Towards a Critical White Theology

Al Barrett has been Rector of Hodge Hill Church (in east Birmingham, England) since 2010, and is author of Interrupting the Church’s Flow: a radically receptive political theology in the urban margins (2020) and co-author (with Ruth Harley) of Being Interrupted: Re-imagining the Church’s Mission from the Outside, In (2020).Jill Marsh served as Inclusive Church Implementation Officer for the Methodist Church in Britain (2020 – 2023) and is now Superintendent Minister in the Coventry and Nuneaton Methodist Circuit. She has published a number of articles and papers based on her University of Chester doctoral thesis Cosmopolitan Practical Theology and the Impact of the Norming of Whiteness (2020).Anthony G. Reddie is the Professor of Black Theology in the University of Oxford, a historic first ever appointment. He is also the Director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture in Regent’s Park College, in the University of Oxford. He is also an Extraordinary Professor of Theological Ethics and a Research Fellow with the University of South Africa. He is the first Black person to get an ‘A’ rating in Theology and Religious studies in the South African National Research Foundation. He is the Editor of Black Theology: An International Journal.

• Introduction – Towards a Critical White Theology: Dismantling Whiteness? 1. Borderline: Reading Mark 7:24-30 as a White Woman 2. One Body, Many Parts: A Reading of 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 3. Tangled Roots: the Legacy of Christian Mastery and Anti-Racism Today 4. The Christian Settler Imaginary: Repentant Remembrances of Christianity’s Entanglement with Settler Colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand 5. Between Jim Crow and the Swastika: African American Religio-Cultural Interpretations of the Holocaust 6. Contending for the Cross: Black Theology and the Ghosts of Modernity 7. Castro’s Negra/os 8. The Politics of Prayer: White American Catholicism and “Negro” Sainthood 9. Ecce Homo…? Beholding Mission’s White Gaze 10. Encountering our Own Whiteness: an Autoethnographic Conversation on the Experience of Putting Together a Journal Issue around Mission, Race and Colonialism 11. God and my Whiteness: a Personal Theo-Biography 12. Teaching for Globalized Consciousness: Black Professor, White Student and Shame 13. Dismantling my Whiteness 14. A Tale of Two Cities: Implicit Assumptions and Mission Strategies in Black and White Majority Churches 15. Interrogating Whiteness through the Lens of Class in Britain: Empire, Entitlement and Exceptionalism 16. Whiteness in Congregational Life: an Ethnographic Study of one Ethnically-Diverse Congregation in the UK 17. “The Utter Failure of White Religion”: W.E.B. Dubois’ “The Souls of White Folk” and the Challenge of Dismantling Whiteness in the (Post-)Trump Era 18. Back to a White Future: White Religious Loss, Donald Trump, and the Problem of Belonging 19. ‘Making America Great Again? An Essay on “The Weightier Matters of The Law: Justice and Mercy and Faith” 20. Citizenship in Jesus and the Disinherited: From Black Internationalism to Whiteness on the Contemporary Border 21. Reimagining the White Surveillance Gaze: A Practical Theological Proposal for Repentant and Solidaristic Engagement 22. “The Problems of the White Ethnic Majority” Revisited: a Personal, Theological and Political Review 23. To Resist the Gravity of Whiteness: Communicating Racialized Suffering and Creating Paschal Community through an Analogia Vulneris 24. James Cone’s Constructive Vision of Sin and the Black Lives Matter Movement 25. Dismantling Whiteness: a Rationale 26. Dismantling Whiteness: a Response Conclusion – Deconstructing Whiteness: “What on Earth does that Mean?” Afterword: A Foreign Language in a Foreign Land? Or Learning to Speak Locally? Afterword: Critical White Theology