Latest Releases
The Spiritual Practices of South African Clergy
Clergy play an important role in the spiritual wellbeing of their congregation. They are entrusted by the Great Shepherd to shepherd his flock which entails leading them to green pastures and still waters, for example, pastoral care, and defending them from predatory animals, for example, heresy. However, clergy are sheep before they are shepherds and are also in need of the green pastures and still waters of meditation, prayer, fasting, and Bible study. These are known as inward spiritual disciplines (exercises) and have been practiced for centuries. Spiritual Practices of South African Clergy: State of the Clergy discusses these inward spiritual disciplines’ mental, physical, spiritual and social benefits. The volume explores how clergy from five diverse denominations practice these specific inward spiritual disciplines. They include the Methodist, Netherdutch, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic faith traditions. This book focuses on clergy in the Global South and how they practice these spiritual disciplines within their context. Clergy, congregants, academics and lay-persons alike will benefit from the research conducted.
Editor: Shaun Joynt
Contributors: Annelie Botha; Graham A. Duncan; Anthony Egan; Shaun Joynt; Marius Nel and Derek L. Oppenshaw
Glocal Theological Education: Teaching and Learning Theology in the Light of Crisis
This book presents a vision for Glocal Theological Education, an invitation to rethink and reshape theological training in times of crisis. The aim is to train theological judicium, the ability to exercise sound judgment and practice discernment in the face of the different crises in the world of today–like the climate crisis, the changed role of the church, and the challenge of youth citizenship. It explores what has been learned from developing shared, global learning within the framework of local learning communities in Norway, South Africa, and beyond. The book also discusses key practices, such as the combination of coteaching online and learning in local contexts, and best-practice research on other educational activities. Contributors also reflect more theoretically on where, how, and what we can learn from crisis, and how these theoretical insights can help us shape theological leaders for the future who can read the times.
International Handbook of Practical Theology
The International Handbook of Practical Theology was published in September 2022. In a globalized world, the perception and description of religion has become a complex challenge. How to talk and think about cultures and religions is a sensitive question. Methodologically, instead of dealing with top-down-definitions, the aim of the Handbook was to develop sensitive transcultural concepts of religion and religious matters methodically collected in different cultures and among different religions. The Handbook follows a concept of Practical Theology that understands Practical Theology as an empirically founded and hermeneutically reflected theory of “lived religion”. According to this concept, what is understood as “lived religion” depends on the different culturally situated discourses on and about religion. With its transcultural and trans-religious approach or methodology, the Handbook intents to promote the praxis of Practical Theology by reflecting and conceptualising the very different challenges of religious practices as they react on and interact with their very different religious and cultural circumstances and conditions. In this regard the methodology can also be described as postcolonial in nature. Three of the editors and three of the contributors to the Handbook will by means of a panel discussion present this new resource in the field of Practical Theology. After general background presented by the editors, one author who contributed a chapter to each one of the three parts of the Handbook will, based on their contributions, illustrate how they gave form to the concept of the Handbook.
