Tuesday, September 29, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Meet & Greet
Come meet other students interested in Global Christianities and share your ideas for the workshop. Lunch will be provided.

FALL QUARTER 2015 EVENTS (Tentative):

Tuesday, September 29, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Meet & Greet
Come meet other students interested in Global Christianities and share your ideas for the workshop. Lunch will be provided.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Hector Varela
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.
Lunch will be provided.
Co-sponsored with the Theology & Religious Ethics Workshop.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Recent Scholarship Discussion
We will discuss a recent influential article about Global Christianities (article TBD). Please email contact-global-christianities@lists.uchicago.edu for a copy of the article in advance.
Bring your own lunch.*

Wednesday, October 28, 2015, 1:30-2:45pm (Swift 200)
Rev. Saeed 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.
Light refreshments will be provided.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Reuben Lillie
Metaphysics and the New Birth: Regenerating Wesleyan Convictions
Abstract: This paper examines some remarks about Wesley’s distinctive contributions to soteriology as they relate to anti- or post-metaphysical theology as framed by Bruce McCormack in an essay, “Sanctification after Metaphysics: Karl Barth in Conversation with John Wesley’s Conception of ‘Christian Perfection’” (ed. Kelly Kapic, Sanctification: Explorations in Theology and Practice [IVP Academic, 2014]). McCormack focuses on Wesley’s “new birth” language while contending that Barth improves upon the matter through a primarily christological ontology (and therefore, at least for McCormack, not grounded by metaphysics). In this paper, I briefly weigh the options McCormack presents against other approaches to the problems of metaphysics for soteriology, namely the approaches of D. Stephen Long and Kevin Hector. That is, with the aid of Hector and Long, I intend to show that (a) McCormack’s approach to Wesley via Barth is an option rather than a necessary trajectory once certain metaphysical assumptions are set aside, and that (b) present scholarly conversations concerning metaphysics and theology require a fresh look at the aims of the Wesleyan tradition – what can and/or should be maintained and what may be done without.
Bring your own lunch.*

Tuesday, December 1, 2015, 12:00-1:15pm (Swift 208)
Hank Owings
Bring your own lunch.*

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 you study.
Refreshments will be provided.

*Our budget does not allow us to provide lunch at all of our meetings. However, on weeks when we will not be providing a full lunch, we will bring ingredients to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so nobody will go hungry 🙂

The Global Christianities Workshop invites paper proposals for the 2015-2016 academic year. Presentations can include portions of dissertation chapters or proposals, job talks, book reviews, pedagogical reflections, master’s theses, articles, conference papers, or other research.

The workshop aims to call attention to the diverse manifestations of Christianity around the globe, both past and present. United by its object of study, the workshop seeks papers with diverse methodologies and approaches to the study of religion: anthropological, comparative, ethical, historical, literary, philosophical, political, psychological, sociological, theological, and so on. The workshop has been designated as a Study Group by the Council on Advanced Studies, which means that it is less formal than other workshops. Graduate students and faculty members are invited to bring work in progress, so that they can benefit as much as possible from the group discussion. We will also be reading and discussing key articles related to the study of Global Christianities.

If you are interested in presenting, please send an email to contact-global-christianities@lists.uchicago.edu with the following information:

– A tentative title for your presentation
– Your program and departmental affiliation
– The type of work you will be presenting (dissertation chapter, article-in-progress, etc.)
– Your preferred term (fall, winter, or spring)
– A brief overview of your project (1-3 sentences)

Thursday, June 4th, 2015, 12:00pm-1:20pm (Pick Hall Lounge):
“The Politics of Song in Chinese Christianities” – Xiao-bo Yuan

Monday, May 18, 2015, 12:00-1:20pm (Swift Hall Room 208):
“The Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed, and Everywhere: Cold War Politics and American Missionaries in 1960s Africa” – Hank Owings

The 1960s witnessed both African legal independence and significant but limited political empowerment for African-Americans. Simultaneous to both historical changes and often associated with each, pejoratively and not, was the expansion of Marxist ideologies and the growth of the Soviet Union – two separate Twentieth-century phenomena that Americans in popular discourse frequently associated together. Moreover, shifting social attitudes challenged Americans, particularly religious Americans, at home as they adapted to the collapse of post-WWII social values.

