Canadian Pentecostals (Brill)

Significant book !

"The Canadian Pentecostal Experience includes eighteen essays organized into three themes: 1) Historiography and Early Canadian Pentecostalism; 2) Theological Practices and Processes; and 3) Social and Cultural Change. This collection makes a significant contribution to the growing literature of global Pentecostal scholarship.

The works are important for the Canadian context but as the editors argue in the Introduction, Canadian Pentecostalism is “glocal” (shaped by both local and global realities). This collection will interest readers drawn from the wider field of religious studies and global Pentecostalism to initiate conversations about how Pentecostalism evolves in both its local and global expressions"

Link. 

Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions

Just released : Edited by Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado, this Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions offers...

• Comprehensively details a multitude of Caribbean religions in one volume
• Geographic chapters focus on religious practices in complex nations
• Thematic chapters explore a large number of religious traditions

A must-have ! Link

 

Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power

In the popular imagination, Evangelical Christianity is a patriarchal religion whose traditions and lasting legacies perpetuate a singular patriarchal social order.

However, as Lisa Weaver Swartz reveals in this meticulously researched book about women in church leadership in USA, Evangelicalism tells two very different gendered stories—one complementarian and one egalitarian.

Mostly based upon a focus on the training of future Church leaders in two Evangelical flagship seminaries, Southern Baptist and Ashbury.

As usual with US monographs,(alas), a wide title, but the data is based upon two field research which are not representing the whole diversity of US Evangelicalism, far from that.

Still a really good book to read, thank you Lisa Weaver Swartz !

Link

Exhibiting Evangelicalism (Devin Manzullo-Thomas)

Exhibiting Evangelicalism provides the first account of the growth and development of historical museums created by white evangelical Christians in the United States over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Exploring the histories of the Museum of the Bible, the Billy Graham Center Museum, the Billy Sunday Home, and Park Street Church, Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas illustrates how these sites enabled religious leaders to develop a coherent identity for their fractious religious movement and to claim the centrality of evangelicalism to American history.

Link

Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered Millennials and Social Change in African Perspective

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.

Link

Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies

David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, Chair of Christian Social Ethics at Vrije Universiteit (Free University) Amsterdam, and Senior Research Fellow, International Baptist Theological Study Centre. 

Surveying global politics and modern history, he analyzes in Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies how "Christians have discarded their commitment to democracy and bought into authoritarianism". David Gushee urges his readers to fight back by reviving their "hard-won traditions of congregational democracy, dissident Black Christian politics, and covenantal theology". 

This very important book has been motivated by the shocking events in the U.S. that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. A must-read !

Link.

Trump, White Evangelical Christians, and American Politics

 Trump, White Evangelical Christians, and American Politics, political scientists Anand Edward Sokhey and Paul A. Djupe bring together a wide range of scholars and writers to examine the relationship between former President Donald Trump and white American evangelical Christians.

They argue that, while this relationship―which saw evangelicals supporting a famously unfaithful, materialistic, and irreligious candidate despite self-defining in opposition to these characteristics―prompted many to wonder if Trump himself transformed American evangelical religion in politics, this alliance reflected both change and the outcome of dynamics that were in place or building for decades.

In this book, oppotunity is given to find a welcomed balanced and fair view of the very complex issue of the relationships between White Evangelicals in America and Donald Trump.

A must-read.

Link.

Oxford University Press releases a new book on Christian Zionism

"In Christian Zionism in the Twenty-First Century authors Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin draw on three original surveys conducted in 2018, 2020, and 2021 to explore the religious beliefs and foreign policy attitudes of evangelical and born-again Christians in the United States (...)

Inbari and Bumin demonstrate that a generational divide is emerging within the evangelical community, one that substantially impacts evangelicals' attitudes toward Israel. They also show that frequent church attendance and certain theological beliefs have a profound impact on the evangelicals' preference of Israel over the Palestinians. Throughout, the authors aim to add nuance to the discussion, showing that contemporary evangelical and born-again Christians' attitudes are much more diverse than many portrayals suggest".

 

Just published by Oxford University Press (link)

Birthing Revival

The nineteenth century witnessed a flurry of evangelical and missionary activity in Europe and North America. This was an era of renewed piety and intense zeal spanning denominations and countries. One area of Protestant flourishing in this period has received scant attention in Anglophone sources, however: the French Réveil.

Born of a rich Huguenot heritage but aimed at recovering the religion of the heart, this awakening gave birth to a dynamic missionary movement—and some of its chief agents were women.

To know more about this 2022 scholarly book (Baylor University Press) written by Michèle Miller Sigg, click here

And for a review (in english) of Birthing Revival from French scholar Valérie Duval-Poujol, click here

Missionaries and US Diplomacy in the Nineteenth Century

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!

