Navigating a world of religious <scp>NGO</scp>s: Ethnography, abstraction, and views of the horizon

Fountain, Philip; Feener, R. Michael

doi:10.1111/gec3.12328

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…12 For valuable overviews of this literature, see: Jones and Juul Petersen (2011), Fountain (2013), Fountain and Feener (2017), and Fountain and Juul Petersen (2018).…”

Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Christianity and Development in the Pacific: An Introduction

Fountain

Troughton

2019

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Although a significant literature has arisen examining the intersections of Christianity and development in the Pacific, these themes have yet to receive the full attention they deserve. This special issue seeks to encourage further scholarship on these important themes. In this introduction we trace some of the entanglements between religion and development in Pacific history and suggest some productive future research trajectories.

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“…12 For valuable overviews of this literature, see: Jones and Juul Petersen (2011), Fountain (2013), Fountain and Feener (2017), and Fountain and Juul Petersen (2018).…”

Section: Acknowledgementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Christianity and Development in the Pacific: An Introduction

Fountain

Troughton

2019

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“…As well as considering Forman's taxonomy as applied to Talua, it is also worth considering it in relation to genesis and motivation. Fountain and Feener (2017) have noted the widespread use of taxonomies in mapping development, including in the religious domain. They argue that taxonomies are maps.…”

Section: Forman's Taxonomy and The Realities Of Vanuatumentioning

confidence: 99%

Theological Education as Development in Vanuatu: ‘Wayfaring’ and the Talua Ministry Training Centre

Taylor¹,

King

2019

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Education is essential to development. In Pacific cultures, in which the church is a significant presence, theological education can empower agency and offer analytical frames for social critique. Equally, theological education can reinforce hierarchies and dominant social narratives. This paper provides an account of Presbyterian theological education in Vanuatu. Applying an educative capability approach to a theological education taxonomy proposed by Charles Forman brings into focus the interplay between economics, context, and sustainability as mutual challenges for both development and theological education. However Forman's model does not accurately reflect the realities of Vanuatu. An alternative frame is proposed, that of wayfaring, in which knowledge-exchange is framed as circulating movements. Wayfaring allows theological education to be imagined as a development actor that affirms local agency, values networks, and subverts centralising models. This alternative model provides a way to envisage theological education, both historically in Vanuatu and into an increasingly networked future, as an actor in Pacific development.

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“…4 Then President to disregard aid recipients' historically and culturally situated understandings-resulting in the reinforcement of top-down, ethnocentric formulations and problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of the spheres of 'religion' and 'development'. 5 ethnographies of FBOs, on the other hand, often question the cross-cultural validity of such a sharp distinction between religion and development and reveal the contingent character of this constructed dichotomy as grounded in specific histories of Western modernity (e.g., Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan, 2009;Bolotta, 2017;Bornstein, 2005;Fauzia, 2013;Feener, 2013;Feener and Keping, forthcoming;Fountain et al, 2015;Mostowlansky, 2017;Scheer et al, 2018). 6 Such studies have examined how the religioussecular divide gets divergently signified and contested at global, national and local levels by a range of different actors, such as international and private donors, policymakers, political authorities, NGO workers, religious specialists and aid recipients.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Translating religion and development: Emerging perspectives from critical ethnographies of faith-based organizations

Bolotta

Scheer

Feener

2019

Progress in Development Studies

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Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide original possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development. This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.

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Navigating a world of religious NGOs: Ethnography, abstraction, and views of the horizon

Cited by 12 publications

References 49 publications

Christianity and Development in the Pacific: An Introduction

Christianity and Development in the Pacific: An Introduction

Theological Education as Development in Vanuatu: ‘Wayfaring’ and the Talua Ministry Training Centre

Translating religion and development: Emerging perspectives from critical ethnographies of faith-based organizations

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