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Chapter 4 - Theology in the Public Realm? David Tracy and Contemporary African Religiosity

from Part II - Public and Beyond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2023

Barnabas Palfrey
Affiliation:
Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge
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Summary

Tracy’s theology has often been well received in African contexts for its hermeneutical openness, but difficult distances remain between Tracy’s post-modern framing of theology and post-colonial imperatives. Tinyiko Sam Maluleke criticises universalising gestures in historic Christian theology, repeated in recent ‘public theology’, that efface the kinds of differences in power that follow from colonial domination. Few who abide in entrenched traditions of subjugation, Afro-pessimism, and Western supremacism will be willing, ready, or able to re-evaluate sufficiently their readings of ‘the classics’– despite Tracy’s hopes for such hermeneutical events. And yet, Tracy’s subsequent work: (1) parses classics as ‘frag-events … that shatter, negate, and fragment all totality systems … including Christendom’; and (2) emphasises the dialectical and apophatic seriousness of his commitment to thinking analogically. Perhaps Tracy could be received outside the limiting frame of Western post-modernity, in support of decolonising exchanges between subjugated African theological experience, on the one hand, and historically privileged perceptions stained by colonialism, on the other.

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Beyond the Analogical Imagination
The Theological and Cultural Vision of David Tracy
, pp. 87 - 108
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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