Abstract
Growth in Christianity has spurred the appearance of the subfield of world Christianity, whose assumptions increasingly shape scholarship on Christianity. What I term the world-Christian turn, which is often linked to mission studies, yields more comprehensive approaches to the Christian past, connecting local histories of Christian communities to larger-scale historical movements and producing innovative comparative perspectives on Christianity past and present. In Catholic theology, this turn has encouraged new comparative and contextual theologies. Yet support for Christian mission and the world-Christian turn need not go together. Two cases in point: comparative theology tends to eschew mission while the work of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, is suspicious of some impulses behind the world-Christian turn and their potential for undermining Christian mission. Such cases notwithstanding, I argue that missiology is a promising resource for the field of world Christianity.
In December 2012, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released “The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Major Religious Groups as of 2010.”
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Notable data included:
Europe having more Christians than any other continent (558 million), with South America and Africa gaining ground; Asia remains far behind; the Christian median age worldwide is 30 (compared to 23 for Muslims), with large geographic disparities—for example, European and North American Christians are far older than those in Africa, Latin America, and Asia; Christians are by far the most evenly distributed religious group; Asia houses the majority of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, members of “folk religions” and the religiously unaffiliated.
Such findings explain the prevalence of the term “world Christianity” and near-equivalents like “global Christianity.” These terms aim to recognize major transformations in the “world Christian movement,”
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highlighting, for example, the movement of Christianity from “the West” (North America, Europe, and Oceania) toward the “Global South” (the “Majority World” of Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Caribbean and Pacific islands). Christianity is no longer a “Western” religion—if it ever was.
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Beyond the phenomena itself, “world Christianity” denotes an academic subfield predicated on grasping the significance of such changes. Dale Irvin defines the discipline this way: an emerging field that investigates and seeks to understand Christian communities, faith, and practice as they are found on six continents, expressed in diverse ecclesial traditions, and informed by the multitude of historical and cultural experiences … It is concerned with both the diversity of local or indigenous expressions of Christian life and faith throughout the world, and the variety of ways these interact with one another critically and constructively across time and space. It is particularly concerned with under-represented and marginalized communities of faith, resulting in a greater degree of attention being paid to Asian, African, and Latin American experiences; the experience of marginalized communities within the North Atlantic world; and the experiences of women throughout the world.
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Signs abound of world Christianity's growing importance. More faculty positions in seminaries, divinity schools, and the religion and theology departments of colleges and universities include “world Christianity” in their titles. Since the 1990s journals and book series with “world” or “global Christianity” affixed to their titles have appeared, as have academic courses with “world Christianity” or globalized framing in their titles. 5
One's biography usually positions one's attentiveness to world Christianity. I am no exception. I have lived about 10 percent of my life in eastern Africa—studying, teaching, and undertaking research—while pursuing a US-based academic career. As a Catholic priest belonging to a global congregation, I have visited and taught at seminaries in the Global South. I have taught courses entitled “World Christianity” in my department at a US Catholic university and have partaken of institutional processes marking the field's growth: attending book series discussions and journal launches, cooperating in collaborative research, and developing a doctoral-level specialization in world Christianity.
In this essay I consider implications of the emergence of world Christianity as a phenomenon and as a field. I contend that the increasing acceptance of the term marks a “turn” similar to other “turns” discerned in humanistic and social-scientific disciplines over the past decades: for example, the postmodern, postcolonial, or feminist turns; or turns associated with seminal figures like Kant, Freud, or Wittgenstein. The metaphor of “turn” captures what has happened to the study of Christianity under the influence of “world Christianity.” We are moving—unevenly but steadily—“beyond the turn,” where scholars of Christianity will be expected to consider the world or global implications of their work. To ignore such implications will place one's scholarship outside of an emerging consensus. I focus here, therefore, not on major figures in the discipline but on understanding how world Christianity is transforming the study of Christianity itself.
