Video: World Christianity, Christianity in the West: Continuities and Differences

Professor Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology at the Harvard Divinity School led a online conversation with the 2022-23 Yang Visiting Scholars, Dr. Heather Mellquist Lehto, and Dr. Ashok Kumar Mocherla. This conversation showed us how perspectives on the global scene might confirm, yet also challenge, how we think about Christianity and the study of Christianity here in the United States.

The Yang Visiting Scholars in World Christianity program brings distinguished senior and junior scholars of world Christianity to Harvard Divinity School each year, opening up fresh perspectives, particularly from the global south. This was our second year of having Yang Visiting Scholars at HDS, and the cohort for the third year in 2023-24 has been selected and those scholars will also be in attendance.

This event took place April 18, 2023.

Full transcript:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

DAVID HEMPTON: World Christianity, Christianity in the West Continuities and Differences. April 18, 2023.

Good evening, everybody from the Harvard Divinity School campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As Frank said, my name is David Hempton. And I'm honored and very pleased to welcome you to our first ever Yang Scholars Event in World Christianity here at Harvard Divinity School. Over a decade ago, I was invited to write the fifth volume for a new seven volume history of Christianity.

The aim of this series published by Taurus was to replace the old Pelikan History of the church. And the volume I was replacing was by JR Craig. I'm sure many of the book. It was called "The Church and the Age of Reason: 1648 to 1789." So both the title and the boundary dates show the eurocentrism of this well written volume. The first date 1648 as a piece of Westphalia, and then 1789 no prizes for guessing the French Revolution.

And The Church and the Age of Reason shows that it was really an intellectual history of the Enlightenment and its impact on Christianity, which is an important subject. But in a way locates the volume at a certain date in the history of scholarship.

My task was to write about the early modern period from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries. I called it the church in the long 18th century. Chandra just said, I borrowed a device from one of the great pioneers of scholarship in World Christianity, and I'm sure a name known to many of you here. Andrew Wills I know was instrumental in the intellectual formation of quite a few on this call.

The literary device I chose, which was borrowed from Andrew, was to invent and invite an intergalactic space traveler to visit planet Earth in this period to do research on World Christianity. What would world Christianity look like without any location bias for someone who simply stepped off from another planet?

What was immediately obvious to this intergalactic visitor, of course, is that the Euro-American preoccupation of most scholarship on the History of Christianity was not reflected in her experience of traveling around the globe. Saying Christianity, as a world religion, not as a mythological prototype or a purely English speaking religious tradition, is a vital first step towards understanding its global social salience.

As I soon found out, writing a book like that was not easy work since most scholarship on the History of Christianity is still mostly located within national or denominational traditions. Christian internationalism is hard to grasp and even harder to write about. Trying to do justice to that World Christianity framing was one of the most difficult intellectual projects I ever had to address.

That experience of trying to do justice to the enormous geographical and lived religion diversity of World Christianity persuaded me then that Harvard Divinity School should make this a priority at some stage in its intellectual journey. And that brings me to tonight's event. As you know, the Yang Visiting Scholars in World Christianity program at HDS was established by Nancy and X.D. Yang, and ran for the first time during the 2021, 2022 academic year.

We're incredibly grateful to the Yang's for their philanthropy and for their interest in this exciting program and for helping us on our way. The Yang Scholars Program brings scholars in World Christianity to Harvard Divinity School for a year, during which the scholars work on their own research, network with others at Harvard University, continue writing their publications, and teach one course to our students during the year.

At such a great pleasure, really a great pleasure to have all our seven Yang visiting scholars, past, present, and future, with us this evening. So we extend a very special welcome to you all and thank you for coming to HDS for a year and for joining us for this important evening. My gratitude also goes to professors Clooney and Olupona for all their efforts and contributions to the program overall, and for tonight's event in particular.

From their different geographical launching pads in Africa and India, these two very distinguished scholars have been stalwart supporters of this program from its outset. We wouldn't be here without them. So this evening, Professor Clooney will start us off in a conversation with Dr. Heather Mellquist Lehto and Dr. Ashok Kumar Mocherla, our current Yang visiting scholars. And after some discussion and further exploration with our other five Yang Scholars, Professor Olupona will offer some summarizing and concluding remarks.

Finally, my thanks go to our office for Academic Affairs, and in particular to Mr. Marlon Cummings and Mr. Kevin Chimo, who keep our program running and thriving, and have set up this event in record time at a very busy time of the year. It is our hope that we will have more events with our scholars who are able to visit and spend time at HDS due to the general support of X.D. and Nancy Yang.

Tonight's question we are exploring together is "World Christianity, Christianity in the West: Continuities and Differences." Now, without further ado, it's my great pleasure to punt over to Professor Frank Clooney the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology here at HDS to start us off in our discussion and conversation. Frank, thank you for hosting this evening's discussion and thank you for all you've done for this program.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: I think it was only a few weeks ago, Karen Greenlee Whittaker who is the genius behind so much of this and I run the phone together imagining how we might do this. And amazingly, what we hope for and dream for has come about, and so we're really happy to be here tonight. My own role in this is simply to moderate and to watch the clock and so forth.

But I do say that over the past 50 years, I've been going back and forth to South Asia, any number of times studying classical Hinduism and the like. But always mingling with and benefiting from contact with Christian communities in Nepal and India and Sri Lanka, and developing friendships and learning about old ways that go back as far as the traditions of Thomas the Apostle to the missionaries of the 16th, 17th century up to burgeoning new communities in India.

I think as a comparativist, I'm always very aware of the fact that the similarities across the world in World Christianity are striking, and the differences are extremely instructive. I think tonight, we are privileged to be able to hear and learn from the similarities and the differences.

As David announced that I'll begin, our two fellows from this year have a place of privilege. I'll introduce them one by one. And then, after they have spoken, our two fellows from last year and our three fellows from next year will go, and then we'll opening things up. So let us begin.

Heather Mellquist Lehto, our first speaker tonight, is a cultural anthropologist who work attends to the intersections of technology, religion, and kinship in South Korea and the United States. Her ethnographic book manuscript Holy Infrastructure draws together religious studies, anthropology, science and technology studies to demonstrate the co-construction of Christianity and media technology in some of the first transnational multi-site churches in the world.

Her research appears in many academic journals including the Journal of Korean Studies, Religion and Society in American Religion, and her audio ethnographic research has been featured on the International Public Radio program, PRI's The World. We're very honored to have Heather Mellquist Lehto lead us off. Over to you, Heather.

