Reflections on Yale-Edinburgh 2026

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Written by Centre PhD student, Kpanie Addy, SJ.

Professor Emma Wild-Wood (Centre Co-Director) and Professor Jeremy Carette (Head of School) welcoming delegates to Yale-Edinburgh 2026.

With the theme “Popular, Folk, Grassroots and Pop Culture in World Christianity and the History of Mission,” the 2026 Yale-Edinburgh Conference promised an intellectually stimulating encounter. Held at New College, University of Edinburgh, from 10th to 12th June 2026, it more than met that expectation. Not many conferences witness the eruption of rhythmic sounds and harmonious melodies, with bodies gently gyrating to depict the performative aspects of religious practices, all of which align with the quest to advance academic inquiry. This distinctive feature of the 2026 Y-E Conference pointed to the richness of the field of World Christianity and the need to delve deeper into how religion is evoked, religious soundscapes, and the theatre of Christian ritual. The conference began with a gracious welcome from Professor Jeremy Carette, Head of the School of Divinity, followed by a preview by Professor Emma Wild-Wood, CSWC co-director. The eighty-five participants were then ushered into three days of thought-provoking scholarly exchanges, consisting of forty-eight in-person presentations and two hybrid panels, each comprising three presentations, held in Hong Kong and Nairobi. 

Presentations addressed a wide range of themes, including World Christianity and Music; Popular Culture and Christianity in the Digital Age; Mediating Christianity in Popular Culture; Christian Popular Culture, Social Justice and Liberation. Papers were grouped into panels to foster conversations across geographic specialisations, enriching presenters’ insights through regional, thematic, and disciplinary perspectives. Notwithstanding the emergent hybridity, traditional themes in world Christianity, such as the translation principle, resonated across many papers while also introducing novelty to these enduring motifs. 

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Studies in World Christianity 32.2

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Indigenous Theologies: Relationality and Lived Cosmologies on Land and Sea

Guest Editors: Rathiulung Elias KC and Elia Maggang

After the final session of the Yale–Edinburgh Conference on 23 June 2023, a group of us working on Indigenous theologies gathered under the shadow of New College on the Mound, Edinburgh, to reflect on our papers and the responses they had generated. Over the past two days, we had presented on various aspects of Indigenous theology and now sought to process both the reception and the pushbacks we had encountered. Most of us were members of RISC (Researching Indigenous Studies and Christianity), a network that was then meeting monthly online since 2022 for seminars and had cultivated a year of sustained engagement with Indigenous theological discourse. Insights from these online seminars were reaffirmed at the Conference: Indigenous theology, in its diversity and contextual specificity, challenges the fundamental assumptions of dominant Western theological frameworks. Its claims often require a basic and elemental re-evaluation of Christianity as expressed in Western theology. This raises critical questions: What makes Indigenous theology ‘indigenous’? How is it distinct from merely contextual or local expressions of Christian thought? What, precisely, does the term ‘Indigenous’ signify in theological discourse? We are grateful to the editors of Studies in World Christianity for inviting us to collate a special issue on Indigenous Theologies. This issue offers an opportune forum to bring these latent questions to the fore and to explore the cosmological, relational and ethical contributions that Indigenous theologies make to World Christianity. The articles represent a varied and textured account of Indigenous theologies from Central America and Asia; from land to sea; and across disciplines and themes.

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Studies in World Christianity 32.1

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Familiar Themes, New Angles

The articles in this issue present new angles on familiar themes within World Christianity. Translation, the regional histories of churches and organisations, material aspects of religious belonging, and diasporic Christianity are all explored here. Particular case-studies in specific geographical locations are examined in each article. Yet each article also acknowledges the ways that Christians in one area relate to those in another part of the world. The intersection of a specific context and the actors’ wider connections are the ingredients for exploring a theme for a fresh perspective.

In each of these articles, attention to a specific place and organisation allows the authors to examine new aspects of wider themes, furthering knowledge and understanding of World Christianity as both local and global, distinct and interconnected. Reading these articles, we observe how and why translation and interpretation of key concepts shaped a Christian movement, how far regional histories of global organisations and women’s groups in mission-initiated churches disseminate and adapt Christian practices and values. We learn in what ways material aspects of religious identity influence behaviour and belonging, and how diasporic churches live their fellowship in marginal and hostile environments.

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