Broken Bodies of God: The Christian Eucharist as a Locus for Ecological Reflection

2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel ◽  
Slow Food ◽  
Ecological Awareness ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Christian Theologian ◽  
Ecosystem Changes

AbstractThe recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report attests to the reality of a warming global climate and describes potential ecosystem changes that may be devastating to communities—both human and non-human—across the globe. I contend that the Christian practice of sharing the Eucharist meal provides an opportune moment for Christians to engage in ecological reflection. To defend this claim I draw upon Christian theologian Sallie McFague's metaphorical understanding of the world as God's body in order to connect environmental plight to the Eucharist meal and to show why that plight should be a concern for Christian communities. Next, I turn to the work of anthropologist Claude Fischler in order to make a connection between sharing the Eucharist and communal and individual identity formation. Finally, I draw upon the Slow Food movement in order to provide specific suggestions for adapting the Eucharist to make it more conducive to ecological reflection. I also briefly discuss the growing green sisters movement and suggest that this movement provides a model of ecological-awareness and practice for other religious communities, and for North American Christian churches in particular.

scholarly journals Exploring the mediatization of organizational communication by religious communities in digital media

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (66) ◽  
pp. 101-121
Author(s):  
Gry Høngsmark Knudsen ◽  
Marie Vejrup Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Evangelical Lutheran Church ◽  
Digital Spaces ◽  
The Way

This article presents an exploratory study of some of the ways in which religious communities communicate as organizations in digital spaces. Based on previous research, the article examines the extent to which processes of mediatization are visible in the digital spaces utilized by religious communities in Denmark today.The study is based on data from websites and Facebook groups from ten Christian churches: five ELCD (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark) parishes and five free churches. Data was collected using methods particularly designed for collecting digital data, with due consideration of the ethical implications of researching religious identity online. The data collection represents a follow-up study to the research project Religion in Aarhus 2013. Based on our findings, we suggest that mediatization processes progress more slowly in institutional religious communication because of the way in which they are organized. Furthermore, we demonstrate that there are some patterns in the way Christian communities express themselves online, and that these patterns to some extent depend on whether an ELCD parish or a free church is involved.

The Church of the East Until the Eighth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 429-450
Author(s):  
Stefan R. Hauser
Keyword(s):  
Eighth Century ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Church Of The East ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Christian Population

For a long time, the development of Christian communities within the Sasanian and early Islamic Empires was either neglected or described in terms of a history of persecution and antagonism within a Zoroastrian or Islamic state. Only recently has the perception of the extent of Christianization, the interaction of religious communities, and the importance of Christians within these societies and their upper echelons changed dramatically. The narrative of permanent conflict and oppression of Christian faith has given way to the acknowledgment of a predominant Christian population in the territory of modern Iraq and western Iran in the fifth through seventh centuries. One argument in this context is the growing body of material evidence for Christian churches and images as well as burials, which are expressions of respected and self-assured Christian communities.

Saving Comrade Stalin’s Soul (1949–1958)

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
True Jesus Church ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Christian Leaders ◽  
Party State ◽  
Discursive Patterns

During the 1950s, the universal ideology of Chinese Christian churches such as the True Jesus Church clashed with the universal ideology of the Maoist party–state. Christian communities’ relative ideological autonomy hindered the party–state’s ambitions for control. Christians, especially Christian leaders, experienced intense pressure to adopt the new code of Maoist speech during this era. Documents from archives in Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan and oral history interviews with members of the True Jesus Church in South China show how between 1949 and 1958, top church leaders bowed to this pressure, replacing biblical rhetoric and discursive patterns with Maoist rhetoric and discursive patterns. The contest between religious communities and the state to control the terms of public moral discourse demonstrates the significance of such discourse in demarcating and legitimating community authority.

