Beyond Conversion and Syncretism

Beyond Conversion and Syncretism PDF Author: avid,
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857452185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
The globalization of Christianity, its spread and appeal to peoples of non- European origin, is by now a well-known phenomenon. Scholars increasingly realize the importance of natives rather than foreign missionaries in the process of evangelization. This volume contributes to the understanding of this process through case studies of encounters with Christianity from the perspectives of the indigenous peoples who converted. More importantly, by exploring overarching, general terms such as conversion and syncretism and by showing the variety of strategies and processes that actually take place, these studies lead to a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural religious interactions in general—from acceptance to resistance—thus enriching the vocabulary of religious interaction. The contributors tackle these issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—history, anthropology, religious studies—and present a broad geographical spread of cases from China, Vietnam, Australia, India, South and West Africa, North and Central America, and the Caribbean.

Beyond Conversion and Syncretism

Beyond Conversion and Syncretism PDF Author: avid,
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857452185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Get Book Here

Book Description
The globalization of Christianity, its spread and appeal to peoples of non- European origin, is by now a well-known phenomenon. Scholars increasingly realize the importance of natives rather than foreign missionaries in the process of evangelization. This volume contributes to the understanding of this process through case studies of encounters with Christianity from the perspectives of the indigenous peoples who converted. More importantly, by exploring overarching, general terms such as conversion and syncretism and by showing the variety of strategies and processes that actually take place, these studies lead to a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural religious interactions in general—from acceptance to resistance—thus enriching the vocabulary of religious interaction. The contributors tackle these issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—history, anthropology, religious studies—and present a broad geographical spread of cases from China, Vietnam, Australia, India, South and West Africa, North and Central America, and the Caribbean.

Christianizing Egypt

Christianizing Egypt PDF Author: David Frankfurter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216789
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
How does a culture become Christian, especially one that is heir to such ancient traditions and spectacular monuments as Egypt? This book offers a new model for envisioning the process of Christianization by looking at the construction of Christianity in the various social and creative worlds active in Egyptian culture during late antiquity. As David Frankfurter shows, members of these different social and creative worlds came to create different forms of Christianity according to their specific interests, their traditional idioms, and their sense of what the religion could offer. Reintroducing the term “syncretism” for the inevitable and continuous process by which a religion is acculturated, the book addresses the various formations of Egyptian Christianity that developed in the domestic sphere, the worlds of holy men and saints’ shrines, the work of craftsmen and artisans, the culture of monastic scribes, and the reimagination of the landscape itself, through processions, architecture, and the potent remains of the past. Drawing on sermons and magical texts, saints’ lives and figurines, letters and amulets, and comparisons with Christianization elsewhere in the Roman empire and beyond, Christianizing Egypt reconceives religious change—from the “conversion” of hearts and minds to the selective incorporation and application of strategies for protection, authority, and efficacy, and for imagining the environment.

World Christianity and Indigenous Experience

World Christianity and Indigenous Experience PDF Author: David Lindenfeld
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108917070
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 427

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Book Description
In this book, David Lindenfeld proposes a new dimension to the study of world history. Here, he explores the global expansion of Christianity since 1500 from the perspectives of the indigenous people who were affected by it, and helped change it, giving them active agency. Integrating the study of religion into world history, his volume surveys indigenous experience in colonial Latin America, Native North America, Africa and the African diaspora, the Middle East, India, East Asia, and the Pacific. Lindenfeld demonstrates how religion is closely interwoven with political, economic, and social history. Wide-ranging in scope, and offering a synoptic perspective of our interconnected world, Lindenfeld combines in-depth analysis of individual regions with comprehensive global coverage. He also provides a new vocabulary, with a spectrum ranging from resistance to acceptance and commitment to Christianity, that articulates the range and complexity of the indigenous conversion experience. Lindenfeld's cross-cultural reflections provide a compelling alternative to the Western narrative of progressive development.

Whose Religion Is Christianity?

Whose Religion Is Christianity? PDF Author: Lamin Sanneh
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802821645
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
An analysis of the growth of global Christianity.

After-Mission, Beyond Evangelicalism

After-Mission, Beyond Evangelicalism PDF Author: Najib George Awad
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900444436X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
After-Mission touches on on three questions.The first question is about self-perception and identity-formation strategies, and the various views that we have on the Protestants’ relation to their Arab Muslim Middle Eastern context. This will furnish the basis for the ensuing parts, as it will provide the study with coherent and analytical readings of the cultural situation and intellectual views of the Arab Eastern Protestants in their Sitz im Leben from the perspective of the hermeneutic tripod of ‘identity–othering–relationality’. The second question, about the theological dimension, asks what kind of a theological discourse do the Protestants need to develop, and how do they need to re-form their own theological heritage, in such a manner that will allow them to heal the historical enmity and suspicion towards them from the Eastern Orthodox Christian community in the region? How should they re-think their traditional view on theological subjects common to them and the Eastern Christian tradition? Traditional Protestant attitudes towards Eastern Christianity, which have been viewed through the lens of evangelicalism and mission, have failed to grant the Protestants an influential and truly indigenous presence in the region and have led to them being constantly accused of being a foreign transplant and alien entity. In the light of this, it is clear that going beyond missiology and traditional evangelicalism demands re-thinking certain mutually shared but contentious theological subjects from a new perspective with the focus on more constructive attempts to build fellowship through dialogue. Finally, the third question touches on the Protestants’ future in the Arab Muslim Middle East by viewing this inquiry from a broader perspective that is related to all the Middle Eastern Christian communities’ presence and role in the Muslim-majority context. It will discuss questions about the kind of presence and role that Christians, Protestants included, should hope to play in order to guarantee survival and a continuing presence in the region. The question of identity formation, and the managing of difference without trapping it in the mud of ‘otherizing and self-otherizing’, will also be tackled, so that the theological dimension is integrated with the broader, multifaceted contextual one.

