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Just released : Edited by Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado, this Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions offers...
A must-have ! Link
Building from a behind-the-scenes case study of Kenya's Nairobi Chapel and its "daughter" Mavuno Church, Dr. Wanjiru M. Gitau's book expands their story into a narrative that offers analysis of the rise, growth, and place of megachurches worldwide in the new millennium.
The author helps us rethink what African megachurches can be – and what we can learn out of the American framework. Gitau shows that recognizing the psychological, spiritual, and social destabilization of modernizing societies is the first step to valuing the place of megachurches in contemporary Christianity. The book won the 2019 Christianity Today’s book of the year award in the Global Missions category.
A must-read.
Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East.
Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems?
To know more, read Emily Conroy-Krutz ,Missionary Diplomacy Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024).
Congrats Emily!
"In the decades following the era of decolonization, global Christianity experienced a seismic shift.
While Catholicism and Protestantism have declined in their historic European strongholds, they have sustained explosive growth in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
This demographic change has established Christians from the Global South as an increasingly dominant presence in modern Christian thought, culture, and politics. (...)
Contributors argue that the collapse of colonialism and broader cultural challenges to Western power fostered new organizations, theologies, and political engagements across the world, ultimately setting Christianity on its current trajectory away from its colonial heritage."
Thank you Elizabeth A. Foster and Udi Greenberg for this major collective work.
A GSRL program led by Pascal Bourdeaux and Sebastien Fath (GSRL)
321 million people worldwide are able to express themselves in French (OIF data 2023).
From a social sciences perspective, these French-speaking spaces lead us to think differently about religious interaction and dynamics. The French-speaking global framework (including Africa, Americas, Asia, Carribean isles, Pacific islands....) invites to reshape analysis beyond a hexagonal prism (French-centered) that remained hegemonic for long.
Deploying the analysis of religion in society in this French-speaking and postcolonial space-time, such is the purpose of this program “Religion and Francophonie (French-speaking world)”.
This blog gathers information related to the MISTIC research program (Migrations of religious specialists and transnational construction of competence) financed by the French Collaborative Institute on Migrations (CNRS).
This research program focuses on the migration and transnational circulation of religious specialists of various faiths.
This issue of Studies in World Christianity includes a look at some of the papers from the 2022 Yale–Edinburgh Conference on ‘World Christianity: Legacy and the State of the Field’.
Together, these articles very much pay tribute to the pioneering work of Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh and the Yale–Edinburgh Group. But they also demonstrate the ways in which the ideas which gave birth to the field of World Christianity have been generative across a multiplicity of disciplines to open up new ways of understanding Christianity.
Evangelical Christianity is known for its defence of traditional Christian teachings and resistance to liberalizing trends. Many Western evangelicals themselves do not yet realize how their faith is being reshaped by the modern zeitgeist.
Caught in the Current explores how and why Western evangelicals are changing. Church attendance is declining, conservative moral positions are unpopular, and young people are drifting away from the faith. Evangelism is avoided, so few are joining congregations. Yet these surface changes are only symptoms of a more profound shift that church leaders have not fully apprehended.
According to a vast global study published in The Guardian,
"By 2100, the Lagos- Abidjan stretch is projected to be the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people".
Among these people living in the World's biggest megalopolis, millions and millions of young French-speaking African citizens impacted by post-colonial Christianity and revivalism....in a context of massive Global warming, which is directly threatening the megalopolis, boosting people to leave.
Cf. Howard W. French, "Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century"
As the amount of research on Christian Nationalism is growing rapidly (for good reasons), let's not forget that Evangelicalism per se can't be simply coined as a whole as "nationalist". A very robust internationalist and transnational trend can be noticed all over its contemporary history, including on the US ground.
Time to remind readers of this highly valuable piece of research published by David P. King in 2019 on one of the World's biggest humanitarian NGO today : World Vision.
"Chronicling the evolution of World Vision's practices, theology, rhetoric, and organizational structure, King demonstrates how the organization rearticulated and retained its Christian identity even as it expanded beyond a narrow American evangelical subculture".