The Earliest Christian Communities in Southeast and Northeast Asia: An Outline of the Evidence Available in Seven Countries before A.D. 1500

1991 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. England
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Eastern Christianity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Central South

The history of Eastern Christianity in central, south, and east Asia prior to A.D. 1500 is rich and extensive, yet has been largely ignored. Material evidence now available from southeast and northeast Asia shows that Christian communities were present in seven countries for different periods between the sixth and fifteenth centuries. Often termed “Nestorian,” or “Jacobite,” these communities have left a diversity of remains—epigraphical, architectural, sculptural, documentary—which testify to their presence, as far northeast as Japan and southeast as far as Indonesia. The glimpses of Christian churches in medieval Asia afforded by the evidence from these and other regions of Asia offer alternatives to Westernized patterns of mission, and question many assumptions concerning the history and character of Christian presence in the region.

scholarly journals Orthodox Christian Bulgarians Coping with Natural Disasters in the Pre-Modern Ottoman Balkans

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 367
Author(s):  
Raymond Detrez
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
World View ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Moral Value ◽  
Secondary Importance ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Ottoman Balkans

Premodern Ottoman society consisted of four major religious communities—Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Armenian Christians, and Jews; the Muslim and Christian communities also included various ethnic groups, as did Muslim Arabs and Turks, Orthodox Christian Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs who identified, in the first place, with their religious community and considered ethnic identity of secondary importance. Having lived together, albeit segregated within the borders of the Ottoman Empire, for centuries, Bulgarians and Turks to a large extent shared the same world view and moral value system and tended to react in a like manner to various events. The Bulgarian attitudes to natural disasters, on which this contribution focuses, apparently did not differ essentially from that of their Turkish neighbors. Both proceeded from the basic idea of God’s providence lying behind these disasters. In spite of the (overwhelmingly Western) perception of Muslims being passive and fatalistic, the problem whether it was permitted to attempt to escape “God’s wrath” was coped with in a similar way as well. However, in addition to a comparable religious mental make-up, social circumstances and administrative measures determining equally the life conditions of both religious communities seem to provide a more plausible explanation for these similarities than cross-cultural influences.

Advances in the data rescue and digitization of historical wind speed observations in Sweden: the WINDGUST project

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Engström ◽  
Cesar Azorin-Molina ◽  
Lennart Wern ◽  
Sverker Hellström ◽  
Christophe Sturm ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Wind Speed ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Weather Data ◽  
Climate Data ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
The 1960S

<p>Here we present the progress of the first work package (WP1) of the project “Assessing centennial wind speed variability from a historical weather data rescue project in Sweden” (WINDGUST), funded by FORMAS – A Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (ref. 2019-00509); previously introduced in EGU2019-17792-1 and EGU2020-3491. In a global climate change, one of the major uncertainties on the causes driving the climate variability of winds (i.e., the “stilling” phenomenon and the recent “recovery” since the 2010s) is mainly due to short availability (i.e., since the 1960s) and low quality of observed wind records as stated by the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).</p><p>The WINDGUST is a joint initiative between the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) and the University of Gothenburg aimed at filling the key gap of short availability and low quality of wind datasets, and improve the limited knowledge on the causes driving wind speed variability in a changing climate across Sweden.</p><p>During 2020, we worked in WP1 to rescue historical wind speed series available in the old weather archives at SMHI for the 1920s-1930s. In the process we followed the “Guidelines on Best Practices for Climate Data Rescue” of the World Meteorological Organization. Our protocol consisted on: (i) designing a template for digitization; (ii) digitizing papers by an imaging process based on scanning and photographs; and (iii) typing numbers of wind speed data into the template. We will report the advances and current status, challenges and experiences learned during the development of WP1. Until new year 2020/2021 eight out of thirteen selected stations spanning over the years 1925 to 1948 have been scanned and digitized by three staff members of SMHI during 1,660 manhours.</p>

scholarly journals The global impact of the transport sectors on atmospheric aerosol in 2030 – Part 1: Land transport and shipping

