Abstract
Due to his theological insights and his personal, relational and ecumenical involvement in the life of the Pacific Churches and at the academic level during the second half of the twentieth Century, Sione ‘Amanaki Havea is called, and rightly so, the father of Pacific Theology. Among the many themes and ways of contextualization he suggested, celebration holds a central place. From my perspective—that of a palagi historian from abroad—this issue should be considered as one of the most relevant contributions that the Pacific could offer to the global theological debate. In the first part, the chapter shows how the younger generation after Havea developed the celebration theme in very creative ways including those in the French-speaking islands. In the second part, the chapter adopts a more critical point of view, analyzing how celebration binds theology and anthropology together in order to face the dialectic of tradition and modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
I taught for eight years, from 1988 to 2008 with interruptions, in the Loyalty Islands (Kanaky-New Caledonia) and so I had the opportunities to participate in several theological meetings.
- 2.
Concerning the use of these symbols, see Havea 1987, 13–14. It is remarkable that in his 1995 Encyclical on Ecumenism, Ut Unum Sint, Pope John Paul II used a similar formulation, speaking of an “exchange of gifts” between different denominations.
- 3.
Havea attended the Assembly in Evanston (1954) and was again present in Vancouver (1983), where his participation seems to have been more active.
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Vidal, G. (2021). A Pacific Theology of Celebration. In: Havea, J. (eds) Theologies from the Pacific. Postcolonialism and Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74365-9_6
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