Video: Yang Scholars 2024: Explorations in World Christianity (2024)

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 discussion was led by David N. Hempton, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and Alonzo L. McDonald, Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Professor Hempton led a conversation with this year’s Yang Visiting Scholars, Nathanael Homewood, Tom Santa Maria, and Gina A. Zurlo. Each scholar gave a brief presentation of their work and how it contributes to the study of World Christianity, followed by a group discussion.

This event took place on April 11, 2024.

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SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Explorations in World Christianity. A discussion with the Yang Scholars, April 11, 2024.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: I'm very happy to be here at this panel tonight. I'm very unhappy at the fact that our former Dean, David Hempton, who was to chair the panel, had some health issues today and was unable to come in for the panel. So he sends his regrets in advance, and very much wishes that he could be here tonight. So we have a wonderful panel, Explorations in World Christianity.

I'll say something general about what we're up to tonight, and then I'll introduce each speaker just before they speak, so I'll do them one at a time instead of all at once. So the first thing to do with the Yang fellows in global world Christianity is to thank XD and Nancy young for their generous support and foresight in realizing that this program was very well worth bringing into existence and getting people together to think about world Christianity and to think about where we might go with this exciting project.

This is the third year of this project. We've had wonderful fellows year one, year two, and now in year three, bringing very rich and different aspects of world Christianity to bear in our conversations, teaching courses for our students, and opening so many doors and windows in the Divinity School.

The goal, the longer term goal, I think, is to establish this as a regular part of the life of HDS going forward, that as we globalize, and we celebrate, and explore many different religious traditions at the Divinity school, to realize that Christianity is not simply a religion of the west, the modern west, or the ancient west, or the medieval west, but that in fact, most Christians in the Christian world are actually living outside the west now. And countries, parts of Asia, but certainly Africa increasingly important in how we think about what it even means to be a Christian.

So really, kind of investing in the next century of HDS by having this wonderful program. And David asked me to mention that he's-- due to his, I think, hard work and maybe cooperation from our fellows that the Radcliffe Institute has awarded a major seminar grant for next year to bring a dozen or more scholars to Harvard to discuss this field of inquiry. So there will be events next year that David will have to say more about over time, but it's quite exciting to realize that it's gaining momentum and things are moving forward quickly.

So what we will do tonight is that we'll have the three speakers approximately 20 minutes each, more or less, and then open it for discussion. It's a little after four so by 5:30 we'll be done. But nonetheless, we can have, I think, plenty of time for discussion, conversation. And at any point during our conversation, if you'd like to go back and grab some refreshments, please do don't hesitate to do that.

So let me introduce then our first speaker for tonight. Gina Zurlo, received her PhD in history and hermeneutics with a concentration on world Christianity. From Boston University, School of Theology. Studying under Dana Robert, who, of course, is a renowned scholar of world Christianity with a focus on Africa. Gina's research interests include history, quantitative studies, sociology of religion, and gender studies. And she is co-author of the World Christian Encyclopedia, the third edition, which came out just before COVID in 2019.

And she's the editor of the World Christian Database and World Religions Database from Brill. She's authored three books, at least, Global Christianity: A Guide to the World's Largest Religion, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, A to Z, Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement, also 2023 and From Nairobi to the World: David B. Barrett and the Reimagining of World Christianity also in '23.

In 2019, she was named by the BBC, one of the 100 most inspiring and influential women for her work in quantifying religion and non-religion worldwide. Her interdisciplinary work utilizes novel methods to make new discoveries about current and future trends of world Christianity, from measuring membership and affiliations to assessing attitudes and beliefs on current issues.

This year, she has been working on a new global data set to measure gender gaps in Christian membership, participation, and leadership in churches worldwide. She's also working on a project of world Christianity and the climate crisis, which uses free online tools such as Google APIs and ChatGPT to analyze global Christian discourse on climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice. All of our fellows teach a course, and Gina did her course back in the fall, trends in world Christianity 1900 to 2050. So we look very much forward to hearing our first speaker. Gina, over to you.

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GINA A. ZURLO: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for that generous introduction. I have slides to show because as you heard, I work with data and I can't speak without a visual. So we're going to be working through a lot of data tonight, but there's no math involved on your part, so don't be nervous if math is not your thing.

So what I want to share with you is a little bit of what I've been working on, on the Women in World Christianity Project to measure gaps in membership, participation, and leadership in Christianity around the world. But first, I just wanted to set the stage by this big picture, really important theoretical framework for world Christianity studies, which is the shift of Christianity from Global North to Global South.

So in the beginning of the 20th century, 82% of all Christians lived in the Global North, defined by the United Nations as Europe and North America, and only 18% of Christians lived in the Global South. But today, this is the demographic makeup of Christianity where now 33% of Christians live in Europe and North America, but 67% of all Christians live in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. And if you follow this trend out to 2050, we anticipate it will be 77% of all Christians living in the Global South.

So this is a whole new framework for thinking about Christianity in the world today. And here's a map of the world's 2.6 billion Christians, and this is Christianity by membership and self-identification, so these are all the people in the world who self-identify as Christians. The darker the blue, the higher concentration of Christians, the lighter the blue, the lower concentration of Christians.

Now, I could spend the next 18 minutes just talking about this map and why this map looks like it does, but this is just for the broader context, because today we're talking about women. And I had this book come out last year, Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement, where I produced the first ever data set on the male, female ratio of every Christian denomination in every country of the world, and that's what I will call the membership gap. So I want to share with you a little bit from this.

But I want to start with the United Nations human Development Report from 2019. I don't know about you, but I get really excited to read this report every year because I want to know what's going on in the world. And in the 2019 report, it had a chapter on gender inequality where it said, nowhere in the world have women attained complete equality with men. And if current progress continues, it will take 202 years for women to be fully equal.

And they said that progress on gender equality is slowing as women attain some of the easier markers of progress. So great, women are less likely to die in childbirth and they can get a secondary education that's pretty low level markers of progress. Some of the harder measures of progress like parliamentary seats, and obtaining PhDs, and other being CEOs of companies is still much harder for women. Now, part of the reason they gave in this report was that these two sets of quotes, which when I read it, immediately applied it to the Christian situation.

So they said this. Beliefs about what others do and what others think a person in some reference group should do, maintained by social approval and disapproval often guide actions in social settings. So it's essentially men's roles and women's roles in societies, what they call biased social norms. Unless the active barriers posed by biased beliefs and practices that sustain persistent gender inequalities are addressed, progress towards equality will be far harder.

So unless we actively do something, unless you challenge those social norms and gender inequalities, nothing will change. So for me, as a scholar of world Christianity, I thought, well, what we know about church history, about Christian theology, about biblical interpretation, there are a lot of biased social norms when it comes to gender.

So that's what led me down this path to see if we could really scrutinize where the gender gaps are in World Christianity and what are those social norms and power imbalances that render women unequal in a lot of Christian spaces. So my study did find that indeed Christianity is majority female in everywhere-- everywhere in the world. And Dana Robert famously came out with an article, in 2006, where she called World Christianity a women's movement.

And in that article she said there was no data to back that up. Now there is. So I did find that Christianity is majority female everywhere in the world, but actually by really small margins. So on every continent, church affiliation is more female than the general population. And remember, this is church membership and affiliation. Now, the world's population is 50% female, and I found that Christianity is 52% female. This is what we call really uninteresting data in technical terms. OK, so this is not interesting at all.

But the interesting thing though, is the chronic lack of data on gender in World Christianity. So I did a many years long research project to uncover the best sources of data for membership in churches, denominations, Christian networks. And for the most part, that data was not there. And it's not because Christians don't count stuff. Christians count all kinds of things. Every network, and denomination, and church, they know how many people are attending, they know how much pastors are getting paid, they know how much money it takes to keep the lights on.

Christianity is quantified, but they're either not asking the question of what percent of their members are men or women, or they are asking and they're not reporting it. And I'm not sure which one is worse, actually. So the data that you see here represents really a broad brush approach using available census data. But not every country asks a religion question on their census, there's just lots and lots of data problems.

But what you do find is when you look at the more local ethnographic qualitative data, a much different picture emerges. So, for example, one of the most common refrains about African Christianity is that it's majority female. Women were among the first converts to Christianity, and in most places women are recognized as the main drivers of church life, but it's really difficult to get the numbers to back this up. Here's a couple examples from some of the secondary literature that I encountered.

