business of theology and hermeneutics; to expose and challenge the logics and delusions of coloniality; to tally and demand restitution of stolen, commodified and capitalized lands; to account for the capitalizing (touristy) and forced movements of people; and to scripturalize the undeniable ecological crises and our responsibilities to the whole life system (watershed). This book is a protest against the claims of political and religious empires over land, people, earth, minds, and the future.
List of contents
Foreword
Collin Cowan
Preface
1. The land has colours
Jione Havea
PROMISES AND LOSSES
2. Lost Paradises: Tracing the Imperial Contours of Modern Tourism Upon Lands and People
Steed Vernyl Davidson
3. When No Land on Earth is "Promised Land": Empire and Forced Migrants
Gemma Tulud Cruz
4. Empty Land: Righteous Theology, Sneaky Coloniality
Santiago Slabodsky
5. Religious Diversity, Political Conflict, and the Spirituality of Liberation
Mitri Raheb
6. A Theology of Land and its Covenant Responsibility
Sifiso Mpofu
DISPOSSESSIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
7. Landed Churches, Landless People
Kuzipa Nalwamba
8. Empire 2.0: Land Matters in Jamaica and the Caribbean
Garnett Roper
9. Delusions of Empire: On People and Land in Oceania
Nasili Vaka'uta
10. People, Land and Empire in Asia: Geopolitics, Theological Imaginations and Islands of Peace
Jude Lal Fernando
11. Colonization of the Watersheds and the Green Politics of Hagar
George Zachariah
12. Lost Land: Visualizing
About the author
Jione Havea is research fellow with Trinity Methodist Theological College (Aotearoa New Zealand) and with the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture (Charles Sturt University, Australia).Jione Havea is research fellow with Trinity Methodist Theological College (Aotearoa New Zealand) and with the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture (Charles Sturt University, Australia).Mitri Raheb (ThD, Phillips University, Marburg, Germany) is the president of Dar al-Kalima University College in Bethlehem, Palestine and president of the Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan & The Holy Land. The most widely published Palestinian theologian to date, he is the author and editor of sixteen books on modern Middle Eastern church history, religion and the state, citizenship, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including The Invention of History: A Century of Interplay between Theology and Politics in Palestine and Sailing through Troubled Waters: Christians in the Middle East.Nasili Vaka’uta is the current Principal and Ranston Lecturer in Biblical Studies, Trinity Methodist Theological College, Auckland, New Zealand.