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (16) ◽  
pp. 22985-23025
Author(s):  
M. Righi ◽  
J. Hendricks ◽  
R. Sausen
Keyword(s):  
Atmospheric Aerosol ◽  
Radiative Forcing ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Climate Impact ◽  
Radiation Budget ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel ◽  
Surface Level ◽  
Aerosol Module ◽  
Year 2000 ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. Using the EMAC global climate-chemistry model coupled to the aerosol module MADE, we simulate the impact of land transport and shipping emissions on global atmospheric aerosol and climate in 2030. Future emissions of short-lived gas and aerosol species follow the four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) designed in support of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We compare the resulting 2030 land-transport- and shipping-induced aerosol concentrations to the ones obtained for the year 2000 in a previous study with the same model configuration. The simulations suggest that black carbon and aerosol nitrate are the most relevant pollutants from land transport in 2000 and 2030, but their impacts are characterized by very strong regional variations during this time period. Europe and North America experience a decrease in the land-transport-induced particle pollution, although in these regions this sector remains the dominant source of surface-level pollution in 2030 under all RCPs. In Southeast Asia, on the other hand, a significant increase is simulated, but in this region the surface-level pollution is still controlled by other sources than land transport. Shipping-induced air pollution is mostly due to aerosol sulfate and nitrate, which show opposite trends towards 2030. Sulfate is strongly reduced as a consequence of sulfur reduction policies in ship-fuels in force since 2010, while nitrate tends to increase due to the excess of ammonia following the reduction in ammonium-sulfate. The aerosol-induced climate impact of both sectors is dominated by aerosol-cloud effects and is projected to decrease between 2000 and 2030, nevertheless still contributing a significant radiative forcing to the Earth's radiation budget.

North India

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-130
Author(s):  
Leonard Fernando SJ
Keyword(s):  
North India ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Indian States ◽  
Constitutional Protection ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Nicobar Islands ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Christian Population ◽  
The Church

The Christian population in North India is varied, from less than 1% (in most North Indian states) to 22% in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Many fix its emergence in the 16th century, when Jesuits were invited by the Muslim Emperor Akbar the Great. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, many Protestant missionary societies were established in India. Six churches in India united in 1970, forming the Church of North India (CNI). Recently, Christians have been attacked as a threat to the hierarchical social system and threatened by radical Hindu fundamentalism. Amidst the persecutions, Christianity has continued in unique paradigms: whether in the adoption ashram life to promote the mystical traditions of Christianity as well as Hinduism, in translations of the Bible into tribal languages; or in the faculties of philosophy and theology in North India preparing men and women for ministry. Religious communities and NGOs in North India have served those at the peripheries. Lack of growth of Christian communities can be attributed to hostility against Dalit Christians who risk losing constitutional protection given to other Dalits. In fact, the collaboration of lay Christians is on the increase through different associations, basic Christian communities and Charismatic movements.

1. What is climate change?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Mark Maslin
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Greenhouse Gases ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Intergovernmental Panel

‘What is climate change?’ discusses what climate change is. Climate change is no longer just a scientific concern, but encompasses economics, sociology, geopolitics, national and local politics, law, and health just to name a few. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) play an important role in moderating past global climate. Why they have been rising since before the Industrial Revolution, and why are they now considered dangerous pollutants? Which countries have produced the most anthropogenic GHGs and how is this changing with rapid economic development? It is important here to consider the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and how it regularly collates and assesses the most recent evidence for climate change.

Writing African Christianity

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 275-312
Author(s):  
Elias Kifon Bongmba
Keyword(s):  
Religious Communities ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Disciplinary Practices ◽  
African Identity ◽  
African Christianity ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Movements ◽  
Material Conditions

In this overview of the historiography of Christianity in Africa a number of desiderata and considerations for future research are reviewed. The first issue considered relates to the practice of historiography. The second issue relates to African identity/-ies and its relationship to global cultural movements. The third desideratum is the pursuit of new disciplinary practices in the study of African Christianity, especially interdisciplinarity as scholarly ethos. Finally, a number of themes that should become foci in historiography of African Christianity are explored, among these are: concentration on local and regional narratives, the gendered character of Christianity in Africa, attention to the material conditions and needs of African religious communities and the various cultural innovations adopted to cope with these conditions, as well as the role of Christian communities in development in Africa and the wider encompassing question of ethics and morality.

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