Gender and Family in the History of Christian Missions
This issue of Studies in World Christianity is devoted to five papers selected from a total of nearly sixty presented at the twenty-fourth meeting of the Yale–Edinburgh Group on the history of missions and world Christianity, held at New College, Edinburgh, from 24 to 26 June 2014. The theme of the conference was ‘Gender and Family in the History of Missions and World Christianity’. The popularity of the theme can be deduced from the record number both of participants in the conference (almost one hundred) and of papers presented. Gender and family are hot topics in contemporary historical research into Christian missions (as they are more generally in social history), and it is perhaps surprising that the Yale–Edinburgh Group has never tackled the theme before in any of its meetings since its inception in 1992. As may be predicted, the vast majority of the papers given were about women or children, with only a sprinkling devoted to the role of men or questions of Christian masculinity: the default setting for historical research remains obstinately male in its orientation, with the result that any meeting advertised under the theme of gender is normally assumed to be an intended corrective to the default setting and hence to be primarily or even exclusively about the role of women. Continue reading
I’m excited to report that, starting the academic year of 2015-2016, we will be offering a new graduate course entitled ‘Theologies of World Christianity’. It will mainly be aimed at graduate students of our World Christianity cohort (MTh/MSc), but open to other graduate students in the School of Divinity and beyond.
These two strands of historiography have been largely understood in terms of a binary, Catholic-Protestant divide: liberation theology as rooted in the former, and Pentecostalism as a Protestant alternative. Professor Brian Stanley gave a paper this week in the History of Christianity seminar that challenged many widely held assumptions regarding liberation theology. I will use this seminar as a springboard for discussing new currents in the study of Latin American social theology and a solution to the historiographical islands that often give rise to partial or inaccurate narratives. 