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.
Praise for Decolonial Futures:
“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
“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
“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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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.
Praise for Waking Up Ghosts:
"A book like this comes once in a generation. Waking Up Ghosts is among my favorite memoirs on Asian spirituality, an essential, unflinching reflection on diasporic identity, ancestral calling, and the lived tension between Christianity's colonialist legacy and Korean indigenous mysticism." --Benebell Wen, author of I Ching, The Oracle and The Tao of Craft: Fu Talismans and Casting Sigils in the Eastern Esoteric Tradition
"Dr. Hong deftly weaves a tapestry of meaningful connections through deeply Korean ideologies between herself and her ancestors, her Christian faith and her roots in Korean shamanism, the traumas our Korean immigrant parents inherit and the ones we learn to carry." --Kathleen Kim, Emmy-nominated Producer Sesame Street puppeteer
"This book offers all a vital resource for engaging questions of culture, ancestry, spirituality, and belonging, especially for communities navigating faith beyond assimilation, silence, and inherited theological fear." --Rev. Mihee Kim-Kort, PhD, author of Outside the Lines and Seeing and Being Jesus in the World: How to Live God's Radical Welcome as a Family
"With grace and courage, Christine J. Hong bridges the worlds of Korean tradition and Christian theology, blending personal narrative with Korean folklore to offer a powerful account of what it means to live with faith between cultures." --Heinz Insu Fenkl, author of Memories of My Ghost Brother and Skull Water
"In a time when history, culture, and lineage are deeply threatened, Waking Up Ghosts is a testament to the power of memory and the strength of relationships with those who come before us. It is not simply a book you read; it is one you savor." --Tamisha A. Tyler, PhD, theopoet, co-director, Level Ground
"I've been searching for the right word to describe this book. It's vulnerable. Elegant. Brave, too. But I think the best word is moving. Christine Hong's book moved my heart, stirred my spirit, and compelled me to think more deeply about my own family, culture, and faith." --Jeff Chu, author of Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand
"Hong moves with the tenderness of memory and the precision of scholarship, guiding readers through ancestral shadows with a steady, compassionate hand, revealing how hauntings--personal, historical, and spiritual--can become sites of healing and reclamation. This book is a brave and necessary testament to the power of stories to return us to ourselves." --Donald E. Quist, author of To Those Bounded and Harbors
"Waking Up Ghosts provides a compelling way forward for Christians who have longed to reconcile a colonized faith formation absent one's cultural history and ancestral connections. Through the telling of her own story and the rich history of Korean spirituality, Hong invites us to reimagine the mystical--an animated faith bound to our story, and in the presence of our ancestors." --Rev. Gail Song Bantum, coauthor of Choosing Us: Marriage and Mutual Flourishing in a World of Difference and director, Faith and Leadership Collaborative, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
"This is a beautifully painful love letter . . . with deep resonance for any of us curious to explore how we have become who we are as religious people, as families, the ways in which we are formed, sharing grief, deep knowing, and mystery." --Laura Mariko Cheifetz, coeditor of Crossing Shores and Horizons: Asian and Asian American Transnational Feminist Theologies
"Waking Up Ghosts reminds us that the act of re-indigenizing our faith and stories allows us to deepen our sense of connection to our histories, our spiritualities, and ourselves." --Angie Kay Hong, writer, speaker, and worship leader
Candidly Speaking: Dialogues for the End of Empire - Co-written with Dr. Anne Walker.
Cascade Press
Candidly Speaking incorporates personal letters as dialogue which invites the reader to listen in on intimate conversations between two anti-colonial scholars and friends (one hybrid Cherokee and white, one Korean in diaspora), who focus on navigating the world in communities striving to flourish in a time when empires are collapsing. Through letters framed as chapters that engage complex histories, contemporary challenges, and personal stories, the authors write back and forth weaving together anti-colonial practice through facing interconnected histories and realities, hybrid identities, solidarities, interdependence, accountability, and ancestral practices of dialogue.
This book invites readers to embrace the creativity of anticolonial dialogue through relationships and practices in theological education and beyond—practices that challenge the oppressor/oppressed dialectic in the creation of decolonial futures. Persons, communities, leaders, and scholars are invited to embrace a future focused upon highly relational ways of being that privilege the role of story and dialogue in resisting the continued attempt to erase persons and histories through a colonial project breathing its last breath.
Praise for Candidly Speaking:
"Every now and then a book arrives that does not simply describe liberation but enacts it. Christine Hong and Anne Carter Walker write to one another--and in so doing, write toward all of us--from the depths of memory, loss, and the stubborn refusal to let the empire have the last word. They understand what too many theologians refuse to accept: that the kitchen table is a sacred altar, that storytelling is epistemology, that dialogue is not merely method but medicine."
--Cláudio Carvalhaes, Professor of Worship, Union Theological Seminary
"This book feels like a kitchen table conversation with two trusted friends who are not afraid to just tell the truth, while also making space for care and compassion. Their conversation is a beautiful modeling of decolonial praxis through dialogue that is intellectually expansive and deliciously personal."
--Lakisha R. Lockhart, Associate Professor of Christian Education, Union Presbyterian Seminary
"An authentic read that is rooted in Indigenous oral tradition and decolonial practice. The authors openly struggle with hard topics and move the conversation forward. Beautifully written, a must read for those with hybrid identities and for those who are about the work of Indigenous reclamation."
--Erica Littlewolf, Director of Storytelling and Narrative Change, Auburn Theological Seminary
"This intimate, powerful, and evocative book by Hong and Walker reveals the transformative power of storytelling as integral to anti-colonial pedagogy and practice. . . . This book invites community leaders to risk solidarity and creatively embrace anti-racist and anti-colonial dialogue to end empire and build a more just and interconnected future."
--Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook, Professor of Practical Theology and Christian Histories, Claremont School of Theology
"Storytelling's greatest gift lies in its capacity to help us make sense of our often complex and conflicted lives by making meaning and building a sense of belonging and solidarity with others. . . . By modeling collaborative scholarship with care, courage, and creativity, Hong and Walker invite us to do the same."
--Eunil David Cho, Assistant Professor of Spiritual Care, Boston University School of Theology
"These honest and revealing letters on indigenous identity, decoloniality, and the academic life between two scholars and friends offer readers an opportunity to uncover, and discover, what lies deep within each of us."
--Mark Chung Hearn, Dean of Academic Affairs, Church Divinity School of the Pacific
"Weaving together the personal, political, and the powerful, Chris and Anne's conversation opens a middle space between the two of them for the reader to inhabit, to listen, to bear witness and, even, to join in."
--Natalie Wigg-Stevenson, Associate Professor of Contextual Education and Theology, Emmanuel College, Victoria University
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.