On the Catholic Church in Benin. This one informant said, "Women are very active in the church," she boasted. "For instance, women are the majority in church attendance everywhere. Women do everything. Coming to the church, you'll find out the population of women is greater. Women can be about 80%, while men would be something like 20% in attendance." 80-20 is a lot more than 52-50.

Another example of the International Center for Evangelism in Burkina Faso, where this one informant said, about 90% of their church members are women. And not only did they make a quantitative statement, they made a qualitative statement and said, and they are far more dynamic than the men. So when you can get down to more nuanced data, you see the gender gap emerge. So I was curious to find out more about what women are actually doing in churches. Are they doing everything or are they only doing some things in churches? Are there men's roles and women's roles?

So I did a global survey which was supposed to be done in person in the year 2020, which did not happen. So it was administered online in 2021, where I asked people a series of questions. How do you think the chances of women and men compare when it comes to getting a particular position in a church? And so I asked all kinds of positions, senior pastor, deacon, administrative assistant, family pastor, worship leader, intercessor, small group, 16 different positions in churches.

The blue is that people thought men had a better chance of getting that position. The orange is people thought women had a better chance of getting that position. And the green is people thought men and women had an equal chance of getting that position, and they don't add up to 100 because some people didn't answer. Now, when I saw this data, I was actually kind of surprised by all the green in the graph. I thought, OK, there's actually quite a few positions where people think men and women have a more or less equal chance.

You can see the 0% for head pastor, for women at the top, that was not surprising. So I asked, what do you think? And then I asked, who actually holds this position in your congregation? And that's where you can see the gendered realities of congregational life, where blue is a man held that position, and orange is a woman held that position. So women appeared most often to be serving as administrative assistants, children's Sunday school teachers, and intercessors, and that's the global data.

When you look at regional data, so Latin America, for example, the only position that was majority women was children's Sunday school teacher. So the gender dynamics of World Christianity are pretty clear. But I wasn't really satisfied with that. I wasn't satisfied because of this lack of data. And I thought, well, what data is out there that we can get to nuance this big brush picture that I published in this book?

So that's what I've been working on this year at HDS, is what I'm calling a series of Christian gender gap indicators. So I thought, is there a way to piece together what I found in the membership gap with existing survey data from the World Values survey, which is the largest, most global, social scientific tool we have looking at various practice and belief measures, church attendance, prayer, importance of religion and belief in God.

And then the yellow here is the leadership variables, which are two new variables that I worked on this year. So let's look at the participation gap and the leadership gap. So these are the four standard variables in religiosity that social scientific surveys and polls use to show how religious an area or a country is. And there actually isn't much of a gap between men and women as you might expect.

So here we have a radar graph of all the four variables together, the green is men and the orange is women, and you can see those lines are pretty close. We only have a slight majority for women in belief in God, prayer, and importance of religion. Now, one thing I want to say about survey measures is that they are self-report measures. And I think there's a lot of bias that goes into how often do you go to church? Are you really going to say never, if you feel like the person asking you the question expects you to go to church with any regularity?

So we do see some differences with these data by continent. And this is what I think is important when we're considering trends in World Christianity. So we can see much higher rates of importance of religion, prayer, service, attendance, and belief in God in Africa. Look how large the radar graph is in Africa compared to, say, Oceania, very tiny. Now, of course, the Oceania data only includes Australia, and New Zealand, doesn't include the Pacific Islands at all. So Australia and New Zealand are notoriously some of the most secularizing countries in the world.

But you can see, Africa, Latin America, even Asia to some extent, higher on some of these measures than Europe and North America. But the thing that's most interesting to me is there's no gap. There's hardly a gender gap at all in these self-report measures. If you nuance the data more on a regional level, some greater gaps do emerge. But for the most part, the global quantitative data doesn't actually support what we see on that localized, ethnographic, qualitative perspective of these huge participation gaps.

To me, this says more about how far global quantitative data can take us than it does how accurate qualitative data is. So the last gap I'll talk about is this new variable of what I'm calling the leadership gap. So to study the leadership gap, I created two new variables, one for women in pastoral leadership, and the other for women and other kinds of decision making bodies.

Now, a man can be a pastor in every church in the world, and a man can be on a decision making body in every church in the world, and that's what the green shape shows you in these two graphs. And then the gap is between women, which is orange and green, which is men. So women around the world are asking questions that men fundamentally do not have to ask. Women are constantly navigating where they can and what they can and cannot do in churches.

And I'm not framing the whole question of women's leadership in terms of where you can be a pastor, because that's reductionistic that's why I include this other variable of decision making body. So for this portion of the project I created a data set of the top five largest denominations in every country of the world, which is around 1,100 different groups. And that data set represented 79% of all Christians in the world. And I manually researched every denomination to see if they allowed women pastors and if they allowed women in other kinds of decision making bodies, and it was just as tedious as it sounds.

If you didn't see me all year, I was in my office working on this spreadsheet. And so this data represents where women can be leaders or where they're allowed to be leaders, not necessarily where they are leaders. So I think there's still a gap between where women can be leaders and where they are leaders. So, for example, here's the data broken out by continent.

So globally, 45% of Christians worship in churches where women can be pastors, and the gap is much narrower for other kinds of decision making bodies, 84%, and that's not-- oops, sorry. That's not at all surprising that women can serve in all kinds of leadership positions. But it does mean that 16% of Christians worldwide are members of churches where women can hold no formal leadership position at all.

And it might come as a surprise that the gender gap in pastoral leadership is actually smaller in the Global South. 48% of Global South Christians are in churches where women can be pastors, compared to 35% in the Global North. Another set of data here is in Europe, or I'm sorry, some of the regional variation. So the highest percent female pastor is in the Caribbean, actually, and in this region, the largest Protestant denominations are Seventh Day Adventist, Church of the Nazarene, Church of God, and Assemblies of God, all of which allow for female pastors.

And I think it's interesting that the Caribbean comes out in this region to differentiate it from Central and South America. They tend to all get lumped together, but trends in the Caribbean are actually quite different. And the lowest opportunity is for women in church leadership is in Central Asia, which is not surprising since most of those churches are Orthodox or Jehovah's Witnesses, where different set of gender norms reside. The last thing I want to share is another way of looking at this, which is by major Christian tradition.

So clearly, Orthodox and Catholic churches don't allow for women priests, but they have very high figures for women serving and other kinds of decision making bodies. And if we redefine what a decision making body is, which really is very different from denomination, denomination, I think we'd have more variation in the Catholic and Orthodox figures. Now, the most variation is in Protestants and independents and independents are Christians who self-identify other than Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant. There are lots of Christians who are not Catholics, Orthodox, or Protestants.

Now, these two groups, Protestants and independents, vary quite a lot in their interpretations of scripture, their understanding of tradition, and their relationship to culture concerning women's roles and opportunities. 83% of Protestants are in churches that allow female pastors and 32% of independents. So this is a little bit of what I've been working on, and I have a million more slides and a million more data points that I can share. At some point, maybe I'll be able to teach women in World Christianity and we'll go through all the data together, which would be really fun.

But I think what this shows is, we really have to nuance the method, the data, and the sources when we're looking at what's happening around the world in terms of women's challenges and opportunities. And I'm still working out the implications of measuring the gaps in membership, participation, and leadership. But what I have found so far in talking to a lot of Christian women around the world is that they do see themselves in this data.

They recognize what those challenges are for women around the world, and they are coming up with all kinds of creative, interesting ways to overcome those challenges. So the work continues. And hopefully, in the Q&A, we can talk about it more if you'd like. Thanks.

[APPLAUSE]

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Thank you, Gina, for a wonderful presentation. So many questions come to mind immediately. And according to the format, hold the questions, keep them in mind, write them on your hands, whatever. And then we'll hear all three speakers before we have any of the open conversation. So our second visiting scholar professor here this year is Nathanael Homewood. Nathanael is a native of Canada, earned his PhD in global Christianity at the Department of Religion at Rice University.

