Decolonial
Theology Brief

Dear colleagues,

One of the disciplines of doctoral education is learning to recognize location, not just data. It’s a movement from what is being published to where knowledge is happening.

Scholarship is never simply a collection of books and articles. It is an ecology of conversations, assumptions, silences, and emerging possibilities. Our vocation as researchers is to cultivate the intellectual and spiritual attentiveness necessary to discern those movements.

During the past month I have been struck by an important convergence across theology, migration studies, ecclesiology, public theology, and World Christianity. Increasingly, scholars are no longer asking how theology should respond to migration or how Christian communities ought to address colonial histories. A deeper methodological question is emerging:

That question is reshaping several disciplines simultaneously. More importantly, it is inviting us to reconsider what counts as theology, where theology is generated, and whose voices become authoritative in its construction.

This month’s brief traces five trajectories that I believe deserve sustained attention.

Trajectory I

Migration as a Theological Location

Migration is increasingly being understood as more than a social phenomenon requiring pastoral care.

Across recent scholarship—from migrant women constructing theology through lived experience, to Indigenous communities interpreting Christian faith through ancestral practices, to African and Asian diasporic churches negotiating new forms of belonging—migration itself becomes a theological location.

This represents a significant methodological shift.

The migrant is no longer merely the object of theological reflection.

Migration becomes locus theologicus—one of the places from which theology emerges.

For those of us interested in border ecclesiality, this confirms an intuition that has shaped much of my own work: border communities are not simply sites of ministry. They are sites of theological imagination.

Trajectory II

Decoloniality Is Becoming “Parasitic” to Research Method

One of the most encouraging developments concerns methodology.

For many years decolonial scholarship has excelled at exposing colonial assumptions embedded within institutions, theological education, and systems of knowledge.

Current scholarship increasingly asks another question.

What does research actually look like after colonial critique?

Across recent studies, attention shifts toward:

• participatory knowledge
• Indigenous epistemologies
• collaborative inquiry
• locational intersectionality
• non-extractive research
• alternative forms of evidence

This movement is particularly significant for critical thinking, practical theology, qualitative research, and participatory action research.

Our task is no longer only to critique extractive scholarship.

Our task is to imagine—and practice—research that itself embodies justice.

Trajectory III

Border Ecclesiality Beyond Institutional Thinking

Several recent books suggest that ecclesiology is quietly changing.

Church increasingly appears less as institution and more as:

Migration is forcing ecclesiology to reconsider assumptions inherited from Christendom.

Concepts such as hybridity and interculturality remain valuable, yet they often begin with stable cultures entering dialogue.

Border communities invite another possibility.

Let’s admit that Christian communities have always been constituted through overlapping worlds of belonging, asymmetrical histories, and ongoing translation.

This intuition continues to shape my own exploration of border ecclesiality.

Trajectory IV

Pneumatology Beyond Abstraction

Another noteworthy development concerns renewed attention to the Holy Spirit.

Recent scholarship approaches pneumatology through:

• migration
• Indigenous wisdom
• embodied vulnerability
• diasporic imagination
• intercultural ecclesial life
• communal discernment

The Spirit appears less as an abstract doctrinal topic and more as the One who animates communities navigating uncertainty, displacement, and hope. My core claim in Spirit Outside the Gate (2019).

At the same time, scholarship on Christian nationalism reminds us that spiritual language can also be mobilized in service of domination. An argument I make in Embracing Fear (2025).

This sharpens an important theological challenge.

A decolonial pneumatology must distinguish between spiritual practices that cultivate liberation and those that sanctify conquest, exclusion, or authoritarian belonging.

That distinction, I suspect, will become increasingly important over the coming decade.

Trajectory V

Public Theology from Below

Perhaps the most significant shift concerns public theology.

Rather than beginning with theories of the public sphere, several scholars reconstruct public theology through sanctuary movements, labor organizing, migrant communities, Indigenous struggles, and everyday practices of resistance.

Theology in the public sphere increasingly appears not as theology translated into public language—of public domain.

It emerges, for better or worse, from communities struggling to survive, organize, remember, and hope but also dominate, possess, and exclude.

A curated bibliography

Selected Reading

Books

• Kgatle, Mookgo Solomon. African Pentecostals in the Diaspora: A Pneumatological Missional Imagination. Religion and Society in Africa 9. New York: Peter Lang, 2026. doi:10.3726/b22971.
• Medina, Néstor, and Becca Whitla, eds. Decolonizing Church: Emerging Voices Speak. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026. doi:10.1515/9780228025962.
• Tirres, Christopher D. Liberating Spiritualities: Reimagining Faith in the Américas. Fordham University Press, 2024. doi:10.5422/fordham/9781531508326.001.0001.
• Bradbury, Pablo, and Niall H. D. Geraghty, eds. Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America: As It Was in the Beginning? London: University of London Press, 2025. doi:10.14296/hflc8361.
• Kunz, Katherine. Contested Home: Asylum-Seeking in Switzerland and the Politics of Belonging, Place, and Religion. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2025. doi:10.14361/9783839400722.
• Hutagalung, Toar Banua. Toward an Embodied Decolonial Pneumatology: Dishoming Space. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2024. doi:10.5771/9781666938166.

