News of the extended network of faculty, alumni, students, visiting researchers, and mission partners is regularly updated, and some of the big ideas or major events in Global Christianity are covered in the CGCM News.

Remembrance: Mar Thoma Bishop Zacharias Mar Theophilus (’76)

By dri January 4th, 2016 in Alumni Profiles and News

image_previewThe Rt. Reverend Dr. Zacharias Mar Theophilus Suffragan Metropolitan of the Mar Thoma Church passed away on December 27, 2015.

He started his career as a teacher at the Ashram High School, Perumbavoor. Following this he went for Theological training at the Leonard Theological College, Jabalpur in 1966. He again returned to Perumbavoor, Ashram English High School and also pasturing the parishes in Perumbavoor, Vengoor, Krariali, Kothamanglam, Koratti, Mamala, Methala etc. He then completed his Masters at the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1974 and his Doctoral studies at the Boston University, USA in 1976. During his education at Princeton and Boston he was also the Vicar of the Congregations in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.

His contribution in the educational field is noteworthy while he ministered at Ashram English High School, Alwaye Settlement High School, St. Thomas High School - Mysore and St. Thomas Residential School - Trivandrum. He was also Vicar of the parishes in Mysore, Kozencherry, Bombay - Santa Cruz, etc.

He was consecrated as a Bishop on the 1st of May, 1980 and served in the following Dioceses: Adoor - Mavelikara Diocese, Kottayam – Ranni Diocese, Madras - Kunnamkulam Diocese, South Zone of Bombay - Delhi Diocese, Malaysia - Singapore - Australia Diocese, Kottayam – Kochi Diocese, North America - Europe Diocese, Madras – Calcutta, Chennai – Bangalore Diocese and currently at the Chengannur – Mavelikara Diocese since 2005. His contribution to the strengthening of the Mission work in all the dioceses and also responding to the spiritual and social needs of each region was explicit in the various Projects and Missions started in different Dioceses. Some of the important projects such as Asha Bhavan – Pathanapuram, Mochana De-addiction Centre – Kottayam, Thrikkunapuzha Mission, Haripad Centre, Pathanamthitta - Working Women’s Hostel, Santhigiri Ashram – Alwaye, Sinai Centre – New York, Karuthal – Cancer Care and Counselling Centre, Higher Education Loan Project, Navadharshan De-addiction Centre – Kidangannur, Mar Thoma Mission School and Mission Hostel Narasapuram, Ministry for Widow, Widowers and Aged, Sadhu Sadanam – Venmony, Bodhana Project, Bodhadhara Project, VISA-Vivaha Sahayam Project, Dalit Development Project. His leadership in the success of the Metropolitan’s Navathy Project by collecting more than Rs. 16 Crores and providing more than 2050 houses for the homeless in India has been one of the most unique contributions in the history of the Christian Community in India.

His Grace has served as the President of the Mar Thoma Yuvajana Sakhyam, Mar Thoma Sunday School Samajam, Mar Thoma Voluntary Evangelistic Association, Mar Thoma Suvishesha Sevika Sanghom, Mar Thoma Dayara and Sanyasini Samooham, Vaideeka Selection Committee, Backward People’s Development Committee. At present, He is the President of the Mar Thoma Evangelistic Association, Theological Commission of the Mar Thoma Church, Planning Commission etc

The Ecumenical Contribution of His Grace in the National and International Christian circles is noteworthy. His Grace has served as the President of the National Missionary Society of India, Bible Society of India, Kerala, Auxiliary, World Mission of India, Ecumenical Christian Center (ECC), Bangalore and Theological Literature Society, Kerala. He has also served as the Secretary of the Nilackal Ecumenical Trust of all Episcopal churches in Kerala, Executive Committee Member of the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA) and Executive and Central Committee Member of the World Council of Churches (WCC). He is also the member of the Ecumenical Meeting of Bishops, Friends of the Focolare Movement and member of the Ecumenical Solidarity Visit to Sudan. The Ecumenical Community also mourns his death.

Library Research Awards

By dri December 21st, 2015

4fb14c78-a4b8-496d-973b-082c3ff9818cColumbia University Libraries/Information Services invites applications from scholars and researchers to its annual program designed to facilitate access to Columbia’s special and distinctive collections, the Libraries Research Awards.

