The Centre for the Study of World Christianity (formerly, the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World) is a research centre in the School of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh.
Digital technology is changing the world. In response to global challenges, diverse grassroots faith-based organisations, indigenous or otherwise, are using digital technologies to activate for justice. These activists draw on contextual wisdom and religious resources and express their activist commitments publicly in social media forums. Some of these organisations describe themselves as indigenous. Others find terms like grassroots more helpful. Academic analysis of these local digital activisms provides ways to learn with and from online theologies that are immediate, provisional and contextual.
Despite its globalising and ecumenical aspirations, there remain significant geographical and confessional blind spots in the literature in World Christianity. As the leading sociologist of religion, globalisation and politics Paul Freston has remarked in an interview for this special issue, Latin America is the Cinderella of World Christianity, the continent left out of the party. We believe there are a number of reasons for that. The first has to do with the genealogy of the field. The study of Christianity in Africa generated much of the initial intellectual impetus for World Christianity. The key architect of the field, British mission historian Andrew Walls, before establishing the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Aberdeen in 1982, also founded the Journal of Religion in Africa in 1967, an important venue for the study of local seizures of the Christian faith in the continent and its interactions with Islam and traditional religion. Since the interest around World Christianity emerged in part out of a critique of the links between mission and empire, the initial intellectual capital and interest for it flourished in former British colonial territories. Notably in Britain, some of the leading scholarly influences of the field spent part of their careers in colonial and post-colonial Africa as lecturers, teachers and researchers, including Adrian Hastings, Terence Ranger, John Peel, David Maxwell and Emma Wild-Wood. Specialists in South and East Asia, most of them theologians based in North American institutions, also joined the party and made decisive contributions to World Christianity literature, including Robert Frykenberg, Kirsteen and Sebastian Kim, Peter Phan, Alexander Chow and Chloë Starr. Although there have been recent attempts to correct this imbalance, such as the appointment of Brazilian theologian Raimundo Barreto, Jr, as co-editor of the Journal of World Christianity, scholarly attention to Latin America still lags far behind the academic literature on Africa and Asia. Second, another crucial stream that shaped the concerns of World Christianity scholars and students was a focus on Protestantism, especially its evangelical variants. The first two generations of scholars who built up the field, such as Walls, Brian Stanley, Dana Robert, Mark Hutchinson, Mark Noll and Ogbu Kalu, came from Protestant backgrounds and were experts in mostly Protestant and evangelical history and theology: Lamin Sanneh was the notable exception. Catholicism, the form of Christianity that has historically predominated in Latin America, also lags behind, while Orthodoxy only makes occasional appearances in the literature and conferences.
For the first time since its inception the next Yale-Edinburgh conference will be held in the Global South. Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo, one of Brazil’s largest private universities, has kindly agreed to host the conference in their Higienópolis Campus on 28-30 May 2025. We are thankful to Prof Sérgio Santos, head of the School of Theology, for his generosity. The theme will be ‘Christianity, Democracy, and Nationalism.’
Christianity, Democracy, and Nationalism 28-30 May 2025 ‧ Universidade Mackenzie, São Paulo, Brazil ‧ #YaleEdin2025 Yale-Edinburgh Conference on World Christianity and the History of Mission Deadline: 15 December 2024
Christian communities around the world have long developed an ambiguous and troubled relationship with nationalist movements and processes of democratisation. They can be seen on all possible sides of the religious, political, and ideological divides: at times fostering patriotic sentiments, at times falling victim to nationalist pride; at times providing theological rationale and exemplary models for movements of racial, gender, and class equality, at times portraying social hierarchies as organic and God-given. Such interactions between religious communities, the authority of the state, and the imagining of the nation shaped decisively the historical experiences of the modern world and exert a profound impact in the political and religious configurations of our time. In the Global South, local and indigenous leaders educated in Christian institutions rallied against foreign colonial control and laid the groundwork for movements of independence. We can think of the Latin American Catholic clergymen in the nineteenth century and their role in fostering “creole patriotism” against the Iberian colonisers, or the young leaders educated in Protestant missionary schools in Africa and East Asia who around a century later challenged Western colonialism. Nationalist ideals, however, could also be leveraged against religious minorities. Catholics in nineteenth-century Britain, for instance, were seen as disloyal to the monarchy on account of their attachment to Rome, while Christian conversion in post-1949 China and postcolonial India was often deemed as detrimental to the nation. In yet another way, Christian thinkers and laypeople in the modern era conceived themselves as members of a universal fellowship crossing territorial, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries, sentiments that challenged aspects of nationalist pride. Much has been written in recent years about the simultaneous revival of populist regimes and charismatic Christianity worldwide, especially their impact on processes of democratisation. The intersection of these two forces have contributed to the polarisation of civil society and the destabilisation of democratic systems of checks and balances in the United States, Brazil, Colombia, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe. Conversely, Christians of different persuasions have both organised large-scale mobilisations in favour of the enfranchisement of social and religious minorities and deployed theological arguments to withstand political authoritarianism. Examples of this abound and range from the Catholic critique of totalitarianism in interwar Europe, the evangelical participation in the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the militant Christianity of Latin America in the Cold War, to grassroots movements of popular theological reflection and action in East Asia.
For our 2025 conference we invite papers that interrogate the relationship between democracy, nationalism, Christian communities, and the Christian faith around the world. We especially welcome historical case studies exploring the relationship of Christian bodies with changing sociopolitical circumstances; ethnographies that illuminate the religious and cultural imaginaries of Christian communities and their lived realities; theological interrogations into the politicisation of Christian religion; comparative studies highlighting patterns of interactions between religious communities, democratisation, and nationalism; and any other pertinent topics.
Please, send us your name, affiliation, and 250-word abstract by 15 December 2024 using this form. We accept proposals and papers in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.
As we get ready to welcome new students, we are pleased to announce our research seminars for the upcoming semester. Seminars will be held fortnightly on Tuesday afternoons in the Martin Hall, and we hope for them to be hybrid on Zoom. Please direct queries to Emma.WildWood@ed.ac.uk.