Selected Chapters

• Vallejo, Rafael. “Los Hijos del Maíz: Narratives on Religion and Culture Among Mexican Migrant Farm Workers in Southwestern Ontario.” In Decolonizing Church: Emerging Voices Speak, edited by Néstor Medina and Becca Whitla, 108–124. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026. doi:10.1515/9780228025962.
• Spies, Miriam. “Cripping the Failed Body of Christ.” In Decolonizing Church: Emerging Voices Speak, edited by Néstor Medina and Becca Whitla, 125–142. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026. doi:10.1515/9780228025962-010.
• Díaz-Arévalo, Juan Mario. “Orlando Fals Borda’s Participatory Action Research: At and Beyond the Crossroads of Camilo Torres’s Neo-Socialism and Liberation Theology.” In Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America: As It Was in the Beginning?, edited by Pablo Bradbury and Niall H. D. Geraghty, 83–112. London: University of London Press, 2025. doi:10.14296/hflc8361.
• Orrego Torres, Ely. “Towards the Possibility of an Ecofeminist Political Theology: The Case of the Con-spirando Collective.” In Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America: As It Was in the Beginning?, edited by Pablo Bradbury and Niall H. D. Geraghty, 179–198. London: University of London Press, 2025. doi:10.14296/hflc8361.

Selected Articles

• Espinosa Schatz, Christian. “A Theology of Mountains from the Margins: The Linguistic Practices of Mountaintop Prayer in Mam Mayan Experiences of Migration.” Religions 17, no. 3 (2026): 384. doi:10.3390/rel17030384.
• Ocadiz Arriaga, Miriam Adelina, and Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki. “Indigenous Wisdoms and the Decolonial Efforts in Migration Studies in South Africa.” Migration Studies 14, no. 3 (2026): mnag030. doi:10.1093/migration/mnag030.
• Pasura, Dominic. “Reframing the Lens: Transnational Youth, Lived Religion and Rethinking Mobility and Transnationalism.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. Advance online publication, February 13, 2026. doi:10.1080/01419870.2026.2624655.
• Matolino, Bernard. “Beyond Ubuntu and Decoloniality: Toward a Precarity-Based African Existentialist Mobility Framework.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. Advance online publication, March 3, 2026. doi:10.1080/01419870.2026.2624652.
• Romero, Robert Chao. “Brown Theology as Public Theology: César Chávez, the Sanctuary Movement, and Latinx Theology.” Political Theology 26, no. 5 (2025): 487–506. doi:10.1080/1462317X.2025.2523682.
• Saiya, Nilay. “The Varieties of American Christian Nationalism.” Politics and Religion 18, no. 2 (2025): 171–189. doi:10.1017/S1755048325000069.
• Mujinga, Martin. “Hybrid Christianity! A New Approach to Doing Church in the Context of Migration.” Theologia Viatorum 49, no. 1 (2025): a291. doi:10.4102/tv.v49i1.291.
• Chan, Yuk Wah. “In Christ We Survive, in Christ We Thrive: Post-2019 Hong Kong Christian Migration and Development of Intercultural Christendom in the UK.” Asian Ethnicity. Advance online publication, February 21, 2026. doi:10.1080/14631369.2026.2635410.
• Nair, Shalini. “Locational Intersectionality: A Decolonial Standpoint Theory from the Margins.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. Advance online publication, April 28, 2026, 1–20. doi:10.1080/01419870.2026.2658539.

A shared practice

A Pedagogical Invitation

Read this month’s literature slowly.

Read comparatively.

Read beyond disciplinary boundaries.

Most importantly, read with enough humility to allow your research questions to change.

Doctoral education is not merely preparation for writing a dissertation.

It is apprenticeship in the responsible production of theological knowledge.

Our calling is to cultivate scholarship marked by conceptual rigor, methodological integrity, ecclesial accountability, and intellectual generosity—not as ends in themselves, but in service of communities seeking justice, reconciliation, faithful public witness, and abundant life.

My hope is that this monthly letter becomes more than an annotated bibliography.

I hope it becomes a shared practice of attentiveness.

Together, may we learn to recognize where the Spirit is opening new intellectual horizons for the church and the academy—and may we have the courage to follow.

With gratitude for your scholarship and companionship,

Oscar García-Johnson
Professor of Theology & Decolonial Studies
Fuller Theological Seminary