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.
Gina Zurlo gives papers at social science conferences NY and Boston
Doctoral student Gina Zurlo has recently given several papers and lectures at social science conferences. In August, she presented a paper at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in New York City, titled, "Christian Sociology in Transition: The Institute of Social and Religious Research," which discussed an early phase of American sociology and its intersections with the social gospel and ecumenical movements in the early 20th century. She also gave a paper at the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion annual meeting in Boston on the development and use of demographic databases.
Distinguished Alum Jerry Anderson Honored in Rome
Gerald (Jerry) Anderson (STH’55, GRS’60) met Pope Francis, gave a lecture and received an honorary Doctor of Missiology degree from the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome on November 14. The degree was presented to him by Cardinal Fernando Filoni, the Chancellor of the university. It was the first time an honorary degree has been given to a Protestant by this university that was founded in 1627 and is owned by the Sacred Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples. Dr. Anderson, a former UM missionary in the Philippines and president of Scarritt College in Nashville, is emeritus director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, CT, and resides in Hamden, CT.
Zurlo Lectures in Busan
Doctoral student Gina Zurlo was on the faculty of the Global Ecumenical Theological Institute at the 10th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Busan, South Korea (October 30–November 8, 2013). Gina gave a lecture titled, "Demographics of World and Asian Christianity" to a group of 200 students from 60 countries, representing 80 different denominations, and also offered reflections on the future of the ecumenical movement in light of trends in global Christianity. Videos of her lecture can be found in two parts, here and here.
Roldán-Figueroa at 2013 Sixteenth Century Studies Conference
The 2013 Sixteenth Century Studies Conference was held from October 24-27 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Professor Roldán-Figueroa served as Theology Track Director for the conference. The theology track had a total of sixteen panels. Roldán-Figueroa organized eight panels, and chaired three of them. One of the panelists was BU STH Professor Claire Wolfteich, whose paper was entitled "Spiritual Guidance for those 'In the World': A Theology of Lay Spiritual Practice in Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal." Roldán-Figueroa presented a paper related to the missionary work of Discalced Franciscans in the Philippines, "Enlisting Saints for the Cause of Catholic Missions: Marcelo de Ribadeneira’s Historia de las Islas del Archipiélago Filipino (Barcelona, 1601)." The session was sponsored by REFO500 and VU University Amsterdam. The other two panelists were Professor Sabine Hiebsch from VU University Amsterdam and Professor Tarald Rasmussen from the University of Oslo" You can see picture of the panelists here.
Highlights of the World Christianity Forum
Important scholars of World Christianity and Directors of Centers of World Christianity in North American and Europe convened for the first time at Boston University from October 17-19. The importance of the conference was apparent from the beginning, as participants came to Boston at their own expense, and with great enthusiasm for the opportunity to meet other center directors and scholars. Hosts of the conference were Dr. Dana Robert, director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at BU, and Dr. Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell. The purpose of the conference—the World Christianity Forum—was to begin to map the contours of this emerging area and to identify important questions that need to be addressed in order to establish its identity.
The Forum began with presentations by the directors of each World Christianity center attending. Their purposes—teaching, research and documentation, and public outreach and service—turned out to be similar. What differed was the structure of each center and its institutional locus or absence thereof. The most significant defining attributes were the visions of the center founders, and the organizational context of particular centers. . Centers located in secular universities were more likely to emphasize teaching and global level historical research and documentation, all of which give them grounds for relating to secular scholars and religious studies departments. Centers located in seminaries or religious institutions are more likely to emphasize local level research including field work and case studies as well as training for and service to local churches. Freestanding centers have the ability to forge independent visions. The Overseas Ministries Study Center in New Haven, for instance, offers hospitality to foreign missionaries in the U.S. on furlough and also publishes the prestigious journal, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research. What the centers almost uniformly shared, however, was financial fragility. Regardless of the source of funding, whether a dwindling old endowment or grants from individuals or foundations, consistency of funding was felt by the directors to be uncertain.
In subsequent sessions, participants identified and began to wrestle with the larger questions of identity and function. One measure of how new “World Christianity” is as an academic discourse, is that its definition is not entirely clear to people outside institutions dedicated to its advancement. Nor is there agreement by people inside those institutions on what it should mean. The phrase “world Christianity” first emerged as a way to describe Christianity outside the West and research in the area is still generally focused on issues related to the Global South and immigrant churches in the West. Increasingly, though, teachers include Europe and North America in their use of the term. There were scholars attending the Forum who advocated for including Europe, in particular, in research studies.