HEATHER MELLQUIST LEHTO: Thank you so much, Professor Clooney. I'm going to share screens so that we have something, perhaps a little interesting to look at while I talk. As he has described, my name is Heather Mellquist Lehto. I am a cultural anthropologist, but I come to it by way of the study of religion. In fact, I started to study anthropology by attending Harvard Divinity School as a master's student. This is a little bit of a homecoming this last year for which I'm grateful.

Being rooted in anthropology during my first research project, I didn't necessarily envision myself as working in World Christianity or really situate my research project within the subfield itself. As many of you might be aware, the history of World Christianity, as a scholarly conversation, has emerged in part through conversations and mission studies or missiology. There's a lot of deliberate focus on non-Western Christianities or Christianity's practice primarily by non-white Christians.

And that's a way to correct the imbalance in Christian studies that has been so Eurocentric or American centric. This was not my orientation, just coming from anthropology, and some of the concerns that I had motivating my research. I'm going to talk a little bit about how I came to be so interested in World Christianity because I think it speaks to what's going on in the field today.

What first interested me in my research was really the fairly recent transformation of megachurches into multisite churches around the world. Now, a multisite church is a single church that meets at multiple locations. And they do this often by recording the service in one sanctuary and broadcasting it to what are sometimes called satellite campuses that can be dispersed geographically across quite a great distance at times.

This is something that now is quite common, particularly after the pandemic, this probably needs no introduction. But when I began my ethnographic field research in 2011 and 2012, this was a fairly new thing in North America and this was the context that I was most familiar with. So I started doing research in this context because I thought that studying how Christians designed and deployed media technologies in this context would help me to answer some of my theoretical questions that I had about technology and religion.

At this point, it was a new and controversial thing in America. There was a lot of debate over what are the implications that these technologies would have on the relationship between the pastor and the congregation, for example, or how do we think about liturgy and ritual as being achieved across geographic distance like this.

While there were all these kind of questions that were live in North America, and I was doing my research, I noticed in a footnote that there was mention of some of the first multisite churches being in South Korea in beginning in the 1980s. It is based on that footnote that I started to learn Korean language, thinking that someday in the future it might become a second or third project. But because of the generosity of certain grants that I want as a graduate student, that is how I became somebody who works in South Korea in the Korean diaspora.

It's that that led me to South Korea, but it's an excellent place to study. Christianity, global Christianity, and in my case, religion and technology. These are the three kind of main churches that I did my research at. Onnuri Church, SaRang Church, and Yoido Full Gospel Church, which is perhaps the most famous because it has been known to be the largest church in the world for quite some time. At one point, they claimed almost 1 million congregants at just the main location alone, but they have hundreds of campuses spread throughout the world.

South Korea is an excellent place to study these things. As I said, even though Protestant Christianity was a fairly marginal religion in South Korea at the end of the Korean War, it grew very rapidly to the point that in the 1980s and 1990s, it was the site of many of the largest churches for several denominations.

I learned a lot of things about Christianity and megachurch Christianity in particular from doing this research. Perhaps, first and foremost, I'm going to highlight a couple of those things because I think that they're particularly definitive of megachurch trends of the last 20 or 30 years.

First, I was able to trace empirically the influence of South Korean churches on American megachurches in developing these multisite church structures. When I first began my project, I was under the assumption that this was a trend that began in the United States or perhaps Australia and then was moving throughout the globe, because this was the narrative that was being relayed to me not only through the churches, but also in the scholarship that I was reading.

But in fact, I was able to highlight the way that not only were American church is not the pioneer of this organizational form, but in certain notable prominent cases, they were directly modeling themselves off of South Korean examples, as in the case of Willow Creek church here. I have a picture here of the founding pastor of the South Korean church I studied and Willow Creek's founding pastor. This was a time in which Willow Creek was beginning to develop their multisite church and would later become popularly attributed with having pioneered it.

Another thing that I was able to trace back was the way that the cell group model of small group-- small bible study that was so popular in megachurches all over the world in the 1990s and 2000. That this is actually largely attributable to the popularization of it through Young-ho at Yoido Full Gospel Church.

These were really prominent influences that I was able to find that really cemented for me the importance of studying South Korea if we want to think about evangelical Christianity and trends in megachurch Christianity in general. On the theme of similarity and differences, this is not to say that these are carbon copies of one another.

Perhaps, the most significant difference that I'll highlight here is that I learned quickly that in South Korea, there's no colloquial term even for multisite church. Even though they did so much to develop this model throughout the world, they don't actually have a word for it in Korean. Typically, they would just call these churches megachurches. And this indicates a number of things about the kind of social and historical context of its development.

Theologically, from some of the pastors, they would explain this to me as an example of their obedience to God almost because they developed the multisite church model just kind of by accident. It wasn't a strategy per se, but Onnuri Church, for example, was gifted four plots of land at the same time. And so they just decided, well, let's try to do church across campuses.

This to them is a way of being obedient to God, which is in contrast to an American model of multisite church which does rigorous studies trying to figure out the best practices for creating these franchise-like structures.

But socio-culturally, there's also the fact that South Korean churches have a significant diasporic community, and they wanted to facilitate these bonds across geographic distances people moved and migrated and returned migrated.

When I returned to the United States to write my dissertation though, I was reviewing a lot of the literature in World Christianity. And the question that came to mind often was, why isn't this-- why isn't the influence of South Korean Christianity I think better documented in studies of Christianity? Why was I reading over and over again this narrative implicitly that megachurch trends really began in North America or perhaps Australia or Europe, and then were spread and copied in other places in the world?

Even if they were done so creatively, I think a lot of scholars who are really celebrating and highlighting the significance of megachurches in places like West Africa and in East Asia still do so with the implicit narrative that what is so exceptional is the way that they've creatively adapted what we're natively Western models and examples.

One of the things that I've been sort of grappling with, and one of the things that I think is quite interesting about World Christianity right now, is the methods that are being reflected upon. In order to grapple with this challenge within the field, that is, how can we both highlight and undo the asymmetry of how we are covering Western and non-Western Christianities without exoticizing a sense of-- exoticizing non-white or non-Western Christianities?

How do we deploy the category or use the category World Christianity in a way that doesn't reify the sense that the normative home of Christianity is in the West? That is properly understood to be not World Christianity while World Christianity is elsewhere. That has become my entry point into World Christianity. I'm really grateful here to have this opportunity at HDS with the generosity of the Yang Family to work to develop this.

What I find really exciting, I think, is that, even though World Christianity or Global Christianity has been-- is already a kind of well developed subfield, there's still so much work to be done. I think that there's a lot of openness to thinking about what hasn't been done in the field, what kinds of examples haven't been thought about enough, and what new tools can we adopt in order to theorize and do justice to both the particular and the global at once.

