Both the spoken and confessional languages of Latinx Christian communities have made their labors invisible to scholarship on the ecumenical movement in the United States. Ecumenical efforts in the United States seek to facilitate discourse with ecclesiastical and political entities, foregrounding the choice of language as a determinative paradigm for ecumenical action. The predominance of English as a medium of institutional communication in the country privileges the language within the ecumenical activities of churches, overlooking non-anglophone communities within these same churches. Additionally, while ecumenism is often regarded as the domain of “Mainline” Protestant denominations, the vast majority of Latinx Christians in the country are members of other churches, leaving their work outside of the typical scope of attention for ecumenists. The consequence of the argument is the need for the study of ecumenics to be multilingual—literally and confessionally.
The advanced usage of technology during the COVID-19 lockdown shows that our epistemology is bounded by the accessibility of digital networks/devices, if not merely by our geographical locations. Likewise, the knowledge scholars produce/absorb may also be limited by what they are exposed to. As an interdisciplinary study between sociology and theology, this paper investigates the production of knowledge within the world Christianity discourse and argues for the necessity of epistemic justice within the production process, through Martha Frederik’s emphasis of a ‘world Christianity approach’ and Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s ‘sociology of absence’. In an interconnected world, I propose that we world Christianity scholars have to be sensitive to the invisible ones during the process of knowledge production, and to avoid the dilemma of being bounded by the methodology per se and forget the marginaliased ones we suppose to lift up in our research.
According to the United States Census Bureau, over one-fifth of the U.S. population speaks a language other than or in addition to English at home. That the same is not true in our classrooms reveals a power imbalance in academia rooted in a long history of settler-colonial white supremacy. The exclusive use of English marginalizes non-English speaking and multilingual populations and hinders learning. This paper argues for a translingual approach where students are encouraged to use all of their languages in their learning and are given resources for doing so. Drawing on the presenter’s experience teaching undergraduate and seminary courses in theology and world Christianity, it highlights what professors, especially those who do not speak the same languages as their students, can do to recognize and support the wide diversity of multilingual students in our classrooms.