Within these significant social changes, how do white, Evangelical missionaries in Africa from the United States respond to social changes abroad? Specifically, how do these missionaries understand their own sense of Christian mission in a context where they must confront challenges to both their racial and political values in ways that differed significantly from Americans at home? This paper examines the ways by which white Americans confronted and imagined their own cultural values abroad while mediating between political shifts domestically and abroad. Beginning with an analysis of how 1960s Americans conceived of both race and “Africa,” it relies on Wheaton’s African Inland Mission archives to perceive how American missionaries abroad narrated their own experience and responds to these changes.

Thurs, April 30, 12:00-1:20pm (Pick Hall Lounge)
“Negotiating auctoritas: The construction of an authoritative voice for Christianity in Madurai (ca 1610)” – Margherita Trento:

In this paper, Margherita will analyze the strategies the Jesuit missionary Roberto Nobili (1577-1656) used to create an authoritative voice for Christianity in Madurai, strategies influenced by Nobili’s study, selection and implementation of local methods of religious legitimization.

Tues, April 14, 12:00-1:20pm (Pick Hall Lounge)
“Contemporary Christian Material Culture – ‘Constellation’: A Descriptive Analysis of Religious Artifacts from University of Chicago students” – Hector Varela-Rios.

This paper analyzes a series of Christian religious artifacts owned by University of Chicago students: a wall-hanging crucifix, a Holy Face icon, a few rosaries, a holy card, and a Holy Family statue. Using David Morgan’s typology of belief and Henry Glassie’s typology of context, I examine how the artifacts display a specific, and very personal, disposition of being religious by the owners. I argue that the discursive relationship between owner and artifact is facilitated by both “being-religious” and the artifact’s materiality.

“Indigenous knowledge and Western expertise: a collision for Christian environmental ethics in Tanzania, East Africa” – Erika Dornfeld

In the global south, sustainable development projects and environmental protection programs often rely on western technical expertise. Recently international NGOs have attempted to integrate local indigenous knowledge of landscapes and ecosystems into sustainability projects.

Practically, however, this is a challenge.The problem only increases when a project’s justification or impetus comes from a religious standpoint. In the realm of Christian environmental ethics, traditional indigenous knowledge is often ignored and devalued. In Tanzania specifically, Christians seek to distinguish and separate themselves from more traditional, animist hermeneutics.

This talk will examine the role various forms of knowledge play in environmental conservation projects when undertaken by faith-based groups in Tanzania.

Co-sponsored by the Theology and Ethics Workshop.

Thur, Feb 5th, 2015, 12:00pm-1:20pm (Swift 200):
“Interpreting Pope Francis: David Tracy, Ignacio Ellacuría, and the Method of Critical Correlation” – Raúl Zegarra

This paper aims to provide a theological hermeneutics of Pope Francis’ papacy, putting the emphasis on his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii gaudium. In order to do so I will try to reconstruct what in my view is the hidden method operating in the document, namely, what we may call a “Latin American method of critical correlation.” I claim that Francis’ text is a representative of what David Tracy calls in his foundational Blessed Rage for Order a “method of critical correlation,” but I also maintain that such a method is somehow qualified and expanded by Francis while using something very much like Ellacuría’s understanding of the “Latin American method,” i. e., the method of liberation theology. The goal of the paper is to suggest that the best way to read Francis’ papacy and first important magisterial document, then, is by means of a combination of Tracy’s and Ellacuría’s methodological proposals.

Co-sponsored by the Theology and Ethics Workshop.