Public Lecture
Jay Case
An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812-1920
Monday, February 27
3:30 PM
Meeter Center Lecture Hall
Cosponsored by the Nagel Institute, History and Religion Departments
Christian Engagement with People of Other Faith Traditions
A Faculty Workshop – June 4-7, 2012
Christians have always lived in a multi-religious world. But this fact has taken on a new face and generated new urgency in the twenty-first century. As technology shrinks the distances among globally diverse people, our graduates need to know how to bring a well-grounded, theologically-informed Christian faith to bear on these intersections so that they honor the authenticity of others' religious commitments without replacing vibrant Christian faith with vague spirituality, with relativism regarding central Christian truths, with a form of tolerance that discourages evangelism, or with crude, ineffective missionizing. Read further.
New Publication from Oxford University Press
An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812-1920
Jay Riley Case, Oxford University Press
“American missionaries went out to bring religious change to other countries, but in this highly orig
inal study, Jay Case shows that new Christian movements emerging in 19th-century Africa and Asia changed Christianity in America. ‘World Christianity’ is not just a feature of our times; it was already influencing American religion and culture 150 years ago. This book will change the way we think about missions and American history.”
--Joel Carpenter, Professor of History and Director of the Nagel Institute, Calvin College
Latest Publication from Africa World Press
Jesus and Ubuntu: Exploring the Social Impact of Christianity in Africa
Edited by Mwenda Ntarangwi 
As African Christianity takes a commanding position in global Christianity due to its exponential growth in the last few decades, questions abound of the relationship such growth has with continued decline in most development indicators in the continent. Jesus and Ubuntu assesses the social role played by Christianity in contemporary Africa amid the growing awareness of Africa’s social, economic, and political challenges.
New publication from Wiley-Blackwell
A New History of Christianity in China
Daniel H. Bays
ISBN: 978-1-4051-5954-8
Hardcover,
256 pages
August 2011, Wiley-Blackwell
A New History of Christianity in China, written by Calvin College History professor Daniel Bays, one of the world's the leading writers on Christianity in China, looks at Christianity's long history in China, its extraordinarily rapid rise in the last half of the twentieth century, and charts its future direction.
Orbis Books
Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F. Walls
Edited by William R. Burrows, Mark R. Gornik, and Janice A. McLean.
Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in Christian self-understanding. In place of the eurocentric model of Christendom, a new understanding has emerged of Christianity as a world movement. At the cornerstone of this new perspective lies the work of a remarkable scholar, Andrew F. Walls, whose book, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Orbis 1996) was named by Christianity Today as one of the hundred most influential books of the twentieth century. Understanding World Christianity introduces the Walls s work and explores its wide-ranging implications for the understanding of history, mission, the formative place of Africa in the Christian story, and the cross-cultural transmission of faith.
Contributors include: Kwame Bediako; I. Howard Marshall; Allison Howell and Maureen Iheanacho; Wilbert R. Shenk; Brian Stanley; Jonathan J. Bonk; Moonjang Lee; Lamin Sanneh; William R. Burrows; Stephen B Bevans; Dana Robert; Mark Noll; Michael Poon; J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu; Gillian Bediako; Jehu J. Hanciles.
The book can be pre-ordered from Amazon for $19.80.