Witnessing world Christianity: The turn in the history of Christianity
Charles Farhadian identifies three paradigms for exploring world Christianity. 6 First there have long been efforts to map Christianity's changing demography, culminating (for now) in the 2009 Atlas of Global Christianity 7 and continuing in the World Christian Database. 8 Without ceasing, these initial efforts were accompanied by the emergence of a second paradigm in the late twentieth century when the increasingly polycentric nature of Christianity fostered attention toward diverse examples of Christian-inspired local agency. Farhadian discerns the most recent paradigm moving beyond these earlier demographic and historical approaches to engage new disciplines to describe Christian growth and development. He embraces this new paradigm: “To complement the breadth of historical analysis, we need the depth of what can be unearthed through social scientific investigation, since social scientific perspectives help us see Christianity as events that have transformed cultural, social, religious, and political domains.” 9 Much of the recent work on the world-Christian turn reflects this third paradigm by joining together historical with social-scientific methodologies.
When I first analyzed studies in the history of Christianity that were seeking a global perspective ten years ago, I argued that “world” or “global” in those works had three interrelated foci: first, expanded comprehensiveness designed to capture a fuller story; second, localized histories focusing on how faith arrived somewhere (“mission history”) and its subsequent developments; and third, new perspectives creating innovative comparative insights. Noting the mission-studies background of leading figures in the field, I acknowledged the decline of “church history,” a term with assumptions increasingly foreign to scholars and, moreover, deemed inadequate to encompass how the history of Christianity was being addressed. 10
These three foci have since become established areas of inquiry for historians of Christianity. These trends anticipate analogous changes embodying the world-Christian turn: that it expands the breadth of how the history of Christianity is presented, shapes narrative structures of historical accounts of particular Christian bodies, and discloses new comparative perspectives on Christianity's regularities.
Increasing breadth in comprehensive histories of Christianity
One aspect of the world-Christian turn is greater inclusiveness manifest in the ongoing temporal and geographic decentering in comprehensive historical studies. Previously accepted highpoints of Christian history—the formation of the so-called “Great Tradition” in Christianity's first six centuries, events linked to Rome and Constantinople before mutual excommunications in 1054, the fracturing of Christianity in Western Europe linked to the Protestant Reformation and its aftermaths—no longer enjoy such centrality. Normative assumptions focused on theological and institutional formations of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism have given way to the call for a more complete story.
While this shift is linked to a broader trend toward social history, the impetus for increasing breadth is rooted in Christianity's changing demographics. If 60 percent of the world's Christians live in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, scholars shaped by the world-Christian turn ask whether theological and political issues driving past historiography ought to dominate. This has fostered interest in Christian experiences arising from within long overlooked faith communities and individuals.
One consequence of the world-Christian turn has been growing appreciation for non-Chalcedonian Christianity apart from the Great Tradition and peripheral to the splits between Orthodox East and West as well as to those later among Western Christians. After all, non-Chalcedonian forms of Christianity represent the earliest forms of the faith in Africa and Asia, places where Christianity now burgeons. 11 This “other Eastern” Christianity deserves increased historical appreciation as it continues to affect ancient and newer Christian communities in Africa and western and southern Asia.
Mainstream historians of Christianity have taken notice. The subtitle of distinguished historian Diarmaid MacCulloch's massive Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2010)
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deliberately shocks a reader, since the calendar orienting our lives is predicated on the assumption that Christianity is only two-thirds that old. MacCulloch's point derives from two instincts in the world-Christian turn—first, locating Christianity within larger global processes of religious change and development; and second, new periodizations that reflect changing Christian demographics. MacCulloch's re-periodization emphasizes Christianity's roots in the Judeo-Hellenistic cultural matrix linked to Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Axial-Age religions. After that, the book's subject matter covers research on Christianity in myriad times and places. MacCulloch treats the three great originating traditions as the Syriac East (primarily non-Chalcedonian after 451
Robert Wilken's 2012 The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity
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also evinces the world-Christian turn. Wilken's work hitherto focused on early Mediterranean Christianity. In The First Thousand Years his compass widens considerably as he foregrounds the earliest Christianities in Africa and Asia. Wilken highlights his long-standing desire to “show the wide geographical reach of Christianity in the first millennium.” Then he admits, But only as I read more broadly and learned about Christianity in such regions as Armenia, Persia, Ethiopia, Central Asia, India, and China did I realize how energetic and enterprising the mission to spread the Christian gospel was and what vast reach it had in the early centuries.
