Anglican Studies Seminar
Following our discussion of a provocative set of papers in Year 1 that focused on the historical legacies shaping Anglican ecclesiologies in various contexts and, in Year 2, a set that investigated their theological factors, we invite for Year 3 of this five-year initiative papers that surface missiological currents within Anglicanism, past and present, that contribute to the development of processes of Anglican identity formation and the ecclesiologies that arise alongside those identities. The complicated and fraught history of missionizing goes far beyond the typical account of how the non-European “peripheries” have been the recipient of colonializing mission work from the imperial “center” in England. This is only a part of a much larger story that extends through Anglican history to the present in a more complicated manner, one that finds, for example, various African churches with active, ongoing mission to churches in the industrialized world, which are perceived to have strayed from the truths that the earlier missionaries from those regions brought to them through the work of several Anglican missionary societies based in the United Kingdom, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This complex tangle of forces demands nuanced scholarly treatment with special attention paid to how it impacts Anglican self-understanding and practice in different ways throughout the Communion. Papers that emphasize de- and postcolonial dynamics at work in forming and maintaining “operative ecclesiologies,” particularly in understudied regions of the Communion, are especially welcome.
Please note that those whose proposals are accepted must commit to submitting their paper for pre-circulation by Monday, October 14, 2024. Seminar members and others wishing to attend will have access to these papers, which will be briefly summarized at the meeting but will not be presented by their authors. Instead, they will be discussed among the panelists, seminar members, and session attendees. Please note that, due to AAR/SBL policies pertaining to participation, those whose proposals are accepted must commit to attending the 2024 Annual Meeting in San Diego.
The Anglican Studies Seminar holds that Anglican Studies requires a sustained study of the intersections of post– and de-colonialism, imperial legacies, and globalization with the ongoing evolution of Anglican identity in specific locations marked by their particular economic, social, cultural, and historical conditions. The Seminar pays detailed attention to context; its work disrupts extant assumptions about the Anglican tradition being a monolithic, monocultural entity. Accordingly, the Seminar focuses on the “operative ecclesiologies” of Anglican churches at the national or provincial level. That is, we are interested in how the contextual realities of Anglicans in concrete locales shape the ways in which church is practiced by Anglicans, whether they answer to standard ecclesial and theological conceptualizations or not.
Seminar members are committed to a globalized study of Anglicanism, conceived broadly, and to investigating various operative ecclesiologies, locally and contextually. We foster interdisciplinary conversations that enable scholars to speak to multiple aspects of Anglicanism. The seminar’s findings will be of interest to scholars working in a range of disciplines. Moreover, close examination of the processes of decolonization that inform lived Anglicanisms will supply the wider field of religious studies with a set of thickly described case studies of post-colonial decolonization. It is the intention of the Steering Committee to publish research resulting from the Seminar and make it accessible to an interdisciplinary audience.
| Chair | Dates | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook, Claremont School… | skujawa-holbrook@cst.edu | - | View |