The Libraries will award ten (10) grants of $2,500 each on a competitive basis to researchers who can demonstrate a compelling need to consult Columbia University Libraries/Information Services holdings for their work.  The award was established in 2011 and supports scholars and researchers who may benefit from access to Columbia’s special and unique collections. Participating Columbia libraries and collections include those located on the Morningside Heights campus: the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary, Butler Library, the Lehman Social Sciences Library, the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, and the Libraries' Global Studies Collections.

Applicants must be U.S. citizens or Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs). Persons holding J-1 or F-1 exchange, student, or visitor visas are not eligible for this grant.  Preference will be given to those applicants residing outside the greater New York metropolitan area who need to travel to New York City to conduct their research.

Applications will be accepted until February 29, 2016. Award notifications will be sent to applicants by April 30, 2016 for research conducted at Columbia during the period July 1, 2016 – June 30, 2017.

For more information and application materials, please visit the Libraries Research Awards page.

Jesse Lee Prize Awarded to Doug Tzan

By dri December 21st, 2015 in Africa, Alumni Profiles and News, Announcements, People, Publications, Research, World Christianity

image001The General Commission on Archive and History (GCAH) of The United Methodist Church announced the 2015 winner of its highly sought-after Jesse Lee Prize: The Rev. Dr. Douglas Tzan (pictured), elder and full member of the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference. Tzan’s award winning manuscript is titled "The World His Circuit: The Methodist Odyssey of William Taylor."

This work is a case study of a Methodist preacher, missionary, author, evangelist and bishop who not only mobilized the then Methodist Episcopal Church across the American frontier but brought the same energy, organization and enthusiasm across six continents. William Taylor (1821-1902) introduced American revivalism in places other missionaries disregarded, growing churches among marginalized populations, especially in South Africa and India. Forged in American Methodism, his global encounters with different cultures, languages and religions shaped the ways and means of the entirety of Christian mission outreach for generations.

The Jesse Lee Prize, awarded once every four year is named for United Methodism’s first historian (1758-1816) and given for serious manuscripts about the denomination’s history, including studies of antecedent Methodist churches or its missions. The $2,000 prize is granted by GCAH to assist authors with publication of their manuscript related to Methodist history.

The Rev. Dr. Tzan currently serves on the staff of the Sykesville Parish (St. Paul’s and Gaither UMC) in Sykesville, Maryland. He holds a PhD. in the field of the History of Christianity from Boston University where his extensive research of William Taylor began. Tzan continued his research utilizing materials at the United Methodist Archives and History Center in Madison, New Jersey. Tzan is a graduate of Iliff School of Theology and The University of South Carolina. He teaches at Wesley Theological Seminary and Boston University School of Theology.

GCAH is pleased to sponsor the Jesse Lee Prize awarded next in 2019. Information about various awards, grants and prizes for scholarly work in Methodist History can be found at http://gcah.org/research/grants-and-awards .

Call for Papers: American Society of Missiology

By dri December 17th, 2015 in Call for Papers

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Missiology and Public Life: Mission's Engagement with Societies, Change, and Conflict

2016 Annual Meeting
June 17 – 19
University of Northwestern–St. Paul,
St. Paul, Minnesota

For a full statement of the conference theme, visit the ASM website.
Registration for the annual meeting will open in January 2016.

Plenary Speakers

  • Sebastian Kim – Chair, Theology and Public Life, York St. John University, UK
  • Emmanuel Katongole – Department of Theology/Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame
  • Ruth Padilla DeBorst – Coordinator, International Fellowship of Mission as Transformation (INFEMIT), Costa Rica
  • Mario Vega – General Director, Misión Cristiana Elim, El Salvador
  • Gregory Leffel – 2016 ASM President

 
Call for Papers and Panels
 
Social change creates ever-new challenges to mission and public life. The church — wherever it is established, or is in the process of being established — must participate in ever-fresh ways with shaping public narratives and supporting public action for human flourishing and the common good. We invite papers and panels that apply a distinctive and critical Christian perspective to matters of society at large; contribute to anintellectual grounding for Christian public engagement; find common ground with others to act cooperatively and collaboratively within pluralistic settings; resource individual Christians, churches, and organizations/movements to apply their faith to public concerns; and frame a broad-based missiological language to link various theological/missiological traditions of Christian social engagement. 
 
