Description: "Christian theologians in the Pacific Islands pay close attention to culture, seeing it as the grounds on which one understands God and engages in dialogue with others. In this pathbreaking book, Matt Tomlinson engages in an anthropological dialogue with the work of these theologians, asking how the combination of culture and Christian theology opens up new conversations while limiting others. The kinds of dialogues that Pacific theologians engage in, Tomlinson writes, range from radical critiques of biblical stories as inappropriate for Pacific audiences to celebrations of traditional gods such as Tagaloa as essentially Christian figures. This book presents a symphony of voices-engaged, critical, prophetic-from the contemporary Pacific's leading religious thinkers, and suggests how their work articulates with broad social transformations in the region"--
Brief description: Matt Tomlinson is associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University.
Review Quotes: From the onset, Tomlinson's strength as a writer and researcher becomes apparent: he elaborates theoretical terms with clear explanations and gripping quotations from historical sources and his own ethnographical fieldwork. He interweaves the necessary explanation of cultural techniques from Pacific islands, e.g., the emphasis and advocacy of dialogue in theology and the importance of storytelling (talanoa) in his research, and has gathered convincing examples how people from Oceania retell or write back at the bible in their own words and more importantly with their own history and cultural concepts. Tomlinson succeeds in sparking an engaging process between anthropology and theology, thereby adding to a deeper understanding of the history of the Pacific Islands from a social and cultural perspective.--Moritz Pöllath PhD, Ludwig-Maximilians-University "Island Studies Journal, 16:1 (2021)"