Happy 2026! We look forward to welcoming students, staff, and friends to our Semester 2 research seminars and readings groups. Do get in contact if you would like to have Zoom details.
Research Seminars, 2025–2026 (Semester 2)
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Author Archives: CSWCEdinburgh
Yale-Edinburgh 2026 – Call for Papers
Popular, Folk, Grassroots and Pop Culture
in World Christianity and the History of Mission
10–12 June 2026 ‧ New College, University of Edinburgh ‧ #YaleEdin2026
Yale-Edinburgh Conference on World Christianity and the History of Mission
Deadline for Proposals: 1 February 2026
Christian communities, individuals, and institutions have always grappled with grassroots cultural expressions that surround them in different historical and social settings. This relationship has been riven with ambiguities. Songs, plays, and literature, print, radio, television, and the internet are deemed to edify or to scandalise, to propagate the Gospel or to profane it, to promote Christian virtues or to reject them, to encourage devotion or to deaden Christian sentiments. Missionaries have drawn upon familiar forms for hymns or folk traditions for liturgy. They have also eschewed popular songs and myths as antithetical to the Gospel. Majority World Christians simultaneously cultivate a ‘world-breaking’ attitude towards popular culture, casting off local traditions and customs as demonic, and a ‘world-making’ posture that positively engages local ontologies and folk cultures, like the Orthodox Anastenaria in which icons are displayed at festivals.
Continue readingResearch Seminars, 2025–2026 (Semester 1)
We are looking forward to beginning the new academic year next week, and especially in welcoming new students. Along with various reading groups and other activities for students, we are pleased to hold the following public seminars this Autumn.
We look forward to seeing friends and alumni of the Centre in person or online. Do get in contact for Zoom details.
Reflections on Yale–Edinburgh in São Paulo
Centre student Zihao He shares his reflections on the 2025 Yale-Edinburgh conference, held in São Paulo, Brazil, on the theme ‘Christianity, Democracy, and Nationalism’.
As a current PhD student at the Centre for the Study of World Christianity, I had the great privilege of attending this year’s Yale–Edinburgh Conference, held at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil. The theme of this year’s gathering, ‘Christianity, Democracy, and Nationalism’, could not be more timely in our increasingly volatile world. It also closely resonates with my own research interests in Chinese pre-modern nationalism, Christianity, and the issue of violence. Significantly, I had the unique opportunity to witness a historical milestone: for the first time, this influential conference was held in the Global South.
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