Paper Presentations  
 
High-quality papers are invited that reflect on the conference theme from a missiological perspective from any context. Papers might address topics including (but not limited to):

  • Secularization and privatized religion
  • Class, race, ethnic and economic marginalization
  • Social and political divisions among Christians
  • Conflict, violence, and peace-building
  • Interreligious public theologies
  • Ecological responsibility
  • Political theology and liberation theology, including their critiques of mission
  • The relationship between good works and evangelism—between, that is, justice and justification
  • The nature and value of public advocacy, collective social action, critique, and dissent
  • Historical analysis of the church’s public engagement

 
Papers not directly related to the conference theme will also be considered, as space allows.
 
This year, we invite proposals for presentations in Korean and Spanish to be included in Spanish/Korean language panels. For more information, contact Enoch Jinsik Kim (enochk2000@fuller.edu) for Korean presentations or Johnny Ramirez-Johnson (ramirez-johnson@fuller.edu) for Spanish presentations.
 
올 해에는 한국어와 스패니쉬어로도 연구 발표 접수를 합니다. 한국어 발표에 관한 자세한 문의는 Enoch Jinsik Kim (enochk2000@fuller.edu) 으로 연락해 주시기 바랍니다.
 
Este año, invitamos propuestas para presentaciones en coreano y español. Para obtener más información acerca de las presentaciones en español, póngase en contacto con Johnny Ramírez-Johnson (ramirez-johnson@fuller.edu).
 
To submit a paper proposal, provide a title and 200-word abstract at the following link: http://goo.gl/forms/2AoD1Kjx7V. (Deadline January 31, 2016) At the meeting, 20 minutes are provided for each presentation and 10 for questions and answers. Submissions from higher-level graduate students are encouraged.
 
Confirmation of accepted papers is expected by March 1, 2016.
Submit papers and confirm meeting attendance by June 1, 2016.
 
Organizing a panel
 
We strongly encourage teams of three to five presenters to coordinate and submit proposals for panel sessions focused on topics related to the conference theme. In addition to paper presentations, panels can include respondents or extended periods of discussion. The panel organizer should submit a session title, 300-word abstract, and a list of participants. In addition, each panelist should individually submit a paper proposal. We also welcome proposals for panels that do not involve formal paper presentations: e.g., a film screening followed by discussion. Questions about formulating a panel proposal can be directed to Alison Fitchett Climenhaga (afitchet@nd.edu) and Bonnie Sue Lewis (BSLewis@dbq.edu). Again, the deadline is January 31, 2016.
 
To submit a panel proposal follow this link: http://goo.gl/forms/AKpHW4RDf6.
Confirmation of accepted panel proposals expected by March 1, 2016.
 
Questions?  
 

 
Over the past few years, we’ve seen significant growth in attendance at our annual meeting and a rapid increase in the number of papers presented in the parallel sessions.  Do plan to join us at University of Northwestern this year, and encourage your colleagues and students to take advantage of the wonderful ASM program that is coming together.  

Mennonite Brethren Historical Study Project Awarded

By dri December 16th, 2015 in Africa, Announcements, People, Research, Students, World Christianity

Anicka_Fast_profile 2 thmAnicka Fast, a first-year student in Mission Studies at Boston University, received the Mennonite Brethren Historical Commission's study grant for 2015. Before moving from Montreal to Boston, Anicka worked with the Mennonite Central Committee in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for three years. Anicka's research interests include intercultural reconciliation and power balancing in the global church, Anabaptist missiology and ecclesiology, the history of the missionary encounter in the DR Congo, and African political theology. Her grant is in the amount of $2,865, and will be disbursed in May 2016. Anicka's project title is, "Identity and Power in Mission: A Study of Cross-Cultural Relationships among North American and Congolese Mennonites."

Biographer’s Craft

By dri December 14th, 2015 in Africa, Reviews, World Christianity

The Dictionary of African Christian Biography was recently highlighted by the Biographer's Craft, a monthly newsletter for writers and readers of biography. The article was written by Kathleen Sheldon who participated in the African Christian Biography Conference held at Boston University, October 29-31, 2015.

