Global Religions

As a global religion, Christianity is also an African religion, and increasingly so. During the twentieth century, the number of Christians in Africa rose from an estimated 10 million to 350 million, a dramatic increase from less than 10 percent to nearly 50 percent of the continent's population. Within the predominantly Muslim region of North Africa, ancient Christian communities survive including the Coptic Church, the Ethiopian Church, and the Nubian Church. During the twentieth century, substantial and widespread Christian commitment was generated by new forms of African Christianity that have been variously identified as African independent, indigenous, or initiated churches. Revitalizing traditional African culture, these local innovations in Christianity have also responded to global forces—conquest, colonization, capitalism, and urbanization—while participating actively in the twentieth-century transatlantic expansion of intensely experiential forms of Christianity. This article briefly recalls the history of Christian formations in Africa before focusing on two forces in that history—intercultural translation and economic exchange—that continue to operate in African Christian responses to the challenges of globalization.

The product of an early and involuntary globalization of African culture, Haitian Vodou is arguably the most misunderstood and maligned world religion. The reasons for this are not so much theological as they are historical and political. The historical reasons are rooted in Haiti's revolution. Haitian Vodou was born from the interaction of groups of people brought to Haiti to work as slaves, people who had been taken from several areas in West and Central Africa. Vodou, whether in Haiti or in diaspora communities in New York, Miami, New Orleans, and Montreal, is still characterized, more often than not, as a primitive religion involved in magic. In an attempt to undermine this persisting consensus about the nature of Haitian Vodou, this article examines one of Vodou's most misunderstood aspects, the manufacture of charms, or wanga. It also discusses the charm called mare djol, the function of the wanga in healing practices, the ethics of wanga, and the belief that all healing is about the healing of relationships.

This article explores how American journalists cover religion in Europe, where issues of faith and church-state relations lead to differing interpretations of religio-ethnic news events, by analyzing U.S. newspaper coverage of the anti-Islamic Dutch MP Geert Wilders. A focus on Geert Wilders incorporates both the Netherlands and Britain into the analysis but also Europe more generally given that the case prompted a wider discussion of immigration and the place of Islam in European societies. After discussing the differing roles and perceptions of religion in the United States and Europe, the article considers the differing models of integration for immigrants on the two continents and demonstrates how this has played out in news coverage of Islam. An examination of the reporting of the Geert Wilders case shows how Islam in Europe is represented through a conflict frame that incorporates a discourse of immigration, cultural incompatibility, identity, liberalism, and freedom.

Muslims who live in regions such as Europe and the United States that are outside the sphere of dominant Islamic culture face a steady array of choices. Underlying the lifestyle decisions of many American Muslims is what is often posed as a fundamental choice between being first an American or first a Muslim. Muslims who currently make their home in the United States represent a great number of movements and identities—immigrant and indigenous, Sunni and Shi'i, conservative and liberal, orthodox and heterodox. Over the last three decades, the number of Muslims in the United States has grown from fewer than half a million to an estimated six million. American Muslims can be clustered into three general groups, although this is not to suggest that they necessarily live or operate discretely: Muslims who are recent immigrants or children of immigrant families, including students; African Americans; and other Americans who have converted to Islam. This article describes Islamic communities, converts to Islam, mosques, and Islamic organizations in the United States.

Anglican relations with Islam and with Muslims are rooted in the long history of Christian contact with the world of Islam. There has been mutual recognition and cooperation during the millet system of the Ottoman times, but also hostility and conflict. Anglicans have sought to strengthen the ancient Oriental churches in Islamic lands through assistance of various kinds, without proselytizing. At their best, they have tried to serve their Muslim neighbours through education and medical work, whilst also seeking to understand Muslim cultural, literary, and spiritual traditions. In particular, Anglican witness has focused on translating and making available the Bible in Muslim languages. This chapter maps out the variety of approaches adopted and to outline what has been fruitful as well as to acknowledge the mistakes and to learn from them in order to work towards a common understanding of and commitment to fundamental freedoms, including that of belief in our world today.