Something that I've really put forward to my graduate students and my seminar at HDS this year is that there's a lot of opportunity and energy and investment in this conversation. And I hope that more people who may not have originally thought themselves a part of it, like myself, will find a place for themselves and really help to make their own contributions. So thank you very much.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you, Heather, for interestingly and also concisely getting us started. I appreciate very much your presentation. I'm happy now to introduce our second speaker, Ashok Kumar Mocherla from India. He is a visiting professor here this year as Heather is. He is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology at Indore. The IITs are among the most prestigious institutions in South Asia.

His academic interests include sociology of religion, caste, and Indian Christianity, sociology of faith healing and public health. He is the author of Dalit Christians in South India: Caste, Ideology, and Lived Religion from Routledge 2020. He's held visiting physicians at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

And his current book project Desacrilizing the Body and Illness: Christianity Modernity, Missionary Medicine and Public Health in the Telugu Country examines how public perceptions of body and illness have been desacralized with the intervention of missionary medicine and Christian modernity in the Telugu-speaking region of South India. Ashok, we welcome you. Grateful for that you're here. And I turn things over to you.

ASHOK KUMAR MOCHERLA: Thank you so much, Professor Clooney, for the kind introduction. I'm grateful to Harvard Divinity School for this wonderful opportunity. And thank you Professor David Hempton and the HDS staff in making this event possible. Without waiting much of time, let me get to the point. How do we understand World Christianity is from Indian experience?

Today, roughly, there are about 32 million Indian Christians living in different parts of Indian states. Given an unofficial estimate, say, that number would be way more than 40 million because there are Pentecostals would not officially identify themselves as Christians according to legal entanglements and other social dynamics associated with each and every region. Having said that, I would like to talk about two major themes in the light of which we will be able to understand what World Christianity and what the Indian experience has to offer and to move forward.

When you talk about India, the discussion on caste becomes almost unavoidable and impossible. The first thing is the caste and Indian in Christianity, how do you understand? The advent of World Christianity in India, particularly the 19th and 20th century Protestantism, presented an alternative framework of social change for the depressed classes, mostly dalits, tribes, women, and other backward classes.

In that sense, the 19th century Protestantism of India, even though it has its origins in both Europe as well as in America, it was providing an alternative framework of social change. One of the depressed classes to deal with the caste inequalities and to deal with the realities of past oppression and other structures of inequality.

As a result of that, what happened in 1860 to 1920 was what the missionaries of then call the mass movements to Christianity. The mass movements to Christianity was the time frame where many people, particularly communities converted to Christianity in groups, not as an individual. Another important aspect of mass movements to Christianity in this time frame was majority of them who converted to Christianity were coming from the lower caste and the depressed communities.

In terms of the ideology, all of them who converted to Christianity from 1860 to 1920s, one of the view that Christianity-- they viewed Christianity as an escape route from the caste discrimination. Meaning, the Protestantism of the 19th and 20th century in India presented itself an alternative framework to what a prominent Indian anthropologist seen was called sanskritization.

Sanskritization was a dominant paradigm of social change. It is the process of cultural change towards the firstborn communities. If anybody is familiar with the caste system. So you have four major hierarchies in the caste system, whereby the sanskritization is nothing but a process where lower caste try to imitate the lifestyles and ritual practices of the [INAUDIBLE] in an attempt to raise their social status.

Theoretically, sanskritization only allows for positional change from one state, one particular caste status, to that of another one. Theoretically, it doesn't allow any kind of structural changes.

Christianity, as a framework, going beyond the sanskritization, provided the lower caste and the first communities with an alternative ideas, practices, symbols, and a worldview to contest the structures of caste inequality from 1860s to 1920. As a result of that today, we have an overwhelming majority of Indian Christians coming from the lower caste background. As a result of that, the first class of India moved away from being mere spectators or participants of the previous fate to that of being ambassadors of a new faith that is Christianity.

The second theme I would like to talk about is the public health and gender, and indeed, Christianity. By 1930s, there were about roughly 176 mission hospitals operating in India of both large scale and small scale, particularly catering to the needs of women, children, lepers, insane, TB patients, and so forth.

There are also-- it was organized on different lines. You have the missionary societies from the British land, particularly the [INAUDIBLE] and the [INAUDIBLE] missionary societies, and you also have [INAUDIBLE] missionary societies mostly funded by the American Evangelical Lutheran churches, particularly Lutherans.

The different fund was created by the Queen Victoria to provide health services to Indian women. The primary motive was to educate the Indian women and to make them doctors, medical assistants, nurses, and midwives. It also operated various dispensaries across the Indian subcontinent.

On the other hand, you have the mission hospitals of small and large scale primarily catering to the needs of the women and children, because the traditional cultural structures and the practices prohibited male doctors to even have a basic physical contact with the women patients. Consequently, women and the children were largely left at the mercy of the untrained midwives leading to so many pre and post natal deaths and child mortality rates.

It was reported in the Poona province, the child mortality rate in Poona province in 1920s was 10 times higher than the United Kingdom. That was the seriousness of the medical situation that women and the children were experiencing. In that sense, the current project that I'm trying to look at was a pioneering attempt by the pioneering women medical missionary who traveled all the way from Philadelphia to a small town in the Telugu-speaking region presidency in the 19th century, and established a hospital to serve the women and children.

This project analyzes how the pioneering woman missionary fundamentally transform the gender relations in the field of medicine by establishing hospitals, nursing colleges and medical colleges for women, and it breaks down the cultural barriers. We democratize the medical knowledge as well as education in favor of the woman and the lower class.

From these two major themes, we have about roughly 176 medical missions. Prior to that, you have a sizable number of people close to 30 million people converting to Christianity on the grounds that Christianity is an alternative route to escape the caste discrimination.

In that sense, the essence of all Christianity that human beings are equal in the sight of God has been an integral part of Indians who dealt with the most compelling social challenges in the past, including the freedom struggle and their ongoing journey today. As Dana Robert observes, the strength of all Christianity lies in its creative interweaving of the vow of world religion with the proof of its local contexts. Thank you.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you very much, Ashok, for opening up so many more questions. I'd like to think that, as we go along, we're accumulating unique insights. First, Heather, and now Ashok opening up questions and possibilities for discussion later on.

Having heard two more ample presentations from our young fellows of this year, we now will have five shorter presentations by our past fellows and our coming fellows. Giving them the impossible task of taking very complicated material and speaking about it in only five minutes or so. We're sympathetic with them in advance in all that they will be challenged to do.

