Papers & Publications
Bartolomé de las Casas
For scholars of world Christianity, Bartolomé de las Casas is a fascinating figure. A missionary to the New World, he struggled to express a theology that could address the extraordinary conditions that colonial expansion and colonization created. In Bartolome de las Casas, O.P.: History, Philosophy, and Theology in the Age of European Expansion, prominent scholars from such disciplines as history, Latin American studies, literary criticism, philosophy, and theology come together to think about the man and his message. The volume was edited by David T. Orique, O.P. (Providence College) and Rady Roldán-Figueroa (Boston University), who also co-wrote the introduction and have chapters of their own in the volume.
Pedagogical Dilemmas in the Global Church
After publishing an article about power and privilege in relation to colonial subsidies and the education of missionary children in the Belgian Congo, Anicka Fast received feedback from people around the world. Their comments spurred her to explain her larger project, and the aims of her research. She also reflects on the complexity of writing history and getting it 'right.' Published in Anabaptist Witness, her reflections on the task and challenge of writing mission history are rich food for thought.
Ambivalent about Mission?
The Council of International Anabaptist Ministries held a symposium on "The mission of God and global partnerships." Anicka Fast shared ideas about "Reclaiming Mission," for those ambivalent about the very idea.
Anabaptists in Nigeria
In 1958 a group of congregations in southeastern Nigeria solicited affiliation with the North American Mennonite Board of Missions (MBM), declared themselves Mennonite, and sought missionaries and assistance. MBM responded by sending missionaries and by providing assistance to Mennonite Church Nigeria (MCN) and others in the region. The collaboration between MCN and MBM developed during a period when partnership was becoming a primary paradigm in the Protestant missionary movement as well as in the Anabaptist tradition.
In his recent article, R. Bruce Yoder ('16) highlights five themes in the missiological discourse about partnership during the last half of the twentieth century and uses those themes to explicate aspects of the engagement between MCN and MBM during the same period. The themes are (1) collaboration, (2) context, (3) reconfiguration of mission structures, (4) bilateral and multilateral approaches, and (5) ambiguity. The first section examines partnership in the Protestant mission movement. The second shows that these themes also arise in Anabaptist mission discourse. The third section presents the case of Mennonite Church Nigeria and Mennonite Board of Missions, showing the partnership paradigm to be a compelling missionary vision while clarifying challenges that may require consideration of additional mission models.
Lay and Ecclesiastical Travelers from Europe to China in the Long 18th Century
In Illusion and Disillusionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age, Eugenio Menegon opens the edited volume with a chapter on "Desire, Truth, and Propaganda: Lay and Ecclesiastical Travelers from Europe to China in the Long Eighteenth Century." The introduction explains: "The letters written by this early modern eighteenth century traveler, the Italian Serafino da San Giovanni Battista (1692-1742) provide a stark contrast to the other travelers and essays in the collection, offering a good starting point for our discussion. Penned as utilitarian documents, these letters were not meant for printed public consumption. The correspondence does not offer lengthy reflections on cultural difference, or the meaning of Serafino's voyage. However, the letters do include reports on the logistics of travel, and relate the difficulties of early modern travel, just before the onset of modernity in travel writing. The focus on the material reality in Menegon's essay diverges from the literary representations of voyages included in the rest of the volume, but is also linked to them in its exploration of illusion and disillusionment in missionary travel and activities."
Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled
A 17th-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds
The Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College will host a presentation of the recently published book Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled (Columbia University Press, 2018), a strikingly original work and a major contribution to East Asian, transnational, and global history, with important implications for historical approaches and methodologies. Dominic Sachsenmaier explores the mid-seventeenth-century world and the worldwide flows of ideas through the lens of a Chinese Christian’s life (Zhu Zongyuan), combining the local, regional, and global. In his book, he argues that particularly a combination of micro- and macro-historical perspectives can help us understand how large power systems impacted religious life on the ground. It can also help us raise new questions about the complex and often contradictory set of foreign and domestic forces that framed the history of Christianity in seventeenth-century China.
Friday, October 5, 2018, 12 - 2 p.m.
Boston College
Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies
Ground level of Simboli Hall
9 Lake Street
Brighton, MA 02135
A light lunch provided
RSVP iajs@bc.edu
Dominic Sachsenmaier holds a chair professorship in “Modern China with a Special Emphasis on Global Historical Perspectives” at Göttingen University, Germany. He has held faculty positions at Jacobs University Bremen, Duke University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dominic Sachsenmaier is the president of the US-based Toynbee Prize Foundation, and he is an elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is also one of the three editors of the book series Columbia Studies in International and Global History (Columbia UP).
