Finished Reading: Balkan Contextual Theology by Stipe Odak 📚

Tremendous. Refreshingly complex and open-ended. As one author puts it:

Autochthonous forms of theological thinking inspired by concrete lived experiences in the Balkans are mostly missing or are on the margins of the mainstream theological corpus.

I have been fascinated by writers from the Balkans from the moment I picked up Udovički’s Burn This House in a bookstore in Lancaster, PA in the summer of 2013. There is much to revisit in this collection of essays—much to hear and learn from.

The notion of border-living in the Balkans refers to a way of life that is historically grounded and which has long resisted the Western models of religio-national homogeneity by simultaneously affirming the borders among different groups and shaping the paths to cross those borders.