Christian geographers, Christian geographies

• Main Author: TSE, Justin Kh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: Christianity; Theology; Postsecular; Morality; Ontology; Geopolitics; Peace; Protestant; Science; Evil; Human Geography; Religion
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research/277
• Institution: Singapore Management University

What I review in this chapter is how some Christian geographers—practitioners of geography who are professing Christians—have attempted to integrate their Christian faith with the disciplinary practice of geography. I demonstrate that some geographers have made use of Christian theology as a modality of critical geography by attempting to harness its account of the power of evil in the world as a critique of unjust systems and persons. I focus on four cases in this chapter: David Livingstone’s account of the Protestant Reformation and its aftermath for geographers in The Geographical Tradition (1992), David Ley’s Christian critique of Marxist geographies in Antipode (1974), the theo-ethics proposed by Cloke and his coauthors for postsecular participation in civic life (Cloke P, Progress Hum Geogr 26(5):587–604, 2002; Cloke P, Theo-ethics and radical faith-based praxis in the postsecular city. In: Molendijk A, Beaumont J, Jedan C (eds) Exploring the postsecular: The religion, the political and the urban. Brill, pp 223–241, 2010; Cloke P, Cult Geogr 18(4):475–493; Williams A, Trans Br Inst Geogr 40:192–208, 2015; Cloke P, May J, Williams A, Cities 100:102667, 2020), and the peaceable imagination that Nick Megoran (Brandywine Rev Faith Int Aff 2(2):40–46, 2004; Trans Br Inst Geogr 35:382–398, 2010; Area 45(2):141–147, 2013; Big questions in an age of global crises: thinking about meaning, purpose, god, suffering, death, and living well during pandemics, wars, economic collapse, and other disasters. Wipf and Stock, 2022) imports from Christian faith into his work on critical geopolitics. I argue that the narrative structure that orients their work begins with an identification of evil in their geographical case studies, which usually do not focus on Christian communities but on the world at large, and proposes paths to conceptual conversion that would lead to the overcoming of injustice. I offer at the end possibilities for Christian theology to be used in geography in ways that do not begin with evil, but instead with the possibility of divine ontology as constitutive in modern geographies.