Lectures and Colloquia: Spring 2010

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Mr. Christopher E. George

The U.S. Government Refugee Resettlement
Program: The Challenges of Resettling
Iraqi Refugees

Chris George is executive director of IRIS, Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services, a New Haven–based refugee resettlement agency. Previously he worked part time at the Connecticut Commission on Children in Hartford and advocated for better government and citizen’s rights by writing several articles on the legislative process, transparency, and voter registration. George began his international career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Muscat, Oman, and spent most of his professional life living in or working on matters relating to the Middle East. Before returning to Connecticut in 2004, he worked seven years in the West Bank and Gaza Strip directing contracts with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Working for the Vermont-based international consulting firm ARD Inc., he directed a project for strengthening the first democratically elected Palestinian parliament and later established an emergency assistance program that gave grants to nonprofit organizations. From 1994 to 1996, George was executive director of Human Rights Watch—Middle East, based in New York City, and he continues to serve on its advisory panel. Prior to that, he worked nine years with Save the Children, mostly in the Middle East, and three years with American Friends Service Committee, mostly in Lebanon.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Dr. Philomena Njeri Mwaura

Christian Identity and Ethnicity in Africa:
Reflections on the Gospel of
Reconciliation

LISTEN (34:23)

In this lecture Dr. Philomena Njeri Mwaura explores the issue of ethnocentrism. Despite the church’s tremendous growth in Africa during the past century, this problem challenges Christian identity and the authenticity of the church in Africa. Tracing the New Testament markers of Christian identity as transformation in Christ, love, unity, and embrace of the other, Dr. Mwaura argues that only a people who are secure in their Christian identity are able to be authentic witnesses to the Gospel. Paul’s teaching on the ministry of reconciliation is an imperative in diverse contexts where ethnic, national, and religious identities are in conflict and competition. The church must be equipped for this ministry by being prophetic, vigilant, intentionally present and active, and in solidarity with the marginalized.

An OMSC senior mission scholar for the spring semester, Dr. Mwaura is senior lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya. She teaches courses in the areas of African Christian history, new religious movements, African-instituted churches, world Christianity, and gender. She has also been a consultant on gender mainstreaming in education, theology, and HIV/AIDS vaccine clinical trials. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of World Christianity and is a contributing editor of Mission Studies.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Dr. Elias Kesrouani

The New Science, Musimedialogy: A Reading of the Ancient Maps of the Middle-Eastern and Eastern Churches and Civilizations

Professor Elias Kesrouani has earned an international reputation for musical compositions in Syriac and Arabic. He has participated in many international conferences, concerts, and colloquia, among them a concert at Royaumont Research Center in France in 2007 and in the scientific colloquium of the Arab Academy of Music in Cairo, annually since 1996. He represented Lebanon at a meeting of experts in New Delhi organized by UNESCO, which discussed the “Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.” Dr. Kesrouani’s academic activities have taken him to Italy, Algeria, Greece, Morocco, Oman, Jordan, the Netherlands, Bahrain, Tunisia, Syria, Turkey, Kuwait, United Kingdom, and Spain. In addition to being a member of several scientific committees with UNESCO and the Arab Academy of Music, part of the Arab League,

Dr. Kesrouani is founder and research professor in the Department of Music and Musicology at Notre Dame University, Zouk Mosbeh, Lebanon, where he created the university’s discipline called “musimedialogy.” Previously he was dean of the Jordan Academy of Music, and professor at the University of the Holy Spirit, Kaslik, Lebanon, and at the National Higher Conservatory of Music, Beirut. He is also codirector of Ph.D. research at the Sorbonne Paris IV University for Oriental Ethnomusicology.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Dr. Mary C. Nebelsick

“You Visited Me in Prison”: The Philippines,
the Church, and Repression

Political oppression is something that governments can use to silence their opponents. It has been used in the Philippines to intimidate the United Church of Christ in the Philippines—including six members of the Union Theological Seminary community—which opposes the way that the Philippine government is treating the poor. But does a professor of Bible have a choice? Authentically following the mandates of Matthew 25 calls one into potentially dangerous aspects of ministry. This lecture will look at the question of political oppression through the lens of Mary Nebelsick’s experience with her students and with fellow Christians who have been abducted, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered.

