Abstract
In World Christianity: Methodological Considerations, editors Martha Frederiks and Dorottya Nagy offer an insightful and evenly crafted compilation of essays. Frederiks and Nagy’s distinctive contribution is to outline World Christianity as an approach to the study of Christianity, “the conscious and consistent endeavor to study” Christianity “in light of and in relation to Christianity’s wider (his)story” (19). In doing so, they open up a methodological conversation that travels across disciplines, discourses, geopolitical realities, and religious contexts. Case studies investigate a range of choices researchers make about historiography, sources, and who and what constitute a “field” for World Christian study.
Following Frederiks and Nagy’s conceptual chapters, Raimundo Barreto calls attention to the underexamined contribution of Latin American thinkers, such as Enrique Dussell and Walter Mignolo, to World Christianity scholarship. Barreto contends that closer attention to Latin American historiographies and contexts of Christian practice will elucidate the aftershocks of colonization, as well as the intercultural dynamism of “popular Christian expressions” in Latin America (76). Emma Wild-Wood disrupts oppositional thinking in her essay on religious encounter and use of missionary sources. She argues that “layering” and triangulating missionary sources with oral histories and private records, for example, can yield insights into indigenous perceptions of cultural encounter, as well as call into question theoretical “master narratives” that foreclose terrains of inquiry in processes of change (107).
The volume’s eight case studies demonstrate that religious plurality, church-state tensions, and broadly conceived “religious fields” necessitate working creatively to access and generate sources that account for religion as lived (227). For example, Joseph Tse-Hei Lee and Christie Chui-Shan Chow show that archival research coupled with multisite fieldwork can address the limitations of archival access because of state control in Chinese contexts of Christian practice. Kari Storstein Haug illustrates the researcher’s role in knowledge creation in her study of Thai Christianity. She invites Thai Christians and Buddhists to reflect on and discuss a selection of biblical texts. Haug then elucidates the dialogical nature of Thai theological construction in an environment in which Christianity is a minority religion.
The volume encourages World Christianity researchers to recognize and delineate the normative commitments and theological and political potential of their research and practiced methods (57). In what might be one of the most overdue and needed essays in World Christianity literature. Nagy provides a comparative reading of “world” as applied to the disciplines of literature, history, and philosophy. Most pointedly, she observes that the work of “worlding” scholarship is never neutral. She calls for attention to the “public and political functions” and the researcher’s role in the construction of World Christianity knowledge (57–58). The case studies provide incisive explorations into the decisions researchers make that shape knowledge production about Christianity as a “world-ed” phenomenon and scholarly approach.
World Christianity: Methodological Considerations is a welcome addition to the shelf of essential World Christianity reading. The volume shows that the term, understood as “an approach ‘in the making,’” not only will have a greater pliability across disciplines (11, 292), but it will also traverse discursive borders and demonstrate broader, and more accessible, interpretive and methodological possibilities for scholarship and, perhaps, for Christian practice.