Participants had different opinions about whether “World Christianity” captures a subject matter or whether it is a discipline with distinctive approaches and frameworks for interrogating cognate subjects such as contextual theology. One participant saw it as an “intersection point” for scholars from various disciplines but with similar interests. A number of participants recommended a descriptive and comparative approach, although there were differences of opinion on whether treating various manifestations of Christianity as phenomena also risked emptying World Christianity of any theological content.
A panel discussion held Friday afternoon and open to the entire community drew a large crowd from BU and beyond. Three of the Forum participants, Dr. Emma Wild-Wood from University of Cambridge, Dr. XiYi Yao from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Dr. Jehu Hanicles from Emory University, gave talks focused on the relationship between World Christianity and theology, on Chinese Christianity, and on African Christianity respectively.
The final session on Saturday morning was devoted to small group discussions on how to divvy up the terrain and develop collaborative projects. Potential collaborative research projects, such as the next edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia, were presented. In final plenary, participants discussed possible next steps growing from this first World Christianity Forum. A logical next step might be to host a conference exclusively on the question “What Is World Christianity?” Another logical step would be to broaden the discussion among centers to include those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Forum ended on a very positive note, as participants greatly appreciated the hospitality of Boston University in hosting the conference, and especially the opportunity to interact with peers in other centers and programs in World Christianity.
Mission and Church Planting
PhD student Christopher James has been busy publishing several articles on missiology. Chris' two peer-reviewed journal articles are: “Missional Acuity: 20th Century Insights Toward a Redemptive Way of Seeing," in Witness: Journal of the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education, vol. 26 (2012); and “Some Fell On Good Soil: Church Planting in Religious Ecologies,” Witness: Journal of the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education, vol. 27 (2013). Well done! We look forward to sharing more of his work.
Report from Maryknoll Conference of the ASM-EF
The annual Maryknoll mission conference was held last Friday and Saturday, Nov. 1-2. A. Scott Moreau, Professor of Missions and Intercultural Studies at Wheaton College, asked the American Society of Missiology's Eastern Fellowship of Professors of Mission, "Evangelicals and Contextualization: Oxymoron, Uneasy Relationship, or Energetic Experiment?" Over a series of talks Moreau unpacked that question, and mapped the various ways Evangelicals are experimenting with contextualization in missions. Respondents helped expand the discussion, and participants were invited to join in the conversation both during sessions and over meals. The annual meeting of the ASM-Eastern Fellowship is the oldest gathering of missiologists in North America. Most recently, meetings have been convened at the Maryknoll Mission Institute in New York. Eight students from Boston University participated in the event, along with Dr. Dana Robert who coordinated the meeting this year.
Left to Right: Laura Chevalier, Gun Cheol Kim, Michele Sigg, Daryl Ireland, Dr. Dana Robert, Jean Luc Enyegue, Jeremy Hegi, Younghwa Kim, Dan Bk
Dana Robert and BU Alums at the WCF
Three of Dana Robert's former students attended the World Christianity Forum last week and got together for a photograph with her before departing. From the left are Xiyi Yao, Charles Farhadian, Dana Robert, and Sung Deuk Oak.
World Christianity Forum Photos!
Directors of World Christianity centers and scholars of World Christianity gathered at BU School of Theology last week for a first-ever exchange of ideas and information. Get a glimpse of this hard-working group!
Cathy Corman on Hollinger’s “After Cloven Tongues of Fire”
UC Berkeley history professor emeritus David Hollinger describes in After Cloven Tongues of Fire his encounter with an essay of sinologist Joseph R. Levenson. “This essay,” Hollinger writes, “helped me formulate […] the chief questions on which I have worked for forty years. Levenson came at the right time for me” (164).
Here’s what I wrote in the margins: “Hollinger came at the right time for me.”
In a preface, ten chapters, and an epilogue, Hollinger explores the long-shadow liberal Protestants have cast on American politics and scholarship. He digs into the work of William James and Reinhold Niebuhr and is particularly interested in the relationship between pragmatism, the Enlightenment, science, and Christianity. Hollinger writes about the significance of a variety of gatherings, from the Realist-Pacifist Summit at Ohio Wesleyan University in 1942 to the Lilly Seminar, a twenty-first-century conference convening scholars for three years to debate the role of Christianity in American universities. One particularly sparkling essay treats the concept of “post-religion” in the context of American Jewish history. But for me Hollinger’s most important chapters showcase his thoughts on the rise and fall of mainline Protestantism, especially regarding social gospel and foreign missions.