The events in Seattle surrounding—or more accurately, opposing—the meeting of the World Trade Organization in the fall of 1999 constituted a symbolic beginning of the targeting of the global. Seattle 1999 amplified a strong switch away from the adage, “think globally, act locally.” Similar protests against globalization and capitalism took place in other parts of the world, but Seattle 1999 constitutes a symbolic representation of a major turn in the general and diffuse conceptions of globalization and globality. Since Seattle, the rallying cry appears to be that global action is required to confront perceived exploiters of the deprived, the poor, the oppressed, and so on; or that “localization” can only be achieved globally. And this is precisely one point where religion becomes particularly salient. Fundamentalism provides some fertile ground for the exploration of anti-global religious movements and trends. This article examines anti-global movements, religion and economic globalization, and the impact of globalization on “local” religion.

Islam is often identified as the religion of Arabs, and Arabs are commonly assumed to be Muslims. Today, the majority of Muslims live east of Karachi, Pakistan—far from Arab lands. For all that, the Arabs and the Arabic language have played an enormously important role in Islamic societies. At the same time, Islam has transformed Arab society, a fact that becomes apparent when one considers pre-Islamic and non-Muslim Arab religions. In modern times, non-Muslim Arab minorities, predominantly Christians, have shared a common language, culture, and political fortunes with Arab Muslims. Thus Islam evolved as a global religion following the Arab Muslim conquests of large parts of North Africa and West Asia in the seventh and eighth centuries. This enabled the Arabic language, as the medium of scripture, worship, theological, and juristic discourse to attain global importance well beyond the ethnic and geographic borders of Arab society. This article discusses the history and globalization of Arab Islamic societies.

Worship and its practices occupy a central place in every religious tradition, from Christianity and Judaism to Buddhism and Hinduism. Understanding aesthetics in religion requires paying attention to the role of the human body and its artistry in devotional acts, such as the use of paintings and sculptures as aids to prayer and meditative practices. Artistic means are employed in communal worshiping traditions; sacred rituals involve artistic expressions such as dance, song, poetry, story, images, and symbolic acts. This article examines artistry and aesthetics in modern and postmodern liturgy and worship practices of the world’s religious traditions. It first looks at scholarly sources that provide evidence on the aesthetic dimensions of liturgy. It then discusses the history of worship, whether communal or individual, in a cultural context, along with the concept of worship as verbal and non-verbal performance. It also considers the “art” of leading a worshiping community and concludes with a discussion of improvisation in religious worship.

Indigenous societies are affected by globalization in two ways: the forces of the global economy and culture that come into their traditional homes and their own out-migration to new pluralistic settings, including urban centers and foreign lands. In the case of the Australian aboriginals in the outback, their communities become remittance economies that are similar but also different from other indigenous remittance economies in small Pacific island states such as Tonga. Though some have migrated to Australia's cities, for cultural reasons Australian aboriginals are strongly disinclined to leave their own local areas, and when they have left their local region, they have not left the landmass of Australia in any significant numbers. A major factor in this reluctance to leave is a culturally religious one: the notion of the Dreaming. The Dreaming is a powerful factor in the culture of all Australian aboriginals and has religious roots. The cultural values of the family, the Elders, and the land with its Dreaming are still largely in place in traditional outback communities.

This chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the literature on Islam in Belgium since the early 1980s. It argues that this interdisciplinary field of study is largely typified by a concern with integration. This concern is expressed through two central themes that emerge as privileged tropes in the literature: the question of the social and economic integration of Muslims and that of their compliance with liberal and secular understandings of citizenship. While the first trope approaches Muslims as an underprivileged working class that needs to be included through education and labour, the second trope regards Muslims as a religious minority and examines the extent to which they comply with dominant forms of citizenship that are defined in liberal and secular terms. The authors show how these different tropes are unevenly distributed across the linguistic frontiers but they also nuance the omnipresence of this concern by referring to studies that disregard this exclusive focus on integration.