Link

 

TB Joshua unmasked long ago by Bisola Hephzi-Bah Johnson

Leading the Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN) based in Nigeria, late Prophet T.B. Joshua (1963-2021) has been one of the most prominent African neopentecostal prophet of the last 40 years. The recent BBC documentary reveals he committed systemic abuse on some women and disciples.

 

To the people who challenge BBC's timing and European/white angle, let's remind them that huge evidence was already revealed 4 years ago by Lady Bisola Johnson in a very long TV interview in Abuja to Asabe Afrika TV (a purely African TV) by Lady Bisola Johnson (link).

Evangelist Bisola Hephzi-Bah Johnson, who escaped T.B. Joshua's cult after heavy involvement in the Prophet's first circle, wrote also a very revealing and long 2017 book with enormous evidence (link).

 

Missionaries in the Golden Age of Hollywood

There are not that many authors who publish significant History books over a period of more than 25 years. Professor Douglas Carl Abrams is one of them.

I remember having reviewed in 2001, for the "Archives des Sciences Sociales des Religions", a very good book released by this Historian of contemporary Evangelicalism in USA. It was Selling the Old-Time Religion. American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920-1940, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 2001 (link).

In this year 2023, this lover of France has released another very valuable piece of research related to the same fields (mass culture and US Evangelicalism). It is Missionaries in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Race, Gender, and Spirituality on the Big Screen (Springer, Palgrave MacMillan, 2023).

Congrats and thank you Douglas Carl Abrams.

Link

Christianity's American Fate

Christianity’s American Fate (2022) situates the ascendancy of conservative Evangelicalism within the broader transformation of American religion.

"How did American Christianity become synonymous with conservative white evangelicalism? This nuanced and informative work by a leading historian of modern America traces the rise of the evangelical movement and the decline of mainline Protestantism’s influence on American life.

In Christianity’s American Fate, David Hollinger shows how the Protestant establishment, adopting progressive ideas about race, gender, sexuality, empire, and divinity, liberalized too quickly for some and not quickly enough for others. After 1960, mainline Protestantism lost members from both camps―conservatives to evangelicalism and progressives to secular activism".

This book may be also taken as a contribution to the polarization thesis defended, in France, by Philippe Portier, Jean-Paul Willaime and Alain Dieckhoff.

A must-read.

Decolonization and the Remaking of Christianity

"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.

Link

 

A major book on the Geneva Revival

The nineteenth-century international religious movement known as the Reveil had a major impact on Protestantism, and particularly on Evangelicalism. That impact is still evident today. Yet as a multi-faceted phenomenon, this movement has not received its due share of scholarly attention. This book offers a collection of essays exploring the international dimensions of the Genevan strand of the Reveil, providing an overview of events and trends, outlining the careers of some of its key figures, and highlighting some of the areas in which it made a contribution to contemporary society.

COngratulation to Jean Decorvet and the whole team for this major book.

Link.

Black is a church ?

Black Is a Church: Christianity and the Contours of African American Life

The title of this new Josef Sorett's book may be questionable. However, the content is largely worth reading.

"Across four chapters that proceed as chronologically organized episodes, Black is a Church maps the ways in which black American culture and identity has been animated by a particular set of, often unmarked, Protestant logics. In doing so, the book charts the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity constitutive of the content and forms of blackness."

Link

Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Nigeria

Ebenezer Obadare examines the overriding impact of Nigerian Pentecostal pastors on their churches, and how they have shaped the dynamics of state-society relations during Nigeria's Fourth Republic. (...)

In contrast to rapidly eroding pastoral authority in the West, pastoral authority is increasing in Nigeria. This engaging book will appeal to those who want to understand the far-reaching political and social implications of religious movements―especially Christian charismatic and evangelical movements―in contemporary African societies. 

A Book to read ! Link (Notre Dame University Press, 2022)

The Other Evangelicals (Eerdmans, 2023)

For many, the answer is "white," "patriarchal," "conservative," or "fundamentalist"--but as Isaac B. Sharp reveals, the "big tent" of evangelicalism has historically been much bigger than we've been led to believe. In The Other Evangelicals, Sharp brings to light the stories of those twentieth-century evangelicals who didn't fit the mold, including Black, feminist, progressive, and gay Christians.

Though the binary of fundamentalist evangelicals and modernist mainline Protestants is taken for granted today, Sharp demonstrates that fundamentalists and modernists battled over the title of "evangelical" in post-World War II America.

In fact, many ideologies characteristic of evangelicalism today, such as "biblical womanhood" and political conservatism, arose only in reaction to the popularity of evangelical feminism and progressivism.

 

Link

Caught in the Current

Caught in the Current

British and Canadian Evangelicals in an Age of Self-Spirituality

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.

Link

World Vision: God's Internationalists

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". 

Link

Healing and Power in Ghana

African Initiated Churches are not always chronologically postcolonial. Many of them started during the colonization process, and encountered the hostility of the colonizers. This is the case of the oldest Ghanean African Initiated Church, which has been studied by Paul Grant in this remarkable book published in 2020 (Baylor University Press).