I'll introduce them one by one. We'll have, first of all, last year's fellows who graciously brought so much to our community in their time with us. Beginning with Chandra Mallampalli. Chandra Mallampalli holds the Fletcher Jones Foundation Chair at Westmont College and he is a Professor of South Asian History. His recent and very well admired and received books South Asia's Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim from Oxford University Press explores the deep history of interaction between Christians, Hindus, and Muslims in South Asia.

His current project explores the capacity of religion to foster cosmopolitanism, especially among South Asian diasporic communities. Chandra, over to you, and welcome back.

CHANDRA MALLAMPALLI: Thanks so much, Professor Clooney, and thank you Dr. Heather Mellquist Lehto and Ashok Mocherla. Really great to meet you. I think you're going to have-- I think it must have been an exciting year for you here at Harvard as it was for me. I don't have that much to say. I only have five minutes, so I'm just going to play off of what each of you has said, riff a little bit.

The first issue that jumps out at me as I listened to Dr. Lehto relates to the issue of difference. The very field of World or Global Christianity is predicated on a certain type of difference of the non-West from the West and of these expressions of Christianity in Africa and Asia that there is agency and there is a role for what came before in the ways that Christianity is expressed.

It seemed, as I was listening to the relationship between megachurches and the satellites, that there is more of a capacity to identify the similarities, the identification, the common identity that's shared between the satellites and the megachurch. That seems to break down, when we look at the Christianities across the ocean, that there is a type of a difference that is hard to grapple with.

I remember reading something from the Africanist Paul Landau who basically contended that it's very difficult to recognize African Christianity as a common religion to what is practiced in America. I continue to ponder that as I look at the different expressions of Christianity around the world. What is the glue? Does belonging to a common religion presume that there is some solidarity, some cooperation that exists between the traditions across the world? What's the affinity?

The other questions that come to mind is I think of the corporateness of some of these entities in South Korea or other megachurches around the world relates to the issue of capitalism of global wealth. These are issues that are taken up in earlier work is, are megachurches an expression of the American gospel being exported abroad and the impact of broadcasting? I think, Heather, I think you've pushed back on that very effectively in describing the reverse influence that's taking place. I certainly appreciated that.

Relating to Dr. Mocherla, I appreciated your emphasis on the emancipatory impact of Christianity in the Indian context. But it only reinforces the sense that Global Christianity or World Christianity is becoming increasingly the religion of the global poor. And as such, it's not always easy to recognize the forms and the structures and the theologies as sharing any common basis or what came before in America or in Europe.

I don't know that these dollar converts are reading Karl Marx dogmatics or any of the other aspects of the corpus of theological education elsewhere. What is the cultural material out of which the poor express and articulate their Christian devotion? In what ways do we recognize them as sharing the common thread with Christianity in the West? I think that's the task of the study of World Christianity is to really listen carefully to the ground, understand some alternate experiences, and the different ways that they're formulated. So I'll leave it at that.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you, Chandra. Being marvelously succinct. Everybody's being so succinct tonight, which will leave us plenty of time later on to amplify and have back and forth among the speakers and all of us who are listening in. But thank you for picking up on the two presentations made already, and then bringing out some of these aspects which I think will give us a lot to talk about.

Our second speaker from last year is Dr. Oluwakemi Abiodun Adesina who is associate Professor of History at Redeemer's University in Ede, Osun State in Nigeria. Kemi, as she is popularly known, is currently the editor of JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies. She has published in local and international journals and books. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Youth and Pentecostalism in Nigeria. Kemi, over to you and welcome back. Thank you for coming from a different time zone to be with us tonight.

OLUWAKEMI ABIODUN ADESINA: Thank you very much, Professor Clooney. It's a pleasure seeing you again, Chandra. Heather, it's a pleasure meeting you and Ashok. Well, I-- for this presentation, I've actually looked at the future of Global Christianity. But I am going to lay emphasis on the place of Nigerian youths in the future of Global Christianity.

Nigeria is a great player in Global Christianity, particularly within the scope of reverse mission. The youth in Nigeria actually played a great role in Christianity-- in World Christianity. From my studies, the role of youths, particularly in the future of Global Christianity, cannot be overemphasized. The youth is the future of the church and play a significant role in the growth and development of the church.

From my research, we carried out a study through Google form. Like Etha rightly said, "Technology is a very important feature of World Christianity," which the youths use a lot, particularly through the various social media platforms. They have been able to impact on Global Christianity through those platforms.

They have used those platforms for evangelism where they have shared their faith through those platforms, and this has led to the growth of church in Nigeria and even in other parts of the world. They have brought unique styles of worship to the Christian community. The Nigerian youths have also brought-- they've also been passionate about mission works. This has made significant impact on global missions.

They have also engaged with social justice in Global Christianity as they have tried to be advocates of social justice, issues, such as inequality, poverty, and corruption. An interesting trend that I noticed is a reawakening which was born out of some comparative analysis between modern day societies and cultural societies. What they've concluded, these youths that I referred to, that their cultural beliefs do not mesh well with what is available today.

They believe that there is-- I believe that there's a clash of ideals and they have some identity crisis, the youth that I referred to. They are no longer satisfied with the provisions of institutions of Western civilization. Such civilization that I refer to here are democracy, legal institutions, because they feel they can't see the church as a champion of social justice. For them, it has become a breeding ground of social injustices that has decimated wider society.

I'm sure this is going to be controversial, but that is my observation from my field trip, that this young people feel that what society stood for before Christianity, they feel it's more ideal than what they find in Christian faith now. Because now, they go to churches, they find people who have been accused of embezzling funds being celebrated. Meanwhile, in traditional societies, either two, such people would have been condemned by society and they wouldn't be able to-- they won't be respected in society. I'll leave it at this point because I think I would spent my five minutes. Thank you.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you, Kemi. You are raising some controversial points that we can return to later. Everyone, make a mental note, and we can come back to your questions about the pre-Christian and the Christian era. Is it better? Is it progress? Or how these things go? That's very interesting. Thank you so much.

Now, we turn to the future. Our three Yang Scholars who will be with us next year. I'll, in the same way, introduce them one by one. And I would ask them perhaps, just as a teaser, to attract interest for next year to tell us also, in a sentence or two, and you can take an extra minute or whatever you need to do this, what you intend to be working on while here next year. I think that will be a bonus that we begin to anticipate where we'll be in the fall.