Conference Explores Twenty Years of African Christian Biography
By Kathleen Sheldon

The Dictionary of African Christian Biography(DACB; www.dacb.org) hosted a conference at Boston University in October 2015 to mark its twentieth anniversary. As the DACB website announces, “The mission of the DACB is to collect, preserve, and make freely accessible biographical accounts and church histories—from oral and written sources—integral to a scholarly understanding of African Christianity.” The conference gathered together scholars of African history, authors of biographies, and theologians from the United States, Europe, and Africa, who all contributed to a series of informative and provocative presentations and discussions.
Jonathan Bonk, editor of the DACB, provided some background in his welcoming remarks. The dictionary was conceived as a way to bring attention to the role of Africans in spreading Christianity in the most Christianized continent, where one in four Christians in the world are found. With a non-proprietary, open-access collection of brief biographies, the DACB hoped to contribute to a more accurate understanding of religion in Africa and to honor some of Africa’s church leaders and founders, theologians, and proselytizers. The site holds more than 2,000 entries, and over 1,500 visitors browse it each day.
The conference featured plenaries and papers on biographical methodology and on the intersection of biography and history. Participants raised questions and encouraged discussion about what makes a good biography, what makes a story worth telling, and how to understand human agency in the historical process. While some of the religious participants discussed biography as a narrative of faith, others were more concerned with determining the accuracy of a story, especially when using the sometimes-difficult sources and archives found in African communities.
While discussing the DACB’s own collection of many brief biographies, participants reflected on using such a source to develop a collective story about a particular place or event beyond one person’s life. Michele Sigg put forward her idea of “pointillism” as a way of seeing how many brief biographies could coalesce to tell a larger story. Lamin Sanneh, Paul Grant, and Roger Levine discussed the importance of “naming” as a route to retrieve lost stories and to understand how one person’s life might present a series of different identities. Though most Africans who were enslaved remain anonymous, there were individuals who rose to prominence and whose individual histories repudiate that anonymity. Tracing their changing names through archival documents is one important way to bring such stories to light. The use of oral testimony and the problems of fixing fluid narratives in a written form was another topic, discussed in Stan Chu Ilo’s paper on the strengths and weaknesses of oral sources.
There was a notable emphasis on women. Philomena Mwaura, a professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, provided an overview of gender and power, while others presented papers about individual women and their leadership work in a variety of churches, Protestant, Catholic, Pentecostal and other new forms of religious organization. Wendy Belcher, an associate professor of African literature at Princeton University, told the intriguing story of Krastos Samra, a fifteenth-century Ethiopian saint, while Bard Associate Professor of History Wendy Urban-Mead discussed the role of one woman who influenced the development of the Brethren in Christ Church in twentieth-century Zimbabwe. A dinner talk and slide show by Linda Heywood,  professor of African History at Boston University, looked at the complicated story of Njinga, a queen and sometime convert to Catholicism in seventeenth-century Kongo, now part of Angola.
     The conference concluded with a useful wrap-up of events, in which Andrew Barnes, an associate professor of history at Arizona State University, suggested that biography serves four human desires: memorializing individuals, shaping the historical record, illustrating historical experience, and revising erroneous accounts. At the same time, it contributes to an ever-expanding set of data by encouraging the idea of patterns of human behavior, and by providing a skeleton for historical narrative. It was clear that even when writing within the restricted topic of African Christianity, there is a multitude of human stories now being discovered and told to a wider audience.

Kathleen Sheldon is an independent historian and research affiliate at the University of California, Los Angeles Center for the Study of Women. She wrote dozens of brief biographies of African women for her Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa (2005; revised edition forthcoming in 2016) and was an area editor with responsibility for entries on women for the Dictionary of African Biography, edited by Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 6 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2011 and ongoing online).

Interpreting the Signs of the Times

By sjlloyd December 13th, 2015

The CGCM is delighted to post the announcement and call for papers for the upcoming Costas Consultation on World Mission and Ecumenism. This year's theme is contemporary challenges for African Christianity. The Rev. Jean Luc Enyegue, SJ (CGCM graduate student) will be speaking from a Cameroonian perspective. See the announcement and call for papers below (click to enlarge).

Costas 3

INFORMATION ON POSTER SESSIONS

Evangelicals Around the World

By dri December 8th, 2015 in Announcements, People, Publications, Students, World Christianity

51Jt5gwGAdL._SX405_BO1,204,203,200_In the newly released Evangelicals Around the World: A Global Handbook for the 21st Century, Gina Zurlo explains how evangelicals are counted. In an age when statistics are despised as "saying anything you want," Zurlo walks readers through the process of how the data is collected, analyzed, and interpreted so as to arrive at a reliable number of Evangelical Christians in the world. It is the only publication of its kind.

Zurlo is a PhD candidate at Boston University, and is writing her dissertation on David Barrett and Christian demography.