Good news! Annette Joseph-Gabriel's landmark book entitled Reimagining Liberation: how Black women transformed citizenship in the French Empire, (Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2019, 262 p) has now been translated in French. And will be available as soon as the beginning of May, 2023.
From the Cold War to the present day, the rise of white Evangelical Christianity in America has brought religion clearly into the public sphere. A must-watch: this three-part documentary (from ARTE Channel) on how the politico-religious machine of US white evangelicalism is determined to reshape USA.... and the world (with the participation of the sociologist Philippe Gonzalez).
Professor at Lausanne University (Switzerland), Jörg Stolz was invited today for the GSRL monthly seminar.
He spoke about the secularization process from an international perspective.
An occasion to remind that he was among the editors of this important book:
Stolz, J., Könemann, J., Schneuwly Purdie, M., Englberger, T. and Krüggeler, M. (2016). (Un)Believing in modern society. Religion, spirituality, and religious-secular competition. London: Routledge.
Edited by Jonathan Laurence, this new book on Secularism in Comparative perspective
Includes many non-Western experiences and viewpoints on how secularism is theorized and lived
Featuring the writing of preeminent scholars – such as Michael Walzer, Asma Afsaruddin, Sudipta Kaviraj AND Carol Ferrara, who wrote an essay on France, which provides a thorough history of the 1789 French Revolution, Church-state relations, colonialism, and education, and how the intersection of these elements with the evolution of French secularism led to modern-day laïcité
Edited by Janet Wootton, "Women in Christianity in the Age of Empire (1800-1920)" offers a broad view of the nineteenth century as a time of dramatic change, particularly for women, critiqued in the light of postcolonial theory.
This edited volume includes important contributions from academics in the field.
Overarching themes include the cult of domesticity, the changing impact of Christianity on views of women's nature in an age of scientific thinking, conflation of 'gospel' and 'civilization' in global mission, and the exclusion of women from public spheres of life."
As Alexandre Antoine (EPHE-PSL) is going to defend tomorrow his PhD Thesis on the History of the Assemblies of God in France (1909-1968), it's time to highlight this stimulating European research network on Pentecostalism:
The European Research Network on Global Pentecostalism (GloPent) is an interdisciplinary academic networking initiative coordinated by experts on Pentecostal and Charismatic movements at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Basel, the University of Birmingham, the University of Cambridge, the University of Heidelberg, SOAS University of London, and the University of Uppsala.
We are interested in:
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
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.
Combining religious studies with ethnography, Powerful Devices (forthcoming) explores Nigerian Pentecostals and US Evangelicals’ praxis of transnational spiritual warfare.
By closely studying spiritual warfare prayers as a “device,” Powerful Devices shows how the rituals of prayer enable an apprehension of time, paradigms of self-enhancement, and the subversion of politics and authority.
Abimbola Adunni Adelakun explores charismatic Christianity’s relationship to science and secular authority, technology and temporality, neoliberalism, and reactionary ideology.
To be noticed !
The Center for Afro-European and Religious Studies (or CARES) is born.
The CARES is a Center for Afro-European Studies and Religious Sciences attached to the University Faculty of Protestant Theology of Brussels (FUTP).
Congratulations to Dr and Dean Bernard Coyault for this new -and much needed- research center.
At the beginning of the 19th century, more than 90% of Christians lived in Europe and North America. By the end of the 20th century, over 60% lived in Asia, Africa, South America and the Pacific.
The historian and missiologist Andrew Walls was among the first to highlight and study this shift in the Christian centre of gravity. Professor Andrew Walls (1928-2021) passed away in Aberdeen less than one year ago, on the 12th of August, 2021. This prominent Scottish historian of missions left for us groundbreaking research, re-centering Christianity from West to South. Author of many insightful books, he has taught in universities in Africa (Sierra Leone, Nigeria), Europe and North America, and has also lectured in Asia and the Pacific region.
Founder of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity located at the University of Edinburgh, Andew Walls was considered by many as a "Baobab", rooted, mighty and generous.
