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Langham is one ot the major publishers providing today fresh quality content from skilled African authors.
Social science researchers would greatly benefit from paying closer attention to the many good books released each year, including this one: written by Eraston Kambale Kighoma from a Christian scholarly point of view, this missiology study is worth reading.
It provides a deep insight into the way Baptist churches in Congo dealt with the war in Eastern Congo between 1990 and 2011.
This article outlines and discusses two aspects of the French mediatization of Tu ne tueras point (Hacksaw Ridge) film: the relationship between media, normative secularism and religion in the context of the hegemony of mediatization as ‘media and communication-centered’ phenomenon.
Based on the content analysis and discursive strategies of the biographical war drama chronicles, the contribution points out less developed empirical aspects in France regarding the relation between religion and media:
(a) the media discourse is dependent on a normative narrative of secularism,
(b) the media discourse represents and expresses a confusion between the sacred, religion and faith, deliberately created and maintained by the journalists, and (c) the media discourse is based on a conception of violence with modern origins.
Early Pentecostal revivals swept through Canadian communities, big and small, in the early 1900s. .. Following these revival meetings, Pentecostals organized, built churches, and expanded across the country, while many churches were beginning to decline. How did these Pentecostal "holy rollers" move from the fringe to take centre stage in Canada's religious landscape?
After the Revival offers a state-of-the-art review of the academic study of Canadian Pentecostalism.
"Using the concept of a “religious market”, this volume explores how African Traditional Religions and churches within Prophetic Pentecostalism in Zimbabwe seek to attract and retain members and clients.
Chapters provide extensive coverage of two of the leading churches, namely, Emmanuel Makandiwa's United Family International Church (UFIC) and Walter Magaya's Prophetic Healing and Deliverance Ministries (PHD)"
Innovation and Competition in Zimbabwean Pentecostalism is an important contribution to understanding the marketization of religion.
he increasing appropriation by Charismatic Evangelicals of Jewish narratives, rituals, and even Zionist anxieties is now evident in many parts of the globe. Drawing on two cases, one based on a Brazilian Neo-Pentecostal church and another based on an ethnographic investigation of a ‘Judaizing Evangelical’ community in Brazil this study interrogates to what extent we can comprehend this emerging tendency within Brazilian Charismatic Evangelicalism...
This article centers Black religious women’s activist memoirs, including Mamie Till Mobley’s Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America (2003) and Rep. Lucia Kay McBath’s Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith over Gun Violence: A Mother’s Story (2018), to refocus the narrative of American Evangelicalism and politics around Black women’s authoritative narratives of religious experience, expression, mourning, and activism.
Available in full access here (link)
Pentecostals throughout Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora use music to declare what they believe and where they stand in relation to religious and cultural outsiders. Yet the inclusion of secular music forms like ska, reggae, and dancehall complicates music's place in social and ritual practice, challenging Jamaican Pentecostals to reconcile their religious and cultural identities.
Melvin L. Butler journeys into this crossing of boundaries and its impact on Jamaican congregations and the music they make. Using the concept of flow, Butler's ethnography evokes both the experience of Spirit-influenced performance and the transmigrations that fuel the controversial sharing of musical and ritual resources between Jamaica and the United States.
A rare and important research ! Link
Who did not hear about Prosperity Gospel ? However, even if it's easy and simple to remember, the label misleading.
The more I read (for example, Blessed, from Kate Bowler, and Coleman, The Globalization of Charismatic Christianity) and the more I do field research (In France, Congo, Madagascar Burkina Faso etc), the more I come to realize that there is at least FIVE distinct theologies behind the "Prosperity Gospel" label. In a nutshell, let me share these varieties with you:
-A magico-religious variety
-A performative variety (Word of Faith)
- A gift /countergift version (Mauss)
-A contract variety (Covenant, Laws of the Kingdom)
-A postcolonial version
To be followed....
The Religious Liberty and Covid-19 Research Project is a joint effort by an interdisciplinary group of international scholars, professors, and lawyers who seek to monitor the impact of public health guidelines and restrictions on the worship and faith practices of religious groups and individuals.
The project is initially focused on monitoring developments in the United States and the countries of the European Union, though it may be expanded to include other countries.
Link to know more about this project led by Nicholas Miller and Alexis Artaud de la Ferrière
Historians Anthea Butler and Heather J. Sharkey (picture) and political scientist Michele Margolis share their thoughts on the history of American evangelicals in politics, Trump’s appeal, and what it means for the future of the GOP.
Thank you University of Pennsylvania for sharing these bright analysis.
This article demonstrates how British evangelicals, German pietists, and Hungarian Protestants sought to ‘educate’ the masses outside the educational framework of ecclesiastical and state structures within the Hungarian Kingdom in the nineteenth century. More specifically the study intends to offer a concise overview of the history of Protestants who spread the gospel through the distribution of affordable Bibles, New Testaments and Christian tracts.
To read more, click here (link)
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".
Joseph Prud'homme (Ph.D. Princeton) is the Burton Family Chair in Religion, Politics, and Culture and the Director of the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Washington College in Chestertown, MD, USA.
He just released a very interesting piece of research, "Separation of Church and State, American Exceptionalism, and the Contemporary Social Moment: Viewing Church–State Separation from the Priority of Slavery"
His main point is this :
The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power.
A very much needed scholarly book to put in historical perspective White Evangelical's contemporary positioning.
