Tag Archives: Africa

The Andrew Walls Fellowships

Posted on by
Reply
Professor Andrew F. Walls

The Andrew Walls Fellowships have been established in honour of our colleague Professor Andrew Finlay Walls, OBE and will provide visiting Fellowships for African scholars at the University of Edinburgh, to further research into African Christianity.

The University of Edinburgh is committing seed funding for this initiative, and we are seeking further support from individuals and organisations to enable the Fellowships to be established over several years. Our aim is to raise sufficient funds to launch the Fellowship programme in 2023.

Continue reading →

Faith, Healing, and Medicine in the time of COVID-19

Posted on by
Reply

Centre Co-director Dr Emma Wild-Wood has been collaborating with researchers in DR Congo to understand how faith communities there have been impacted by COVID-19. Here is some material developed for UK secondary schools to show how religious studies can help global health studies.

“Faith, Healing, and Medicine in the time of COVID-19”Download

Commemorating Andrew Walls (1928–2021)

Posted on by
Reply

This is a recording of our seminar of October 5, 2021, which commemorated the life and legacy of the Centre’s founder, Professor Andrew F. Walls (1928–2021). Panelists included Margaret Acton, Dr Barbara Bompani, Professor James L. Cox, and Professor Jehu J. Hanciles, who reflected on Professor Walls’s many contributions in African Studies, Religious Studies, and, of course, World Christianity and Mission Studies.

If you are unable to access the video above from YouTube, you can also try watching it from the University of Edinburgh’s Media Hopper service.

Professor Andrew Finlay Walls: A Tribute

Posted on by
5
Professor Walls in November 2018, after receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.

Andrew Finlay Walls, OBE (1928–2021), Honorary Professor of World Christianity, was a pioneering historian of Christian missions and their reception, and in many ways the architect of the field of study now known as world Christianity. Trained as a patristic scholar at the University of Oxford, he went to Sierra Leone in 1957 to teach at Fourah Bay College. There and at the new University of Nsukka in Nigeria (1962–66) he studied the growing churches of Africa and their history.

At the University of Aberdeen where he taught between 1966 and 1986, he became a scholar of international renown, establishing the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World (now known as the Centre for the Study of World Christianity), and supervising many research students who became leaders in both church and academy. The Centre was established as a library and archival resource, documenting the history of missions and the growth of non-western Christianity: the students followed, attracted by the sources. 

Continue reading →