Sainthood and Race

Sainthood and Race PDF Author: Molly H. Bassett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131780872X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In popular imagination, saints exhibit the best characteristics of humanity, universally recognizable but condensed and embodied in an individual. Recent scholarship has asked an array of questions concerning the historical and social contexts of sainthood, and opened new approaches to its study. What happens when the category of sainthood is interrogated and inflected by the problematic category of race? Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh explores this complicated relationship by examining two distinct characteristics of the saint’s body: the historicized, marked flesh and the universal, holy flesh. The essays in this volume comment on this tension between particularity and universality by combining both theoretical and ethnographic studies of saints and race across a wide range of subjects within the humanities. Additionally, the book’s group of emerging and established religion scholars enhances this discussion of sainthood and race by integrating topics such as gender, community, and colonialism across a variety of historical, geographical, and religious contexts. This volume raises provocative questions for scholars and students interested in the intersection of religion and race today.

A Mission Divided

A Mission Divided PDF Author: Dr Kirstie Close-Barry
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1925022862
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book provides insight into the long process of decolonisation within the Methodist Overseas Missions of Australasia, a colonial institution that operated in the British colony of Fiji. The mission was a site of work for Europeans, Fijians and Indo-Fijians, but each community operated separately, as the mission was divided along ethnic lines in 1901. This book outlines the colonial concepts of race and culture, as well as antagonism over land and labour, that were used to justify this separation. Recounting the stories told by the mission’s leadership, including missionaries and ministers, to its grassroots membership, this book draws on archival and ethnographic research to reveal the emergence of ethno-nationalisms in Fiji, the legacies of which are still being managed in the post-colonial state today. ‘Analysing in part the story of her own ancestors, Kirstie Barry develops a fascinating account of the relationship between Christian proselytization and Pacific nationalism, showing how missionaries reinforced racial divisions between Fijian and Indo-Fijian even as they deplored them. Negotiating the intersections between evangelisation, anthropology and colonial governance, this is a book with resonance well beyond its Fijian setting.’ – Professor Alan Lester, University of Sussex ‘This thoroughly researched and finely crafted book unwraps and finely illustrates the interwoven layers of evolving complexity in different interpretations of ideals and debates on race, culture, colonialism and independence that informed the way the Methodist Mission was run in Fiji. It describes the human personalities and practicalities, interconnected at local, regional and global levels, which influenced the shaping of the Mission and the independent Methodist Church in Fiji. It documents the influence of evolving anthropological theories and ecumenical theological understandings of culture on mission practice. The book’s rich sources enhance our understanding of the complex history of ethnic relations in Fiji, helping to explain why ethnic divisive thinking remains a challenge.’– Jacqueline Ryle, University of the South Pacific ‘A beautifully researched study of the transnational impact of South Asian bodies on nationalisms and church devolution in Fiji, and an important resource for empire studies as a whole.’ – Professor Jane Samson, University of Alberta, Canada

Compel People to Come In

Compel People to Come In PDF Author: Autori Vari
Publisher: Viella Libreria Editrice
ISBN: 883313427X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
“Compelle intrare”: since the time of St Augustine, St Luke’s words in the parable of the Banquet have served as a justification for forced conversion to Christianity. Challenging this tradition, in 1686 Pierre Bayle denounced how a literal interpretation of the parable had led to a long line of crimes, and argued that “nothing is more abominable than obtaining conversion by coercion”. In recent decades, scholarly research on conversion in the Early Modern Age has increasingly focused on intriguing aspects such as the fluidity of converts’ identity and their crossing of borders – both geographical and confessional. This book takes a different perspective and brings the focus back to the dark side of conversion, to the varying degrees of violence that accompanied Catholic missionary activities in the non-European World in the 16th and 17th centuries. The essays collected here examine three areas where, sometimes visibly, sometimes much more subtly, the violent aspects of conversion took shape: doctrine, missionary practice, and the conversion narratives. Investigating the connection between violence and conversion is a way to reflect not only on the early modern world, but also on that of the present day, when conversion – including by coercion – has yet again become a significant issue.

From Christ to Confucius

From Christ to Confucius PDF Author: Albert Monshan Wu
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300217072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z

Indigenous Evangelists and Questions of Authority in the British Empire 1750-1940

Indigenous Evangelists and Questions of Authority in the British Empire 1750-1940 PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004299343
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This is the first full-length historical study of indigenous evangelists across a range of societies, geographical regions and colonial regimes and the first to focus on the complex issues of authority surrounding the evangelists. It answers a need frequently voiced in recent studies of Christian missions. Most scholars now acknowledge that the remarkable expansion of Christianity in Africa, Asia and the Pacific in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owed far more to the efforts of indigenous preachers than to the foreign missionaries who loom so large in publications. This book addresses that concern making an excellent introduction to the role of indigenous evangelists in the spread of Christianity, and the many countervailing pressures with which these individuals had to contend. It also includes in the introductory discussions useful statements of the current state of scholarship and theoretical debates in this field.