Dr. Mary C. Nebelsick is the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries and stands in the tradition of seeing active engagement in the world as mandated by biblical faith. She was born in Berlin, Germany, and grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, and Louisville, Kentucky. She studied at Wellesley College, Princeton Theological Seminary, Heidelberg University, and Philippine Christian University, from which she holds a Ph.D. She and her husband, Paul D. Matheny, are Presbyterian mission coworkers with the United Church of Christ in the Philippines. Since 2001, she has taught biblical studies at Union Theological Seminary and the Graduate School of Philosophy of Religion at Philippine Christian University.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Dr. Chloë Starr

Sino-Christian Theology: The Origins
and Development of a Movement

The term “Sino-Christian theology” refers primarily to a movement that began around 1993 and was developed in the mid-1990s by the “church fathers” Liu Xiaofeng and He Guanghu. One of the prime identifying marks of Sino-Christian theology is its adamantly academic nature, with its agenda to have Christian theology recognized as an academic discipline in China and to generate a body of public intellectuals in China who are versed in theological thinking. This theology is not “of the church for the church,” but “from Chinese academia for Chinese academia, facing the church and society.” What effects has Sino-Christian theology had on church beliefs and on the wider society in China? Has the movement now run its course?

Dr. Chloë Starr is assistant professor of Asian Christianity and theology at Yale Divinity School. Her academic interests span Qing dynasty fiction and Chinese Christianity. She has published a monograph and two edited volumes; recent articles include “The Prayer Book in Nineteenth-Century China” and a survey of Chinese para-scriptural texts. She spent the 2008–09 academic year in China and Hong Kong and is currently translating and editing a reader in Chinese theology with materials gathered in that period. She holds honorary research positions at the Institute for Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong and in Beijing.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Dr. Jesudas M. Athyal

Edinburgh to Athens: The Rough and Tumble
of Ecumenical Missiology

At the first centenary of the Edinburgh Mission Conference, focus naturally falls on the legacy of this historic event. A significant development since Edinburgh 1910 has been the end of colonialism and the shift ofChristianity’s center of gravity from the North to the South.Despite itscolonial and missionary baggage, Edinburgh 1910 attempted to redefine the meaning of Christian mission for a world coming of age. When we review the momentum created by Edinburgh, what needs to be noted is not so much the grandiosity of the event or triumphalistic slogans such as “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” but the critical voices raised against a crusading spirit and the strong call for unity that rang out at the conference. The challenge today is to recapture this vision for our time.

Dr. Jesudas M. Athyal is a fellow at the Center for Global Christianity and Mission of the Boston University School of Theology. He was associate professor of social analysis and philosophy at the Gurukul Lutheran Theological College, Chennai, India. Dr. Athyal’s books include Mission Today: Subaltern Perspectives (2001) and The Community We Seek: Perspectives on Mission (2003).

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Dr. Paul Shore

Competing Christianities: Jesuit Missionaries
in Calvinist Hungary, 1650–1750

In the late seventeenth century Jesuits and Calvinists promoted their very different visions of Christian religious practice and personal conduct in the mountains of northern Hungary. The “point-counterpoint competition” for souls these missionaries undertook included debates, polemics and even violent confrontation. While Jesuits and Calvinists disagreed on the role of music and art in religious experience, Dr. Paul Shore says, they shared views on some notable points such as God’s vengeance being expressed through natural or military disasters.

