Proselytization Revisited

The act of converting people to certain beliefs or values is highly controversial in today's postcolonial, multicultural world. Proselytization has been viewed by some as an aggressive act of political domination. 'Proselytization Revisited' offers a comprehensive overview of the many arguments for and against proselytization in different regions and contexts. Proselytization is examined in the context of rights talk, globalisation and culture wars. The volume brings together essays demonstrating the global significance of proselytization, ranging from Christians in India to Turkish Islamic Movements and the Wiccan use of modern media technologies. The cross-cultural and multidisciplinary nature of this collection of essays provides a fresh perspective and the book will be of value to readers interested in the dynamic interaction of beliefs, ideas and cultures.

The act of converting people to certain beliefs or values is highly controversial in today's postcolonial, multicultural world. Proselytization has been viewed by some as an aggressive act of political domination. 'Proselytization Revisited' offers a comprehensive overview of the many arguments for and against proselytization in different regions and contexts. Proselytization is examined in the context of rights talk, globalisation and culture wars. The volume brings together essays demonstrating the global significance of proselytization, ranging from Christians in India to Turkish Islamic Movements and the Wiccan use of modern media technologies. The cross-cultural and multidisciplinary nature of this collection of essays provides a fresh perspective and the book will be of value to readers interested in the dynamic interaction of beliefs, ideas and cultures.

This volume brings together a range of critical studies that explore diverse ways in which processes of globalization pose new challenges and offer new opportunities for religious groups to propagate their beliefs in contemporary Asian contexts. Proselytizing tests the limits of religious pluralism, as it is a practice that exists on the border of tolerance and intolerance. The practice of proselytizing presupposes not only that people are freely-choosing agents and that religion itself is an issue of individual preference. At the same time, however, it also raises fraught questions about belonging to particular communities and heightens the moral stakes in involved in such choices. In many contemporary Asian societies, questions about the limits of acceptable proselytic behavior have taken on added urgency in the current era of globalization. Recognizing this, the studies brought together here serve to develop our understandings of current developments as it critically explores the complex ways in which contemporary contexts of religious pluralism in Asia both enable, and are threatened by, projects of proselytization.

A fresh descriptive and normative perspective on law and religion supported by comparative case studies of Greater China.

The concept of religious freedom is the favoured modern human rights concept, with which the modern world hopes to tackle the phenomenon of religious pluralism, as our modern existence in an electronically shrinking globe comes to be increasingly characterised by this phenomenon. To begin with, the concept of religious freedom, as embodied in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, seems self-evident in nature. It is the claim of this book, however, that although emblematic on the one hand, the concept is also problematic on the other, and the implications of the concept of religious freedom are far from self-evident, despite the ready acceptance the term receives as embodying a worthwhile goal. This book therefore problematizes the concept along legal, constitutional, ethical and theological lines, and especially from the perspective of religious studies, so that religious freedom in the world could be enlarged in a way which promotes human flourishing.

With its myriad people groups, Melanesia has much to teach the rest of the world about what happens when Christ encounters local culture. This collection begins with a look at specific case studies of the Gospel's encounter with local culture in Melanesia itself, before turning to broader themes particularly raised by the Melanesian context. Case studies from Asia and the wider Pacific then throw further light on the incarnational process of encounter, demonstrating that there is much for the rest of the world to learn from the Melanesian experience. The book concludes with some penetrating analyses of the dynamics at work when the Gospel encounters human cultures for the first time. The process of critical contextualization of the Gospel is never complete, and is inevitably the product of conversation and experimentation. As such it is a communal process. This set of essays models one such conversation while at the same time enabling the rest of the church to listen in on important insights.

Three master narratives currently dominate the analysis of modern mission history.?One puts foreign missionaries at the heart of the story.?A second emphasizes the colonial aspect of modern missions.?Here, missionaries are not heroes but villains, who are implicated in hegemonic schemes of imperial domination.?Thirdly, mission history is subordinated to one of its outcomes, the advent of World Christianity.?In this master narrative, the concept of contextualization looms large, bolstered by Sanneh's notion of translatability and emphasis on the agency of non-Westerners, who participate in and subtly shape the complex social processes of evangelization.?While all three of these master narratives are insightful, none of them adequately balances concern for missionary initiative and indigenous agency.?? Borrowing from speech-act theory, Skreslet offers a new analytical approach to the modern roots of World Christianity that differentiates between what a speaker might intend to communicate and the effects of what has been said or actions taken both in the moment and over time.?Corresponding to the concepts of illocution and perlocution as these technical terms are used in speech-act theory, the book is structured in two main sections.?Initially, the focus is on expressed missionary motives. Part two engages a representative set of modern-era mission performances involving many more actors than just the foreign evangelizers whose stated or implied intentions are emphasized in part one.

Almost everyone today affirms and applauds "religious liberty." But different and sometimes irreconcilable conceptions of religious liberty have emerged in our world, often as responses to specific challenges (for example, globalization or Islamic immigration). In this book, scholars in law, theology, and political theory exchange views on five specific challenges to religious liberty in the twenty-first century.