An ethnographer of contemporary Christianity, he is committed to theoretical interventions exploring world Christianity and colonialism, sexuality, race and gender. His first book, which came out fairly recently from Stanford University Press is Seductive Spirits: Deliverance, Demons and Sexual Worldmaking in Ghanaian Pentecostalism. In the book, he probes embodied elements and sexual content of deliverance rituals. In the conclusion of the book, he argues that Ghanaian Pentecostal sensual engagement with demons constitutes a decolonial performance, counter signifying the sexual, and religious scripts of colonialism.

His current projects, which are many, include an exploration of global Christianity within the City of Houston, Texas. This is under contract from Bloomsbury Publishing. Tentatively entitled, Hallelujah Houston, it emphasizes diversity of Christianity in Houston, expanding on complicating what WEB Dubois called visiting Houston, called the triple color line.

Nathanael is also working on a long term ethnographic project centered on the popular and controversial faith healer Toufik Benedictus or Benny Hinn. This book will articulate the complex cartography of faith healing, demonstrating that practices and beliefs around Pentecostal faith healing do not only or perhaps even primarily emanate from America and Western televangelists. He explores Hinn's global personality, his relationships through participant observation in healing events, interviews include also with Hinn himself, unprecedented access to Hinn's ministry archives.

There's a lot going on in this research. And Nathanael has been teaching this semester the medium and the mission, technology and communication in global Christianity, so let us welcome Nathanael.

[APPLAUSE]

NATHANAEL HOMEWOOD: Thanks for coming. First, I need to express a lot of gratitude. The word that I keep using to describe this year is gift. I mean, the last two nights alone I've been in this exact room actually for opera premieres. And last night a really fantastic evening with Twinkie Clark, which undoubtedly makes the three of us a huge letdown, certainly less musically inclined.

But many have contributed to this gift, and so I'm thankful to the Yangs, to the many faculty who have shared time and expertise with me, the staff who have been so helpful, the students, especially those in HDS 2248, some of whom are here, who have taught me so much. And finally, to my fellow Yang scholars who have made the fourth floor of Divinity Hall a really pleasant place to exist and live for some of us.

The prompt for today's discussion was to talk about our work and how it contributes to World Christianity. And the second half of that prompt is quite fraught for me at this moment. I've spent much of this year wondering, wrestling, debating, second guessing exactly how my work contributes to World Christianity, or more accurately, if it does at all.

Much of this angst is rooted in the book I'm currently finishing on Christianity in Houston, Texas, which has challenged my understandings of and hopes for World Christianity. I've always considered myself an ethnographer of World Christianity with a focus on Africa. Some of this emerged from my own interests, but also from those who played a significant role in my formation as a scholar. My mentors, primarily La Massana and Elias Bamba, were both Africanists.

This is not an insignificant personal anecdote, but a common path to the field of World Christianity. Africa was and likely still is, at the center of the field, with many of the most significant early founders studying Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, and so my early work was based on ethnography in Zimbabwe and Ghana. My first book, Seductive Spirits, which came out just last month with Stanford, is a book that I have no doubt is a world Christianity text.

But during the reign of COVID-19, when the kind of long-term travel and ethnography I previously did was impossible, I began a project writing about Christianity in the city where I live, Houston, Texas. Houston is a city I love and hate in equal proportions. A city where I met my wife, where my first child, the dissertation was carried to term, where my second child, my actual most perfect son, was born, where I experienced my first hurricane and my first catastrophic flood, and then my second, and then my third.

More relevant though, is that it is a city where I taught World Christianity for a decade. It's a city where I continue to encounter diverse instantiations of Christianity. And so from those encounters, this book was born, tentatively titled, Hallelujah Houston.

It's an ethnographic and historical exploration of Christianity in Houston, especially around issues of race, gender, immigration, sexuality, the environment, and oil, the apocalyptic, et cetera. And the data emerged from combining participant observation at events diverse as Black Lives Matter protests, oilfield Christian fellowship, prayer breakfasts, churches, big and small, and hip hop concerts with more than 200 interviews, including with some really prominent figures in the US, such as Joel Osteen, Cardinal Daniel Dinardo, Hakeem Olajuwon, and Beth Moore, try fitting all of those into one book.

It is in many ways a sprawling project and one that has taken many twists and turns. This, perhaps should not have been surprising. As Jonathan raban writes in Soft City, quote, "The city and the book are opposed forms. To force the cities, spread, contingency, and aimless motion into the tight progression of a narrative is to risk a total falsehood.

There is no single point of view from which we can grasp the city as a whole. A good working definition of Metropolitan Life would center on its intrinsic illegibility. What also should not have been surprising, but was to a certain extent, is the intrinsic illegibility of Christianity in the city and what that means for the field of World Christianity. To ape the words of Rayburn, there is no single point of view from which we can grasp Christianity as a whole, and a good working definition of Christianity would center on its intrinsic illegibility.

Due to the illegibility of the two elements at the core of this book, Christianity and Houston, structuring the book has been a challenge. Accordingly, the book chases many threads and I'll mention just a few here. First, ideas of freedom. The different ideas of freedom operating in Christianity in Houston are stark. One, for example, emanates from Juneteenth, which was recently made a national holiday, but has long been a lived holy day in the Houston area for descendants of the formerly enslaved.

Sometime around June 19, 1865, Union General Granger issued general order number 3 at the Southwest corner of 22 Street in Galveston. Galveston is the beach town very close to Houston, it's all kind of part of the same area. Order number three informed the people of Texas that, quote, "All slaves are free," unquote.

Those free quickly moved from the courthouse to Reedy Chapel AME, to celebrate their freedom in the presence of their creator. Most early Juneteenth celebrations in Galveston were at Reedy or at the Historic Avenue L Baptist Church, or they were in Houston, birthed and fostered by Reverend Jack Yates. Freedom rang out from these deeply Christian spaces in ways that challenged and continued to challenge Christian systems.

But freedom in the city is often framed quite differently. For example, at Yang, longtime pastor at Second Baptist in Houston with a congregation of probably 80,000 across his various campuses, is not interested in the idea of freedom I just shared. Telling me, quote, "I do not believe race is a category. There is no racial category in the entire Bible. I throw race out now. It's silly to talk about race," unquote.

For Yang, freedom is found in capitalism. He exclaims, I am a Christian and I'm a capitalist. I have no doubt that a biblical worldview contributed to the rise of capitalism and economic freedom in the west. History shows that the biblical system of economics has produced the most prosperous nations in history," unquote. Many who think quite differently than Yang acknowledge that his version of freedom is predominant in Houston. The activist, Secunda Joseph, told me that Houston is, quote, "The most capitalist city in the United States of America to the detriment of Black folks."

Every act of desegregation, including churches, were business decisions, public relations tactics to make it seem like the city is progressing, to make it seem like the city is even a little bit just when it's quite the opposite, smoke and mirrors. So there are many ways in which deeply Christian definitions of freedom and many others intersect and resist each other in the city.

Another thread is gender and sexuality as global persecution. The popular anti-trans language of bathroom bills actually emerged through Christianity in Houston in 2015 in response to an equal rights ordinance. The largely church led hysteria over, in their words, biologically male pedophiles and predators in women's bathrooms contributed to the ordinance's defeat by a significant margin, leaving Houston as the only large city in America without such an equal rights ordinance.

Well, it was called the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance or HERO. Opposition to this ordinance was very much framed in the language of global persecution of Christianity. In the political back and forth, the mayor's office subpoenaed the sermons of five clergy in the city, something that she acknowledged to me in our conversation as a tactical mistake. The global testimonies of these clergy became a rallying cry.

One leader shared, quote, "So I just put together some brief biographical information on the five of us who were subpoenaed. When I sat down, I looked at that, and there's those moments where you just realized, oh, OK, this is what God's doing because we had to Hispanics, an Asian, two Anglos. Now let me share how some of the Houston five understood their subpoenas in conversation with me. Hernan Castano said, the first thing that came to my mind was the memories of the country my parents had brought me out of, which is Colombia.

The memories of what my parents had taken me out of to never live again, where if you speak, you get denied the right to speak, you get intimidated. Where they make you understand that your voice has no significance. What is happening in this city and in America. Calhoun, who refers to himself as one of the original Vietnamese boat people said, it's a shock for me because coming from a Communist country that I escaped from, we have that happening where sermons were reviewed or censored by the authorities and we escaped Vietnam from that and now came to this city, and I can't believe it's happening here in Houston, Texas.