This is a very exciting news ! Thanks to the great work already completed by Karina Wendling, a bright French PhD. candidate from the GSRL research team, a GSRL-CNRS International Conference will be held in Paris next october 2021, with Prof. Paul Freston, Prof André Gagné and PhD. Tobias Kremer as keynote speakers.
Research on Evangelicalism being at the heart of current events, the goal of this international conference will be to broaden the field by crossing analysis and observations in order to better identify the dynamics at work in the Christian world. Religion and politics will be the main focus, through the particular lense of the Christian Right.
The preliminary program is already available here: link
Thanks to @ForeignPolicy, here is a slightly more nuanced & balanced piece than what we've read recently on the notion of #Laicite (secularism) in #France.I
n Western Europe, populist radical right parties are calling for a return to Christian or Judeo-Christian values and identity. The growing electoral success of many of these parties may suggest that, after decades of secularisation, Western Europeans are returning to religion. Yet these parties do not tell their supporters to go to church, believe in God, or practise traditional Christian values. Instead, they claim that their respective national identities and cultures are the product of a Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition which either encompasses—or has produced—secular modernity.
A new book written by Nicholas Morieson. Link.
While French laïcité is often considered something fixed, its daily deployment is rather messy. What might we learn if we study the governance of religion from a dynamic bottom-up perspective? Using an ethnographic approach, this book examines everyday secularism in the making. How do city actors understand, frame and govern religious diversity? Which local factors play a role in those processes? In Urban Secularism: Negotiating Religious Diversity in Europe, Julia Martínez-Ariño brings the reader closer to the entrails of laïcité. She provides detailed accounts of the ways religious groups, city officials, municipal employees, secularist actors and other civil-society organisations negotiate concrete public expressions of religion.
To read more, and order Dr. Julia Martinez-Arino's book, click here (link)
Visiting the French Protestant Historical Society (SHPF), rue des Saints Pères, Paris, on the day French Prime Minister announced a third lock-down.
Major representatives of the three branches of French Christianity, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox speak out in a column published in the daily Le Figaro yesterday.
They warn about the current "separatism bill" and the threat of an increased State control over churches and religions.
For them, freedom is at stake.
If the growing English-speaking litterature that has arisen in the recend decades aims at "materializing" or more precisely "re-materializing" the study of religious facts, in France, the dynamism of this approach has been remarkable through numerous publications over the past five years.
To know more, click here (link).
France's particular brand of secularism, known as "laïcité", is considered a backbone of the French Republic. And yet this separation of church and state is a touchy subject and often misunderstood. Its backers say it's the glue that lets the French live together in harmony despite their differences, but critics say it's anti-religious and increasingly used to stigmatise Muslims. So what exactly is "laïcité" and is it compatible with a modern multicultural society? Florence Villeminot and Genie Godula take a closer look in this episode of French Connections Plus.
As you already know, I did study French Baptist history for my Ph.D (defended in Sorbonne EPHE in 1998). I've decided to review (and improve) two old Powerpoint presentations.
The first one is historical and chronological. It explains the four steps of French Baptist implantation, from 1800s to 1950s.
The second one is a thematic presentation, using both sociology and history, in order to highlight the social distinctives of Baptist churches (and individuals) in French society.
These two slideshows are in French. They may require some effort to be read and understood but the effort is worth it!
The first slideshow can be seen here : Link to historical slides
The second slideshow can be seen here : Link to thematic slides
This is the first work devoted to the history of the Reformed Church of France, from its rebirth in the 20th century on the ashes of the Concordant Church to the union between the Reformed and Lutherans in 2013.
This Reformed Church embodies a particular presence in the world, carried by a strong identity.
A must-read book édited by a prestigious publishing house, which hopefully may be translated in English, at least partially ! Congrats to the authors.
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).
The French national motto is Freedom, Equality, Fraternity.
Will the current French government remember its first word, "Freedom"?
As it is heading toward a new law targeting "separatism", concerns rise.
Evangelical Protestants are approximately 665 million in the world at the beginning of the year 2021, according to this annual global statistical overview I am glad to share with you.
This release also gives the opportunity to highlight some of recent published research. Books have been slightly less numerous in 2020 ("Covid19 effect" was felt on the the last semester).
The data in PDF are available here (link) and they are presented in video below via Youtube.
This one is in french but I'd love some day to do one in english. To be followed....
Did you know that there were Baptist churches in France before Baptist churches started in Texas ?
Baptist beginnings trace back to 1820, with several Believer's baptisms in Nomain (North of France). One year after (1821), the first French Baptist congregation started in Aix, a very small village near Nomain.
Due to the current pandemia, French Baptists could not really mark this 200th Anniversary properly. However, this French Baptist bicentenary remains a significant step towards a more diverse French religious landscape.
As I did study this particular French Baptist history for my Ph.D (defended in Sorbonne EPHE in 1998), I've decided to review (and improve) an old Powerpoint presentation which explains the four steps of French Baptist implantation, from 1800s to 1950s.
Although this presentation is in french, the many pictures and sources may be of some interest to English-speaking lovers of Protestant History.
Debates do NER is a Brazilian biannual journal, created in 1997 on the initiative of the Center for the Study of Religion (NER), of the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).
Debates do NER is currently one of the most important vehicles for disseminating research related to the Social Sciences of Religion in Mercosur. Thanks to my Brazilian colleagues Marcelo Camurça and Emerson Giumbelli, whom I warmly thank, I had the opportunity to publish in 2020 a comparative historical study on Evangelicalism, USA vs Brazil.