I'll begin with Thomas Santa Maria. Tom recently finished his PhD in Renaissance Studies and History. He is currently the Interim Dean of Silliman College at Yale. He is working on co-editing a book on Catholic Global Missions and the Emotions in the Early Modern World. His first monograph project is also coming forth, which is well underway on the role of the body in Catholic devotional life. Tom, over to you, and you can respond and tell us about what we can expect from your next year.

THOMAS SANTA MARIA: Thank you so much Father Clooney, and thanks, of course, the generosity of the Yang family that makes this possible. And to Harvard Divinity for bringing this interesting evening of conversation, which no doubt will continue in future with Yang Scholars, past, present, and even more future as we move forward.

I think what I'll do is I'll talk a little bit about the projects that I want to work on and tie them in with some of the themes that I'm already hearing. World Christianity. There's this phrase that Tony Grafton used at a lecture last year that haunts me when thinking about World Christianity because he said, "It's really hard to do one thing well let alone two or three or more." Of course, if you're working in World Christianity, you're working in two or three or more things at once, which does make it quite a challenge.

Now, I know that one thing we're thinking about in Christianity I work mostly in Catholicism or Catholic Christianity is, who are Catholics today or who are Christians today? This is a question, I think, we all see all the time in relation to American Politics. People want to know. Well, it's a question whose origins reach back quite far into early modernity, which is what I work on in missions.

Increasingly, as we've all mentioned, we're trying to move away from a eurocentric model of thinking about those missions and therefore, whatever global Catholicism or Global Christianity is.

One thing that I think I'm proposing to start addressing that problem, as we try to move away from the European voices and think more of the subaltern voices, is a new theme. A lot of what we work on now is conversion. What I think I want to research more is apostasy. As it turns out, one person's trash is another person's treasure. Well, in a similar way, one person's convert is another person's apostate.

It seems to me an interesting take because one thing that happens in these moments of cross-cultural contact between Europeans and other peoples is that, Europeans, as frequently as they convert people or at least to some degree, also a positive size, and leave either religious life or even Christianity or Catholicism altogether. It strikes me that if it's hard to do a lot of things, well, maybe focusing on a theme across geographies might be a good way, and that seems like an interesting theme.

And then the only other thing that I was going to raise is something of a response to Heather's presentation on multisite churches is that, before technology, there was also the supernatural. Another thing that I'm going to be working on next year is by locating nuns and these missionary nuns from Europe who managed by certain accounts and by certain attestation to be in multiple places at once as part of their missionary efforts.

It also actually does bring in to a showcase question the point about social change. One of the things that happened following the Council of Trent was when it concluded in 1563 was this decision to keep nuns cloistered in convents. Well, it's pretty amazing if you have bi-locating nuns just how far from the convents they're getting, and it speaks to the ways that Catholicism in this period was grappling with social change. I think I'm going to keep it brief in there by talking about how some of the things I'm working on relate to some of the themes that have already been raised.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: I never thought we'd get to bi-locating nuns tonight, so that's another trip down the road. I did some work on Constantine Beschi, the Jesuit missionary 18th century South India, who was inspired in part by Maria of Agreda, the Spanish nun who wrote a life of the Virgin Mary based on discussing things with the Virgin Mary. But there are all these stories about Maria of Agreda having apparitions in the Southwest of what is now the United States and going back and forth and all that.

Bringing this unusual angle into the discussion will be fascinating. It'd be fun to find if there are other parallels. The things that one might find either implausible or perhaps out of the ordinary that we find by turning to different cultural context. And also how people in other parts of the world might look at the United States and say, well, that's pretty implausible to what you are calling or practicing as Christian.

Thank you very much, Tom, for such a succinct presentation. Everybody's being so good on time. This is quite marvelous. I'd like now to turn to Gina Zurlo. Gina, welcome to the area. You're up not too far from here already, but we'll come down to Cambridge soon. Gina Zurlo is co-director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity up located at the Gordon-Conwell campus, at least temporarily up there on the North Shore of the Boston area.

Her work intersects quantitative sociology of religion, gender studies, and world Christianity. In 2019, she was named one of the BBC's 100 most inspiring and influential women in the world for her work in quantifying the religious future. Her latest book is Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement, which is out right now in 2023. Gina, over to you, and the screen is yours.

GINA ZURLO: Wonderful. Can you see my screen share OK?

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Yes.

GINA ZURLO: Great. Wonderful. Thank you so much. The benefit of going towards the end is that your mind is just racing with all kinds of things you can talk about. But I wanted to use a little bit of time here to talk statistics if I can. My entry point into World Christianity is through quantitative social science.

I wanted to share this very boring line graph, in fact, which of the world that is Christian from roughly the year 1900 to projections for the year 2050, which shows very little information, which is that around a third of the world has been Christian is Christian and is projected to be Christian into the future. You might think, Wow, she only has five minutes and she's spending it on this very flat line. But what this line graph hides is the reality that this shift of Christianity to the global South has happened and is continuing.

So if we look at the demographic makeup of Christianity in the year 1900, we see that 82% of all Christians lived in the global North in 1900, and only 18% of Christians lived in what the United Nations calls the Global South. But today, Global Christianity looks like this. This is why we're all here. This is why we study this material in a sense is because 67% of all Christians today live in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania, and only 33% of Christians are European, North American.

So this discussion of centering eurocentrism in the study of Christianity is real because Christianity is shifting. And we anticipate that by the year 2050, 77% of all Christians will live in the global South. Of course, Christianity shifting is not anything new. There have been other shifts in Christianity over the course of Christian history.

But I think one of the least acknowledged aspects of Christianity shift to the global South is that there would be no shift to the South if it weren't for women. And I'm really delighted to hear Ashok and Kemi and Tom talk about gender and women in their research because in the words of Dana Robert in her 2006 article, World Christianity is a women's movement.

We see that Christianity really is majority female everywhere in the world. And the book that I have coming out in a couple of weeks here talks about the reality of the queens, and mystics, and pastor's wives, and missionaries, and teachers, and nurses, and Bible women, and indigenous evangelists, and mothers, and widows who help spread the faith and make Christianity the world religion that it is today. Really, if you go to almost any congregation in the world, it's going to be majority female.

But one thing that my previous study revealed was a chronic lack of data on gender in World Christianity. My first round of my Women in World Christianity project talked about the gender makeup in membership of Christian churches and networks and denominations around the world, which tends to show gender parity. Both men and women tend to both be members of congregations. But when you look at who's participating, it's just off the charts that it's mostly women who are on the ground workers, whether or not they're in official leadership capacities.

