This book enters a lively discussion about religious faith and higher education in America that has been going on for a decade or more. During this time many scholars have joined the debate about how best to understand the role of faith in the academy at large and in the special arena of church-related Christian higher education. The notion of faith-informed scholarship has, of course, figured prominently in this conversation. But, argue Douglas and Rhonda Jacobsen, the idea of Christian scholarship itself has been remarkably under-discussed. Most of the literature has assumed a definition of Christian scholarship that is Reformed and evangelical in orientation: a model associated with the phrase "the integration of faith and learning." The authors offer a new definition and analysis of Christian scholarship that respects the insights of different Christian traditions (e.g., Catholic, Lutheran, Anabaptist, Wesleyan, Pentecostal) and that applies to the arts and to professional studies as much as it does to the humanities and the natural and social sciences. The book itself is organized as a conversation. Five chapters by the Jacobsens alternate with four contributed essays that sharpen, illustrate, or complicate the material in the preceding chapters. The goal is both to map the complex terrain of Christian scholarship as it actually exists and to help foster better connections between Christian scholars of differing persuasions and between Christians and the academy as a whole.
Christianity is the largest religion in the world and Christians can be found in virtually every nation and culture on earth. The diversity of the Christian experience around the world is fascinating and that diversity is explored in my new book The World's Christians: Who they are, Where they are, and How they got there (Wiley/Blackwell, 2011).
My second major focus of scholarship is religion and higher education, research I pursue jointly with my wife Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen. We co-direct the "Religion in the Academy" project and next year (2012) we will be pubishing a new book on this topic with Oxford University Press.
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Frequently asked questions about The World's Christians: Who they are, Where they are, and How they got there (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
1. Why did you write this book?
My desire to write this book was planted more than twenty years ago while meeting at Princeton University with an extraordinary group of what were then called "third world" theologians. It was obvious that Christianity was undergoing a dramatic transformation and I wanted to understand what was entailed. I have spent the last two decades trying to make sense of the explosive growth of Christianity around the world both as a scholar and as a person who is a Christian himself.
As a scholar I am an empiricist, focusing as much as possible on "the facts" without trying to bend them in one direction or another. As a Christian theologian, I believe that Christianity can be studied meaningfully only in light the sometimes disturbing history of the movement and in dialogue with people representing all of its varied expressions. The World's Christians reports on those historical and contemporary facts, setting the table for a broadened discussion about Christianity's significance in the twenty-first century.
2. Why should readers care about the topic/book?
The first reason to care about Christianity is size. Christianity is the largest religious movement on the planet, encompassing a third of the world's population, and that makes it simply too big to ignore. Christianity is the world's 800-pound religious gorilla. American's tend to look past this fact because Christianity seems so familiar, but they shouldn't.
And that leads to the second reason to read this book: Christianity is almost surely more complex than most people imagine. To know Christianity in just one local form (whether it's as evangelical Baptists in North America or as Orthodox Christians in Europe or as Charismatic Catholics in South America) is not the same as knowing Christianity as a whole. The world's Christians are amazingly diverse in their beliefs and behaviors. Understanding Christianity globally means seeing it as a living and multifaceted tradition of faith and practice, not as a formalized system of belief or as an institutionalized regime of rules and rituals.
3. In writing the book, what did you learn that was most surprising?
Over the centuries, the population center of Christianity has shifted dramatically, moving from the East (until about the year 1100) to the West (until about 1950) and now increasingly toward the South. The big surprise in contemporary Christianity is that there is no longer a clear center for the movement. The Christian world is "flat," with a remarkably even distribution of Christians around the globe.
While the stature of Christianity in the "global South" has grown tremendously in the last hundred years, Europe and especially North America still remain enormously influential. Today Christianity exists as an interconnected global movement. Developments anywhere have the potential to affect believers everywhere, and spiritual creativity and energy flow out of many different sources East, West, North, and South.
4. Where is Christianity growing fastest and why?
Right now Christianity is growing much faster in the "global South" (Asia, Africa, and Latin America) than it is in the north (Europe and North America). In 1800, Europe and North America accounted for 85% of the global Christian population and a hundred years later (1900) that percentage was virtually unchanged. Today, however, only 40% of the world's Christians live in the "global North" and 60% live in the South.
In terms of raw numbers, the greatest growth has taken place in Latin America, where roughly 440 million Christians have been added to the rolls in the last century. Almost all of this expansion can be explained in terms of natural population growth; many Latin American Christians have large families. The real explosion of Christian growth has been in Sub-Saharan Africa--a combined result of conversion and population growth. In 1900, only 2% of the African population was Christian; 50% are Christian today. So far, Christianity in Asia has lagged behind Africa and Latin America, but if current trends persist, this is where Christianity will grow the most in the 21st century.
