Michael Adegoke Christianity in China is not a nineteenth-century novelty with a medieval rumor attached. In 635, according to the Xi’an stele of 781, a Church of the East mission reached the Tang court. Later centuries saw Yuan-era Christians, Jesuit scientific accommodation under the Ming and Qing, the bitter Chinese Rites Controversy, suppressed communities, Protestant and Catholic … Read More
In the late 1960s and 1970s, a cluster of Latin American Catholic theologians and pastoral workers argued that Christian faith must be thought from the underside of history: from poverty, landlessness, dictatorship, and structural violence. They called the resulting reflection liberation theology. Admirers heard the prophets and the Magnificat. Critics heard Marxism in a cassock. … Read More
Between Columbus’s first voyage and the independence wars of the early nineteenth century, Latin America became the largest Catholic region on earth. That fact is not a hymn and not a curse by itself. It is a historical outcome of Iberian conquest, papal grants of patronage, mendicant and Jesuit missions, demographic catastrophe and recovery, African … Read More
If the previous article traced Christian entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade, this one traces how Christian activism helped make that trade—and eventually slavery itself in many jurisdictions—legally and morally indefensible. Abolitionism was never only Christian; Enlightenment natural rights, slave resistance, economic shifts, and imperial politics all mattered. Yet Quaker discipline, evangelical conversion ethics, Black … Read More
The transatlantic slave trade relocated millions of Africans under coercion into a plantation world that enriched European and American economies for centuries. Christianity was not a spectator. Iberian crowns baptized empire; Protestant merchants prayed and trafficked; churches owned people; missionaries debated whether conversion required freedom; enslaved Africans remade Christian faith into survival, protest, and hope. … Read More
African Independent Churches—also called African Instituted, Initiated, or Indigenous Churches (AICs)—are Christian communities founded and led by Africans, often in tension with European mission control, and frequently marked by prophecy, healing, vernacular liturgy, and selective engagement with African cultural forms. They are not a footnote to “real†mission Christianity. In many regions they were early … Read More
Pentecostalism began as a contested revival claim—that the gifts of Acts, especially speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy, were available now as a “baptism in the Holy Spirit”—and became one of the most expansive Christian families of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its demographic weight in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia shifted Christianity’s … Read More
Modern ecumenism did not begin because Christians suddenly forgot their doctrines. It began because missionaries, students, and church leaders noticed that a divided witness overseas looked absurd—and because world war later made Christian nationalism look dangerous. The World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh (1910) became the symbolic ignition of a Protestant-led movement that grew into Faith … Read More
The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) is the most consequential Catholic event of the twentieth century—and one of the most argued. For some Catholics it recovered the gospel’s pastoral face; for others it unlocked confusion, decline, and rupture with tradition. Protestants and Orthodox watched a church they thought frozen suddenly speak of religious liberty, ecumenism, and … Read More
The First Vatican Council (1869–1870) is remembered in slogans more often than in texts. “The pope became infallible.” “Rome invented a new dogma.” “Catholics must believe every papal word.” Each slogan names a fear or a hope; none is a careful reading of what the council actually defined. Vatican I met in a Europe of … Read More