The title of Hollinger’s collection, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, refers to the biblical story of Pentecost in Acts 2:1-11. These verses describe tribes with different linguistic backgrounds able to testify in a common language --“cloven tongues of fire.” To experience the divine and communicate across boundaries, even for a brief moment, is a miracle. The question, Hollinger asks, is what happens after: “What does one do in the world, in the prosaic routines of daily life, to act on this vision of human community inspired by the Jesus of Nazareth?” (x-xi).
Hollinger believes the answer to this question defines the split between two strands of American Protestantism in the twentieth century: evangelism and ecumenism. Some Protestants focused on ecstatic, mystical experience and believers’ relationships to the Divine. Hollinger identifies these Christians as “evangelicals.” They became “scripture-centered activists” (xiii) who worked to recreate “the spiritual intensity of the moment” (22). The “ecumenists,” meanwhile, explored what happened next, after the mystical moment, which led them to be “more frankly concerned with social welfare than with the state of the individual soul” (22). These Christians, cosmopolitan modernizers and energetic institution builders, “sought to overcome the curse of Babel not in fleeting moments of ecstasy but in the prosaic routines of daily life” (22).
Hollinger’s framework crystallizes what I have come to know about the evangelical/ecumenical split through Barry Alter, the Presbyterian missionary whose voice animates my project, “In the Midst.” Like the ecumenists Hollinger studies, Alter’s religious activism centered on the World Council of Churches, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, both the YM and YWCAs, and the periodical The Christian Century. Unlike Hollinger’s ecumenists, Alter’s spiritual home was Yale Divinity School, not Union Theological Seminary in New York, although that institution certainly played a large role in her life. Steeped in “social gospel” from childhood, Alter, along with other mainline Protestants, came to embrace pacifism, racial and gender equality, contraception, and the validity of same-sex relationships.
Hollinger’s explorations of ecumenist missionaries’ decisions to “engage the world rather than withdraw from it” jibe with the stories that make up “In the Midst.” Christian liberals, Hollinger writes, “were in the process of changing the notion of ‘foreign missions’ to one of ‘world mission,’ with the implication that indigenous peoples were no less qualified to preach and exemplify the gospel than Methodists and Presbyterians from the United States” (72). Reading that passage, I immediately summoned Alter’s growing conviction in the 1940s at Connecticut College that she would not serve as a foreign missionary unless she could rid herself of feelings of cultural superiority and American exceptionalism. Hollinger identifies missionaries, like Alter, who looked fondly on “foreign peoples” and their “inherited religions” (11). As these missionaries came to know those they served overseas, they concluded, like Alter, that “the Hindus and Buddhists they encountered […] were not quite so much in need of Christian conversion as once assumed” (44).
Hollinger’s conclusion, that the ecumenists’ success in some ways foretold their decline, resonates with what I know of Alter’s life, as well. Because they used contraception (as did Alter and her husband), ecumenist women gave birth to fewer children than evangelicals. Their numbers – relative to evangelicals – declined. More important than this fact of demography, Hollinger explains, ecumenists’ children embraced their parents’ tolerance for a multiplicity of beliefs but chose not to join their parents’ churches. This observation holds true for two of Alter’s three children. While one of her kids, John, is currently teaching English and serving as chaplain at a liberal, private Episcopal school, the other two have not affiliated with any denominations or churches. Marty, Alter’s daughter, has spearheaded a movement to organize marginalized women workers around the globe. Tom, Alter’s youngest son, took Indian citizenship and, through his work as a celebrated film and stage actor, champions the preservation of India’s wild places. I won’t touch, here, on Alter’s nephews or grandkids, many of whom are equally committed to issues of social and environmental justice here and abroad.
I was motivated to record Alter’s life stories in large part because of her deep-seated disappointment in her country’s refusal to acknowledge her cohort’s commitment to Christianity and its influence on important political shifts, from Abolition to Civil Rights. Hollinger tackles America’s cultural amnesia head on. Were it not for the Christian work of oft-overlooked liberalizers, Hollinger argues, America would not be home to the pluralistic, multi-cultural society we enjoy today. Ecumenists like Barry Alter “play a greater role in American history than is commonly recognized,” he writes, and therefore deserve “attention” and recognition (xi).
I feel lucky to have encountered Hollinger’s essay collection now, as I’m working to finish “In the Midst,” because it fuels my afterburners. I started this project out of love and conviction. I’m going to finish this project, because of Hollinger’s superb overview, with a greater appreciation for its historical significance.
See: David A. Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013).