Dr. Christine J. Hong's Books
Published books and forthcoming publications
A book on teaching and learning in theological education, Decolonial Futures: Intercultural and Interreligious Intelligence for Theological Education, is guided by the question, "What makes education intercultural and interreligious?" "How might we rethink and redesign learning spaces to be hospitable to cultural and religious differences and dismantle the coloniality of theological education?" "How might we subvert traditionally colonial spaces to model the engaged intercultural and interreligious world we seek?" The book helps educators and practitioners of intercultural and interreligious learning to deconstruct and reconstruct spaces of learning by centering interreligious and intercultural intelligence through the voices, experiences, and narratives of minoritized people.
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Praise for Decolonial Futures:
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“This book boldly imagines the future of theological education as a practice for freedom and offers practical steps to achieve it by promoting intercultural and interreligious intelligence. Combining personal narrative with scholarly analysis, the book inspires, incites, and instills hope. I highly recommend it to educators, students, and people who hope to decolonize their minds.” ―Kwok Pui-lan, Candler School of Theology, Emory University
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“Dr. Hong heals and unbinds the mind, body, and soul from the colonial violence that undergirds theological and religious education. More than just a decolonial critique of dominant ways of knowing, Dr. Hong provides an anti-colonial strategy that recovers the narratives and traditions that were intentionally erased, and she casts a vision forward for a collective future where all of our descendants may thrive. Simply put, this is a once in a generation book. It honors our ancestors and provides a platform for future generations to dream creatively and heal our communities.” ―Patrick B. Reyes, Forum for Theological Exploration
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“Informed at least in part by six years of teaching at two leading Presbyterian seminaries this two-part argument of deconstruction and reconstruction seeks to both name the ways in which theological education’s historical white male Christian paradigm has been marginalizing and oppressive and propose ways forward for how to correct the course. Hong invites transition from a competency-mastery-civilizing approach characteristic of Eurocentric colonialism toward a critically and historically self-aware, narrative/story-based, embodied, border/boundary-crossing, and praxis-oriented pedagogical model that forms theological students for interreligious/ intercultural engagement and equips them to retrieve and reappropriate resources from their various ethnic and otherwise defined and understood communities.... Theological educators working in global contexts will benefit from this work and be encouraged to both analyze and reorient their own pedagogies as relevant to their own situations.” ―Religious Studies Review
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Waking Up Ghosts: Making Peace with Ancestors
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Broadleaf: Pre-order now! Out November 17, 2026
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A lyrical memoir of Korean ancestry, faith, and the sacred work of healing what we inherit.
Since childhood, Presbyterian minister Dr. Christine J. Hong has experienced ancestral hauntings: voices, presences, and memories that carry both sorrow and care. But after the birth of her daughter and the death of her last maternal grandparent, the spirits with a question: "Do you want to know where this pain goes--the pain you and I are holding?"
What followed was a journey into Korean indigenous beliefs and practices that her family, like many diasporic Koreans, abandoned in favor of Christianity. Through encounters with family stories, Hong began to unravel the grief that has shaped generations. She names the spiritual dissonance of reclaiming practices her ancestors discarded, while remaining tethered to Christian communities and the stories of faith they left as an inheritance.
This book is a reckoning for those who feel haunted by what religion can't explain, and for those who long to heal what their families can't name. Waking Up Ghosts invites us to reimagine ancestral practice, confront the ruptures of displacement and conversion, and shift into a spirituality that makes room for grief and liberation. With crisp, powerful prose and theological depth, Hong offers a fresh vision of faith to anyone seeking justice and repair, qualities of true community.
This book studies Korean American girls between thirteen and nineteen and their formation with regard to self, gender, and God in the context of Korean American protestant congregational life. It develops a hybrid methodology of de-colonial aims and indigenous research methods, aiming to facilitate transformative life in faith communities.
Candidly Speaking: Refusing a White Supremacist World Through Dialogue and Story - Co-written with Dr. Anne Walker.
Forthcoming by Cascade Press
Listen in on an intimate conversation between two women of color, Cherokee and Korean American--both anti-racist scholars and theological educators—about navigating our hybrid identities amid the national conversation on anti-racism. This book is a vulnerable conversation between two people often invisibilized within the U.S. racialized binary. The book captures how culturally and racially hybrid people like us navigate visibility in the anti-racist community. The book seeks to identify ways that hybrid people can live into wholeness and flourishing by refusing white supremacy. This book is invested in decolonial futures. In a complicated world, the two authors want to understand their roles in realizing that future.