Dr. Shore is a visiting fellow at the Jesuit Institute at Boston College and coauthor of the forthcoming book “Crisis and Survival on the Peripheries: Jesuit Culture, Continuity, and Change at Opposite Ends of Continental Europe, 1762–1814.” He has held teaching and research positions at Saint Louis University, the University of Edinburgh, Collegium Budapest, Harvard Divinity School, Charles University Prague, and Central European University.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Dr. Michael A. Rynkiewich

Mission, Orality, and Hermeneutics

While it has become accepted in missionary circles that newly-planted churches should become self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating, the proposition that they should also become self-theologizing has been more difficult to argue. The centrality of the written word, the long tradition of philosophical theology, and the increasing separation between the church and the academy are among the factors that seem to make Western church leaders reluctant to give up control over doing theology. In this lecture Dr. Michael A. Rynkiewich, professor of anthropology in the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism, Asbury Theological Seminary, will ask, “What is happening among local churches that are primarily oral in their learning/teaching style? What precedents exist for local hermeneutics? What will be the relationship between global and local theology?”

Previously he served with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church as a missionary in Papua New Guinea. Dr. Rynkiewich is a longtime member of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania. His early research was in the Marshall Islands in Micronesia, and his early career involved teaching at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota. He is author of Ethics and Anthropology (1976), Politics in Papua New Guinea (2000), and Land and Churches in Melanesia (2001). His most recent book is The Times of Our Ancestors: Origin and Distribution of Melanesian Languages and Cultures. For two years he was editor of the journal Catalyst: Social Pastoral Journal for Melanesia. Details

Lectures and Colloquia: Fall 2009

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

The lecture begins at 7:30 p.m.

Dr. Paul D. Matheny

Changing Perceptions of the Nature of the Church in the Philippines

The Protestant and Roman Catholic landscape of the Philippines, says Dr. Paul D. Matheny, “is very diverse. It comprises parachurches, local churches, Charismatic organizations, missionary communities, monastic and religious orders, unstructured Pentecostal groups, and others. As the influence of liberation theology on both Catholic and Protestant churches ebbs and the impact of Charismatic and populist movements in both church and society rises, something will certainly happen—but what?” Matheny, professor of Christian theology and ethics in the Philippines and an OMSC resident, will describe the current ecclesial context of the Philippines and suggest possible answers to this question. He coordinates the Ph.D. programs at Union Theological Seminary. Matheny is a mission worker with the United Church of Christ in the Philippines and the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The lecture begins at 7:30 p.m.

Dr. Volker Küster

The Christian Art Scene in Indonesia: Yogyakarta and Bali in Focus

Dr. Volker Küster, professor of cross-cultural theology at Protestant Theological University, Kampen, The Netherlands, will contrast the artistry of Ketut Lasia and Nyoman Darsane, who represent two different models for expressing Christian faith within Balinese culture. “Lasia accommodates biblical scenes within his practice of traditional Ubud style, while Darsane makes use of his deep knowledge of Hindu-Balinese culture and iconography to inculturate Jesus Christ with a Balinese face,” says Küster. Previously a lecturer in the history of religion, mission, and ecumenics at the University of Heidelberg, Küster’s research interests include Christian art and theology in the majority world, interreligious dialogue, and comparative religion. He is author of The Many Faces of Jesus Christ (2001; German 1999).

Friday, November 13, 2009

The lecture begins at 12:30 p.m.
Bring a light lunch at 12:15 p.m. Coffee will be provided.

Professor Andrew F. Walls

LISTEN (1:04, 60.3 MB)

When World Christianity Fell Apart: The Missionary Significance of the Sixth Century

Professor Andrew F. Walls, founder and former director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, is senior research professor at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture, Akropong, Ghana. He is honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh, and professor of the history of mission at Liverpool Hope University. He served as a missionary in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. His writings include The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (1996), The Crosscultural Process in Christian History (2002), and The Cultural History of Christian Conversion (forthcoming).

His lecture is the conclusion of a weeklong Distinguished Mission Lectureship at OMSC on “The Church on Six Continents: Many Strands in One Tapestry.”

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The lecture begins at 7:30 p.m.

Dr. Allison M. Howell

“Ecologically Cursed”: Christian Alertness to the Signs of the Times in a Ghanaian Context

“It has been predicted that by 2050, millions of people could be forced from their lands by climate change. There are many factors that already contribute to thousands moving from northern Ghana in search of a better life. Some Christians think that their land is cursed. Many migrants end up in what some people perceive to be the ‘ecologically cursed’ parts of large cities,” says OMSC senior mission scholar in residence Dr. Allison M. Howell, an Australian who was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her lecture will examine “the nature of Christian alertness and response to the signs of the times in this Ghanaian context.” A missionary researcher and teacher, Howell has served for ten years on the staff of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture as a senior research fellow and the dean of accredited studies.

