Questioning Our Faith in Practice

Katherine Turpin, Ph.D., is Professor of Practical Theology and Religious Education at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, CO. She has published in youth ministry, religious education, and practical theology, including Branded (Pilgrim, 2006) and Nurturing Different Dreams (with Anne Carter Walker, Pickwick, 2014).

• ContentsAcknowledgements1 Questioning One’s Own Faith1 Defining Whiteness and White Supremacy2 Salvation beyond White Supremacy3 Why “Questioning”?4 “You’ll Lose Your Faith”?5 How to Read This Book2 Questioning Practice1 Practice and the Transmission of Virtue2 Practice and Symbolic Violence3 Accounting for the Ambivalent Nature of Christian Practice4 Innocence, Purity, and Complicity: Reimagining White Christian Practice3 Questioning Education1 Teaching as Universal Mandate for Conversion2 Education, Civilization, and Imperial Force3 Pedagogical Eternalities and the Education of Children4 Education with Humility4 Questioning Intervention1 The Role of Intervention in Practical Theological Reflection2 Agency, Assumed Control, and the White Savior3 Intervention as Religious Meaning-Making4 The Myth of Progress and Salvation as Whiteness5 From Intervention to Design for Collective Flourishing5 Questioning Leadership1 On Leaders and Followers2 From Corporate Rock Star to Interdependent Co-collaborators3 The Paradox of Servant Leadership4 Decolonizing and Liberating Leadership5 Fragment Workers and Poetic Imagination6 Questioning Congregations1 The Prominence of the Congregation in White Christianity2 Congregations as Institutions of Whiteness3 Decolonizing Community and Moving beyond Congregations7 Questioning the Apologetic and Affiliative Function of Practical Theology1 What Are Apologetics, and How do Practical Theologians Get Drawn into Them?2 When Describing Practice Becomes Advocating for Practice3 Demand for Institutional Loyalty and Assimilation8 Questioning Christianity1 Christian Privilege and the Racialization of Religious Identity2 Struggling with Normativity and Universality in White Theology3 Interreligious Practical Theology and Multiple Religious Belonging4 A Somewhat Less-Christian Practical Theological Reflection Cycle9 Questioning Anthropocentrism1 Refuting Theologies of Human Domin[at]ion2 Restoring Connection to All Our Relations3 Legacy Fears of Heresy and Syncretism4 A Somewhat Less-Christian Practical Theological Reflection CycleEpilogue: Living the Questions1 Original Sin, Shameful Hiding, and Right RepentanceBibliographyIndex