Rowan Strong

This is a big book, not just in its length but in its ambition and complexity. Professor Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Neibuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. In this, his most recent book, he is writing for the first time as an Anglican about his own religious adherence. He seeks to delineate the history and enduring characteristics of Anglican theology from its beginnings in the sixteenth-century English Reformation to the 1980s, attentive to its “royal absolutism, racism, and imperialism” (xii). He finds its characteristics to be a particular emphasis on God’s Word (Logos) incarnate in Jesus Christ, an imperially based racist orientation to whiteness, and, at odds with that, an inherent “ecumenism.” Professor Dorrien does not seem to define what he means by using this anachronism of “ecumenism” for the earlier centuries of Anglicanism, but he does refer to tracking...

The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective, by Kwok Pui-Lan, seems to have been written for readers who are nonacademic and, presumably, mainly Anglican-Episcopalian. It offers an introduction to the theory of postcolonialism as it applies to the present global Anglican Communion and its history. This modern theory, influenced by Marxist antagonism to Western imperialism and capitalism, has enabled scholars to develop influential critiques of Western history and culture in the early modern to modern eras. Postcolonialism has focused on the oppressive dimensions of the West’s imperial engagement with other lands and peoples in its political, economic, and militaristic aspects. In addition, Western culture and Christianity are also viewed as part of the oppressive and exploitative dimensions of the imperialist colonizing of local peoples, who are viewed as subordinates, or “subalterns,” to dominant imperialist Westerners...