Indigenous People and the Christian Faith: A New Way Forward provides detailed historical, cultural and theological background and analysis to a very delicate and pressing subject facing many people around the world. The book is “glocal”: both local and global, as represented by international scholars. Every continent is represented by both Indigenous and non-indigenous people who desire to make a difference with the delicate problematics and relationships. The history of Indigenous people around the world is inextricably linked with Christianity and Colonialism. The book is completely interdisciplinary by employing historians, literary critics, biblical scholars and theologians, sociologists, philosophers and ordained engineers. The Literary Intent of the book, without presuming nor claiming too much for itself, is to provide practical thinking that will help all people move past the pain and dysfunction of the past, toward mutual understanding, communication, and practical actions in the present and future.

List of Tables

Acknowledgment

List of Contributors

Introduction
William H U Anderson

Chapter 1 Quantum Physics, Worldviews and Theology: A New Way Forward in Reconciliation?
Matthew Oliver

Chapter 2 “In the Beginning All the World Was America”: Creation, Eucharist, and the Colonial Reconstruction of Christianity in the Seventeenth Century
Stephen W. Martin

Chapter 3 Indigenous People and the Oblates in Alberta: A Model of a New Way Forward
Catherine Caufield

Chapter 4 Animism and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: Indigenous People and the Christian Faith
Jonathan Strand

Chapter 5 Culture, Interaction and Ritual: A Sociological Approach to the Xucuru-Kariri Indigenous People of Brazil
Paula Guerra

Chapter 6 Postcolonial Considerations of Endo’s Silence and Indigeneity
Tobias Schuckert

Chapter 7 The Glocal Perspective of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Tool for a New Way Forward with Indigenous People?
Rocío Riestra-Camacho, Noelia Suarez Montoto,
Alba Suarez Rodríguez and Clara Vallejo Cotarelo

Chapter 8 The Response of African Indigenous People to the Christian Faith in Ghana between 1471 and 2010
Daniel Nii Aboagye Aryeh

Chapter 9 Indigenizing Effect on Christianity from Missionary Work: The Socio-Religious Identity of Hindu Christians and Transcontextualization
Vinod John

Chapter 10 African Folk Christianity: A Case of Reformed African Traditional Religion with Creedal Ambiguity or a Valid African Christianity?
Fidelis ‘Deji Olokunboro

Chapter 11 Piety in the American Plains: The Politics of Identity and Pentecostalism on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation
Eric Bates

Chapter 12 I-Thou Ideals in Documents and Loving Relationships: The United Church of Canada’s Reconciliation Efforts
Martin Nord

Chapter 13 Toward an Indigenous Eschatology: Caution, Circle Ahead
Terry LeBlanc

Bibliography

Index

Dr. William H. U. Anderson did his Ph.D. in Biblical Studies and Theology in Postmodern Literary Critical Circles at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He is Professor of Religious Studies and the Director of the Canadian Centre for Scholarship and the Christian Faith at Concordia University of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. He has worked interdisciplinarily throughout his academic career and hosts an annual conference on a different topic every year. This book represents the proceedings of the 2018 conference on “Indigenous People and the Christian Faith: A New Way Forward”. He supervised his Indigenous student Charles Muskego’s M.A. thesis entitled Asserting Postcolonial Identities: Cross-Textual Readings of Ezra-Nehemiah and Indigeneity in Canada.

Charles Muskego holds a B.A. and M.A. from Concordia University of Edmonton. He worked for five years with Indigenous Relations in the Government of Alberta and is currently the Communications Director for Cold Lake First Nations in Alberta Canada. He is a member of the Board for Concordia University of Edmonton where he advises on Indigenous matters and has a close relationship with the university’s Indigenous Knowledge and Research Centre.