NTT Journal for Theology and the Study of Religion - Volume 77, Issue 1, 2023

For more than 50 years Dutch churches have spoken out against racial injustices. Yet, this call has rarely translated into transformative practices. This article identifies two obstacles currently preventing churches from combatting white racism: (1) a challenging social climate, including a polarised public debate concerning racism and a lack of interaction between churches of diverse racial compositions, and (2) the role of Christian theology in constructing and maintaining racial ideologies of white supremacy. This article proposes two liberation hermeneutics methods, which combined have the potential to confront these challenges and transform practices.

The 14th-century Turkish author al-Rabghūzī complains in the introduction to his collection of The Stories of the Prophets about the many faulty, repetitious, and unsound stories that go around. Surprisingly, he utilizes himself not only Islamic stories, but also folk narratives, which he artfully transforms into a full-fledged Islamic narrative. As an example and as an incentive for further research, this Research Note studies the way al-Rabghūzī transforms the folk story “the girl without hands” into a pious story about the niece of the Biblical Job. Historical and philological research into this highly important collection of stories about Biblical figures has been surprisingly scant. The theological relevance of stories such as these have hardly been assessed at all. Theological interreligious reflection on Islam has mainly been limited to the Qur’ān, although stories such as these contain extensive Islamic theological issues. In our case, it appears that the story about “a female Job” consciously avoids to challenge God’s justice vis-à-vis the human plight, a fact which deserves further theological reflection.

As part of NTT JTSR’s series on Key Texts, this article discusses Charles H. Long’s collection Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Since its publication in 1986, Significations has inspired a wide range of scholars in the United States. In this article, I will outline some of the main themes and concerns of the text and review its reception in (Black) religious studies. I will then explore the potential impact of Long’s work on religious studies in the Netherlands, where it has been largely overlooked. To do so, I will bring Significations in conversation with the recent debate on Markus Davidsen’s vision for the study of religion in the Netherlands (published in NTT in 2020). I will argue that Long, as a “bringer of problems,” can help “reorient” the field of religious studies in the Netherlands towards a more thorough, forceful, and self-reflexive engagement with (Dutch) colonialism and its afterlife—both as a material reality and as a hermeneutical problem.