Friday, October 16, 2009

The lecture begins at 12:30 p.m.
Bring a light lunch at 12:15 p.m. Coffee will be provided.

Dr. Mark R. Gornik

Urban Age, Urban Mission

“We live in an increasingly urban and globalized age. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than half the world’s population lives in cities. This number is estimated to increase to some 75 percent by 2050,” according to Dr. Mark R. Gornik, director of City Seminary of New York, an intercultural learning community that seeks “the peace of our city through theological education.” In his OMSC lecture, Gornik, author of To Live in Peace: Biblical Faith and the Changing Inner City (2002) and Word Made Global (forthcoming), will address the questions, What form is urban mission taking around the world? How is the church engaging this change?

Friday, September 25, 2009

The lecture begins at 12:30 p.m.
Bring a light lunch at 12:15 p.m. Coffee will be provided.

Dr. Edward L. Cleary, O.P.

Catholicism Without Priests: An Historical Investigation of Latin America

“The shortage of Catholic clergy has become the major preoccupation of the Catholic Church in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Catholicism without priests has already been faced in Latin America in modern history,” says Dr. Edward L. Cleary, O.P., professor of political science and director of the Latin American Studies Program at Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island. He will discuss what happened when there were no priests, which is the central focus of a large research project; the Hermanos Cheos of Puerto Rico forms a part of the study and serves as the centerpiece of the lecture. Dr. Cleary is author of How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church (forthcoming).

Lectures and Colloquia: Spring 2009

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.

The Asian Rural Institute: Training
Leaders at the Grassroots

Steven Cutting

Steven Cutting is director of ecumenical relations for the Asian Rural Institute, Nasushiobara-shi, Tochigi-ken, Japan. A community-based training center located on a farm in northern Japan, ARI teaches rural community leaders practical leadership skills.

Participants learn how to observe and contribute to agricultural and community projects, analyze problems, implement solutions, and evaluate the process. ARI believes that the most effective way to become skilled in both leadership and agriculture is “learning by doing,” a philosophy practiced in almost all areas of the training program. It teaches rural communities how to develop food security and self-sufficiency through hands-on instruction.

At the heart of the program is the concept of “foodlife”—holding to significant value in human life and the food that sustains life. For more information, visit http://www.ari-edu.org.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009, at 7:30 p.m.

Dr. Najeeb Awad

Where is the Gospel? What Happened to Culture?
The Reformed Church in the Near East

Born in Lattakia, Syria, Dr. Najeeb Awad has taught since April 2005 in Lebanon, where he lectures in systematic theology at the Near East School of Theology, Beirut. He also has been editor-in-chief and moderator of Alnashra, the Arabic theological magazine of the National Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon. He was pastor of Alhaskeh National Presbyterian Church in northeastern Syria, where he also served as the director of youth ministry for Presbyterian churches in Syria. Awad points to his spiritual and intellectual journey with Christ as the driving force behind his academic pursuits. While studying with Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School, Awad is examining the relationship between Trinitarian theology and postmodern forms of intellectual inquiry. He is the author of two books in Arabic, God, Man, and Evil (2005) and The Passion Narrative in Matthew (2004).

Tuesday, March 24, 2009, at 7:30 p.m.

Dr. Tian Ling

Changes in University Culture and the Implications of Christianity:
The Case of Peking University

In this lecture, Dr. Tian, associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Peking University and a visiting fellow at Yale University, will explore the process of China’s learning from the West and its relations with the founding of Peking University by discussing the relationship between social historical background and the shaping of the culture of Peking University. Finally, she will present the implications of Christianity for the changing culture of Peking University. Dr. Tian is author of several books including Series of Case Analysis of University Students’ Development (2008) and The Habitus of Peking University and Its Reproduction: The Integration and Analysis of Peking University’s Past and Present by Using Bourdieu’s Theory (2003).

