Western culture romanticizes wildness even as it fears the destruction of our humanity by all that is bestial, savage and unconstrained. Identity is constructed as a supposedly pure, bounded and sovereign force, constantly fascinated and repelled by its animal others.

The consequences of the church’s investment in this modern humanism are disparate, but united by a strange colonial logic, according to which the savage and the unnatural must be domesticated and incorporated into an empire of light. In the labelling of non-heterosexuals as ‘inhuman’ or ‘bestial’, complex links between the rhetoric of empire and resistance to that rhetoric are exposed. Appeals to African authenticity and liberal universalism are contextualized in postcolonial debates about securing human identity, debates in which the human/animal boundary becomes a key site of struggle.

This paper asks what the church looks like if our obsession with a pure identity of the (Western or African) human is challenged in the context of debates about sexuality within the Anglican Communion. It is argued that the dynamic of Christian revelation works to throw such categories into confusion, to release liberating encounters with the ‘inhuman’ others within and beyond our invented boundaries. An inherently plural, multilingual and differentiated process of Christian community is proposed.

This article examines the significance of ‘place’ as a theme in ecclesiology in the interests of developing an ecclesial sense of place within my own context of Australian Anglicanism. To talk about ecclesiology is to talk about place, about God’s place, about our placement in the world, about how and why our social life operates as it does, about what engenders optimal life enhancing community. From this perspective, place can be a critical concept through which theology, ecclesiology, mission and ministry can be organized and better understood. The primary discipline that has deployed the concept of place is geography. Accordingly, in this article, I consider the theme of place as it is discussed in professional geography and briefly examine some implications for being church and the Anglican Church in particular. This provides the framework for consideration of place within an Australian cultural and ecclesial context. In doing so, I examine the motif of verandah as a depiction of ecclesial place down-under. The key concept of the ‘in-between place’ to depict a post-colonial way of being church is deployed in order to recover an ecclesial sense of place down-under. Underpinning such an approach is the theological concept of the in-between God.

The purpose of this article is to approach the heuristic potency of coloniality illustrated by reference to the emergence of African theologies. Coloniality refers to subjugating strategies found in mission discourses which are not unrelated to wider colonial violence. It will be argued that such an analytic category, which arises from historical experiences of mission malpractice, has particular theological and methodological significance. Consequently, post-colonial Anglicanisms will affirm particularism, experiential interfaces and inductive theologizing.

The purpose of this article is to address coexistent Anglican faith identities that have flourished in contexts after the colonial period. Thus far these identities have been treated as differences in viewpoints. Metaphysically speaking member differences are included as ‘parts’ of the one ‘whole’ Body of Christ. Without a postcolonial metaphysical and theological critique that decolonizes the Body of Christ, as the Church, then parts repeatedly seek, to redefine, restore or reform the ‘whole’ to maintain the whole’s coherence and empowering the former part. Ignoring the metaphysical aspect of ecclesial identity postpones the emergence of a postcolonial Anglican Communion where multiple faith identities can coexist.

The article examines the Anglican identity of two Ugandan immigrant communities in Britain and the congregations they have formed in order to foster their social, culture, and spiritual well-being. The two communities are the Acholi, who hail from the northern part of Uganda, and the Baganda from the central region. The former have formed the Acholi London Christian Fellowship while the latter have formed two distinct, yet similar, congregations in two separate London parishes. These are Okusinza mu Luganda (Worship in Luganda) and Ekkanisa y’Oluganda (the Luganda Church). The second is an offshoot of the first one. This article illustrates that religion and ethnicity are often inextricably intertwined, and that for the immigrants, Anglicanism does not merely displace or replace their native culture, but gives it a new sense of direction as they also shape it in the light of their aspirations. In this sense, we can speak of religious ethnicity, which refers to cases where an ethnic group is linked to a religious tradition shared by other ethnic groups.

A sample of 290 individuals attending Evangelical Anglican churches and Anglo-Catholic churches in central England completed the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, a measure of psychological type preferences. Overall, there were clear preferences for sensing over intuition, for feeling over thinking, and for judging over perceiving, which is consistent with the findings of two earlier studies profiling the psychological type of Anglican churchgoers. However, there was also a significantly higher proportion of intuitives among Anglo-Catholics than among Evangelical Anglicans, which is consistent with the greater emphasis in Anglo-Catholic churches on mystery, awe, and the centrality of sacraments in worship which may resonate with the intuitive predisposition. The implications of these findings are discussed for the benefits of breadth and diversity within Anglicanism.