On 11–13 June 2015, the Centre for the Study of World Christianity, in collaboration with the Scottish Centre for Chinese Studies, organised a conference in honour of the Scottish missionary-scholar to China, James Legge, on the bicentennial of his birth (see conference page). The conference received generous financial support from the Confucius Institute and the New College Senate. Continue reading
The United Kingdom is now in the final stages of an election campaign in which two avowedly nationalist political parties – the Scottish National Party and the United Kingdom Independence Party – seem set to re-configure the map of British politics. They will attract numerous Christian votes, but nationalism and Christian principle are uneasy bedfellows. Continue reading
Gender and Family in the History of Christian Missions
This issue of Studies in World Christianity is devoted to five papers selected from a total of nearly sixty presented at the twenty-fourth meeting of the Yale–Edinburgh Group on the history of missions and world Christianity, held at New College, Edinburgh, from 24 to 26 June 2014. The theme of the conference was ‘Gender and Family in the History of Missions and World Christianity’. The popularity of the theme can be deduced from the record number both of participants in the conference (almost one hundred) and of papers presented. Gender and family are hot topics in contemporary historical research into Christian missions (as they are more generally in social history), and it is perhaps surprising that the Yale–Edinburgh Group has never tackled the theme before in any of its meetings since its inception in 1992. As may be predicted, the vast majority of the papers given were about women or children, with only a sprinkling devoted to the role of men or questions of Christian masculinity: the default setting for historical research remains obstinately male in its orientation, with the result that any meeting advertised under the theme of gender is normally assumed to be an intended corrective to the default setting and hence to be primarily or even exclusively about the role of women. Continue reading
I’m excited to report that, starting the academic year of 2015-2016, we will be offering a new graduate course entitled ‘Theologies of World Christianity’. It will mainly be aimed at graduate students of our World Christianity cohort (MTh/MSc), but open to other graduate students in the School of Divinity and beyond.1 The new course attempts to introduce students to the wide variety of Christian theologies that have been forming around the world, with particular focus on more recent developments in contexts such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America – with some references also to Europe and North America. Continue reading