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Local histories of Christianity in light of world Christianity
The world-Christian turn also sparks new studies of Christianity in particular places and times. As Farhadian notes, these studies deploy a range of new metaphors to capture the dialectical relationship between how Christianity first arrived and how it was received and transformed. 15 Censorial implications of terms such as “syncretism” and “conversion” yield to new descriptors, many linked to the emerging field of the anthropology of Christianity: transmission, reception, translation, localization, indigenization, hybridity, inculturation, contextualization, accommodation, resistance, incarnation, naturalization, encounter, appropriation, domestication, internalization, and creolization. 16 These new terms point to the subtle and complicated ways in which Christianity makes itself at home in myriad settings.
Farhadian's third paradigm stresses the social sciences; here especially social-cultural anthropology sharpens historical analysis. Historian Pier Larson's work on historical identities in Madagascar is exemplary. His Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (2009) 17 shows how the Indian Ocean world, shaped by slave-trading, global capitalism, missionary Christianity, and colonialism, affected Malagasy identity formation in the eighteenth century. Central to that identity were the emerging Madagascan language, shaped by missionization, and Merina elites’ reactions to Christianity, pro and con.
Anthropologist Brian Howell's 2008 Christianity in the Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines 18 moves in the other direction. He shows how three different congregations take global faith and indigenize it differently. Howell avoids any “meta-narrative of modernity” that might valorize some particular outcome for the indigenizing process in what he calls “post-missionary Christianity.” Rather, he argues that localized Christianity is paradoxically enacted through believers' self-conscious efforts to harness what they see as a global religion. The three cases show diverse ways in which Filipino Christians construct globalized Protestantism to organize their sense of themselves as distinct yet linked to a worldwide faith. 19
Robert Houle's Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faith in Colonial South Africa also exemplifies an account of local Christianity shaped by the world-Christian turn. Houle calls “naturalization” the way Zulu Christians took control of their religious identity, deploying theological tools brought by American missionaries. For Houle, conversion fails to capture the process: “the really important changes occurred long after that initial moment as slowly, across generations, African believers molded their faith to local realities during the colonial era and beyond.” 20 That process was neither a functional search for power amidst political struggle nor for comforting orientation amidst social change. As Houle notes, aspects of Christianity were used in pursuit of “respectability,” a notion related to Zulu cultural expectations grafted onto late nineteenth-century revivals that promulgated collective Christian ideals. Houle admits, “Part of this process lay outside of South Africa, for just as the conditions of individual believers changed over the years, so too did global Christianity.” 21
New comparative perspectives from the world-Christian turn
The world-Christian turn has also encouraged innovative comparative approaches to Christian manifestations across time and space. One is a move beyond continent-based studies of Christianities to study comparatively emerging faith communities linked through regional, often nautical, connections. For example, John Catron explores Evangelical networks forged by Afro-Caribbeans in the eighteenth century. 22 Catron builds on studies such as Jon Sensbach's Rebecca's Revival, which shows how a Caribbean former slave's life linked Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe already in the eighteenth century. 23 Historian James Sweet provides another example. Using an eighteenth-century African-born healer in Brazil, Sweet unveils the interactions of African and indigenous American religious elements with Christian discourses and authorities in the Atlantic world. 24
Social scientific approaches mobilize these new comparative perspectives, especially the anthropology of Christianity, a subfield that has emerged alongside world Christianity. 25 Self-conscious practitioners like Joel Robbins, William Hanks, and Birgit Meyer have produced outstanding studies revealing Christianity's multiple possibilities in different times and settings. 26 Christian interactions with preexisting religions often feature in such studies, fostering productive comparisons around topics such as Christian meaning-making in relationship to the Bible and Christian constructions of religious authority. James Bielo's work on Bible study groups in the US builds on earlier research into biblicism to understand Christian practices connected to sacred texts. 27 Webb Keane employs semiotic ideology—understood as assumptions about how to approach religious signs—to consider missionary evangelization in Indonesia, while Matthew Engelke uses the term to explore distinctive Zimbabwean Pentecostal approaches to the Bible. 28