Colonialism, Christianity, and Personhood in Africa
"Africans labor under the weight of a crisis of personhood, self-identity, and a split self that is a legacy of Christianity and colonialism," Nimi Wariboko argues. In his recent publication, "Colonialism, Christianity and Personhood," which appears in the Blackwell Companion to African History, edited by William H. Worger, Charles Ambler and Nwando Achebe, Wariboko explores the dual nature of African identity, its source in African tradition and Western colonialism and the spread of Christianity. He ends in hopeful expectation that the twin forces within the African self will no longer stand in opposition to one another, but begin to create a new combination.
Beyond Secular Democracy: Religion, Politics, and Modernity
The presumed relationship between secularism and democracy is precisely that, presumed, argues Jeremy Menchik, CGCM faculty associate, in a recent journal article challenging common convention.
Menchik’s article, entitled “Beyond Secular Democracy: Religion, Politics, and Modernity,” was published in the July 2018 edition of International Studies Review.
From the abstract of the article:
This review essay synthesizes fifteen years of scholarship challenging the presumed relationship between secularism and democracy—that state secularism provides the normative or institutional baseline for modern governance. The idea that states and societies become more secular as they develop economically is no longer supported by most social scientists, including its original proponents. Sociologists and anthropologists have increasingly studied secularism as a project, rather than a teleological process embedded in modernization, and the new scholarship on “comparative secularisms” demonstrates that the manifestations of secularism are complicated and varied. Despite these advances, the new scholarship suffers from insufficient attention to the measurement challenges posed by the diverse content of religion. And while scholars continue to debate the content and characteristics of our secular age, all of the recent scholarship highlights important differences between traditional and modern religion. In view of the current state of the literature, this essay lays out an agenda for research on religion and modernity, or on modernization without secularization.
Jeremy Menchik’s research interests include comparative politics, religion and politics, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. His first book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explains the meaning of tolerance to the world’s largest Islamic organizations and was the winner of the 2017 International Studies Association award for the best book on religion and international relations. He has received numerous awards and fellowships for teaching and research, and his work has appeared in the academic journals Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Politics, International Studies Review, Politics and Religion, and South East Asia Research as well as in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
Soft Separation Democracy
Many countries have created a "soft separation" between church and state rather than a wall as in the U.S. Jeremy Menchik, CGCM faculty associate, published a recent journal article examining the phenomenon.
The article focused on states where there is religious education in state schools, significant financial support for religious traditions, limitations on the freedom of nontraditional faiths, and where public opinion favors strong support for religion in public life and state policies. These states–Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, India, Indonesia, and Switzerland–demonstrate the need for scholars of democracy to look beyond secularism as the normative or institutional baseline for modern governance.
Menchik’s article, entitled “Soft Separation Democracy,” was published in Politics and Religion on June 26, 2018.
From the abstract of the article:
How do nonsecular democracies govern religion? Despite two decades of research on the many ways that church and state overlap in modern democracies, scholars lack an adequate answer to this question. Many consolidated democracies have a soft separation between church and state rather than a wall. These are not defective versions of democracy, but rather poorly understood institutional arrangements. To remedy this lacuna, this paper investigates institutional arrangements in six consolidated democracies with a soft separation between church and state: Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, India, Indonesia, and Switzerland. After describing the institutional workings of these states, the paper develops hypotheses for the origins of soft separation democracy as well as addressing the challenges of this form of government. The paper concludes by suggesting three other potentially fruitful lines of analysis as well as elucidating the implications of soft separation democracy for U.S. foreign policy.
Jeremy Menchik’s research interests include comparative politics, religion and politics, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. His first book, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explains the meaning of tolerance to the world’s largest Islamic organizations and was the winner of the 2017 International Studies Association award for the best book on religion and international relations. He has received numerous awards and fellowships for teaching and research, and his work has appeared in the academic journals Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Politics, International Studies Review, Politics and Religion, and South East Asia Research as well as in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
Business and Mission in 19th Century Africa
The "Impact of Business Practices and Ethos on Mission," cannot be ignored, Nimi Wariboko argues in his recent publication on "Liverpool Merchants in 19th-century Niger Delta." It is an extension of his ongoing work on the intersection between Christianity and economics.