Archives

  • Coping with Crisis: hospitality, security, and the search for faithful connections Proceedings of the IAPT Leuven Conference 2021
    Vol. 3 (2023)

    This book offers essays on ‘crisis’ and practical theology written by participants in the IAPT conference ‘Coping with Crisis’ organized in Leuven, 2021. Here crisis is considered as a multidimensional phenomenon that includes a sense of threat and also a sense of opportunity. The various contributions in this volume each depart from a specific context or locality of practices of people and communities in the midst of some form of crisis. Against the background of a practice oriented approach, different questions come to the fore, which will be addressed throughout this volume. How can a particular experience of crisis be (theologically) understood? How is this experience connected with or embedded in a particular social context? How does the phenomenon of faith relate to this experience? What do we mean when speaking about ‘coping’ with crisis? What are the core values that play a role in such an expression? How is living with crisis embodied in particular situations and how might faith communities act in such situations? The volume has been structured along five main aspects of the crisis experience where connections with the phenomenon of faith might be located and further explored: (1) Justice, (2) Uncertainty and fear, (3) Belonging, (4) Care, and (5) Being church.

     

    cover art by guiltfree OCD

  • (De)coloniality and religious practices: liberating hope; edited by Valburga Schmiedt Streck, Júlio Cézar Adam and Cláudio Carvalhaes
    Vol. 2 (2021)

    (De)coloniality and religious practices: liberating hope

    Proceedings of the IAPT Brazil conference 2019

     This book bears the fruits of the IAPT Conference that happened in Sao Leopoldo, Brazil in 2019. A first time gathering in Latin America, the conference called on the theme of decoloniality, challenging the ways in which Christianity’s thinking and doing are both marked by coloniality but also by many forms of liberation. This book is a collection of the talks given in that conference covering the theoretical aspects of decoloniality as well as three main themes that ran through the event: 1) Decolonizing theological concepts and practices: reflection on theories, methods and approaches of decoloniality, investigating relations with the economy, genders and sexualities, forms of subjectivities and knowledges as well as the earth itself; 2) Religious Practices, cultures and spirituality: exploration of the roles of practical theologies in diverse global contexts as well as diverse practices and religious pluralism; 3) Liberating Hope: practical theology in action: examination of the counter-cultural theology in churches located on different contexts and  borders, interreligious transformations, beauty and the body as it relates to the image of God. 

     

    Cover painting: Exodus by Flávio Scholles. Acessible in: www.fscholles.net

     

  • Cover image: Lars Danbolt The cover picture is taken outside Oslo Cathedral in a ritual event that commemorated the victims of the Norwegian terrorist attacks on July 22, 2011. Eight people died in a bombing in Oslo and 69 young people died on nearby Utøya island. These events left their mark on the IAPT conference, too.

    Reforming practical theology. The politics of body and space; edited by Auli Vähäkangas, Sivert Angel, Kirstine Helboe Johansen
    Vol. 1 (2019)

    Proceedings of the IAPT Oslo conference 2017

    The 2017 IAPT took place in Oslo, which during that year celebrated the 500 years anniversary of the Lutheran reformation. With this Nordic story as a context, and with participants from all over the world, the conference asked how practical theology should be done now, in light of the reforming processes, both spiritual, social and cultural that face us globally and locally. Both in catholic and protestant theological traditions, the relationship between theology and politics has been a central question. Issues like social justice, climate change and citizenships are at the centre of national and international politics. These issues correspondingly confront practical theology with the question of how politics reforms theology and how theology reforms politics. In this book, challenges from the intersections of politics and theology were explicitly tied to questions of body and space. By varied theoretical perspectives and by the range of empirical material presented, the papers included in this volume express the diversity of ways today’s practical theology responds to these challenges.