Highlights from CGCM Faculty Associate Prof. John Thornton
The Center for Global Christianity and Mission celebrates the diverse and valuable contributions of our Faculty Associates.
Dr. John Thornton, CGCM faculty associate, offers the following report on his recent work:
“I wrote quite a bit last year, and some of it was published, the rest is more or less waiting. Probably the biggest work was on my biography of Afonso Mvemba a Nzinga, King of Kongo. I have a contract to publish a biography of Afonso, as well as English translations of his letters and a few allied documents. He wrote a bit over 20 letters between 1506 and 1542. You might remember the bio of him I wrote for the Dictionary of Christian Biography.
“I finished an intermediate draft, and the publisher is now sending it around to readers to assess its potentials as a textbook. This is not a review for publication, that peer review is done. Rather it is a sort of copy-editing exercise to improve style and presentation. We hope the book will be out in 2022.
“As far as global Christianity is concerned, I also gave a recorded public lecture on how Kongolese Christianity intersected with other African religions to create Vodou in Haiti. This was presented on April 29th as a part of Harvard’s ongoing lecture series, and is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arANJmBdy5s The title of the lecture is very misleading, it was a preliminary title that never got changed.
“I gave a talk in Portuguese, an interview with a Brazilian academic named Fabio Ferreira, on the history of Kongo which did deal with religious topics, this was on May 25th. It is also on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALPHLok-E74
“I was also part of a conference at the Kongo Academy, a new organization that does a lot of work on Kimbanguism. They invited me to talk about the eighteenth-century prophet D. Beatriz Kimpa Vita, the ‘Kongolese Saint Anthony’ as a precursor to Kimbangu.
“I also wrote several other pieces, but they were not on topics dealing with religion or global Christianity, for example, a revision of my earlier estimates of the population of Kongo (published in the Journal of African History) and an article on the expansion of the Lunda empire, which I think is a chapter in a book that might already be published.”