Empires rise and expand by taking lands and resources and by enslaving the bodies and minds of people. Even in this modern era, the territories, geographies, and peoples of a number of lands continue to be divided, occupied, harvested, and marketed. The legacy of slavery and the scapegoating of people persists in many lands, and religious institutions have been co-opted to own land, to gather people, to define proper behavior, to mete out salvation, and to be silent.

The contributors to People and Land, writing from under the shadows of various empires—from and in between Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Oceania—refuse to be silent. They give voice to multiple causes: to assess and transform the usual business of theology and hermeneutics; to expose and challenge the logics and delusions of coloniality; to tally and demand restitution of stolen, commodified and capitalized lands; to account for the capitalizing (touristy) and forced movements of people; and to scripturalize the undeniable ecological crises and our responsibilities to the whole life system (watershed). This book is a protest against the claims of political and religious empires over land, people, earth, minds, and the future.

Jione Havea is a native Methodist pastor from Tonga and research fellow with Trinity Theological College (Aotearoa) and the Public and Contextual Theology (PaCT) research centre of Charles Sturt University.

Foreword
Collin Cowan
Preface
1.The land has colours
Jione Havea

PROMISES AND LOSSES
2.Lost Paradises: Tracing the Imperial Contours of Modern Tourism Upon Lands and People
Steed Vernyl Davidson
3.When No Land on Earth is “Promised Land”: Empire and Forced Migrants
Gemma Tulud Cruz
4.Empty Land: Righteous Theology, Sneaky Coloniality
Santiago Slabodsky
5.Religious Diversity, Political Conflict, and the Spirituality of Liberation
Mitri Raheb
6.A Theology of Land and its Covenant Responsibility
Sifiso Mpofu

DISPOSSESSIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
7.Landed Churches, Landless People
Kuzipa Nalwamba
8.Empire 2.0: Land Matters in Jamaica and the Caribbean
Garnett Roper
9.Delusions of Empire: On People and Land in Oceania
Nāsili Vaka‘uta
10.People, Land and Empire in Asia: Geopolitics, Theological Imaginations and Islands of Peace
Jude Lal Fernando
11.Colonization of the Watersheds and the Green Politics of Hagar
George Zachariah
12.Lost Land: Visualizing Deforestation and Eschatology in the Apocalypse of John and the Column of Trajan in Rome
Barbara Rossing

This book is a ‘must read’ for anyone seeking to understand ‘decolonising theologies’ and a critical tool for those who are involved in educating others on the tacit nature of colonial process within Christianity.
— Modern Believing

What colors and contours of biblical texts, traditions, and theologies emerge when scholars take seriously the geopolitics of empire as contemporary structure and system? Third in a series on Theology in the Age of Empire, People and Land deftly enacts and provides models for counter-imperializing, by refocusing the gaze from plural vantages. Its contributors unpick threads of repetition and mutation that serve to re-instantiate imperialist violence – its insidious possessiveness and dangerous cultural constructions impacting people and land across multiple contexts from Pasifika and Australia to the Middle East and Asia, from Jamaica to Africa. Unsettling even theologies that seem liberating, People and Land offers creative resistance, strategies of liberation, and workable hope by taking the discomfort of reality to be its theological concept and ground. This accessible collection should be on the curricula and in the libraries not only of scholars of postcolonial theologies and hermeneutics but more especially in what were once considered mainstream studies. From Genesis to Revelation, from the promises and losses of land to the dispossession and responsibilities of peoples, this is a sharp, critical and thoroughly readable assembly of essays that should inspire change not only at the level of scholarship, but also and especially in socio-political, religious practice. In the face of imperial delusion, the resilience of those whose lands have been stolen through colonization and are subject to ecological trauma underscores this volume.
— Anne Elvey, University of Divinity and Monash University

In the shadows of the neo-liberal development narrative that denies the inextricable relationship of land, people, and life, we have a volume that advocates for a new story based on relationality and justice.
— Upolu Lumā Vaai, Pacific Theological College

Deeply rooted in the ground from which life and thought emerges, the theologies in this collection bear the character and groans of peoples and of their lands. Here are authentically located theologies! Reading this collection exposes theology in vacuum as chicanery.
— Lily Fetalsana Apura, Silliman University

Persuaded that the land and the peoples, especially the indigenous people in various postcolonial contexts, are intricately bound together and fully aware of the adverse repercussions of empire and its persistent harmful death-dealing legacies on the previously colonized people and their lands, the authors in this brilliant volume mock, unsettle, and challenge empire and empire-driven theologies, ideologies and biblical hermeneutics in their commitment to producing a justice-conscious transformative, liberating product. Profound and unapologetically prophetic! This book is a must read for all justice-seeking persons whose vision is to pull down the ruthless strongholds of empire.

Probing, provoking and prophesying. Profound, prophetic and pro-marginalized people and lands.
— Madipoane Masenya (Ngwan’a Mphahlele), University of South Africa

Brilliant! This volume is more than another book relating to Empire hermeneutics. This volume has a voice that needs to be heard, a voice that needs to challenge the churches and a voice that needs to confront the consciences of social and political leaders across the globe for what has been done to Mother Land.

The articles reflect the consciences of authors from the original Promised Land of Palestine to the dispossessed lands of Australia and the mutilated islands of the Pacific. The abuse of Mother Land across the face of Earth is exposed as series of vicious crimes by numerous ‘empires,’ crimes that demand more than theological reflection.

Ultimately land is revealed to be alive and the source of life, reflecting the colours of life and calling for restorative justice for all the cruelties and pain inflicted. Land is depicted as the suffering soul of the planet, a soul that needs to be saved by more than mission theology.
— Norman Habel, Flinders University

People and Land: Decolonizing Theologies is a collection of thoughtful and provocative essays. It incisively connects seemingly disparate dots – forced migration, modern tourism, war, exploitation, and climate crisis, to name a few – to challenge “colour-blind,” Eurocentric theological and hermeneutical underpinnings of imperial and ecclesial structures that have perpetuated coloniality from antiquity to the present day. By raising up voices of thought leaders and community activists from the Global South, contributors to this volume present alternative interpretations of scriptures and traditions that reframe the crises of our time and elucidate pathways toward healing and emancipation of motherlands and their dismembered communities, non-human and human alike.
— Lauress Wilkins Lawrence, Wisdom Commentary Series (Liturgical Press) Editorial Board