What I'll be doing at HDS in this coming year is getting a more nuanced, more localized participation data for gender and World Christianity. So looking at what is the gap between men and women's participation as it comes to leadership, as it comes to private practices, public practices, importance of religion in your life - some of these standard sociological measures of religiosity. Really nuancing and investigating the gender gap that exists in World Christianity and trying to fill the data gap that exists in World Christianity as well. I'm just delighted to join all of you at HDS next year.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: That is also fascinating. Thank you so much, Gina. Knowing so much in saying it's so succinctly again is a marvelous quality that you show us today. So thanks for that. And then, finally, of our visitors for next year, we have Nathanael Homewood. So welcome, Nathanael, to joining us tonight. He is lecturer in the Department of Religion at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He received his PhD in Religion from Rice in 2018.

His first book was entitled Seductive Spirits: Deliverance Demons, and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism. And it's going to be published by Stanford University Press early 2024. He's already working on the second book for Bloomsbury Publishing Exploring Global Christianity in the city of Houston. And a third, I think, long term project on the global networks of the controversial faith healer Benny Hinn. Over to you, Nathanael, to complete our tour of the Yang Fellows, past, present and future.

NATHANAEL HOMEWOOD: Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure and a thrill to be part of this, both the discussion today and also now the legacy of the Yang scholarship and all who have gone before and who will come after. So this is a real pleasure. I think what I'm going to share today will build on what Heather was saying, but I came in late. So if I mischaracterizing anything, I apologize.

One of the things that I have become increasingly interested in World Christianity is the fact that it is not a here and there, a West and the rest type of field, but it is marked by a constant interplay of networks between a great many places. One of the ways that I'm exploring that is this book that I'm writing now on Christianity in Houston, which started as a book on Christianity in Houston, and is now really a world Christianity book in Houston.

Because the reality is that in a city this diverse, the story of Christianity is varied and incredibly diverse. So we have incredible African churches here, we have all sorts of Orthodox churches here. But also, in the way that Christianity is practiced on a daily level is on a daily basis is a story of World Christianity.

So we have quinceaneras that are rooted in masses and practices from Mexico. We have sports, which I just finished an interview with Hakeem Olajuwon, the great Nigerian Muslim basketball player, who is a big part of the story of Christianity and religion in this city. And so in all these varied ways, you have Christianity in Houston, not a story of American Evangelicalism and/or Baptist Christianity as one might assume, but actually a story of many Christianities from many places flourishing in a place where it is hot and hard to flourish.

As far as my thoughts on World Christianity, one is that very fact that I think it is all about thinking through the ways in which networks move throughout the world. That's what I'm going to be working on largely in my year at HDS.

I'm going to be spending at looking at the popular but also controversial faith healer Benny Hinn, which seems like a weird choice for a World Christianity project. Because he is, in so many ways, defined by American excess, even though he's not American, he was born in Palestine and grew up in Canada.

What I'm doing with Benny Hinn though is considering from the start his very international audience. I have attended many Benny Hinn events and have gotten to know Benny Hinn closely and attend his Zoom events. And it is remarkable - the international flavor of the audience. In fact, the American part of the audience is quite small. So starting from that, I was interested in what does that mean, and also how is that come about.

What I'm doing is a multisite ethnographic project on Benny Hinn exploring how places other than the US have influenced Benny Hinn and Benny Hinn has influenced people there. It came out of early field work where I would be in Zimbabwe and there would be no electricity, but they would turn on the generator to watch Benny Hinn. Or I was in Ghana and the prophets there, very much were emulating what they had seen from Benny Hinn.

But Benny Hinn has also learned much in his travels around the globe. And so my hope is to explore the ways in which those travels have also influenced and shaped what he does in his ministry.

I wanted to just also finally add that I was thrilled to hear conversations already about gender and class, as I think they are crucial elements of the exploration of World Christianity. But I also hope that race and sexuality play a more prominent role in conversations of World Christianity. I think they have played a muted role to date and there is much, much more to be done there.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you, Nathanael. Thanks then to all our speakers for opening up so many issues in such a succinct fashion, giving us this dizzying tour of the world all at once. Since we're doing so well on time, before opening it up to any questions from the audience, if others who have been listening in, please do put questions in the chat or comments you'd like us to discuss or be ready to put up your electric hand in a few minutes to raise new questions and so on like that.

But let me first just give an opportunity, if any of the speakers would like to, everybody has already been adverting to what others have had to say. Would anyone from Heather all the way to Nathanael like to comment on what others have said or add to what others have said thus far? There's so much that could be talked about, but I give you the first opportunity.

Yes. Heather, please.

HEATHER MELLQUIST LEHTO: I'm sorry. I'm not going to follow the directions. So I'm going to add another thing to the queue if I may. I just wanted to mention that both in Dr. Adesina's presentation and in Dr. Zurlo. Something that I wonder if either you can speak to is the demographic changes and the focus on youth and how-- as demography shift in the coming years and there are different predictions for that, how that might also affect the way that World Christianity manifests around the globe. I'll be very fascinated to see more work on that or if any of you have comments about that.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Open up. Gina and Kemi, would you like to take that up about the implications of the demographic of the age changes and so on? Gina?

GINA ZURLO: I can say a bit about that. So the Pew Research Center came out with their age report a few years ago. And they said the average age of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa is 19 years old. That's the average age. So there are some of the youngest Christians in the world in a region of the world that has had a tremendous growth of Christianity.

Home to many of these megachurches, home to many prominent evangelists, home to a lot of people moving across borders for mission. Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming, in some ways, the "Center of World Christianity" and yet it's a youth movement. What are the implications of that?

What theological education are these youths receiving, whether formally or informally, to inform the kind of work that they're doing and the influence that they have on Christianity? Is it mostly coming from social media? Is it coming from technology? Or is it coming from learned professors somewhere? Probably not. So there are a lot of implications of the youth bulge.

And really that's even one of the reasons why Christianity grew so much in Africa, whereas, yes, a lot of people converted to Christianity in the mid 20th century, and then those families had lots of children. But there was a population boom in the mid 20th century that helped contribute to the growth of Christianity there as well. I think we do need to think more critically about what this means that the Center of World Christianity is, in some ways, the youngest as well.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Gina, just to add before asking Kemi if she'd like to say anything, would that mean that with this incredibly young average age of 19, that most of these young people are born into Christian families, they're not converts? Is that correct or is that misconstrued?