Magda Hermida said, this was quite a shock to me. I was shaken. Remember when I lived in Communist Cuba, when I could not speak, when I could not speak of religion. For me, these actions were an extreme threat. Not only for me, but for many impacting many nations and their people. In this way, America is held up as a threatened bastion of Christianity in a world of persecution, and the resistance to a very local equal rights ordinance is an International Christian mission.

A final thread I'll share is leaving Earth. World Christianity has always been very earthbound, but what about Christianity that tries to move beyond this planet? Christianity in the Space City demands such thinking in a few ways. The first example is, space exploration. From the very beginning, Christianity was invoked in this move beyond the Earth.

JFK in a speech, September 12, 1962, at Rice University stadium. And I have to note that considering the impressive ineptitude of Rice Football, that we choose to go to the moon speech, Super Bowl 8, and Billy Graham Crusader are actually the only things of note that have ever happened in those stadium walls. In the speech, Kennedy stated, as we set sail, we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous, and dangerous, and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked. And indeed, God traveled back and forth often between Houston churches and space.

On the moon via Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin, took lunar communion with his Webster Presbyterian church. Taking the bread and wine, the first foods ever eaten or poured on the moon, he poured them into a chalice from his church. In the 16 gravity of the moon, the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup, he later wrote.

Webster Presbyterian actually still celebrates lunar communion Sunday annually. Many tried to take the Bible to the moon. Apollo 13 took 512 copies on microfilm. But of course, Apollo 13 did not make it to the moon. Apollo 14 took 300 Bibles on microfilm from the Apollo prayer league in Houston to the moon and back. And on Apollo 15, David Scott, took a Bible gifted from his Houston area church, Saint Christopher Episcopal, and left it in the moon's Sea of Showers, perhaps the only Bible outside of Earth today.

But others have sought other means to travel beyond Houston and the globe, though not entirely dissimilar. Here, probably the most notable is Heaven's Gate. Bonnie Lou Nettles, a.k.a. Peep, was born and raised in a Baptist family in Houston, Texas. Marshall Applewhite, a.k.a. Bo, moved to Houston in 1965 to serve as chair of the music department at the University of Saint Thomas, and was a choral director of an Episcopal Church in the city.

They met in Houston in 1972 and briefly opened a bookstore known as the Christian Art Center, which carried books from a variety of spiritual backgrounds, especially Christian prophecy, theosophy and mysticism. Applewhite then had a vision in which he realized that he and Nettles were the two witnesses prophesied about in Revelation 11, who ascend up to heaven in a cloud.

Also not dissimilar, Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth, was a Houstonian whose conversion experience happened at Baraka Church. His book and theology popularized the pre-millennial, rapture and transportation of true believers to heaven. Houstonians find and desire different ways to leave Earth in fulfillment of their Christianity. Now, I continue to wrestle with how these connections and this obsession, what it might mean for the Study of Christianity.

So I've picked these three threads somewhat at random. I have more than 80 such threads going right now, obviously, all of which will not fit in the book. But I think these threads demonstrate why this book has made me wonder how it fits into World Christianity. In thinking about this panel today, I was reminded of a description of World Christianity written by one of my mentors at YDS, Jonathan Bonk.

He referenced my other mentor at YDS when he wrote, quote, "11 years ago." It's now 21 years ago. "Professor Lamin Sanneh published, Whose Religion is Christianity The Gospel Beyond the West. The title of the evocative little book encapsulates for me what is meant by World Christianity," unquote. Such a definition of World Christianity, the gospel beyond the West, would exclude Hallelujah Houston from the field. Let me break down this definition in three parts to demonstrate both how it excludes, while also making the case for why Hallelujah Houston is World Christianity.

So I'll break his definition down into three segments, the, gospel, and beyond the West. Let's start with beyond the West. World Christianity has often studied regional Christianities and geographical locations in the non-western world, often deliberately excluding Christianity in the west. World equals non-western in this equation. Now, this shift was for good reason.

The west, having long attracted a disproportionate share of scholarly attention. But too microscopic an approach to non-western locales, obscures the broader connections, exchanges, interactions, and ruptures between diverse places, including the West. As such, expanding the boundaries of what qualifies as world, and this is something that is happening more and more in World Christianity, can be inclusive of a space like Houston.

But even in expanding the boundaries of world, I'm still left with a lot of questions about how this project fits in. Is all Christianity, World Christianity? I think an argument can be made that what happens in Christianity, in Houston reverberates globally even when not obviously. Similarly, I think, the same argument could be made for Christianity in Accra or as studied and practiced here at HDS, but is that enough to constitute World Christianity?

Further, does expanding the boundaries make the fields incoherent? Is incoherence a problem? There's a spoiler I'm going to answer no in a moment. So the second piece is gospel, the gospel. Well, I'm respectful of World Christianity's missiological roots. I'm uninterested in perpetuating missiology by another name. Bonk and Sanneh's use of gospel admittedly makes me uncomfortable. Does World Christianity have to be about the good news or good news at all?

I think historically, it certainly has trended that way, but I think it needs more critical lenses and perhaps some irreverence. If World Christianity could embrace irreverence instead of triumphalism and critical interventions, rather than uncritically accepting Christian self-representations, then I think, Hallelujah Houston has a place in World Christianity. And then finally, Bonk and Sanneh's use of the definite article, "the" is loaded with unhelpful notions of hom*ogeneity and uniformity in Christianity.

We need something more complex, and I've long hoped that World Christianity would offer theory that does a better job of representing a vast, dynamic, bewildering complexity, not easily accommodate by customary academic understandings of Christianity. One way I am attempting to capture this complexity is by exploring Christianity as multiplicities, an approach that embraces Christianity's intrinsic illegibility and escapes the totalizing of Christianity or Christianity's.

In many ways, I'm trying to answer the call of Deleuze and Guattari in their book, 1,000 Plateaus, to make multiplicities. I eschew treating Christianities as a numerical fragment of a lost unity or totality, or as an organic element of a lost unity or totality yet to come. I'm trying to create multiplicities with no apparent order or coherency.

Instead, I'm obsessed with connection and heterogeneity. Each element of Hallelujah Houston can be connected to anything and must be. Instead of the definite article 'the" want to use the coordinating conjunction and I'm tentatively titling this Christiandity. By inserting and into Christianity, I'm trying to construct rhizomes. A rhizome has no beginning or end, it's always in the middle between things, making unlikely connections.

Deleuze and Guattari write, the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction and, and, and. The and here is not Christianity plus something else, but an effort to chase peculiar connections that suggest additional connections, only retaining that which augments the number of connections. Such an emphasis obviously runs counter to treating Christianity as a higher unity.

I am left then with the question, what is World Christianity? Is it a field, a discipline, an analytical framework? Is it a mode of doing research? And if it's a mode of doing research, is it purely descriptive or is it normative? It's my hope that our conversation tonight won't answer the question, what is World Christianity, but will expand what it could be.

I also fondly hope that HDS, and this feels trite and pandering but nonetheless true, will continue to invest resources in pushing World Christianity forward down new, creative, thought provoking, and maybe purposefully incoherent avenues. I cannot think of a better place to do so. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Thank you, Nathanael. That was wonderful. So again, you have to start writing questions on your other hand as well to make sure we have a lot to talk about. But we have one more wonderful speaker before us, Thomas Santa Maria. Tom received his PhD in history and Renaissance studies from Yale University. Before coming to Harvard, he was interim dean at the Silliman College at Yale. He has published numerous articles on sanctity and bodies in the early modern world, as well as histories of men who left the Society of Jesus to write a book about the men who stayed in the Society of Jesus.

TOM SANTA MARIA: That's been covered.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: It's covered. OK. And also the conversion of Sir Toby Matthew. He is nearing completion of his first monograph, Temptation and Torture: Catholicism and the Paradox of Feeling. And he is co-editing a volume on global Catholic missions and the emotions that is now under review. He is ready to start research on his second book project, A Jesuit Who Didn't Leave. Robert Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, Saint Robert Bellarmine.

