Abstract:

This book offers essays on ‘crisis’ and practical theology written by participants in the IAPT conference ‘Coping with Crisis’ organized in Leuven, 2021. Here crisis is considered as a multidimensional phenom-enon that includes a sense of threat and also a sense of opportunity. The various contributions in this volume each depart from a specific context or locality of practices of people and communities in the midst of some form of crisis. Against the background of a practice oriented approach, different questions come to the fore, which will be addressed throughout this volume. How can a particular experience of crisis be (theologically) understood? How is this experience connected with or embedded in a particular social context? How does the phenomenon of faith relate to this experience? What do we mean when speaking about ‘coping’ with crisis? What are the core values that play a role in such an expression? How is living with crisis embodied in particular situations and how might faith communities act in such situations? The volume has been structured along five main aspects of the crisis experience where con-nections with the phenomenon of faith might be located and further explored: (1) Justice, (2) Uncertainty and fear, (3) Belonging, (4) Care, and (5) Being church.