In the new year, we begin our next semester of research seminars. Seminars will be held fortnightly on Tuesday afternoons in the Elizabeth Templeton Room, and hybrid on Zoom. Please direct queries to Alexander.Chow@ed.ac.uk.
Creation, Climate Change, and World Christianity #YaleEdin2023
21st–23rd June 2023 ‧ In-person in Edinburgh,
with hybrid hubs in Nairobi, Singapore, and São Paulo
Proposals due 15th February 2023 1st March 2023
The natural environment influences the perspectives and activities of Christian groups and peoples. At a time when rapid climate change challenges and disrupts the lives of humans and animals, our theme provides plenty of scope for examining the responses of Christians worldwide, past and present, to the planet.
The first article of the Apostle’s Creed asserts that Christians uphold a God Who is ‘Creator of Heaven and Earth’. However, Christianity has sometimes appeared to focus more closely on the heavenly realm than on the earthly realm. Theologies underscoring the domination of creation have overridden theologies of care and concern over the natural order. Missionaries and migrants have been at the mercy of the seas. Under the influence of romantic idealisation of pristine lands and unspoilt ‘primitive’ peoples, missionaries romanticised rural villages and communities untouched by modern vices as sites of religious transformation. Other missionaries were keen amateur botanists and geographers. How did their assumptions and knowledge influence understanding of the natural environment? What did they learn from people connected with the land, the sea, and their plants and animals? In what ways did indigenous communities around the world relate Christianity to their natural landscapes and animal worlds? In contemporary Christianity, where are the movements responding to the climate crisis or theologies developing from land rights or a reduction in bio-diversity? How, for example, are Pacific islanders responding theologically and practically to the threat of the rise in sea-levels? Or those living in the Amazon rainforest responding to its destruction? What is observed when Pentecostals do battle with nature spirits? What Christian groups are responding to the tensions when natural resources are limited or used badly? What role does climate change play in the movement of people? What does the establishment of migrant churches in cities mean for engagement with the natural environment?
The theme is vast and applicable to interdisciplinary working in planetary health and geo-sciences, as well as the familiar history, theology and social sciences. We welcome papers that focus on the observation and analysis of what is happening in World Christianity vis-à-vis the topic.
Please supply an abstract of 250 words to cswc-events@ed.ac.uk by 15th February 2023 1st March 2023 that clearly states the enquiry, method and the literature in which you situate your paper. We expect all speakers to be presenting from Edinburgh, with the exception of keynotes separately organized by one of our hubs. We anticipate a high level of interest in the conference and may not be able to accept all papers.
Further details will be released on the Yale-Edinburgh page.
On November 1, 2022, our new Lecturer in Latin American Christianity, Dr Pedro Feitoza, deliver a paper entitled “Religion and Regionalism in Brazil: The Dynamics of Religious Change and the Making of Caipira Culture, 1860-1940.”
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.
Edited by Elizabeth S. Marteijn and Lucy Schouten
It is only fitting that Studies in World Christianity dedicates a special issue to the geographical region that is the cradle of Christianity: the Middle East. This region, spread across North Africa and West Asia, was the site of some of the most significant events in early church history. Jesus Christ was born in a village that is now the bustling Palestinian city of Bethlehem, and the holy Middle Eastern city of Jerusalem was the scene of his death, resurrection, ascension and, shortly thereafter, of the earliest missionary movement, when Jesus’ disciples ventured into the world to spread the Christian message. The apostle Paul received his vision of Jesus Christ on the way to Damascus – what is now the capital of Syria, and his voyages brought him to other places in the contemporary Middle East, mostly in what is now Turkey. The second-century prolific Church Father Tertullian wrote his apologetic and dogmatic literature from the ancient city of Carthage, which is now a neighbourhood in the Tunisian capital city of Tunis, and fourth-century Church Father Athanasius operated from what is now the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria. The birth of another famous fourth-century theologian and philosopher, Augustine of Hippo, happened in the ancient city of Thagaste in what is now modern Algeria. The missionary travels and theological teachings of these Middle Eastern figures, as well as others, were fundamental for the development of Christianity across different times and different places. The foundation of Christianity as a world religion lay, thus, in the Middle East.
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