And Tom will be heading off to Rome in just one week, and will continue working on his article on the theme of this talk today by locating nuns and Catholic global missions. And he's been teaching a course this semester as well, Mysticism and Madness in the Early Modern World. Perfect for HDS. Welcome, Tom.

[APPLAUSE]

TOM SANTA MARIA: So Bellarmine sort of left because he became a Cardinal.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: It's the easy way.

TOM SANTA MARIA: It's the easy way out, yeah. OK. So in my first days here in Cambridge, which are hardly my first days in Cambridge, I'm from down the street, something fundamental was revealed to me about myself. Overwhelming naivete or better put, massive ignorance. I came to realize that when I had applied to be a Yang visiting scholar in World Christianity, I didn't even know what World Christianity was or what it meant to speak within this field of inquiry.

As I began to understand the field better and what it means to study World Christianity, I was stricken with a classic curse, probably seen time and again here at Harvard, Imposter syndrome. Thankfully, I learned a lot from my brilliant colleagues, Dr. Zurlo and even Nathanael.

[LAUGHTER]

And yet some questions lingered. Why on Earth would HDS want me? What does my work have to do with World Christianity? What can I offer this important and vibrant field as a researcher in early modern Catholicism? So like the other Yang scholars, I have to really start by offering my thanks to the Yang family and the visiting scholar committee because not only have I had the extraordinary good fortune of teaching mysticism and madness here at Harvard Divinity and also a very nice course this spring on discernment in the Catholic tradition at the Harvard Catholic forum at Saint Paul's, but also I've had an awful lot of time.

I wouldn't ordinarily be thankful for it, but after a year as the Dean of Silliman College, where I had everything anyone could want except time, it felt very nice to have the time for the research. So I think it's worth then saying a little bit about what I have been doing over these last few months. So first, I did complete this article on the English convert to Catholicism, Tobie Matthew.

And I was able, with the help of my co-editor, Lisa Fry, we submitted a full manuscript. Thanks be to God. For those of you who've done edited volumes, you know, I won't do it again. But global Catholic missions and emotions in the early modern world. And then, as Frank said, this first monograph project, Temptation and Torture. But I've also started working on these by locating nuns, more on them soon. Turns out really they're everywhere.

But speaking of everywhere, Tobie Matthews is a good place to start. So what I did was explore his motivations for converting to Catholicism. His conversion stirred a lot of controversy. He was the son of the Anglican Archbishop of York from a prominent Episcopal family in the Church of England. And remember, Catholicism was in his time outlawed in England. So the question that seemed very important to me is, why would a person risk a comfortable and indeed affluent life to change religion?

The article argued that in Catholicism, its rituals and devotions, its social and especially hom*osocial dynamics, and its international orientation, Tobie was able to fulfill a deep set emotional needs he developed from his childhood and young adulthood in which his father, the archbishop, publicly wished him dead no fewer than three times.

Catholicism offered Toby support, community, and freedom. One of those freedoms was the opportunity to live almost exclusively amongst men. As a Protestant, this was not possible after the Reformation. Luther's idea of masculinity demanded clerical marriage, the thought of which repulsed Tobie as he relates in his autobiography. You see, in return for permission to travel to the European continent from his parents, he promised his mother two things, that he would neither go to Italy nor Spain, and that he would promptly return home and marry.

He admits immediately that he deceived his mother on both counts. Instead, Tobie was drawn to spending his time with male companions and indeed befriended prominent men in numerous European countries, including Robert Bellarmine. Moreover, he hosted Englishmen on the continent in his project to convert them to Catholicism, albeit by some unique means, including, in one case, procuring attractive Spanish Cup bearers for the Lord Roos, the nephew of Robert Cecil.

All the while, he updated Pope Paul VI on Russia's dizzying spiral of affections for Diego. The Society of Jesus, as a single sex religious order never had a female branch, although maybe a few. There were a few women Jesuits welcomed Tobie in its hom*osocial spaces. Still, there was more to his attraction to the Jesuits.

From them, he learned about the Catholic faith and the supernatural community of protectors in the Cult of the Saints. And moreover, the Jesuits were an international and indeed global order. So joining the Jesuits meant belonging to a global community. So to Tobie, the society, I believe, represented the limitlessness of the world.

And indeed Jesuit missionaries as well as other Catholic missionaries, were all over the world by the time Tobie converted to Catholicism in 1606, a fact that the volume I'm co-editing with Lisa Fry attests to. Not only was Catholicism all over the world in the early modern period, but interest in those missions from hundreds of years ago is far ranging today. The volume's 10 contributors hail from North and South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia.

Together, their chapters consider the ways in which Catholic missionaries exported their faith through emotional appeals driven by catechesis and custom. At its root, the missionary effort depended on identifying ways that missionaries could communicate the faith through emotions with the body as a medium, kind of like the medium and mission. The approach was twofold to appeal to people's emotions with sermons and music, but also to implement rigorous tools of social disciplining.

If the missionary approach to disseminating the faith depended on a dualistic attitude toward the body, that is because it was part of a familiar catechesis multiple millennia in the making, Pious and I were debating this last night. And that's the subject of my monograph project called Temptation and Torture, I'll send you a copy before I submit it, which shows how Catholicism defined itself in the age of the reformations. The traditional narrative suggests that as Protestants developed a cerebral religion of the word, Catholics relied on sensuousness or smells and bells to stultify the faithful with propagandistic emotive ritual.

The story is more complicated, and the reality is that Catholicism remained very much suspicious of the body and its senses. In the wake of the Renaissance, there was new optimism about humankind and our capacities that encouraged a certain amount of sensuousness. But there was also serious concern that the senses were the gates of sin. Take sacred art as a case study.

In 1515, a group of Florentine lay women, individually approached their Dominican Friars to confess that they had fallen victim to the sin of lust. In many ways, the confessions on their own merit would not have shocked the Friars. However, the tinderbox in this instance, a painting of Saint Sebastian hanging in their church, presented them with a clear and present problem.

The image of the martyred Sebastian painted by [INAUDIBLE], a Dominican who had belonged to that very community, was meant to move faithful audiences to greater piety, to pray for the courage to passively accept martyrdom should it come to them, and to have that type of great faith. Sensuousness alone would be perilous, and so taming the body remains critical to early modern Catholicism. And so it emphasizes mortification with increasing rigor.

Because of this paradox of the senses, Catholic moral teaching became very complex. Nothing was as simple as top down teaching that had to be universally followed. Instead, most situations needed to be rigorously analyzed. I suspect that this helps to explain why casuistry became so dominant in moral theology. While much of that book is about Catholicism in Europe, I also tried to explain why this penitential fervor increased.

It seems to me that one plausible explanation is that Europeans were inspired by the fervor of recent converts to Catholicism in places like Japan and the new world, where both martyrdom and intense self-mortification were embraced by new Christians. Indeed, one need look no further than the recently canonized Kateri Tekakwitha, who not only practiced traditional Catholic habits of self-torture, including fasts, vigils, and wearing hairshirts, but added Mohawk customs, such as extinguishing fires on her own flesh, rolling in snow, and plunging in icy lakes for prolonged periods of time.

To be sure that penitential fervor was at the root of the spirituality of mystics and the life of religious men and women here, meaning folks who entered the monastic life, there is no mystic in the Christian tradition to my knowledge, who was not also severe with their body. And with this explosion in intensity of self-torture, there is also a flourishing of experiences of the supernatural, most evident in the widespread phenomenon of relocating nuns.

Maria de Agreda, the most prolific bio locator in Catholic history, set a paradigm for the bio locating nun as a type. Maria, a conceptionist nun, who enjoyed a very close relationship with Philip IV, bilocated some 500 times to the New World and especially the American Southwest to the Jumano people. The accounts of her bilocation were popularized by Alonso de Benavides, who encountered the Jumano people around 1630.

Benavides and other Franciscan missionaries were surprised to discover that the Jumano people were begging for Franciscan missionaries to come and baptize them since they had been visited and catechized already by the "Lady in Blue." When the Franciscan missionaries heard the reports, they brought an image of Luisa de La Asuncion to the Jumanos, who identified a likeness but claimed that the woman they saw was much younger. So upon a visit to Maria de Agreda in 1631, Benavides felt he'd confirmed it was she who had been with the Jumano people.

