A separate Canaan

Why so many postcolonial churches today? One reason may be that the "universalism of the Gospel" taught by Europeans did not always translate/lead into a redefinition of social, economic, status boundaries.

Result: enslaved or colonized people remained both "connected and separated by the Christian faith".

A "separate Canaan"....

Without challenging systemic injustice and economic exploitation.

To bring light on this issue from a Colonial North-American perspective, let's remind this brilliant book published in 1998 by John Sensbach:

"Based on German church documents, including dozens of rare biographies of black Moravians, A Separate Canaan is the first full-length study of contact between people of German and African descent in early America. Exploring the fluidity of race in Revolutionary era America, it highlights the struggle of African Americans to secure their fragile place in a culture unwilling to give them full human rights. In the early nineteenth century, white Moravians forsook their spiritual inclusiveness, installing blacks in a separate church. Just as white Americans throughout the new republic rejected African American equality, the Moravian story illustrates the power of slavery and race to overwhelm other ideals".

Link

Asia and the secular

This afternoon, I was fortunate enough to attend the GSRL's monthly research seminar at Campus Condorcet.

We enjoyed a remarkable presentation of this book :

Asia and the Secular, Francophone Perspectives in a Global Age

• Edited by: Pascal Bourdeaux , Eddy Dufourmont , André Laliberté and Rémy Madinier

This volume looks at the secular state in the context of contemporary Asia and investigates whether there existed before modernity antecedents to the condition of secularity, understood as the differentiation of the sphere of the religious from other spheres of social life. The chapters presented in this book examine this issue in national contexts by looking at the historical formation of lexicons that defined the "secular", the "secular state," and "secularism". This approach requires paying attention to modern vernacular languages and their precedents in written traditions with often a very long tradition. This book presents three interpretive frameworks: multiple modernities, variety of secularisms, and typologies of post-colonial secular states.

Link

Protestantism in Spain: tribute to Frances Luttikhuizen

As Protestantism (mainly Evangelical/Pentecostal) is growing in Spain, let's not forget Frances Luttikhuizen, an English Philology lecturer, writer, and researcher of Protestantism, who passed away in Barcelona this last summer 2022.

Her main fields of interest included the history of translation, linguistic awareness, Cervantes' works, and the Spanish Reformation.

Among Luttikhuizen’s most important works is the book España y la Reforma Protestante (Spain and the Protestant Reformation, 2018, 468p (link), of which Spanish theologian José Moreno Berrocal has said it is “a work that represents a before and after in the studies of the Reformation in Spain (...).

There is a wealth of data and ideas that will make this book a constant and obligatory reference work”. 

Some reviews of this book are available, mostly in Spanish, including in this History of Philosophy publication (link)

Thank you Evangelical Focus for this obituary (link)