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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Book Launch: Pedro Feitoza’s Propagandists of the Book

On September 30, 2024, the Centre held a book launch for Pedro Feitoza’s first book, Propagandists of the Book, published in 2024 through Oxford University Press. Panelists included the author, Dr Pedro Feitoza, and three respondents, Dr Timo Schaefer, Dr Maya Mayblin, and Alison Zilversmit.

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.

Studies in World Christianity 30.3

Latin America and World Christianity

Editors: Manoela Carpenedo and Pedro Feitoza

Despite its globalising and ecumenical aspirations, there remain significant geographical and confessional blind spots in the literature in World Christianity. As the leading sociologist of religion, globalisation and politics Paul Freston has remarked in an interview for this special issue, Latin America is the Cinderella of World Christianity, the continent left out of the party. We believe there are a number of reasons for that. The first has to do with the genealogy of the field. The study of Christianity in Africa generated much of the initial intellectual impetus for World Christianity. The key architect of the field, British mission historian Andrew Walls, before establishing the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Aberdeen in 1982, also founded the Journal of Religion in Africa in 1967, an important venue for the study of local seizures of the Christian faith in the continent and its interactions with Islam and traditional religion. Since the interest around World Christianity emerged in part out of a critique of the links between mission and empire, the initial intellectual capital and interest for it flourished in former British colonial territories. Notably in Britain, some of the leading scholarly influences of the field spent part of their careers in colonial and post-colonial Africa as lecturers, teachers and researchers, including Adrian Hastings, Terence Ranger, John Peel, David Maxwell and Emma Wild-Wood. Specialists in South and East Asia, most of them theologians based in North American institutions, also joined the party and made decisive contributions to World Christianity literature, including Robert Frykenberg, Kirsteen and Sebastian Kim, Peter Phan, Alexander Chow and Chloë Starr. Although there have been recent attempts to correct this imbalance, such as the appointment of Brazilian theologian Raimundo Barreto, Jr, as co-editor of the Journal of World Christianity, scholarly attention to Latin America still lags far behind the academic literature on Africa and Asia. Second, another crucial stream that shaped the concerns of World Christianity scholars and students was a focus on Protestantism, especially its evangelical variants. The first two generations of scholars who built up the field, such as Walls, Brian Stanley, Dana Robert, Mark Hutchinson, Mark Noll and Ogbu Kalu, came from Protestant backgrounds and were experts in mostly Protestant and evangelical history and theology: Lamin Sanneh was the notable exception. Catholicism, the form of Christianity that has historically predominated in Latin America, also lags behind, while Orthodoxy only makes occasional appearances in the literature and conferences.

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The RBMU’s Calls for Personnel and Materials

by Savannah Weiler

This flyer by the Regions Beyond Missionary Union’s Southern Sierra Team was printed in 1973 to advertise personnel requirements on the one side, and material requirements on the other. The illustrations make the advertisement more eye-catching and invite the reader to read the advertisements. The Southern Sierra Team stated they needed a car, cassette players and contributions towards the establishment of a radio show that transmitted daily Gospel messages (see figure 2).

This use of cassette players and establishment of a radio programme tie into my previous blogposts, outlining the use of these media to spread Gospel messages in areas in the Loreto region. A similar tactic was clearly being used by the Southern Sierra Team. The advertisement for cassette players states that evangelical and teaching messages can be left on these tapes in Quechua or Spanish in villages or homes as part of teaching via the extension method or to foster interest in the mission’s teachings.

The daily radio programme advertisement describes the success of Hermano Pablo, or Paul Edwin Finkenbinder, in using radio Gospel messages as an evangelistic tool. Hermano Pablo’s radio gospel show In Mensaje a La Consciencia garnered many listeners in El Salvador, where he operated as an evangelist.The RBMU wanted to adopt a similar programme, as it was proving successful for other evangelicals in South America. The radio show was meant to garner interest in the Gospel, and could be supplemented by a free correspondence course, another example of teaching via the extension method. This method could also be used by Jan Hellens and Rosemary Flack, two missionaries for the RBMU who wished to go to villages in the surrounding area of Calhuanca on weekly visits, and were asking for a vehicle for their work in the Calhuanca area.

The other side of the flyer states that missionaries applying to the advertised posts often needed to speak both Spanish and Quechua (see figure 1). This would potentialize the effectiveness of their work and allow them to take part in the creation of such radio shows and cassette recordings and effectively reach out to communities in these areas.

This pamphlet is a visually interesting supplement to lots of the heavily textual material housed in the archive, while still being informative and interesting. It shows some of the approaches to missionary work adopted by the RBMU and how they reached out to potential new recruits.

Figure 1 – Projected Personnel Requirements for the Southern Sierra Team.
CSWC 33/41/1, Archives of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union, Centre for the Study of World Christianity, University of Edinburgh.
Figure 2 – Projected Materials Requirements for the Southern Sierra Team.
CSWC 33/41/1, Archives of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union, Centre for the Study of World Christianity, University of Edinburgh.