In nineteenth-century Ghana, regional warfare rooted in profound social and economic transformations led thousands of displaced people to seek refuge in the small mountain kingdom of Akuapem. There they encountered missionaries from Germany whose message of sin and forgiveness struck many of these newcomers as irrelevant to their needs. However, together with Akuapem's natives, these newcomers began reformulating Christianity as a ritual tool for social and physical healing, as well as power, in a dangerous spiritual and human world. The result was Ghana's oldest African-initiated variant of Christianity: a homegrown expression of unbroken moral, political, and religious priorities.

Link

Imaginer la libération, des femmes noires face à l'Empire

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.

"Black women living in the French empire played a key role in the decolonial movements of the mid-twentieth century. Thinkers and activists, these women lived lives of commitment and risk that landed them in war zones and concentration camps and saw them declared enemies of the state. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel mines published writings and untapped archives to reveal the anticolonialist endeavors of seven women. Though often overlooked today, Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita, and Eslanda Robeson took part in a forceful transnational movement. Their activism and thought challenged France's imperial system by shaping forms of citizenship that encouraged multiple cultural and racial identities. Expanding the possibilities of belonging beyond national and even Francophone borders, these women imagined new pan-African and pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices. The visions they articulated also shifted the idea of citizenship itself, replacing a single form of collective identity and political participation with an expansive plurality of forms of belonging".

Link

(Un)believing in modern society

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.

Lien

Charismatic Healers in Contemporary Africa

Congratulations to Sandra Fancello (Anthology Editor), Alessandro Gusman (Anthology Editor)for this remarkable book.

Based on ethnographic studies conducted in several African countries, this volume analyses the phenomenon of deliverance – which is promoted both in charismatic churches and in Islam as a weapon against witchcraft – in order to clarify the political dimensions of spiritual warfare in contemporary African societies. Deliverance from evil is part and parcel of the contemporary discourse on the struggle against witchcraft in most African contexts. However, contributors show how its importance extends beyond this, highlighting a pluralism of approaches to deliverance in geographically distant religious movements, which coexist in Africa. Against this background, the book reflects on the responsibilities of Pentecostal deliverance politics within the condition of 'epistemic anxiety' of contemporary African societies – to shed light on complex relational dimensions in which individual deliverance is part of a wider social and spiritual struggle.

Spanning across the study of religion, healing and politics, this book contributes to ongoing debates about witchcraft and deliverance in Africa.

Link to the publisher

Prosperity Gospel in Africa

Marius Nel holds the research chair regarding Pentecostalism and Neo-Pentecostalism at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa.

In this scholarly book, written from a pentecostal perspective, the author provides useful insights about the African roots of Prosperity Gospel, which till recently has been far too much related only to US influence. 

"Africans' prevailing interest in the prosperity gospel is not only connected to the influence of American prosperity teachers reaching a worldwide audience through their imaginative use of the media, but is also related to the African worldview and African traditional religion, and its lasting influence on contemporary Africans and the way they think about prosperity, as well as their interest in prosperity in post-colonial Africa".

 

Link.

Secularism in Comparative Perspective

Edited by Jonathan Laurence, this new book on Secularism in Comparative perspective

• Brings new texts on the critical issue of Secularism in comparative political contexts

• 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

Link

'Fundamentalism and American Culture', third edition updated

'Fundamentalism and American Culture' (Marsden) has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements.

In the twenty-first century, militantly conservative white evangelicals have become more prominent than ever in American life. Marsden's volume, which now takes the history through the end of the Trump administration, remains the essential starting point for understanding the degree to which that militancy has been shaped by the fundamentalist heritage of the twentieth century. 

To read more about this third and updated edition, click here (link)

Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa

How hard it is to grasp the whole picture of a continent !

This scholarly book about Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa provides a good example of success.

Published in 2017, this comprehensive reference volume covers every country in Sub-Saharan Africa, offering reliable demographic information and original interpretative essays by indigenous scholars and practitioners.

It maps patterns of growth and decline, assesses major traditions and movements, analyses key themes and examines current trends.

 

Link.

 

Women in Christianity in the Age of Empire (1800-1920)

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."

Link

Harrist Church : still vibrant in Ivory Coast today

"Prophet Harris, The 'Black Elijah' of West Africa" (David Shank, Brill, 1994, 346p) offers the only comprehensive study of the thought of William Wade Harris, the Glebo (Liberia) loyalist whose prophetic mission from 1910-29 moved tens of thousands of West Africans out of traditional religion into the stream of Christianity and modernization, particularly in the Ivory Coast.
It reviews that unparalleled breakthrough, thoroughly examines traditional African, Western missionary and colonial influences which helped determine religious innovation and shape his vocation as prophet of Christ's reign of peace and prosperity." (link).