Friday, April 3, 2009, at 12:30 p.m.

Dr. Edith L. Blumhofer

Protestants, Mormons, and Catholics: 19th-Century Perspectives
on Proclaiming the Gospel

Dr. Edith L. Blumhofer is professor of history at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. An OMSC senior mission scholar in residence for the spring 2009 semester, she is researching three nineteenth-century British hymn writers—Frances Ridley Havergal, Cecil Frances Alexander, and Catherine Winkworth—for a forthcoming book. In addition, Dr. Blumhofer directs the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, Wheaton, Illinois, and is working with the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, on the Future of American Religion Project. She is a consulting editor for Christianity Today and The Christian Century. Dr. Blumhofer is author of People of Faith: A History of Western Christianity (2007) and Evangelicalism: A Very Short Introduction (forthcoming).

Tuesday, April 7, 2009, at 7:30 p.m.

Dr. Kevin Ward

Christianity, Revival, and the Rwandan Genocide

Dr. Kevin Ward, senior lecturer in African religious studies at the University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom, spent twenty years working in East Africa as a teacher and theological educator. He did his original research in Kenya, examining the problems of Protestant Christian ecumenical cooperation in colonial Kenya. An OMSC senior mission scholar in residence for the spring 2009 semester, Dr. Ward has continued to have a strong interest in East Africa, focusing on the history and spirituality of the East African Revival, church-state relations in Uganda, and the religious basis of conflict in Uganda. He is author of A History of Global Anglicanism (2006) and coeditor with Brian Stanley of The Church Mission Society and World Christianity, 1799–1999 (1999).

Friday, April 17, 2009, at 12:30 p.m.

Dr. Tu Yichao

Billy Graham, American Evangelicals, and Sino-U.S. Relations

Dr. Tu Yichao, assistant professor in the Center for American Studies, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, will highlight the important role that American evangelicals played in Sino-American relations during the second half of the twentieth century with particular focus on evangelist Billy Graham. Although an outspoken critic of Communism in the 1950’s, two decades later Graham was promoting the opening of Sino-American relations and paving the way for renewed missionary work in China. His evolving attitude toward China and its impact on Sino-American relations, according to Tu Yichao, a visiting scholar at Yale Divinity School, “provided a significant commentary on the changing perceptions and interactions between two world powers.” In 2007 Tu Yichao completed a Ph.D. at Fudan University, writing her dissertation on “American Evangelicals and International Relations: Using Billy Graham as a Case Study.”

Tuesday, April 21, 2009, at 7:30 p.m.

Dr. Eiko Takamizawa  

Japanese Religiosity and Resistance to Christian Mission in Japan:
An Historical Interpretation

Dr. Eiko Takamizawa is associate professor of mission at Torch Trinity Graduate School of Theology, Seoul, Korea, an interdenominational school that developed out of a five-year deliberation between the Korean Center for World Missions (Torch Missions Center) in Seoul and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. Dr. Takamizawa is the first Japanese female missiologist faculty member in Korea.  She was converted to Christianity from atheism while in college. After teaching in secular education for ten years, she dedicated herself to ministry and then studied for advanced degrees. She is pastor of a Japanese congregation in Seoul and has been a featured speaker for both Japanese and international conferences held in the United States, Brazil, Iran, Japan, and several other Asian countries.

Friday, April 24, 2009, at 12:30 p.m.

Dr. William R. Burrows

Trajectories in World Catholicism

As managing editor of Orbis Books until his retirement in February, William R. Burrows oversaw the publication of more than three hundred mission studies, interreligious dialogue, and world Christianity books, including History of the World Christian Movement: Earliest Christianity to 1453 (Irvin and Sundquist, 2001), The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in Transmission of Faith (Walls, 1996), and Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Bosch, 1991). A former S.V.D. priest who had trained in Rome and served in Papua New Guinea, Burrows is author of New Ministries: The Global Context (1980 and 2006). A contributing editor for the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Burrows is currently conducting  research on the interaction between the peoples of northeast Papua New Guinea and the Divine Word missionaries.

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