Spirit and Resistance
Subtitle: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers
Published: September 2004
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9780800636814
Subjects: Religion; Sociology of Religion; Liberation theology; Ethnic identity; Social Science; Sociology; Native American; Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies - Spirituality; Christian Theology - General; Ethnic Studies - Native American Studies; Government relations; Indians of North America; Christianity - Theology - General
First sentence: The particular bondage of American Indian peoples presents peculiar difficulties for identifying an appropriate starting point for writing an American Indian theology.
Description: Writing from a Native American perspective, theologian George Tinker probes American Indian culture, its vast religious and cultural legacy, and its ambiguous relationship to the tradition{u2014}historic Christianity{u2014}that colonized and converted it.

After five hundred years of conquest and social destruction, he says, any useful reflection must come to terms with the political state of Indian affairs and the political hopes and visions for recovering the health and well-being of Indian communities. Does Christian theology have a positive role to play?

Tinker's work offers an overview of contemporary native American culture and its perilous state. Critical of recent liberal and New Age co-opting of Native spiritual practices, Tinker also offers a critical corrective to liberation theology. He shows how Native insights into the Sacred Other and sacred space helpfully reconfigure traditional ideas of God, Jesus' notion of the reign of God, and our relation to the earth. From this basis he offers novel proposals about cultural survival and identity, sustainability, and the endangered health of Native Americans.