This panel underscores the potential of World Christianity to work toward global justice. The first paper analyzes the relationship between the French Trappist monk Christian de Chergé and the Muslim community with which he conversed in twentieth-century Algeria. The second paper considers the translatability of Christianity in light of the freedom of members of other religions to reject conversion, drawing on the example of the Javanese Muslim princess Kartini. The third paper calls attention to how Christianity’s global spread has not led to a safer world for women. This paper highlights the work of Christian communities that are fighting the gender-based violence still prevalent throughout the world. The fourth paper calls for World Christianity scholars to consider not only local instantiations of Christianity, but also the ways in which World Christianity, both as a phenomenon and as an academic field, might bring about a more just world.
Christian de Chergé (1937-1996) was a French, Catholic, Trappist monk at Notre Dame d’Atlas in Tibhirine, Algeria. He was also a pioneer in Muslim-Christian dialogue, displaying extraordinary openness and appreciation for the teaching, practices, personalities, and values of Islam. That openness was substantially the fruit of his Algerian context, where the French post-colonial Church was essentially stripped of any power or influence. In that milieu, de Chergé developed and practiced a Christian spirituality that emphasized humility, hope, solidarity, and love. His words and life occasion the opportunity to discuss colonial and post-colonial Catholic experiences of dialogue with Muslims as well as to reflect on the relevance of a tiny Algerian Catholic Church for our American context.
The principle of translatability proposed by Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh has provided the world Christianity studies with a framework to explain the phenomenon of diverse forms of Christianity. However, due to Walls' and Sanneh's concern was primarily on the successful spread of Christianity through mission movements, they avoided discussing the application of the translatability principle in cases where rejection and resistance toward the Christian message was the response, thus leaving a gap in the applicability of the translatability principle. This paper seeks to fill that gap by highlighting the understudied interreligious encounter between Dutch Christians and Kartini, a Javanese Muslim princess, in the early 20th century. Using Kartini’s life as a locus of study, I argue that the translatability of Christian messages not only enables people to appropriate and express the Christian faith in their culture and cosmology but also empowers the recipients to critique and reject the faith.
This paper discusses the “crimes of the flesh” that exist in World Christianity, as the shift of Christianity to the global South has not appeared to improve rates of violence against women Two major examples of Christianity’s shift to the global South – Papua New Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both 95% Christian – have some of the highest rates of gender-based violence worldwide. Intimate partner violence and domestic violence are just as prevalent in churches as they are in wider society. Social norms, power imbalances, and individual beliefs and behaviors perpetuate discrimination against women. The stark reality is that women are simply not physically safe anywhere in the world. This paper contains data on and descriptions of gender-based violence in global Christianity and concludes with examples of Christian communities, churches, and organizations addressing these crimes to combat gender-based violence.
In the critical book, Relocating World Christianity (2017), Joel Cabrita and David Maxwell charge the nascent discipline of world Christianity with abandoning the vision that animated initial conceptualization of the idea of world Christianity. While the initial vision was to invoke an international community of Christians who could redeem a world that had descended into catastrophic conflicts and violence, the current manifestation of the idea has focused on exploring local Christian iterations. This paper builds on the critique of Cabrita and Maxwell to argue that the shift from a transnational to a local vision in the study of world Christianity has been occasioned by a genealogical haste in which the initial vision of the concept is often elided or mentioned only in footnotes. Focusing on francophone Africa, the paper calls for a slower reading of the discipline’s genealogy that accentuates the worldmaking potential of this earlier vision of the concept.