Tag Archives: Bible

Studies in World Christianity 32.3

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Yale-Edinburgh Conference in São Paulo: Christianity, Democracy and Nationalism

Edited by: Pedro Feitoza

The 2025 annual conference of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on World Christianity and the History of Missions marked a significant departure from the pattern of the previous meetings. For the first time since its inception in 1992 the conference took place outside the Edinburgh-New Haven, Britain-United States connection in the North Atlantic and moved to the South Atlantic. A group of around 80 delegates, plus a couple dozen visitors, gathered at the campus of Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo, Brazil, to discuss the relationship between Christianity, democracy and nationalism. There were a few reasons for this move. First, the conference organisers were mindful of the need to ‘provincialize the West,’ and this geographical relocation made it easier for students and scholars in Latin America to take part in this important global forum, pull the discussions in the direction of their intellectual priorities, and raise the issues that are at the centre of their own agendas. Second, for a long time Latin America occupied only a marginal place in the academic literature on World Christianity. The conference was conceived as an initial stimulus to correct this imbalance. This was also probably the first bilingual Yale-Edinburgh conference, with plenary and break-out sessions occurring in English and Portuguese. Some of the challenges involved in the planning and running of the event are reminiscent of the very dynamics that make Christianity a world religion: linguistic differences, cultural incomprehension, and the need to cross long geographical distances. But a common disposition motivated the group: the eagerness to share innovative research with peers, learn from students and scholars in different career stages, and find common ground.

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Studies in World Christianity 31.3

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Thirty Years of Studies in World Christianity

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Studies in World Christianity, established in 1995. It has been the first and foremost journal to promote the academic discourse of World Christianity. Its history has included the publication of many field-defining articles. It also continues to be the outlet of choice for studies on the local and the global particularities of Christianity as a worldwide religion.

Thirty years on, it is worth correcting two common misunderstandings of the journal’s legacy. First, many automatically presume the journal was started by the historian Andrew Walls, the doyen of the field. Rather, the journal was established — not by Walls, but by that scholar of World Christianity studies James Mackey. Mackey? Who is James Mackey? I suspect many readers of this journal would not readily know this name, because he is rarely mentioned in standard primers on World Christianity. James Mackey was a Catholic theologian — and, no less, the Thomas Chalmers Chair of Theology and the Dean of the Faculty (now School) of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. Importantly, this esteemed theologian established the journal during a time when ‘World Christianity’ was still a nascent discourse.

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Studies in World Christianity 29.3

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Theological Negotiations in World Christianity

In the last issue, Studies in World Christianity highlighted several papers presented at the 2022 annual conference of the Yale–Edinburgh Group on World Christianity and the History of Mission. The journal took stock of three decades since the group’s first meeting in 1992, which has since been instrumental in ushering into existence the field of ‘World Christianity’. As was noted in that issue’s editorial, this new academic endeavour had at its origins a postcolonial posture which moved away from a Christendom paradigm of expansion and conquest towards a new paradigm of indigenous initiative and Christianity’s polycentric and multicultural manifestations. Hence, World Christianity is not a shorthand for idiosyncratic expressions of Christianity ‘out there’, as is often (mis)understood. Rather, it is the dynamic nature of a worldwide religion that experiences encounter and contestation, continuity and discontinuity, growth and decline.

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Studies in World Christianity 28.1

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Oral, Print and Digital Cultures

A few years ago, Andrew Walls told me that he had once hoped to become a missionary to China. However, with the rise of the Chinese communist revolution, those plans were dashed, and he eventually made his way to Sierra Leone in 1957, followed by Nigeria in 1962. One wonders how the study of World Christianity would have been different if the doyen of the academic field spent his formative missionary years in China instead of Africa. Would he have had the same epiphany in Beijing or Shanghai or Wenzhou that he was ‘actually living in a second-century church’? When considering Confucianism or Daoism, would he likewise speak of the place of ‘primal religions’ in shaping the consciousness of another faith, be it Christianity or Buddhism? Both are undoubtedly possibilities. But perhaps, in this parallel universe, the area less likely to have developed would have been his recognition of the importance of oral cultures – a pervasive characteristic in his beloved Africa, but scantly recognised in China.

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