Decolonial Futures

Decolonial Futures inspires an educational project of personal attention to decolonization. Christine Hong traces the depths and subtleties of different cultural and religious “intelligences” in ways that allow the reader to clearly identify her- or himself as a starting point for broadening the vision. Having taught in eurochristian schools of theology for some 45 years, I can recommend Hong’s book to all my eurochristian relatives who are struggling to de-center their own Whiteness and to decolonize their minds and their bodies from lifelong habits of privilege.

-- Tink Tinker, Iliff School of Theology

In Decolonial Futures we are invited on an exciting and thought-provoking journey for teaching and learning together. This insightful and creative critique of dominant types of theological education does not leave us in the despair of deconstruction, but provides ways for envisioning new futures through the rubric of reclaiming, retelling, reframing, and restoring through which new frameworks of theological education can be created. Here we are challenged to become intercultural and interreligious theological educators in diverse settings as we fulfill individual and communal callings to achieve full freedom for all and to practice holistic justice.

-- Edwin David Aponte, Louisville Institute

If you not only care about, but are also deeply committed to doing the hard yet necessary anti-colonial work that theological education requires right now, then this book is for you. Hong does not mince words in laying out how “institutions of theological education have expertly dominated, stolen from, and erased entire peoples” through perpetuating colonial systems of power. As a means of resistance Hong not only offers up frameworks that must start with deconstructing and then reconstructing teaching and learning, but she does this through her own decolonial narrative-analytical writing style. She offers narrative and story as a decolonial model, allowing the very reading of it to be a porous space making room for “nuanced difference” and complex narratives. She challenges the reader to commit to decolonial futuring, as it requires communal work, by the very decolonial act of dreaming of what can be when educators live “interculturally and interreligiously with embodied intelligence of the mind, heart, and spirit.” Hong is giving us tools for an anti-colonialist revolution in theological education…are you ready to do the work?

-- Lakisha Lockhart, Chicago Theological Seminary

This book boldly imagines the future of theological education as a practice for freedom and offers practical steps to achieve it by promoting intercultural and interreligious intelligence. Combining personal narrative with scholarly analysis, the book inspires, incites, and instills hope. I highly recommend it to educators, students, and people who hope to decolonize their minds.

-- Kwok Pui-lan, Candler School of Theology, Emory University

Through her engaging narrative and theoretical reflections, Dr. Christine Hong helps us to see, feel, and understand the urgency for decolonizing theological education. Her honest and incisive assessment imagines and strategizes the forms our joyful and tenacious anti-supremacist work might take. I am grateful for her wise and disruptive guidance of what needs to be dismantled, bound, and upset in our work together. Even more so, I am indebted to her for naming and calling into being the stories, genealogies, and epistemologies that might make our education truly liberative.

-- Katherine Turpin, Illiff School of Theology

Dr. Hong heals and unbinds the mind, body, and soul from the colonial violence that undergirds theological and religious education. More than just a decolonial critique of dominant ways of knowing, Dr. Hong provides an anti-colonial strategy that recovers the narratives and traditions that were intentionally erased, and she casts a vision forward for a collective future where all of our descendants may thrive. Simply put, this is a once in a generation book. It honors our ancestors and provides a platform for future generations to dream creatively and heal our communities.

-- Patrick B. Reyes, Forum for Theological Exploration

In working toward antiracism, many people (especially white people) often express a desire to know what to DO to create change, before they have done the work of understanding how their BEING plays into white supremacy and coloniality. This work of constructive practical theology by Christine J. Hong melds the DOING with the BEING to embody those minoritized people who most disturb the system, those “possessed with joy.” She shows us how to bridge the gap between who we are and who we want to be as thriving in an intercultural and interreligious world. If we were to take her invitation to freedom and liberation seriously, this work could free and reground the student, the teacher, and the institution; indeed, the church itself.

-- Laura M. Cheifetz, Vanderbilt Divinity Sc