This chapter considers analyses offered by three important feminist scholars, working in different religious traditions, who attend to specific forms of women's religiosity. In Changing the Subject: Women's Discourses and Feminist Theology, Mary McClintock Fulkerson attempts to carve out a place within feminist theology for Christian women who do not consider themselves feminist. In The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power and Spirit Possession, Mary Keller's analysis of the phenomenon of spirit possession, which affects many more women than men, becomes a site in which to reflect anew on questions of gender and religious subjectivity. In Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, anthropologist Saba Mahmood finds that the issues raised by her study of Egyptian women involved in an Islamic renewal movement challenge certain feminist orthodoxies. Taking each author in turn, the chapter first traces the particular contours of the religious phenomenon each analyzes and shows how they reframe religious subjectivity. The final section brings the three essays together and describes what avenues they open up for constructive feminist theology in a global context.

This chapter searches the new identity of Post-Anglicanism beyond Anglicanism in the age of the global empires. The British Empire and Anglicanism were a two-wheeled vehicle during the colonial period. Anglicanism can be understood as justifying a ruling ideology in colonial ages just as the Pax Romana justified the Roman Empire under the slogan of the expansion of the Kingdom of God. This can be called the Pax Anglicana. How then can Post-Anglicanism frame the future of the Communion? It needs to take seriously today’s global contexts in the light of Minjung (the oppressed) in Asia, Latin America, Africa. For this we need to read the Bible against the background of the society and religion of ancient Israel and their links with ancient empires. And it has to reconstruct Anglicanism in terms of justice, peace, and religious dialogue against the global empire.

This chapter surveys the state of knowledge on six key topics of studies on Islam in Bosnia and Herzegovina: the Islamization process, the encounter of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) with modernity, the Bosnian Islamic tradition, Bosnian institutions, the religious revival, and ethnic cleansing and genocide. Research on Islamic history and heritage in Bosnia and Bosniak national identity development accounted for most of this scholarship prior to the 1990s. Since then genocide and security studies have been more prominent. The Islamic tradition of Bosnia is insufficiently studied but already features as an asset that other European Muslim communities may benefit from. Islamic revival has brought Bosnia into the focus of numerous security studies which have generally exaggerated the role of foreign factors. The ethnic cleansing and genocide that took place in the 1990s are attracting considerable attention but the full picture of their impact is far from complete.

Buddhism arose during the fifth century BCE in what is today Nepal and northeastern India to become one of the world's first transregional religions. In crossing from one region to another, hybrid practices emerged as it made contact with other spiritual and cultural traditions. That sort of transculturation, in which both itinerant religious practices and shifting local cultures were transformed, has characterized the history of Buddhism as it moved throughout Asia and the rest of the world. By the time Buddhism died out in India during the thirteenth century, it had spread throughout almost all of southeastern, central, and eastern Asia. Buddhism was transnational and transcultural—with new hybrid rituals, institutions, artifacts, and beliefs emerging as it crossed borders and interacted with local cultures and vernacular religions. This article deals with Buddhism outside Asia, including the United States.

This essay examines a variety of dysfunctional consequences of employing modern nation-states as the default organizing category for Buddhist studies regardless of the period being studied. Two of these consequences are directly related to one another: conflating contemporary nation-states with religious cultures, and equating religious and ethnic identities. Additionally, the organizing category tends to privilege some particular tradition as representative of or the essence of Buddhism in a specific nation-state, marking that tradition as uniquely authoritative. More broadly, research is constrained within the boundaries of nation-states, and the continuity of Buddhist traditions that cross nation-state boundaries is obscured. At the same time artificial continuities are retrospectively imposed, and the tradition comes to be defined by forms located at the center of political power. The work of four contemporary scholars is discussed as exemplifying the arguments for and value of moving away from nation-state categories. Consideration is given to the formative role of the training of missionaries and other agents of empire in the institutionalization of nation-state categories.