GINA ZURLO: I think that's probably true. The rate of conversion has dropped off quite a bit as the potential pool of converts has gotten much smaller. Because Muslims don't tend to convert to Christianity, Christians don't really convert to Islam, and most converts came from traditional African religion and those communities have gotten smaller and smaller. So we're not seeing the same conversion rate as we did.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Fascinating. Kemi, would you like to say anything about the youth factor? You mentioned it also.

OLUWAKEMI ABIODUN ADESINA: I quite agree with Gina.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Do either of you know? Would this be true the demographics of Muslims in Africa, they also would be aged rather young? Any information on that?

GINA ZURLO: It's in the Pew report. I'd have to-- I read the Christian section more closely.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you very much, Heather, for getting us started. Other comments on that issue of youth, or back and forth among any of you who've spoken thus far about how to think about these things? Chandra?

CHANDRA MALLAMPALLI: I have to slip out because I have to lecture on the Vietnam War in about three minutes. But I just wanted to say I appreciated all the presentations and the discussion of networks, discussion of apostasy, the discussion of multi-directionality and counting the numerical growth of Christians.

I just am really captivated with this question of how do we constitute a Christian subject outside of the West. What goes into that type of reflection and the need to just adopt new lenses and new capacities to listen to subaltern peoples, and the way they formulate their theologies and their convictions. Recognizing that they're going to be very different from ours, especially if they're not literate then, if they're not plugged into global networks of information. I think our task is immense. And I'm really excited about being a part of this conversation with all of you.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you, Chandra, and good luck teaching the Vietnam War in hour class. So that's another heroic deed you'll take on yourself. Before opening it up, I would pose a question. I mentioned earlier that I've been going back and forth to South Asia for 50 years now. And my concern is always-- my interest has always been about the Hinduism and the Buddhism in South Asia, thinking about those religious traditions. And then, in a way looking at the Christian communities, particularly in India, particularly in South India, in light of what I know about the Hindu communities.

Very few of you mentioned anything much about the engagement with Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism. Ashok, you certainly talked about the caste issues and the like. Would anyone like to say any more about your expertise area how there is a-- do we learn something-- we're so concerned about pluralism, religious diversity in North America, in United States today, in Cambridge, Massachusetts today.

Do the situations that you study tell us something about how to think about inter-religious relationships that the Christianity's of the world and the South should or could change the way we, in places like North America, East Coast, think about pluralism? Anybody ever think off the top of their head about a topic like that?

GINA ZURLO: I do, if you don't mind.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Please, Gina. Sure.

GINA ZURLO: One of the interesting things is Singapore is one of the most religiously diverse places in the world, with large populations of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists for a very tiny place. A study came out a few years ago that said 9 out of 10 Singaporeans are comfortable living in religious diversity. And then around the same year, a report came out from the United States that said 9 out of 10 evangelicals don't like religious diversity or don't want anything to do with their religious neighbor or are just uncomfortable with levels of pluralism.

I thought, what an interesting world Christianity question, which is the United States, the country with the most Christians in the world, and still a major player in World Christianity discourse. People are uncomfortable living in religious diversity. Whereas Asian Christians, very naturally live in religious diversity, have always lived in religious diversity.

As a Westerner, I don't want to read books from other Westerners about how to live in religious diversity. I want to read books from Singaporeans. I want to read books from Asians, Asian Christians, how to live and welcome your neighbor of other religious traditions. That decentering of eurocentrism still needs to happen as well. But I think some have lost sight of this reality that Asian Christians live and breathe this pluralism that is still rather quite new for Europeans and North Americans.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Others like to jump in on this topic about the--

ASHOK KUMAR MOCHERLA: [INAUDIBLE] to continue the discussion on what Dr. Gina and what Dr. Chandra Mallampalli has mentioned. The future of Christianity lies in the strengths of how World Christianity going to survive in the more diversified and plural society like South Asia, the Global South. In many of these countries, Christianity is the religion of the minorities, not a dominant religion, unlike the West. So that's why our research matters.

The focus of World Christianity two to three decades down the line is going to be that. How do we devise and model World Christianity to be suitable and a thriving religion in the context of many more non-Christian, Abrahamic religions, particularly in the Global South? That's going to be very challenging. Religion has its own challenges to both.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you. Anybody else? David Hempton, would you like to jump in there?

DAVID HEMPTON: Thanks, Frank. I mean, one thing that's going through my mind, I think, is what-- I mean, of course, what I said at the start in my introduction about writing this book that I tried to turn into a book on World Christianity over a period of 150 years, and how to organize that and think about it. It made me think a little bit of Tom's comment about Tony Grafton quote that it's hard to do one thing well, never mind two or three.

I suppose what's going through my mind a little bit is we've had this dazzling travel trip around different parts of the world and looking at Christian expressions in different parts of the world, especially East and South Asia and Africa, sub-Saharan Africa. I mean, is it possible-- I mean, I grew up studying European, British, Irish Christianity.

It was more or less country by country. There were French [INAUDIBLE] historians, German [INAUDIBLE] historians. Even within the British Isles, there was Irish historians, Welsh historians scholars. I remember writing a book on Christian traditions in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, which people thought was an ambitious thing to try and whom even in that small geographical area.

I think the question I have a little bit is that, is World Christianity going to be simply an amalgamation of local geographical studies that only one or two people have the range and scope to bring together in some way? Or, is there something like World Christianity where there's going to be creative interactions among scholars and around some of the things that we've talked about tonight, women and sexuality, and emotion bodies, colonialism, whatever it might happen to be.

People here know far more about this than I do; this is not my specialism. But my understanding a little bit was that there was this group of people who were pioneer scholars in World Christianity, people like Dana Robert and Bea and Sonny and Yale, Andrew Walls in the University of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. These were the conceptual framers of how to think about this in some very fine books and some very creative articles. There was something you might call World Christianity or some generic field like that that encapsulated the work of the field going forward.

I suppose my question of the people on the panel is, is something like that feasible? I mean, even among Yang Scholars going forward, is there a sense of field and disciplinary and family spirit involved in what we're trying to do here, or are we simply a federation of local geographies and doing our bit? It's World Christianity because it's happening in some different location from where we are now.

That seems to me to be a big difficult question to think about. One or two people have tried to answer tonight by focusing on, I think, it was Tom again talking about apostasy as a theme. No doubt, there are other kinds of things we can think of, and I was struck. In the Gifford lectures I gave last year, I was trying to do a World Christianity thing around these three words - networks, nodes, and nuclei - trying to see what networks are working, where are the nodal junction points where something important is happening that then distributes itself in different parts of the world.

