Tuesday, January 26, 2016, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Alice Yeh

Silky Signs: Measuring Conversion and Cultivating Christendom in ultimo Oriente

Abstract: This presentation aims to show how the Jesuit Mission to China was rhetorically represented as a project of measurement. I examine a booklet, Brevis relatio de numero, et qualitate Christianorum apud Sinas (‘Brief Account on the Number and Quality of Christians among the Chinese’), written by the Jesuit Father Martino Martini in 1654. Martini’s assessment of China’s Christian progress was a part of the effort to accommodate China to a Euro-Christian time-space. Measuring Christianization by “number and quality” was no straightforward task, but a worldmaking exercise of semiotic complexity, the strategies of which I will explore.

Lunch will be provided.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Xian-bo Yuan

Public Undergrounds and Underground Publics

Abstract: The paper focuses on how imaginations of exposure and secrecy are animated in the discourse of “above/underground” Christian churches in China, particularly through designations of certain speech genres and actions as “politically sensitive.” It is both an ethnographic and conceptual interrogation of what it means for religious activity to be ‘public’ and/or ‘secret’ in China.

The paper should be read in advance. For a copy of the paper, please email contact-global-christianities@uchicago.edu.

Co-sponsored with the Religion & the Human Sciences Workshop. Lunch will be provided.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift Hall Room 208)
Hank Owings

The Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed, and Everywhere: The African Inland Mission, Congolese Decolonization, and Global Modernity

Abstract: This paper examines both the small group of roughly eighty missionaries, all of whom were white and American,​ ​that were sent by the Africa Inland Mission to serve the Congo between 1955 and 1967. After briefly situated the station in the history of the mission and the Congo, I discusses their personal responses to race, Cold War politics, and decolonization. Missionary relationships with Africa are often framed as narratives that locate mission activity between the poles of racism and humanism, liberalism and conservatism, imperialism and glocalization. But reducing missionary attitudes, behavior, and beliefs to convenient political frames is disingenuous to both history and politics. I hope to work against these reductions, and instead locate the Africa Inland Mission within a recurring theme of Evangelical history. Surprisingly, race and politics did not see to be the major tensions confronting them: rather, their overarching issue was ecumenism and the growth of Pentecostalism. Why, given the domestic racial changes at home and geopolitical tensions abroad, did the Africa Inland Mission and Congo Field respond so consistently to ecumenism, while​ ​having varied responses to social dilemmas? Because ecumenism challenges the accepted fundamentals of Evangelical faith and Christ alone offers the transformative power necessary to redeem a politically fallen world. Racial and political tensions are worldly problems, which will be solved through conversion or displaced by salvation’s primacy; ecumenism directly challenges the truth that makes conversion and salvation possible. I argue that this​ ​Evangelical emphasis on Christ offers a theology of politics that does not fit comfortably into mid-century dichotomies of capitalism and communism, integration and segregation, colonialism and independence.

The paper should be read in advance. For a copy of the paper, please email contact-global-christianities@lists.uchicago.edu

Lunch will be provided.

Thursday, December 3, 2015, 4:30-6:00pm (Swift Hall Common Room)
End of Quarter Social: Christmas traditions from around the world

Please come and share stories about Christmas traditions from the region and/or time period you study.

Refreshments will be provided.

NOTE: This event has been postponed until Winter Quarter.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015, 5:00-6:30pm (Swift 208)
Xian-bo Yuan

Public Undergrounds and Underground Publics

Abstract: The paper focuses on how imaginations of exposure and secrecy are animated in the discourse of “above/underground” Christian churches in China, particularly through designations of certain speech genres and actions as “politically sensitive.” It is both an ethnographic and conceptual interrogation of what it means for religious activity to be ‘public’ and/or ‘secret’ in China.

The paper should be read in advance. For a copy of the paper, please email contact-global-christianities@uchicago.edu.

Co-sponsored with the Religion & the Human Sciences Workshop. Refreshments will be provided.

Tuesday, November 17, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Disciplinary Perspectives: What is Theology?

Professor Kevin Hector will lead us in a conversation about the discipline of theology and its potential contributions to the study of Global Christianities.

Feel free to bring your own lunch. We will have bread, peanut butter, and jelly, though, so nobody will go hungry!

Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Reuben Lillie

Metaphysics and the New Birth: Regenerating Wesleyan Convictions

Abstract: Arguments over the role of metaphysics in theology are hardly new. Since the wake of theological modernism it especially has been called into question whether metaphysics rightly has any role at all. What does Wesleyan theology have to contribute to this arena of post- or anti-metaphysics? Can it do so? In terms of John Wesley’s treatment of the new birth, Bruce McCormack suggests at least two potential entry points, namely, that (a) Wesley views regeneration as an eschatological event, enabling a shift from metaphysics to christology (cf. “Sanctification After Metaphysics: Karl Barth in Conversation with John Wesley’s Conception of ‘Christian Perfection’” in Sanctification: Explorations in Theology and Practice, ed. Kelly M. Kapic [Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014], 109) and that (b) “Barth’s doctrine . . . is what Wesley’s would have had to become [emphasis added] had Wesley lived to see the possibility of elaborating a theological ontology that is not grounded metaphysically” (Ibid., 123). Taking cues from McCormack as well as Kevin Hector and D. Stephen Long, I intend to present two resources for conversation: first, a cursory assessment of the (anti-)metaphysical implications for Wesleyan soteriology, and second, an initial strategy for doing theology so as to regenerate Wesleyan convictions, rather than to revise, replace, or reconstruct, or otherwise re-articulate the theology of John and Charles Wesley.

Feel free to bring your own lunch. We will have bread, peanut butter, and jelly, though, so nobody will go hungry!

Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 1:30-2:45pm (Swift 200)
Rev. Saeed T. Richardson

Ghana as a source of pilgrimage for Black American Christians
University of Chicago Divinity School 2015 International Ministry Study Grant

Abstract: Many Christians in the United States speak of pilgrimage to the Holy Lands that border the Mediterranean Sea. Knowing one’s physical family origin, it becomes a matter of completeness to walk in the origins of one’s spiritual existence, too. However, for the great majority of Black Americans in the United States, there is no family origin to complement those spiritual roots. Furthermore, the very concept of pilgrimage – a rite that supposes powerful change internally and externally – is foreign to most who live in broken, underprivileged communities. This study explores pilgrimage as a theological and anthropological model for Black Americans to make sense of their ancestral heritage, their Christianity, and slavery. The 8-week long venture spanned conversations with pastoral leaders, chiefs, civic leaders, elders, men, women, and even children, across eight regions in Ghana, investigating three primary questions:

1. What does it mean to be Black?
2. What does it mean to be Christian?
3. How does one live at the intersection of questions one and two in a post slavery world?

Can walking in a distant homeland impact one’s community thousands of miles away? Can pilgrimage to Ghana dispel the severed connection to African history the majority of Black Americans experience? In light of the many issues that have divided the American Black community over the last 50 years (violence, drug & alcohol abuse, incarceration to name a few), can pilgrimage be a unifying and empowering resource, in much the same way that pilgrimage is for our Jewish and Islamic siblings? Surely these insights if studied and found valuable would be of great worth to congregations, neighborhoods, barbershops, hair salons, and families not just on the South Side of Chicago but across the nation, and perhaps even in Ghana. One can dare to believe it will have such effects.

Presenter:
Rev. Saeed T. Richardson
Pastor, Chaplain, & Dual Degree Graduate Student
University of Chicago Schools of Divinity and Social Service Administration

Light refreshments will be provided.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Recent Scholarship Discussion

Once a quarter, the workshop will read and discuss a recent article related to Global Christianities so that we have a sense of what’s going on in the wider scholarly community.

This week we will be discussing an article by Joel Robbins on the Anthropology of Christianity. It is the introduction to a supplemental issue of the journal Current Anthropology that was dedicated to the theme of the Anthropology of Christianity. Email contact-global-christianities@lists.uchicago.edu to receive a copy of the article in advance. Please think about how the themes addressed in the article relate to your own work and come with a question that you would like to discuss with the group.

Joel Robbins, “The Anthropology of Christianity: Unity, Diversity, New Directions: An Introduction to Supplement 10,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 55, No. S10, The Anthropology of Christianity: Unity, Diversity, New Directions (December 2014), pp. S157-S171

Feel free to bring your own lunch. We will have bread, peanut butter, and jelly, though, so nobody will go hungry!

Tuesday, October 6, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Héctor M. Varela Rios

Florida Water: Meaningful and Messy Hybridity in the Atlantic Modern

Abstract: Florida Water, a perfume produced by a U.S. company for more than two centuries, has become a powerful signifier in Latin American communities. Agua Florida, as it is called in Spanish, is ubiquitous and polyvalent, used for cleaning the house, and, for some, for purifying the body and space in religious ritual. The paper explores Agua Florida’s cultural agency, inter-religious relevance, and quotidian liminality as an example of messy while meaningful hybridity.

Hank Owings will respond.

For a copy of the paper in advance, please email contact-global-christianities@lists.uchicago.edu

Lunch will be provided.

Co-sponsored with the Theology & Religious Ethics Workshop.