Decolonising Divinity: A Roundtable Discussion

On March 9, 2021, colleagues from the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, held a roundtable discussion around the topic of “Decolonising Divinity.” Jointly sponsored by Religious Studies, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, and World Christianity, the panelists were Drs Arkotong Longkumer, Shadab Rahemtulla, and Emma Wild-Wood, and moderated by Dr Alexander Chow.

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.

Prof. Kwok Pui-lan: Women, Mission, and World Christianity

Prof. Kwok Pui-lan delivered the Alexander Duff lecture ‘Women, Mission, and World Christianity’ on 16 September 2017 at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. It was the keynote lecture in the ‘Women and the World Church’ day conference co-sponsored by the Church of Scotland World Mission Council.


For more about the ‘Women and World Church’ conference, you can read about the response panels, authored by Nuam Hatzaw and Lucy Schouten, respectively.

World Christianity Goes Online with Wikipedia

The massive online encyclopedia grows at an average rate of 800 articles per day, but in 2016, at least 25 of those began here in New College, Edinburgh. A new but growing field, World Christianity thrives upon the continuous challenge of disseminating scholarship from small to growing institutions from Beijing to Botswana. Through a series of Wikipedia projects conducted during Fall 2016, the Centre for the Study of World Christianity and the School of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh have experimented with a new platform for disseminating information quickly in a rapidly changing field.

Women-and-Relgion-Edit-a-thon at New College. Photo by Dr Alexander Chow.

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What do Monks and Friars have in common?

by Eva Pascal (originally posted here.)

What do Buddhist monks and Christian friars have in common? Quite a bit, in fact. While travelling widely across Asia in the late sixteenth century, Franciscans had rich encounters and exchanges with Buddhist monks that led them to identify Buddhism as a unified tradition and a powerful religion in the region.

Westerners encountering new cultures in the early modern period often found it difficult to categorize unfamiliar traditions. For many, the religious landscape was divided into Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Anything outside of that landscape was lumped together as idolatry or paganism – often described as superstition. Repeated new encounters with other traditions prompted new categories with newly identified religions. Many scholars of the process of the transformation of how Westerners categorized and understood religion agree that Buddhism, when it came to be identified as a single entity in the West, had the special distinction of being the first religion parallel to Christianity, and the first “world religion” next to Christianity. Scholars have largely assumed the idea of Buddhism as a common religion across Asia emerged in the west in the nineteenth century. Continue reading