God Is Samoan: Dialogues Between Culture and Theology in the Pacific

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:

This informative book offers an eloquent overview of a variety of contextual theologians' themes and arguments. . . . The issues discussed in the book provide a template for a better understanding of many village, and not just Protestant, variants of Christian life, which are discussed by lay 'contextual theologians' (and their anthropologists) throughout the Pacific. They show, as the editor Tarcisius Kabutaulaka's note states, that since the arrival of Christian missionaries in the mid-seventeenth century, Pacific Islanders have been actively engaged with their teachings, the Bible, and the relationship between Christianity and their lives.