Indigenous Theologies: Relationality and Lived Cosmologies on Land and Sea

Guest Editors: Rathiulung Elias KC and Elia Maggang

After the final session of the Yale–Edinburgh Conference on 23 June 2023, a group of us working on Indigenous theologies gathered under the shadow of New College on the Mound, Edinburgh, to reflect on our papers and the responses they had generated. Over the past two days, we had presented on various aspects of Indigenous theology and now sought to process both the reception and the pushbacks we had encountered. Most of us were members of RISC (Researching Indigenous Studies and Christianity), a network that was then meeting monthly online since 2022 for seminars and had cultivated a year of sustained engagement with Indigenous theological discourse. Insights from these online seminars were reaffirmed at the Conference: Indigenous theology, in its diversity and contextual specificity, challenges the fundamental assumptions of dominant Western theological frameworks. Its claims often require a basic and elemental re-evaluation of Christianity as expressed in Western theology. This raises critical questions: What makes Indigenous theology ‘indigenous’? How is it distinct from merely contextual or local expressions of Christian thought? What, precisely, does the term ‘Indigenous’ signify in theological discourse? We are grateful to the editors of Studies in World Christianity for inviting us to collate a special issue on Indigenous Theologies. This issue offers an opportune forum to bring these latent questions to the fore and to explore the cosmological, relational and ethical contributions that Indigenous theologies make to World Christianity. The articles represent a varied and textured account of Indigenous theologies from Central America and Asia; from land to sea; and across disciplines and themes.