Maria was hardly the last of bilocating nuns from Spain. Mariana de Los Angeles bilocations brought her to the Lutzen Battle in 1632, where she claims to have killed Gustavus Adolphus. Nuns, bajadas, and holy women of the new world and East Asia followed similar trajectories. Maria de Jesus Tomelin, was a contemptuous nun in Mexico.

Her bilocation is drawn from the hagiographies written by her fellow nuns and Jesuit confessor, Miguel Godinez, who was actually an Irish Jesuit born Michael Wadding, traveled by Spiritual journeys thanks to the gift of super speed to various pagan lands where she observed people but never made contact. She also claimed to be present at the funeral of Philip III in Spain. In contrast, Francisco de La Actividad, a discalced Chemalite, credited as the first author of extant spiritual autobiographies in the Americas, visited quote, "Heathen lands, where she actually catechized teaching prayers, the Creed, and Commandments.

She's notable for what she calls her holy jealousy toward male missionaries who were permitted to travel and make contact with other peoples. Among the most famous of these women is Catarina de San Juan, a laywoman known as La China poblana. She was born in India and converted to Christianity by Jesuits when she was taken as a slave to the Philippines.

She was freed and became a prominent religious figure close to the Jesuits in Puebla, Mexico. In her bilocation, she visited India, the Philippines, Japan, China, and the Mariana islands, as well as North America according to her Jesuit hagiographer, Alonso Ramos. Like many of these women, she acted as a scout for male missionaries, telling them the places they should go after she had visited them. Among her more interesting claims is that she met the Emperor of China and actually anointed him with the blood of Christ, placing the sign of the cross on his forehead.

In addition, she claims to have taken part in battles in Europe and to have braved pirates in the Caribbean long before the Disney franchise became popular. And ultimately, her images were banned in 1690 and her hagiographies censured in 1695. Some decades later, Francisco de Los Angeles, a Mexican nun, claimed to have visited modern day Texas and New Mexico with Christ, guardian angels, and Saint Rose of Viterbo.

She met two Indigenous people there who remembered having seen Maria de Agreda, thus using her own bilocation to confirm those of Sor Maria's. Why all this bilocating? Surely, it can be explained in part as a reaction against the strict enclosure of women enforced following the Council of Trent. But not all these women were enclosed nuns, and men bilocated too.

Instead, it seems to me that it reveals how intertwined the Catholic imagination was with the missionary mindset. So you see, when I first applied to be a Yang scholar, my thought process was simple. I know about early modern Catholicism, which is a Christian tradition still, I think, and it was all over the world.

Moreover, having been a classics major, I felt fairly certain that Christianity had diffused itself around the world from its earliest days, with the first movements of the apostles and that early modern missionaries were emulating them. This suggests that from its inception, Christianity was oriented outward, oriented outside of the levant. And from those early days, it faced the questions of encounter with different cultures. It doesn't seem an accident to me that the very first debate among the apostles at the Council of Jerusalem, maybe around the year 50, concerned precisely this question.

The apostles disagreed over whether Christians needed to be circumcised to be saved. Much of the relief of antiquity's middle aged Gentiles, the council determined circumcision was not necessary. Of course, so much more was at stake. And the apostles, with the agreement of Peter, Paul, and James, demonstrated that Christianity could be a religion noted by its adaptability.

While much of the research I've conducted has at its roots the unspeakable harm that Catholicism has done by way of its involvement in colonization and slavery and its oppressive policies toward cloistered women that so readily promoted cultures of self harm, it also constantly turns on its outward orientation, meaning its relationship to the world. Take Tobie Mathew, for example. Though the factors for his conversion were numerous, I'm certain that the major draw of Catholicism was its global nature, something which spoke to a youth stricken with wanderlust, all the more so because his island home was very isolated.

The work of missionaries across the globe and their efforts to learn new cultures and accommodate to them speak to this as well as to the somewhat wild and supernatural quest of by locating nuns. Together, this research makes certain demands on World Christianity as a field. First, perhaps that it could take Catholicism seriously, and that there can be no dispute of Catholic missionaries of the early modern period for all the harm they may have caused that they were at the heart of Christianity's global scope today.

Without them, it seems unthinkable that Christianity would be a religion of the Global South or anywhere outside of the west. This dovetails well with the second point, that World Christianity could and should turn to the past as much as to the future. If Christianity is and will continue to be a religion of the Global South, that is because of events that happened long ago.

Finally, it seems that world Christianity as a discipline will gain much by shifting away from understanding doctrines and trends and toward believers and their experiences, both mundane but also supernatural. Without serious attention to these lived experiences, even the transcendent ones, we may risk losing much about understanding Christianity. If your collective patience and time allow, I hope you'll forgive me to speculate for a moment about the future of Christianity.

I don't know the facts and figures as Gina has them, but it seems to me that if Christianity will, in fact, as people predict, continue to be a world religion and a religion outside the west, then it's going to have to continue its long standing process of adaptation. Drawing on my own research and what I've shared today, I see two critical insights that Christianity, perhaps especially Catholic Christianity, can bring to our world, fractured by digital spaces and gripped by a pandemic of loneliness.

Christianity has always insisted on embodiment. In the more gruesome manifestations of that, it is turned to penitential practices as a way to bring meaning to suffering. Yet it also strikes a more optimistic note, as Saint Robert Bellarmine eloquently reminds us, that God granted humanity as he says, two eyes, two ears, two hands, two feet, one nose, mouth, chest, head, and the outcome, he says, was very beautiful.

And that the same God gave to you all the senses so that you might become full of joy. For would the eyes be helpful if there were no light? Would ears be helpful if everything was silent? Would noses if there were no odors? Now, God on account of you made the sun, moon, stars, all the sounds, odors, tastes, fruit regions, planes, mountains, treasures, and wealth for your senses to enjoy.

The lesson is clear enough. Long before the New York Times app had its well section on how to live better, Christianity pointed us away from strictly digital or interior lives for lives of physical activity and appreciation of our natural world. Yes, developing an interior life is crucial, and yet even Christian hermit monks in their interiority required physicality and interaction with the world. Much of that physicality came in the form of ritual.

And here too, we find another striking point. There is no Catholic sacrament that takes place in solitude. Rather, sacraments, as well as many other ritual activities, depend and rely on community. The great doctor of the church, Teresa of Avila, clarified this point when she described hell. According to her, hell was not the place of wailing, physical torment, and gnashing of teeth. Instead, it was claustrophobic constriction, utter solitude. Loneliness is hell.

Christianity has been selling the antidote for a long time in its communal worship. So let me conclude with this. It seems to me that if World Christianity is to have a future, then Christianity will have to continue to speak to the world. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Thank you very much, Tom. And I think it's interesting to see the overlapping features of the papers pushing the boundaries, going global. But I would see maybe because I'm looking for a kind of subterranean theological issues creeping around the margins of the papers and under them about what difference does this make in terms of Christian belief and so on. So I think we have a lot to talk about on the practice and on the theology.

And we have about 20 minutes or so before the formal session breaks up. I think you could pose a question to any of the panelists, but then the other two would always have the right to jump in and add a comment or so. So who would like to go first? Yes, please.

AUDIENCE: I guess I can selfishly start because I have the microphone in my hand. But this is kind of a general question that I have. As Dr. Homewood mentioned, global and World Christianity have become like a synecdoches. I don't even know if that's the right word with the Global South, the study of Christianity and the Global South. But I'm curious if that also is implying that Christianity has become more like non-white.

And so if that's the case, and you're kind of talking about global Christianity in Houston, I'm just curious about what exactly do we mean by a global, or world, or Global South if like, for example, because of this global movements that have been happening over the past centuries now people are leaving their homelands for various climate reasons for, I don't know, various war torn countries like my own in Korea. I'm just curious, what do we actually mean by that? Is it just another way to say like non-white?

NATHANAEL HOMEWOOD: Yeah, that's a great question. I think you're probably on to something. I hadn't thought about it like that, but that would certainly trouble the geographic definition. But this is part of the problem. And I didn't talk about this because I was going for the less obvious ways in which the world is obvious in Houston. But you mentioned some of the obvious ways, right?