Anthropologists of Christianity also examine the dialectical relationship between continuity with one's past and the novelty of one's Christian identity when new believers embrace the faith. 29 Liana Chua's studies of conversion among the Bidayuhs in Malaysian Borneo pursue this question. Situating changes in religious identity within social worlds composed of believers and nonbelievers, she foregrounds how conversion is both process and “temporal and relational [re]positioning.” 30
Still others link personal transformations via Christianity to moral questions. In a study of Pentecostal healers in Botswana, Richard Werbner uses “alternating personhood” to describe their “holy hustling” as they oscillate between being compassionate interrogators of others’ affliction and self-interested exploiters of credulity and weakness. 31 Werbner's study foregrounds the strategic employment of a certain form of Christianity and the ethical issues it raises. In another study of Botswana's Pentecostals with moral overtones, Frederick Klaits shows how widespread AIDS deaths, far from undermining social cohesion, foster practices of social care under a female pastor's direction. 32
Finally, other social science approaches also accompany the world-Christian turn. Sociologist of religion Martin Riesebrodt's theory of religion, in prioritizing interventionist religious practices, fosters fruitful comparisons between and among religions. This approach is common among those committed to world Christianity. 33 Fellow sociologist Slavica Jakelić's study of what she calls “collectivist religions”—those one is born into—redresses a long-standing scholarly bias. Studies of world Christianity have skewed toward voluntaristic religions such as Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianities even though non-voluntaristic religiosity continues to be the most common way to be religious, and Christian, in the world. 34
Scholars outside the history of Christianity are developing innovative approaches to religion that are applicable to Christian materials. For instance, Jonathan Schofer's studies of early rabbinism draw on contemporary virtue ethics and critical theory to explore religious practices developed in close proximity to—and often in competition and/or dialogue with—contemporaneous Christian practices. 35 Equally promising is Jonathan Boyarin's work on the evolution of Western Christian identity in Europe. Boyarin argues that as Europe became coterminous with Christendom, its identity was always-already in relation to Judaism, and was later shaped in relation to new “others”: first Muslims, then after 1492, “Indians.” 36 As more of the world's peoples come to see themselves as Christian, Boyarin's cautious tale seeks better self-awareness of such implicit othering, potentially inspiring more ethically mindful identity formation. Such studies place pluriform Christian phenomena within even larger comparative perspectives, encouraging appreciation both of Christianity's distinctiveness and its commonalities with near religious others.
Challenges remain in embracing the world-Christian turn in historical research on Christianity. Missionary archives, for example, seldom receive the critical attention they deserve though they reveal much about emerging Christianities. In many places of burgeoning Christianities, missionary archives reveal how peoples now firmly seen as Christian became so. Collective Christian identities often emerged through complex processes in which a changing sense of self and community evolved in relationship to a variety of historical forces, including colonialism, economic exploitation, agitations toward self-determination, the scripting of local languages, and recent globalization.
The world-Christian turn in theology
Beyond the discipline of the history of Christianity, the world-Christian turn is also transforming Catholic theological reflection. However, this transformation is not as readily apparent. Like Christian theology more generally, Catholic theology has been slower to embrace implications deriving from world Christianity. One explanation for this delay is the relative inattention paid to Christian mission in theological reflection until quite recently. In 1995, William Burrows presciently compared the academy's inattention to theology to theology's own failure to appreciate the importance of missionary activity. 37 A year later, mission-studies scholar Wilbert Shenk asserted, “We are at the point where every Christian community ought to be able to perceive and affirm its relationship with every other Christian community around the globe.” 38 Another factor slowing theology's response to the world-Christian turn is the denominational orientation of much theological reflection, naturally angling itself toward existing communities of faith. Unsurprisingly, many leading figures whose theological work reflects the world-Christian turn come from a mission-studies background. 39
One Catholic precursor was Joseph Donders's Non-Bourgeois Theology, an essay collection published in 1985. Donders, a Dutch missionary who served in Kenya, reflected theologically on the intercultural circumstances he faced. 40 More recently, Stephen Bevans and Robert Schreiter, along with many others following their lead, spearheaded what they term “contextual theology”—what Europeans usually refer to as “intercultural theology.” 41 Many of these contextual and intercultural theologians have roots in mission studies.
