World Christianity

Beads and Strands, a selection of classic writings by the Ghanaian theologian, gathers a wealth of insights under three topical headings: Africa and Redemption; Global Issues in African Perspective, and Women, Tradition, and the Gospel in Africa.

In her work Oduyoye brings Akan and other African traditions into correlation with Biblical stories, showing how AFrican wisdom offers a new and deeply spiritualy perspective into its timeless episodes and theme.

Above all Bead and Strands offers access to how one of contemporary Africa's most noted women theologians sees the status and role of women in Africa today.

Bordering all but two of South America's other nations and by far Latin America's largest country, Brazil differs linguistically, historically, and culturally from Spanish America. Its indigenous peoples share the country with descendants of Portuguese conquerors and the Africans they imported to work as slaves, along with more recent immigrants from southern Europe, Japan, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Capturing the scope of this country's rich diversity and distinction as no other book has done-with more than a hundred entries from a wealth of perspectives-The Brazil Reader offers a fascinating guide to Brazilian life, culture, and history.

Complementing traditional views with fresh ones, The Brazil Reader's historical selections range from early colonization to the present day, with sections on imperial and republican Brazil, the days of slavery, the Vargas years, and the more recent return to democracy. They include letters, photographs, interviews, legal documents, visual art, music, poetry, fiction, reminiscences, and scholarly analyses. They also include observations by ordinary residents, both urban and rural, as well as foreign visitors and experts on Brazil. Probing beneath the surface of Brazilian reality-past and present-The Reader looks at social behavior, women's lives, architecture, literature, sexuality, popular culture, and strategies for coping with the travails of life in a country where the affluent live in walled compounds to separate themselves from the millions of Brazilians hard-pressed to find food and shelter. Contributing to a full geographic account-from the Amazon to the Northeast and the Central-South-of this country's singular multiplicity, many pieces have been written expressly for this volume or were translated for it, having never previously been published in English.

This second book in The Latin America Readers series will interest students, specialists, travelers for both business and leisure, and those desiring an in-depth introduction to Brazilian life and culture.

This book will appeal to readers who want to know more about the People's Republic of China. It is in three parts - poems and sketches of old China, his interviews with the foremost revolutionary leaders, and poems and sketches of life under the changes of Mao and Deng. It is illustrated with sketches by Jan Norton, drawn from photographs taken by the author 60 years ago.

Robert Frykenberg's insightful study explores and enhances historical understandings of Christian communities, cultures, and institutions within the Indian world from their beginnings down to the present. As one out of several manifestations of a newly emerging World Christianity, in which Christians of a Post-Christian West are a minority, it has focused upon those trans-cultural interactions within Hindu and Muslim environments which have made Christians in this part of the world distinctive. It seeks to uncover various complexities in the proliferation of Christianity in its many forms and to examine processes by which Christian elements intermingled with indigenous cultures and which resulted in multiple identities, and also left imprints upon various cultures of India.

Thomas Christians believe that the Apostle Thomas came to India in 52 A.D./C.E., and that he left seven congregations to carry on the Mission of bringing the Gospel to India. In our day the impulse of this Mission is more alive than ever. Catholics, in three hierarchies, have become most numerous; and various Evangelicals/Protestant communities constitute the third great tradition. With the rise of Pentecostalism, a fourth great wave of Christian expansion in India has occurred. Starting with movements that began a century ago, there are now ten to fifteen times more missionaries than ever before, virtually all of them Indian. Needless to say, Christianity in India is profoundly Indian and Frykenberg provides a fascinating guide to its unique history and practice.

Examines current issues facing the Anglican Communion through the prism of the history of the Southern African church and people. Through this combined narrative of the global and local church, the author offers a remarkable story combining history, race, class and culture in Africa. He traces the paradigm shift in Anglicanism as its vitality moves beyond the borders of England and America to the global South, with all the theological implications. Today, South African Anglicanism attempts a middle way through crucial issues like HIV/AIDS, poverty, and human sexuality. Ideal for those interested in inculturation - the intersection of church, culture, and ethnicity.

Integrating missiology and ecclesiology in a vision of a church in mission made up of all the world's peoples, Fuellenbach explores the church's life as worshiping community, as communion, as Body of Christ working to make the world reflect Kingdom values.

The Second Vatican Council ended in December 1965, but Vatican II is still happening in the global church. Catholicism has always had a universal claim, but the globalization of Catholicism as a truly world church became part of Catholic theology only thanks to that gatheringdecided by St. John XXIIIof bishops, theologians, lay observers, ecumenical representatives, and journalists. Vatican II is the most important event in church history after the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and it is the key to understanding Catholicism and its inner tensions today.

Speeches and other writings document Tutu's influence on events in South Africa.

Diasporic Feminist Theology attempts to construct feminist theology by adopting diaspora as a theopolitical and ethical metaphor. Namsoon Kang here revisits and reexamines todays significant issues such as identity politics, dislocation, postmodernism, postcolonialism, neo-empire, and Asian values, and constructs diasporic, transethnic, and glocal feminist theological discourses that create spaces of transformation, reconciliation, hospitality, worldliness, solidarity, and border-traversing. This work draws on diverse sources from contemporary critical discourses of diaspora studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism and feminist theology from a transterritorial space.

This essential reference work makes available in one volume the breadth and richness of the theological contributions of the peoples of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Pacific, and the minority and indigenous peoples of the world. Entries show how theology from the non-Western world has changed the language and contours of contemporary theology.

The editors commissioned theologians from the Third World to write more than 150 entries on themes from Christian theology and religious studies, including spiritualities, cultural and social issues, biblical interpretation, and theological categories. The entries are inclusive of geographical, cultural, and denominational/confessional variations and the contributors include members of the Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Mar Thoma (India) churches.

Dispatches from the Global Village is a collection of 30 columns by Derek Evans, former Deputy Secretary General of Amnesty International. While the entry point for these columns (first published by the Naramata and Penticton, B.C., newspapers) is often something seemingly innocuous, perhaps even mundane - like a cup of tea, a croissant, a picture on a wall - the essays themselves are not for the faint of heart. As the leader of more than 60 Amnesty International delegations, and more recently as a consultant to the United Nations and other international organizations, Evans has travelled the globe to meet with African warlords and the Dalai Lama, heads of state and the leaders of rebel armies, victims of torture and peasant farmers; his single-minded objective, to challenge the forces of injustice, violence, and all things that separate people and nations from each other. Yet what shines through in each story - whether he's negotiating with rebel factions in the Sudan; or meeting, under threat of death and in the dead of night, with the families of disappeared children in Sri Lanka - is Evans' unfaltering hope that people can find within themselves the wisdom to choose a different path, that somehow we can learn to live in peace despite our differences. Informing, challenging, and inspiring, the stories, images, and hope contained in Dispatches from the Global Village will stay with the reader long after the book is set down.