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When three professors at Princeton Theological Seminary began planning this year’s World Christianity Conference, they decided the theme should reflect the times. They titled the 2023 conference “War, Pandemic, and Climate Change: Global Crises —Past and Present—And Their Place in World Christianity Scholarship.”
“This was very intentional,” says Afe Adogame, the Maxwell M. Upson professor of religion and society, who organized the conference with his colleagues, Professors Raimundo C. Barreto and Richard F. Young, in collaboration with Tom Hastings, director of the Seminary’s overseas ministries study center.
“World Christianity doesn’t happen in a socio-historical vacuum,” Adogame added. “The conference hits at an important time, and we thought it was time to respond to these ongoing crises.”
The March 14-17 conference drew more than 200 scholars from across the academy and across the globe. Three keynote speakers on successive days represented Brazil, India, and Zimbabwe, with each speaking on issues related to their regions. Panels met throughout the days, covering topics from “Church and War in Contemporary Europe” to “Politics, War, and Christianity in East Asia” to “Prayer, Politics and the Pandemic in Nigerian Churches.”
In his opening remarks, Seminary President Jonathan Lee Walton drew a connection to the spirit of the civil rights movement. Walton recalled the words of Benjamin Elijah Mays, the religious educator who mentored a generation of civil rights leaders and spoke of how humankind is linked by a “common garment of destiny and network of mutuality.”
“This was a line that Martin Luther King Jr. famously picked up and deployed in his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Walton told conference-goers gathered in Stuart Hall. “And when I review the extraordinary and engaging panels, papers, and presentations of this conference, this is the spirit of this gathering—our common fabric of humanity.”
Participants who attended previous conferences said the 2023 gathering felt especially moving, and urgent. David Moe, a scholar at Yale University and a native of Myanmar, said he was inspired by the theme of crisis to invite fellow Myanmar theologians for a panel on the 2021 military coup which he titled, “War, Wound, and Healing: Interreligious Responses to the Myanmar Coup.”
During his presentation, Moe reflected on the parable of the Good Samaritan and its implications for a public theology of ethnic reconciliation, healing, and hospitality in a violent world.
“It was moving to see audiences actively engaged with our panel and asking insightful and challenging questions,” said Moe, a Henry H. Rice, postdoctoral associate in Southeast Asian Studies at Yale. “This is what World Christianity is all about.”
Another panel sought to frame a theological response to climate change, saying the world church needs to prepare for a future of rising heat-related deaths, mass migration, and food scarcity. The panel discussed some church-backed projects taking place now, such as one that provides special stoves to Guatemalan villages to reduce the use of open, wood-fired stoves associated with deforestation and respiratory illness.
“The next two decades are critical for all church planners because the nexus of Christian church and society will need the coordinated effort for mental and spiritual health,” said Hank Bitten, executive director of the New Jersey Council for the Social Studies and Head Elder at Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Ridgewood, NJ.
World Christianity is an emerging academic field that seeks to study the ways Christianity has developed across the globe, including its spread across the Global South and a parallel drop in the proportion of Europeans and Americans who identify as Christian. Princeton Seminary has taken a leading role in research, with Adogame, Barreto, and Young bringing expertise about Africa, Latin America, and Asia respectively.
The conference, now in its fourth year, takes an interdisciplinary approach, with linguists, political scientists, and sociologists contributing their research alongside theologians, religious historians, and scholars of World Christianity.
The first keynote speaker, for example, was Aparecida Vilaça a professor of social anthropology who has been working for decades among the Wari’ Indigenous people in Southwestern Amazonia, Brazil. Her presentation explored the disorienting impact that Christian missionaries have had on the Wari’, including changes to their belief system, social interactions, and relationships with animals.
Vilaca, a professor at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said it was the first time she had been invited to speak at a conference focusing on global Christianity and the first time she has spoken at a Protestant seminary.
“This was unique,” she said. “I really enjoyed the questions, and everyone was very curious and respectful.”
The conference concluded with an announcement that next year’s gathering will be held outside Princeton Seminary for the first time, in Ghana (the University of Ghana at Legon), as part of the new initiative of co-hosting with institutions in the Global South.
“This is something we have been working on for a few years,” says Adogame. “We believe that World Christianity as a field extends beyond the Western academic world and that having the conference next year in the Global South will make the discourse richer.”
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