A commitment to missionary activity need not lead to an embrace of the theological assumptions associated with the world-Christian turn or vice versa. For example, comparative theology, an emerging subfield in which US Catholic theologians have taken the lead, usually disavows mission-linked commitments. In his introduction to Francis Clooney's The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation, James Fredericks explains the aims of comparative theology without reference to mission: “Comparative theology, as we [Fredericks and Clooney] have proposed it, entails the interpretation of the meaning and truth of one's own faith by means of a critical investigation of other faiths.” 42 Along with other scholars such as Catherine Cornille and Hugh Nicholson, Fredericks and Clooney have engaged Hindu and Buddhist texts and teachings to reconsider Christian theology, while eschewing any missionary motivations. 43 Conversely, some of the most enthusiastic mission-minded Evangelical and Pentecostal theologians have little interest in dialogical and comparative approaches linked to world Christianity.
While Catholic theologians are deeply involved in globalizing theological reflection through comparative and contextual theology, they do face challenges in embracing the world-Christian turn. Some arise from deeply rooted Catholic anthropological assumptions about a univocal human nature. Needless to say, Catholic appeals to a universal human nature have had salutary effects at times on missionary practice, as certain missionaries protected local peoples vulnerable to colonial exploitation. Yet, attempts to articulate a universal theology, that is, one that speaks to all times and places, often conflict with the comparative study of religion. Calls to contextualize theology clash with a singular approach to the human person and to God's revelation through creation, covenant, incarnation, paschal mystery, and the ongoing life of the Spirit.
The previous pope's theological stances epitomize this tension. No doubt Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, has long been concerned with maintaining—even strengthening—the church's missionary mandate. Indeed, his evolving theological opinions over past decades suggest that his most decisive and controversial criticisms of others arose because he found their views softening or undermining mission. Thus Ratzinger and others found that Karl Rahner's “anonymous Christianity” putatively drew upon openness to the wisdom of other religions so much that it compromised the need to proclaim the gospel to non-Christians. Liberation theology, chastened by Ratzinger's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1980s, also drew criticism for allegedly secularizing the gospel through promises of an earthly kingdom, obviating the need to proclaim Christ's transcendental salvation. More recently, calls for more dialogical or pluralist theologies, many from theologians attentive to Christianity's interactions with Asian religions like Jacques Dupuis and Peter Phan, generated warnings from Ratzinger that they watered down Christ's soteriological centrality, suggesting other possible “incarnations” of the divine. Benedict XVI's frequent cautions about relativism invoked the danger that accepting others’ beliefs may encourage disinterest in achieving salvation through Christ.
My point here is simple: though the world-Christian turn among Catholic theologians has arisen historically in connection with missiology, commitment to mission does not automatically coincide with an embrace of the world-Christian turn, either for comparative theologians or those who stress the ecclesial centrality of salvation through Christ.
Conclusion
I see three paradigmatic reactions to the dynamism of world Christianity today. 44 First, enthusiasts laud the proliferation of theological creativity and inspiring discipleship as social and cultural differences generate new Christianities. Second, pessimists see some combination of chaos, secularist disaffection with Christianity, deepening syncretism, and what one observer has called “the globalization of superficiality.” 45 Third, others acknowledge the multitudinous ways to be Christian today and try to understand them, withholding judgment.
Those committed to world Christianity tend to options one and three: theologians to option one, and historians of Christianity, who are professionally inclined to reserve assessment, to option three. That dichotomy itself represents a challenge for an emerging field where different disciplinary approaches strive to unite a bewilderingly dynamic subject. For example, the historian's appreciation for a given people's theological creativity in claiming Christian identity can call into question the validity of labeling that same people, in fact, as Christian.
