With this issue, the journal Studies in World Christianity completes twenty-five years of existence. Launched at the beginning of 1995 to be an ‘international forum for a dialogue of equals’ on the study of ‘theology and the science of religion’, this journal has pioneered and defined the interdisciplinary subfield of World Christianity. Today World Christianity has established itself as an important discourse that examines Christianity as a world religion, with scholars from across the globe. It also recognises the limitations of the world religion paradigm and uses the studies of Christianity in diverse localities and Christianity melded into other religious traditions to critique the way in which world religions are often viewed.
Continue reading
Recent historical scholarship on modern Christian missions to China, as to the non-European world as a whole, has been bedeviled by two weaknesses. First, historians have written about Protestant missions to China, or less frequently about Catholic ones, but very rarely about the two together within a single monograph. Second, Anglo-American scholars have tended for obvious linguistic reasons to confine themselves to the study of British or American missions, to the general neglect of those from continental Europe. Not the least of the virtues of Albert Monshan Wu’s book is that it transcends both of these limitations at once. By selecting as his two case studies in missions to China the Protestant Berlin Missionary Society (BMS) and the Catholic Society of the Divine Word (SVD) Wu is able to illuminate both commonalties and dissimilarities across the confessional divide.