Navigating Complexity In Our World: Public Theologies for Everyday Life

This book began, at least in seminal form, back in May 2010. I was sitting in my office at Kijabe Hospital, Kenya, when I received an email letting me know I was accepted as a new faculty member at Asbury Theological Seminary, USA. I had been teaching at a theological institution in Kenya for nearly a decade. My African seminary posted me to Kijabe hospital in order to help integrate theology within a medical curriculum. While in the West this might appear a curious union; there it made complete sense. In Africa (and elsewhere around the world) health represents a significant theological category due in large part to the larger cosmology found on the continent, with more fluid interaction between spiritual and material realities. Being healthy involves negotiating the different ways people become sick as well as how they appropriate resources within the spiritual realm for becoming healthy. Furthermore, health is not just vertical in terms of how people relate to the divine, but also horizontal innature. People are sick together; they also heal together. Working at the hospital allowed me to engage health as a rich, multifaceted theological concept.