In response to this kind of challenge, Darren Marks describes a “global theological mind” as operative “in the present Christian time in response to the pressures and issues of this global world with all of its ‘scapes’ and integration/fragmentation.” 46 Marks offers a challenge to a field like world Christianity—to operate “in the present Christian time” with a critically informed faith mindful of the gifts and burdens of the Christian past, and an awareness of the present complex world. In light of this diagnosis, Marks sees the two future primary theological tasks as pneumatology and missiology.
While I agree with this assessment, I would emphasize the value of missiology, at least as it is construed by leading practitioners in the field today. Contemporary missiologists have loosened missionary practice from negative historical associations linked with the term “mission.” The field is ecumenical, engages theological subfields (including pneumatology), embraces the social sciences, and attends to Christian manifestations everywhere. Missiology seems uniquely situated to serve as a master discipline for world Christianity, poised to capture the phenomena this increasingly familiar term seeks to name. Historical and theological understanding of the diversity and vitality of the world Christian movement will be well served by deeper attention to contemporary missiology. 47
See “The Global Religious Landscape: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Major Religious Groups as of 2010,” accessed December 21, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/uploadedFiles/Topics/Religious_Affiliation/globalReligion-full.pdf.
This is the term used in Dale T. Irvin and Scott W. Sunquist, History of the World Christian Movement: Earliest Christianity to 1453 (vol. 1) and Modern Christianity to 1900 (vol. 2) (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001, 2012).
Volume 1 of History of the World Christian Movement displays Christianity's global past.
Dale T. Irvin, “World Christianity: An Introduction,” Journal of World Christianity 1.1 (2008): 1--2.
Peter C. Phan, “World Christianity: Its Implications for History, Religious Studies, and Theology,” Horizons 39.2 (2012): 171–75.
Charles E. Farhadian, ed. Introducing World Christianity (Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1–4. Regarding the title of this section, see Gerald H. Anderson, with John Roxborogh, John M. Prior, and Christopher H. Grundmann, Witness to World Christianity: The International Association of Mission Studies, 1972–2012 (New Haven, CT: OMSC, 2012).
Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross, eds., Atlas of Global Christianity, 1910–2010 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, 2009).
Farhadian, Introducing World Christianity, 2.
Paul Kollman, “After Church History? Writing the History of Christianity from a Global Perspective,” Horizons 31.2 (2004): 322–42.
For one succinct introduction to their variety, see Lois Farag, “Middle East,” in Christianities in Asia, ed. Peter C. Phan (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 233–54.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010).
Robert L. Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2012).
Ibid., 4.
Farhadian, Introducing World Christianity, 2–3.
For an early typology, see Steven Kaplan, “The Africanization of Missionary Christianity: History and Typology,” in Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity, ed. Steven Kaplan (New York and London: New York University, 1995), 9–28.
Pier M. Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2009), building on his History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770–1822 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann and James Currey, 2000).
Brian M. Howell, Christianity in the Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).
Ibid., 5–7, 221.
Robert Houle, Making African Christianity: Africans Reimagining Their Faith in Colonial South Africa (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University, 2011), xxi.
Ibid., xxii. See also 73–75 and 145–88.
John W. Catron, “Evangelical Networks in the Greater Caribbean and the Origins of the Black Church,” Church History 79.1 (2010): 77–114.
Jon Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2005).
James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and Intellectual History in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2011).
For a programmatic early statement, see Joel Robbins, “What Is a Christian? Notes toward an Anthropology of Christianity,” Religion 33 (2003): 191–99.
Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in Papua New Guinea (Berkeley: University of California, 2004); William F. Hanks, Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross (Berkeley: University of California, 2010); Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1999).
For a representative essay collection, see James S. Bielo, ed., The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2009). Bielo's own ethnographic study is Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study (New York: New York University, 2009).
Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Missionary Encounter (Berkeley: University of California, 2007); Matthew Engelke, A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (Berkeley: University of California, 2007).