The news came today that the Andrew Walls Fellowships have been established in honour of jim. It will provide visiting Fellowships for African scholars at the University of Edinburgh, to further research into African Christianity.
Former secretary of State (USA), Madeleine Albright (1937- 2022)i s gone.
She left a mixed legacy of strong committment to Democracy worldwide, but also of ambiguous global interventionism (including strong support for embargo on Irak, indirectly leading to DAESH's birth).
Smart and well-trained, interested by the role of Faith on Geopolitics, she published a significant book in 2006.
Its title : The Mighty and the Almighty. Introduced by President Bill Clinton.
In that book, she argued that politics and religious values can work together to promote peace. In her seventeenth chapter about Africa, she pleaded for a better training for diplomats, who should take faith seriously. A good lesson that applies to French diplomats too.
The presence of people of African descent in Europe is generally viewed through the prism of slavery and colonization, obscuring a much older shared history.
In her new book African Europeans, An Untold Story, Professor Olivette Otele uncovers a forgotten past, from Emperor Septimius Severus, to enslaved Africans living in Europe during the Renaissance, and all the way to present-day migrants moving to Europe’s cities.
With a forthcoming translation in French. A must-read book !
Just a few days ago, Yvan Castanou, a prominent megachurch pastor (IMpact Centre Chrétien, ICC) based in the Paris' suburbs, met in Lagos Bishop David Oyedepo, Nigeria's most powerful Evangelical pastor.
The go-between was pastor Matthew Ashimolowo, megachurch pastor based in London (Kingsway International church).
This kind of connection doesn't come by accident. It is a testimony of a much larger movement going on: Evangelical/Neopentecostal Revival is on the way in the global French-speaking world, connecting more than ever before the strongest English-speaking and French-speaking networks.
To know more about African Evangelical networks in Europe from a French-speaking persoective, read Fancello and Mary (link).
An international conference not to be missed! Research on evangelicals being at the heart of current events, the objective of this international conference will be to broaden the field by crossing analyses and observations in order to better identify the dynamics at work in the Christian world on the level of interactions between religion and politics.
The conference intends to put forward early career researchers. Papers will be in French or in English, to be followed by ensuing publications.
Anthropologist Devaka Premawardhana arrived in Africa to study the much reported "explosion" of Pentecostalism, the spread of which has indeed been massive. It is the continent's fastest growing form of Christianity and one of the world's fastest growing religious movements.
Yet Premawardhana found no evidence for this in the province of Mozambique where he worked. His research suggests that much can be gained by including such places in the story of global Christianity, by shifting attention from the well-known places where Pentecostal churches flourish to the unfamiliar places where they fail.
A must-read book (link)
From industrial policy and nuclear power to "strategic autonomy" and the 35-hour week, the 2020s are popularising many French instincts about world affairs and the state.
Thank you Jeremy Cliffe for this stimulating analysis (NewStatesman)
Bright French author of many books, Washington Post monthly columnist and powerful anti-racism activist, award-winning filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo is one of the major French figures of the new intellectual generation.
Tired to still face the same gap between the so-called "universalist" French republican values and the reality of remaining discriminations, she is one of the leading advocates of social and cultural mixity and tolerance.
She's fighting for an applied version of Human Rights at all levels of French society. In a nutshell, she does not want to be payed with words, and is pleading for day-to-day translation of the French motto "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity".
This scholarly book is the published version of a PhD dissertation submitted by Dr Samir Boulos in 2013 at the University of Zurich.
It is a well-researched attempt at understanding the interactions of three European Evangelical missions (two of them British, and one German) active in Egypt in colonial, late colonial and post colonial contexts, from a cultural studies perspective. Here are these missionary institutions :the German Sudan Pioneer-Mission, the English Mission College in Cairo (dependent on the Church of England), and the (British) Egypt General Mission.
These institutions were committed to diverse forms of missionary actions. The main aspects were education through schools, and health, both through hospitals and family health advice intended for mothers. The full book's review from Philippe Bourmaud is available here (Social Sciences and Missions, link).