And then you try what are the inner ingredients or DNA structure or atomic molecules of certain religious traditions that are now allow them to spread beyond national geographical boundaries. That's a long rambling question, but I think you get the picture of what I'm trying to say. I'd love to hear in the comments of some of our panelists on that issue about how they see the next decade, for example, in relation to that question.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Excellent. Thank you. Whoever would like to take it up first, we have a good amount of time. Heather seems to be ready.

HEATHER MELLQUIST LEHTO: Sure. I love talking about this actually. It's a bit of an obsession of mine. My answer is just that I hope so. I really do hope so and I really think there's the opportunity to do so. I already think that you're seeing a lot of signals that World Christianity has populated a number of case studies historically and is moving more towards studies of interaction and movement and processes that make Christianity appear global, and networks, and things like this.

Thinking across spaces. Comparatively, that's something that's already being done. Something that I hope is also done. Maybe with the inclusion of more social scientists which have been underrepresented, I would say, in this conversation is thinking very-- thinking very deliberately about the idea of Global Christianity and World Christianity. And maybe adopting some tools, some theories and methods from the social sciences, as they've been thinking about how do we think about-- how difference is imagined and in placed around the world.

Really pointing to the fact that the global is an imaginary. At a certain degree, if we think about Catholicism in the name Catholic, there's a universality to it. To even call, even refer to Global Christianity in a sense is a bit at odds. When has Christianity never not been global?

I would really hope that going forward, we can draw on some of these theories from things like anthropology or cultural geography or sociology to think critically about when did Christianity become envisioned as somehow not global. What are the things that make us view Christianity and think about its spatiality as being more global?

What are different kinds of imaginaries about religious community and movement and dynamics that might move us forward? I think it's at that level thinking about themes and connections and spatiality that I think some of this could also happen, which doesn't take away from the culturally particular cases, which are also quite valuable, of course.

DAVID HEMPTON: Thanks, Heather.

THOMAS SANTA MARIA: I'll jump in if I could here and say that it strikes me that if you're doing early modern Catholicism today, it is Global Catholicism. One wouldn't really be able to talk about Catholic idly anymore as maybe ecclesiastical history historians of the past did. Nation by nation, it just wouldn't really be accepted as an option.

At the same time, though, it actually strikes me that it might be an interesting time in some ways to revert to that model if we're thinking about the world today and really actually rise of nationalism post-COVID with China ascending, Russia and our world closing in some ways and not being maybe as global as it looked three years ago.

Again, it might be a way of looking at opposite things that sparked some interest. But I also think that you've raised an interesting methodological question. Obvious, I'm an early modernist. The subaltern voices is very hard to retrieve in the early modern period. That doesn't mean it can't be done or shouldn't be done, but it does raise a serious methodological question how are you going to do it.

And I'm just noting that the most recent issue of the Journal of Early Modern History was about Global Microhistory of the Local and the Global. And it was all about doing this comparative thing of taking small stories and seeing how they emerge in global trends and themes. Thinking then about what that means is as you're, well, defining, if that's what you will say, what World Christianity or Catholicism is.

DAVID HEMPTON: I have a little additional question, Frank, if I may. I mean, when I was setting out on some of these interesting questions in European Christians. We're reminded of this at the conference we had on Friday celebrating the work of Charles Lamb on how to think about African and African-American Christianity.

I remember the excitement that we all had then of moving away from Christendom establishment therein and social elite Christianity to what we call popular religion or unofficial religion or left religion here at Harvard. Whatever a word or phrase you used, it was really religion from below what does it look like outside cultural elites and denominational structures and so on.

The question I have a little bit is that, can some of those techniques of investigation and theories and models of reconstruction play out in a wider geographical area or is that simply a recipe for another form of Euro-American imperialism and colonialism? You see what I'm getting at? In other words, is it best almost to avoid all of that scholarship and to say, well, a bunch of Europeans did that 20 or 30 years ago? Keith Thomas's and John Bosses of this world, interesting stuff, but it's not going to help us.

Is it better to think that way that it's better to start with very deep other ethnographic or culturally embedded histories, anthropologists, ethnographies, in particular places in Africa or South Asia or East Asia? Or, is there any conversation to be had with that scholarship that some of us were raised in a while ago and had some productive results? I'm noticing there. I mean, to what extent would be using that scholarship itself a piece of insensitive colonial appropriation that's best avoided?

FRANCIS CLOONEY: David, I would add to that. I noticed I've been looking at already at the program for the AR meeting in San Antonio in a few months. One of the interesting proposals that may be a panel for the Hindu-Christian Studies group is to try to reimagine the conversations than ways of talking about Hindus and Christians by using indigenous terminology of the Hindu tradition.

Thinking in Sanskrit, thinking in Bengali or Tamil, and trying to generate out of those knowledge systems and intellectual structures a way of talking about Christianity instead of always using English language and discourses from the West.

It seems to be, maybe something related to what you're saying is destabilizing it by saying, well, if we turn the whole thing around and looked at it in terms of other vocabularies, it could be very productive for us. But comments from anybody on the panel, we'd like to then open it up for everybody who's been patiently listening in. But on David's question, any thoughts from anybody?

THOMAS SANTA MARIA: I was going to take-- I'll just make a really quick jump which is to say this was very much the question of Jesuit missionaries and the point of accommodation they use versus-- I mean, the question of language is really-- I mean, it's at the root of this effort.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: What does translation mean and how can you-- is translating just taking the same old concepts and just importing them into a new language, or how does it change things when you begin to think in an Asian or African language and say?

NATHANAEL HOMEWOOD: I think-- and you brought up Charles Lang. I think using Lang is a helpful way to think about the ways in which all of those sources you mentioned might be part of the act of signifying. And if you wrestle with-- if you're constantly wrestling with how something may or may not be signifying in World Christianity, you also stumble across all the many ways in which counter signification happens.

I think Lang actually is an underutilized resource in World Christianity. I think he offers so so much in these conversations because of his ability to toggle back and forth between places around the world and also the American experience. I think beyond just signifying encounter signifying, but especially signifying encounter signifying, Lang offers us a lot of tools to evaluate the questions that you're mentioning.

FRANCIS CLOONEY: Thank you for everyone who's been here, especially Kemi being up very late at night. We appreciate that generosity in particular, but wonderful conversation. Again, I just close by adding to the Dean's comment thanking the Yang Family for their generosity and making all of this possible. And we've had wonderful conversations last year, this year, and I think we'll look forward to more in the future. With that, unless there's any further comment from the Dean or others, I just say thank you and good night to everyone.

DAVID HEMPTON: Sponsors. Harvard Divinity School, Office of Academic Affairs, Yang Visiting Scholars in World Christianity Program.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.