Towards a Critical White Theology

Introduction – Towards a Critical White Theology: Dismantling Whiteness?
Al Barrett, Jill Marsh, Anthony G. Reddie

Part 1: Whiteness and the Bible

1. Borderline: Reading Mark 7:24-30 as a White Woman
Rachel Starr

2. One Body, Many Parts: A Reading of 1 Corinthians 12:12-27

Carol Troupe

Part 2: Whiteness and History

3. Tangled Roots: the Legacy of Christian Mastery and Anti-Racism Today
Zachary Guiliano

4. The Christian Settler Imaginary: Repentant Remembrances of Christianity’s Entanglement with Settler Colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand
Andrew Picard and A.D. Clark-Howard

5. Between Jim Crow and the Swastika: African American Religio-Cultural Interpretations of the Holocaust
Juan M. Floyd-Thomas

6. Contending for the Cross: Black Theology and the Ghosts of Modernity
Stephen G. Ray, Jr.

7. Castro’s Negra/os
Miguel A. de la Torre

Part 3: Whiteness, Education and Mission

8. The Politics of Prayer: White American Catholicism and “Negro” Sainthood
R.L. Green

9. Ecce Homo…? Beholding Mission’s White Gaze
Peter Cruchley

10. Encountering our Own Whiteness: an Autoethnographic Conversation on the Experience of Putting Together a Journal Issue around Mission, Race and Colonialism
Cathy Ross and James Butler

11. God and my Whiteness: a Personal Theo-Biography
Nigel Room

12. Teaching for Globalized Consciousness: Black Professor, White Student and Shame
Nancy Westfield

13. Dismantling my Whiteness
Lynda J. Burnhope

Part 4: Whiteness in Congregational Life

14. A Tale of Two Cities: Implicit Assumptions and Mission Strategies in Black and White Majority Churches
David Isiorho

15. Interrogating Whiteness through the Lens of Class in Britain: Empire, Entitlement and Exceptionalism
Victoria Anne Turner

16. Whiteness in Congregational Life: an Ethnographic Study of one Ethnically-Diverse Congregation in the UK
Jill Marsh

Part 5: Whiteness in the United States of America

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
Michael Brandon McCormack

18. Back to a White Future: White Religious Loss, Donald Trump, and the Problem of Belonging
Darrius Hills

19. ‘Making America Great Again? An Essay on “The Weightier Matters of The Law: Justice and Mercy and Faith”

Josiah Ulysses Young III

Part 6: Whiteness in Public Theology

20. Citizenship in Jesus and the Disinherited: From Black Internationalism to Whiteness on the Contemporary Border
Sarah Azaransky

21. Reimagining the White Surveillance Gaze: A Practical Theological Proposal for Repentant and Solidaristic Engagement
Eric Stoddart

22. “The Problems of the White Ethnic Majority” Revisited: a Personal, Theological and Political Review
Paul Weller

23. To Resist the Gravity of Whiteness: Communicating Racialized Suffering and Creating Paschal Community through an Analogia Vulneris
Kevin P. Considine

24. James Cone’s Constructive Vision of Sin and the Black Lives Matter Movement
Liam Miller

Responses

25. Dismantling Whiteness: a Rationale
Jasmine Devadason

26. Dismantling Whiteness: a Response
Anthony G. Reddie

Conclusion – Deconstructing Whiteness: “What on Earth does that Mean?”
Al Barrett

Afterword: A Foreign Language in a Foreign Land? Or Learning to Speak Locally?
Jill Marsh

Afterword: Critical White Theology
Anthony G. Reddie

Biography

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.