Houston is a hub of immigration. It is, along with places like Minneapolis, a hub of refugee resettlement. We have in the city churches that represent almost every place on earth, often Baptist in name because that's where they get the money from, but not Baptist in ritual or theology. But also then there are ways in which-- obvious ways in which Houston moves beyond its own borders and to other spaces.

So, for example, John Osteen, who is Joel's deceased father, spent a lot of time in India. But then there is, how do you account for Joel, who missionaries in India that I interviewed aren't so fond of? He doesn't invest the time or money there, but how do you account for his television station that is right, or program that's watched everywhere?

He told me a story of showing up in Nairobi, getting off the plane and immediately seeing his picture on the side of public transportation. And he was surprised, but the reality this is one of the ways that it travels, literally around the world. So I think you are right now to the non-white part. I think this is an important story that I don't know exactly how to talk about in a fruitful way, but it is part of what I'm trying to do in this book.

Dubois, when he visited Houston and he visited Galveston not for any reason other than a bet on how long it was from Houston to Galveston, and he ended up winning the bet. But when he visited Houston, he talked about the triple color line, and that was, for him, white, Black, and Mexican. Clearly, a significant portion of the Houston population falls in this. But recent sociological studies, most predominantly from the kinder Institute at Rice University, call Houston the most diverse city in the US.

Now you have to squint certain ways and ignore other realities to get to this definition, but it is by the definition that Houston is the closest if you divide a population up in quarters, Asian, African, and African-American, white, and Latinx, it's the closest to getting 25% of each of those. But so what does Christianity look like in that city? And it does look very non-white.

It looks like the lady of Guadalupe being paraded through the streets. It looks like churches reclaiming the racial equality of Azusa Street because William Seymour actually before he went to LA was in Houston but couldn't do stuff because of segregation. And so increasingly, it is non-white, and yet the story of Houston is often, Joel Osteen, whom personally I like, he's very, very kind and friendly and, sort of devastatingly recently there was a shooting at his church, but people see his very white face and even on television, and that is what they think of Christianity In Houston. And so I think you are right. Troubling that is a crucial part of complicating World Christianity in a way that's not geographic.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: So would Gina or Tom, would you like to jump in on this question?

GINA A. ZURLO: I think one related point to this is the relationship of World Christianity studies and area studies. And we've had this conversation a lot over the last year. If you study Christianity in Zambia, and you only study Zambia, are you a world Christianity scholar? And some people who study Zambian Christianity will say, yes, and some will say no.

And we had this discussion a lot of is, anyone who studies Christianity anywhere in the world a World Christianity scholar? And if the answer is yes, then what makes any of this unique? If the answer is no, well, what makes any of this unique? Does there have to be some kind of international peace? Does it have to be some kind of connectivity between Christianity in one place and another place? Is that what makes it world?

And there's actually no answer to this question at all. There's articles and chapters coming out constantly in this field trying to figure out what it even is we are doing, and if this thing is actually a real academic field or not. And that's actually the subject of the Radcliffe seminar next year is, is World Christianity a real paradigm shift or a passing academic fad? That is the question that we're wrestling with in the field.

NATHANAEL HOMEWOOD: I would say really quickly, though, that the question has been answered on the front of job hires, which actually do tend to be either area studies or missiology and nothing else.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: We can add, if it consoles you, the American Academy of religion spends a lot of time asking what is religion? Is there such a thing as religion? So maybe it's a syndrome of some sort. Tom, did you want to jump in on this, or?

TOM SANTA MARIA: Nope, I'll let it go. I'll let that one go.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Pious next and then Lauren. OK. Pious.

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for all of your lovely papers. A question specifically for Dr. Gina, I don't know your surname.

GINA A. ZURLO: Zurlo.

AUDIENCE: Zurlo. I wonder if within your data you've considered, for instance, the Anglican so-called Anglican realignment, the North South divide. Analogous to this seems to be the almost unanimous condemnation of the latest papal declaration fiducia supplicants by the African hierarchy. Do you see that there is a tension perhaps between a wider appreciation for gender equality, gender studies.

You cited the UN report and of course, the report, whilst being accepted very often is met by various amounts of dissent on the floor of the UN itself, as I discovered interning there over the summer. I wonder what tensions you see and how it's possible to resolve these without resorting to the kinds of neocolonial ways of trying to influence the things that happen on the ground.

GINA A. ZURLO: Yes, I think about this question all the time, every day. So the theme of tension comes up quite a lot in my work because I am working globally. There is no one view of anything in World Christianity, not in a country, not in a tradition, not in a church. So Anglicans are a great example of this because you have, say, the Episcopal Church USA and everything the Episcopal Church offers. Then you have the Sydney Diocese in Australia, which is very strict on no women in leadership.

Even within sub-Saharan Africa, between priests, bishops, and archbishops, each diocese has a different interpretation of where women can do what in each of the dioceses, even within sub-Saharan Africa. So there's a huge amounts of tension there. How do you resolve those tensions? I do not have an answer for that. If I did, I'd be making way more money, probably if I could figure that out.

But I think a piece of it is local, so it cannot be some-- I don't think it's going to be some top-down approach because we've seen that. We have top down declarations that people just get mad about and then don't follow on the local level. So we have to reinterpret gender injustice in local ways that people will respond to.

So my understanding as a white middle class woman that lives in Massachusetts is going to be a different way of understanding gender inequality and gender justice than a woman from Malawi, who is going to have a different set of assumptions, and theories, and methods for how to close that gender gap. So that's part of my challenge. As a Western researcher, doing global work is not to impose my own understanding of gender roles and ideologies onto everyone else in the world. It's challenging.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Tom, Nathanael, either of you--

NATHANAEL HOMEWOOD: I would just really quickly jump in and say, again, this points to the idea of connections and ruptures between diverse places, including the West. So I will use Houston as an example. Not that everything is about Houston, but the Methodist church, which is splitting or has split in many ways over sexuality, a lot of that happen in Houston.

The first declaration, the Houston-- the Memphis Declaration that included the first Methodist statement about LGBTQ was because a bishop in Houston died of AIDS. And it was a controversy that some Methodists felt the need to address, the Global Methodist Church, which has been spearheading some of the split, certainly in the west and trying to push it beyond the west, grew out of folks and congregations in Houston.

And so there is a very particular sexual theology of sexuality amongst these folks in Houston. And both sides in the Methodist Church in the US accuse each other of colonialism because they accuse each other of using the Global South to further their agenda. And so it is just always these ruptures and connections that go in bizarre ways that I think points to the tensions that you are pointing out to. But if you only look at a single spot, you miss out on some of the places where that tension is really pronounced.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Tom, did you want anything?

TOM SANTA MARIA: Yeah. Well, just to be brief, I think anyone who knows Catholicism knows there are as many branches of the Franciscans as there are hairs on my head. I'm losing it a little, but even still, there are many. And the Franciscans tend to divide over the issue of poverty. And it strikes me as entirely possible that issues of gender and sexuality are going to be the issues of division, well, certainly in the Catholic church, but then also in any other branch of Christianity.

And I mean, it would be a little strange if Franciscans-- so the more observant poverty, I mean, I don't know what that would be like for the church that tolerates this, but not that. I mean, it doesn't-- to a certain degree, it doesn't make sense, but it seems to be the way that it's dividing. And I wonder if turning back to history and seeing a wide array of human experiences under Christian and Catholic or whatever umbrellas might be a good way forward such that Christianity does end up getting more Franciscan in that sense.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Yeah.

TOM SANTA MARIA: So they remain together. Yes.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: So we have four hands up. And I think maybe it would be good if we ask questions briefly and then answer them briefly to just make sure we go. So Lauren, Simon, Swayam, and I'm not sure your name.

AUDIENCE: David.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: David.

AUDIENCE: I'll be brief. OK. My question is mainly for Dr. Santa Maria. Your research on biolubricating nuns is fascinating. I heard you say that you kind of raised this question why bilocating nuns. And you said it could be a reaction to the enclosed life, but it's more likely the popular imagination working on mission, making sense of mission work.

Why is it not a reaction to enclosed life? I think I'm not an early modernist, but I think that around that same time is when a lot of narratives about nuns and convents started to emerge. The popular imagination around Catholic nuns, gender, and sexuality in particular. And that continues to borrow your pun, be everywhere today. I'm not being brief, but it's because it's kind of a complicated question, and I'd like you to unpack that more, and thank you.