The seminal article remains Joel Robbins, “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity,” Current Anthropology 48.1 (2007): 5–17.
Liana Chua, “Conversion, Continuity, and Moral Dilemmas among Christian Bidayuhs in Malaysian Borneo,” in American Ethnologist 39.3 (2012): 511, 522. Also see her “To Know or Not to Know? Practices of Knowledge and Ignorance among Bidayuhs in an “Impurely” Christian World,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 15.2 (2009): 332–48.
Richard Werbner, Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy: Apostolic Reformation in Botswana (Berkeley: University of California, 2011).
Frederick Klaits, Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana's Time of AIDS (Berkeley: University of California, 2010).
Martin Riesebrodt, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), xiii, 16, 44, 87.
Slavica Jakelić, Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice, and Identity in Late Modernity (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2010).
See Jonathan Schofer, “Ethical Formation and Subjection,” Numen 59.1 (2012): 1–31.
Jonathan Boyarin, The Unconverted Self: Jews, Indians, and the Identity of Christian Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009).
William R. Burrows, “Needs and Opportunities in Studies of Mission and World Christianity,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 19.4 (1995): 172–78.
Wilbert R. Shenk. “Toward a Global Church History,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 20.2 (1996): 50.
For three Catholic perspectives, see Felix Wilfrid, “From World Mission to Global Christianities: A Perspective from the South,” Concilium (2011): 13–26; Robert Schreiter, “Christian Mission in a ‘New Modernity’ and Trajectories in Intercultural Theology,” Concilium (2011): 27–36; and Norbert Hintersteiner, “From Cultural Translation to Interfaith Witness: The Intercultural Transformation of Missiology,” Concilium (2011): 85–94.
Joseph G. Donders, Non-Bourgeois Theology: An African Experience of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985).
Earlier works include Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1st ed. 1992, 2nd ed. 2002), and Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985). On intercultural theology, see: Frans Wijsen and Peter Nissen, eds., “Mission is a Must”: Intercultural Theology and the Mission of the Church (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002); Martha Fredericks, Meindert Dijkstra, and Anton Houtepen, eds., Towards an Intercultural Theology: Essays in Honor of Jan A. B. Jongeneel (Utrecht: Centre for Intercultural Theology, 2003); and Mark J. Cartledge and David Cheetham, eds., Intercultural Theology: Approaches and Themes (London: SCM, 2011).
Francis X. Clooney, ed., The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation (London: T&T Clark, 2010), ix.
See for example: James L. Fredericks, Buddhists and Christians: Through Comparative Theology to Solidarity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004); Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Catherine Cornille, The Im-Possibility of Interreligious Dialogue (New York: Crossroad, 2008): Hugh Nicholson, Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry (Oxford: Oxford University, 2011).
These are inspired by Frederick Cooper's framework with regard to globalization found in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California, 2005), 93–94. His terms are the Banker's Boast, the Social Democrat's Lament, and the Dance of Flows and Fragments.
Adolfo Nicolás, SJ, “Depth, Universality, and Learned Ministry: Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education Today,” Keynote Address for International Meeting on Jesuit Higher Education, Networking Jesuit Higher Education for the Globalizing World, Mexico City, April 23, 2010. See: http://www.ajcunet.edu/Jesuit-Superior-General-Adolfo-Nicolas-SJ-Keynote-Address-Available-on-AJCU-Website. Nicolás is the Jesuit Superior General.
Darren C. Marks, ed. Shaping a Global Theological Mind (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), xi.
For a fine overview of missiology, see Stanley H. Skreslet, Comprehending Mission: The Questions, Methods, Themes, Problems, and Prospects of Missiology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012).
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
This article began as a lecture given at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. I thank my hosts for the invitation to speak there and for the rich conversation that ensued. I also thank Pam Foltz for help in editing the text, and especially Joy McDougall for her original invitation to contribute to this issue and her repeatedly generous editorial assistance over some months. Finally, I thank Jeania Ree Moore and Rachelle Brown for their careful copy-editing.