This chapter presents an overview of the state of knowledge on Islam and Muslim communities in Bulgaria. Since 1989, an extensive body of literature has been produced, mainly in fields of history, anthropology, sociology, and political science. The vast majority of these studies deal with the native Bulgarian Muslim minorities. Immigration is a new phenomenon for the Bulgarian society and research of Muslim immigrants is still in its early stages. The chapter presents in detail the demographic and social-economic profiles of Muslim communities. It then discusses the place Islam occupies in public space in Bulgaria, the issues of religious education and religious practices, and Muslim participation in Bulgarian politics. In the final part, the chapter looks in detail into two interconnected phenomena, which have occupied the public debates in Bulgaria in recent years: the alleged radicalization of Bulgarian Muslims and Islamophobia.

This chapter considers Catholic theology’s response to non-Christian faiths. It argues that the ‘theology of religions’ is not a locus of theological reflection distinct from Christology or Trinitarian theology or others, but one that asks the questions in a particular context. At the same time, the theology of religions is an act of Christian discipleship, in which Christians encounter those of other faiths and reflect on how we may discern the work of the Spirit beyond the bounds of the visible Church. The chapter pursues this argument by considering the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra aetate, the relationship between dialogue and mission, the phenomenon of ‘comparative theology’, and the relationship between dialogue and discipleship.

The chapter surveys the historical landscape of Chinese Christologies since the Tang dynasty, noting how the images of Christ relate to and impact specific cultural contexts. It also surveys four recent typological perspectives (the works of John P. Keenan, Kwok Pui-lan, Enoch Wan, and Jonathan Tan) discerning which Christology saves, and which destroys, China. Then, the chapter reconstructs, first, a distinctive Chinese Christology of Dao (way) that attempts to demonstrate the mutually transformative power between Christology and language, and, secondly, a Chinese Christology of Renren (a person who loves) that attempts to demonstrate Christ(ians) as the glorious image(s) of God. The main thesis of the chapter is that, such a biblical, contextual, and global Chinese Christology has the aspiration of ordering the world with beauty.

There are almost twenty million Muslims in China, constituting a diverse community that is both multi-ethnic and, within Islam, multi-religious. There are ten official Muslim nationalities of China, namely, Uyghur, Kazak, Dongxiang, Kyrgyz, Salar, Tadjik, Uzbek, Bonan, and Tatar. With the exception of the Hui, all these Muslim nationalities do not speak Chinese as their native language and are derived more from Central Asian than Chinese origins. The Hui are spread across the length and breadth of the country, but they often share nothing in common with each other except Islam, or the memory of it as handed down to them by their ancestors. While it also might be argued that most of the other Muslim minorities are on the borders of China proper and are historically and culturally more attuned to the regions and peoples outside of China, the Hui are unique in that they inhabit every city, town, and 97 percent of all counties in China. This article examines Islamic communities in China, focusing on Islam among Muslims classified by the state as Hui.

Christianity in China is a relatively new import from the West. During the seventeenth century, European missionary orders, especially the Jesuits and Dominicans, entered China and began impressive missionary efforts. However, a bitter “rites controversy” emerged between the Jesuits and the Dominicans over how much the Christian faith could be adapted to correspond to Chinese culture. In the early eighteenth century, the pope sided with the Dominicans, who rejected any compromise with Chinese religious practices. As a result, the emperor expelled missionaries and proscribed Christianity. The legacy of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperialism still affects Chinese Christian churches. A second important legacy of Christianity in contemporary China is the history of persecution under the Communist regime. Since Catholicism is heavily dependent on an ordained clergy, its growth in China is inhibited by the shortage of clergy. Various forms of Protestantism grow much more rapidly because they can depend on lay preachers.