TOM SANTA MARIA: Yeah. I'm not saying it's not a response, that oppression, that has been the standard account and there's no reason to doubt that. On the other hand, I would say a lot of the stories about early modern nuns that we have are frankly, pretty exceptional ones because we don't have the stories of most early modern nuns. We don't have the stories of most early modern people.

So I think that certainly does account for some of the reason why there's this bilocating. But the reasons why I think we can and should look to other places outside of the question of gender or oppression is because men bilocate as well, and non-cloistered women also bilocate, so it can't just be the one cause. So then why is it? Well, I think one reason, as I said, might be the missionary imagination.

I mean, there's no doubt that as soon as there are Jesuit missionaries and other missionaries, but especially Jesuits, because they were very clever with this. As soon as there were missionaries around the world, Francis Xavier, for example, they're sending letters to Europe, and then people really, as a result, all over the world are fascinated by what they're finding elsewhere.

Believe me, you go to the Jesuit archives, they even have little drawings. Hippo with his mouth open, hippo with the mouth closed. They wanted to even these mundane details, OK, not just the supernatural ones. But then I think there's another explanation. I mean, so far, all by locating nuns I've found in the new world anyway, have been associated with Jesuits.

And I think one could say, this is because the Jesuits are a missionary order and they're learning about missions, but I think there's another reason. You see, most Jesuits were not missionaries, OK, they ended up stuck home in Europe, and they very much wanted to be missionaries. So I wonder to what degree-- a lot of these are lives written by Jesuits about these women.

I wonder to what degree this wasn't a sort of Jesuit attempt to look at their brethren at home in Europe, sad that the superior general keeps rejecting their chance to be martyrs. And it says, look, I mean, here we have these women doing it, maybe if you just were a little bit better, you could also bilocate.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Any quick comments from either of you? OK. Simon.

AUDIENCE: Now, two quick questions. The first to Dr. Gina. In your research, have you explored the possibility of the feminine in African Indigenous religions as shaping the role of African women in Christianity. And not just that, there's a type of agency of leadership in African Indigenous religions that is women bring in, which may not be visible in the traditional understanding of leadership and authority in Christianity.

Then quickly this to the second presenter, I'm thinking the conversation on World Christianity, you problematised it as a way of retrieving a new hermeneutics. But then I'm thinking, have you looked at reception, the phenomenon of reception in the different traditions in Christianity? Because I think we are thinking that maybe the foundations of doctrines have been settled.

But if you are a missionary and you have explored, been in the frontiers, you discover that, that has not been settled. It might have been settled in the Vatican, but not in the peripheries. So maybe this might open up a new conversation, what do we really mean by what Christianity from the lens of doctrinal receptions? Thank you.

TOM SANTA MARIA: It remains unsettled in the Vatican, I'll just--

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Gina and Nathanael, I think we're--

NATHANAEL HOMEWOOD: Well, should we take all the questions and then respond?

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: If you can remember them all. Yeah. So, OK, so--

NATHANAEL HOMEWOOD: Let's make sure we get them all.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Swayam, why don't you ask your question or comments?

AUDIENCE: Thank you. I really love the presentations. So my quick question is, I think, almost all the papers complicated this idea of global Christianity. But I just want to flip it and ask, does Christianity globalize in a unique way? So, for example, in your presentation, Professor Homewood, are there specific elements between which connections are made that might be unique to Christianity, or in case of your paper Professor Zurlo, are there specific roles through which women become included in religious congregations that might be unique to Christianity? So does Christianity globalize in a unique way?

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: And then, David, and then we'll let you answer them.

AUDIENCE: For me, just only a question, a comment for the-- one for Nathanael and one for Gina. Yeah. About the Houston Christianity, it's very interesting. I also been a Houston two months ago doing some research on the astronaut and Christianity, and then I had a chance to visit a Webster Christian Church and some other churches where the astronaut visit and sometimes they pray, leadership pray for the astronaut for the present astronaut.

For that one, my comment is in that case, it's talking about American, NASA, Christianity or spirituality. If we consider Russian Orthodox, and in terms of the International Space station, a Russian Orthodox has a very strong involvement with the Russian.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Be brief, please.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, sorry. So if you can have a look the Russian Christianity in terms of space. And the Gna one is, you talk about the data about Oceania one. You mainly talk about Australia and New Zealand. Meanwhile, you also confess that they are excluding other Pacific islands, Fiji and Solomon Islands in Papua New Guinea. In terms of population, they have more population, especially also Christianity is very rapidly increasing in the Pacific Islands, that could be good if you consider next time. Thank you.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: So three sets of questions, and why don't you each go and turn and answer which parts you can.

GINA A. ZURLO: OK, I'll go backwards. Pacific Islands, is one of my soapboxes in World Christianity that I mentioned everywhere. I included my data I'm actually going to the Pacific Islands this summer. They are always included and I always make sure to include them. It's the World Values Survey that omitted them, not me.

On the uniqueness of women in Christianity, there a lot of work on this, especially Dana Roberts work. Is that her historical evidence that there are specific reasons why women converted to Christianity. But I'd like to see more interreligious comparison that I think we're actually kind of missing in World Christianity studies. Is that unique to Christianity, or is that just women in religion in general, that they get something out of a religious community that they didn't have prior?

So I think there's a lot of work needed to be done from a comparative lens. And the women in ATR, tons of work on women in African traditional religion and how their spirituality and connection with spiritual femininity gets translated to Christianity. A great study is Dorothy Hodgson's book, The Church of Women, about the White fathers among the maasai, which gets at this exact issue. So I think a lot of people who work on women in African Christianity, they're most definitely making those connections.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: Nathanael, or either one.

NATHANAEL HOMEWOOD: So very quickly, the reception question, I think, actually is exactly what I'm trying to do, and that is, I'm not interested at all in the denominational breakdown of Houston or how people self-identify. Stuff looks different on the ground, right? It's practiced different on the ground. And so absolutely. I think you're absolutely right on that front.

The NASA question. So because I'm focused on Houston for this book, the Russian Orthodox connection doesn't necessarily work in that chapter. But I do think you're right, and it's probably something I need to spend more-- I mean, this was a real shock to me as a Canadian. Coming down and living in Houston is the amount of time that communism is talked about.

And Russia, for a long part of Houston's history was this sort of boogeyman or Communist boogeyman, and it did play out in faith. So I do think there is something interesting to look there. The really interesting one, does Christianity globalize in a unique way? I don't have a good answer because, I think, we've just all been studying under the assumption that Christianity is global, and a lot of that is the attachment of Christianity to global power. So my instinct is to say yes, but I actually am not sure that folks have answered, asked or answered this question well, and it's something that I will definitely take with me, so Thank you.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: And Tom.

TOM SANTA MARIA: I mean, the only place where I could add anything is the question of reception, which is, again, fundamental. One of those things that they said to those poor Jesuits who were stuck home, living comfortable lives in their colleges, and not going to be missionaries was, you can stay in the Indies over here. They usually meant Naples.

And I think as part of that, though, my mom is from Naples, and she's not 500 years old yet, but the question of reception continues. I remember not too many months ago, I was on the phone with her and well, she was rehearsing some family drama. But she said something like, I mean, can't they just tell the kid that the Jesus-- you're not really eating Jesus when you take the Eucharist. And my father behind her groaned audibly because, of course, if you're Catholic, you do believe that.

And this is today, but by the bi, I mean, doctrine being what it is, and maybe some of the Catholics in here have a better answer on this. They do these surveys all the time about how many Catholics believe in the real presence. And it remains a very, very low number or a shockingly low number, even though it's the central teaching of the church. So I think there are ways where, yes, what I tried to point to in the paper is, we have to get to the people's experiences. And one of the ways that we can consider this is by taking seriously even the supernatural ones.

FRANCIS X. CLOONEY: So I think we should-- we have to-- we don't really want to, but call to a conclusion our formal session. But we can hang around there are refreshments in the back. I'm sure our three speakers would love to interact with you more. But let us conclude the formal session by thanking you all for coming and thanking our wonderful speakers.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Yang Scholars Program.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, The President and Fellows of Harvard College.