Intercultural Theology as In-Between Theology

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the term intercultural theology has been gaining more and more traction. At the same time, the terms world Christianity and anthropology of Christianity have also become established. This article inquires into the profile of intercultural theology against the other two terms and defines the subject as in-between theology with regard to such factors as audience, media, power, methodology, plurality, and connectivity. Looking forward, the author identifies current challenges and proposes that intercultural theology should be understood as a both descriptive and normative discipline, that the driving force behind it is the universal-missionary truth claim of the New Testament message of salvation, and that—as a subject with a primarily systematic orientation—it is committed to a comprehensive understanding of reality and theology.

Value moves in multiple ways: Ethical values, the anthropology of Christianity, and an example of women and movement

How can anthropologists describe ethical values—that is, what emerges as important—in the social, material worlds of Christianity? This article considers the question by working along interfaces. The first part of the article discusses two diverging approaches to values in the anthropology of Christianity (realizing values and producing values) and situates these in relation to three groupings in the anthropology of ethics and morality (deontological ethics, first-person virtue ethics, and poststructuralist virtue ethics). The second part of the article follows one value—the value of movement—in a historical example: the writings of a group of Christian women in 1880s and 1890s Norway. I argue that ethical values move in multiple ways through this social world: people realize values, people produce values and people work on values.

Taking Dominion in a Christian Nation

This article traces some of the North American theological influences on contemporary Christian nationalism in Zambia. Beginning with an overview of key tenets of Christian Reconstruction and the New Apostolic Reformation, I show how these movements have influenced the writing of some key players in Zambia’s Christian nationalist project. I also demonstrate how these authors have modified the Western ideas that have shaped their thought. This analysis responds to calls in the anthropology of Christianity for better documentation of the various forms Christian nationalism takes around the world, perhaps especially outside the West. It also challenges easy arguments about the influence of Western Christian activists on Christian politics in Africa by foregrounding the agency of local writers and theologians, even as they engage with theological ideas that originated in the West.

Theology and the Anthropology of Christian Life

Both sociocultural anthropology and theology have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of human experience and the place of humanity in the world. But can these two disciplines, despite the radical differences that separate them, work together to transform their thinking on these topics? This book argues that they can. To make this point, the author draws on key theological discussions of such matters as atonement, eschatology, interruption, passivity, and judgement to rethink important anthropological debates about such topics as ethical life, radical change, the ways people live in time, agency, gift giving, and the nature of humanity. The result is both a reconsideration of important aspects of anthropological theory through theological categories and a series of careful readings of influential theologians such as Moltmann, Pannenberg, Jüngel, and Dalferth from the vantage point of rich ethnographic materials concerning the lives of Christians from around the world. In conclusion, the author draws on contemporary discussions of secularism to interrogate the secular foundations of anthropology and suggests that the differences between anthropology and theology in regard to this topic can provide a foundation rather than obstacle to their dialogue. Written as a work of interdisciplinary anthropological theorizing, this book also provides theologians an introduction to some of the most important ground covered by the burgeoning field of the anthropology of Christianity while guiding anthropologists into some major areas of theological discussion.

New Approaches to ‘Converts’ and ‘Conversion’ in Africa: An Introduction to the Special Issue

It is our goal in this special issue on “Religious Conversion in Africa” to examine the limitations of a long-standing bias toward Christianity with respect to the study of “conversion.” Furthermore, we want to use this issue to prime other scholarly approaches to cultural change on the continent, beginning as early as the medieval period, including the colonial and early postcolonial eras, and extending to the contemporary. There are several reasons for making these interventions. One is the emergence of the anthropology of Christianity as a scholarly literature and sub-discipline. This literature has often focused on issues of religious change in relation to its own predilection for charismatic and Pentecostal expressions of Christianity and the distinct characteristics of cultural discontinuity within those communities. Another reason for this special issue on religious “conversion” in Africa is the relative lack of studies that engage with religious change beyond Pentecostal, charismatic, and evangelical Protestant contexts. As such, studies on the “conversion” of Ahmadi in West Africa, medieval Ethiopian women, Mormons in twentieth-century southeastern Nigeria, and Orthodox Christians in Uganda are included, as is a fascinating case of what it means to “trod the path” of Rastafari in Ghana. Taken together, these contributions suggest new and important paths forward with respect to “conversion,” including critiquing and perhaps even discarding the term in certain contexts. Ultimately, we want these articles to illuminate the many ways that Africans across the continent have engaged (and continue to engage) with beliefs, practices, ideas, and communities—including the changes they make in their own lives and in the lives of those communities.

The Anthropology of Christianity and the Dividual Self: Spiritual Flow, Physical Mobility, and Embodied Callings

In Quebec (Canada), the plural religious landscape has strengthened a rhetoric that structures time, space, and morality dichotomously. In local Pentecostal congregations, identity narratives echo this national discourse as they frame religious trajectories within a paradigm of discontinuity that distinguish before and after being Christian, sin and grace, perdition and salvation. By examining Pentecostal migrants’ narratives that have been collected in ethnographic fieldworks among churches located in Montreal (Quebec, Canada), I question the construction of such a binary view in local migratory landscape and propose that we think of the various mobilities of Christian believers and ideology in terms of continuity, fluidity, and dividuality. Drawing on the concept of gendered dividuality, I understand Pentecostals’ charismatic experiences with the Holy Spirit as exchanges that constitute their personhood at the intersection with Quebecois collective debates focused on gender and migration issues. I argue that Pentecostalism’s ontological fluidity is part of a hermeneutics of the dividual self that features religious actors in a postmodern setting.