Included but Indecent?

Abstract This article discusses whether postcolonial perspectives are (at least partly) included but still implicitly, and particularly in terms of methodologies and epistemologies, regarded indecent in the field of empirical and practical theology, using the academic societies of the International Academy of Practical Theology ( IAPT ) and The International Society for Empirical Research in Theology ( ISERT ) and the related journals ( IJPT and JET ) as cases. Whilst drawing on Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s analysis of the IAPT in the 2017 paper “A Tale of Two Cities,” I also pick up the batton where she left it, and trace the development until the present day. To do so, the fields of empirical and practical theology are conceptualized as a social practice and more specifically as activity systems in the tradition of Engeström’s Cultural-Historical Activity Theory ( CHAT ).