Yale-Edinburgh 2024: Call for papers
Yale-Edinburgh 2024
Call for papers
The Yale-Edinburgh 2024 conference will be hosted by the Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT, 26th-28th June, 2024.
The theme is Spirit and the Spiritual: Ancestors, Deities and the Holy Spirit in Church, and Mission. Missions from the West brought Christianity into worlds with a wide array of cosmologies. Recipient cultures embraced the Christian faith while negotiating differing perspectives of spiritual realities. The subsequent transition from missionary Christianity to indigenous faith produced a range of responses to the notion of ‘spiritual beings.’ Through mission, Christianity encountered traditional religions that venerated ancestors, revered spiritual beings, and navigated intricate relationships between deities in a world far more complex than the typical Western experience. From Korea to Brazil, Nigeria to Samoa, France to India – these multifaceted cosmologies continue to animate the Christian experience producing dynamic expressions of the faith. Movements of the Holy Spirit represent another dimension of Christianity. A wide range of pneumatic Christianities populate the long history of Christian expansion around the world.
World Christianity scholarship is deeply enriched through exploration of the historical, theological, and missiological implications of these relationships between the Holy Spirit and the Spiritual worlds of Christians across the globe. The Yale Edinburgh Conference 2024 especially welcomes contributions that illuminate the interactions between the spiritual realities of recipient cultures and missionary notions of the Holy Spirit; provide historical accounts of religious transformations with respect to ancestors, deities, and other spiritual beings in the process of Christian expansion; enlarge current understandings of local and diasporic perspectives of spiritual beings and their role in Christian expressions; provide comparative studies of missionary approaches to spirits and deities across denominations and across time; venture into ecumenical and interfaith dynamics with respect to spirits and the spiritual; or map trajectories of discourses on the Holy Spirit and other beings in a rapidly changing world.
Please supply an abstract of 250 words to world.christianity@yale.edu (link sends e-mail) by 15th February 2024. Your abstract should clearly state, among other things, the enquiry, method, and historical context in which you situate your paper.
The gathering at New Haven will be in person. There will be a conference hub in Nairobi and in Singapore on the same theme and on the same dates.
For more information see link