Recalling the Term ‘World Christianity’: Excursions into Worldings of Literature, Philosophy, and History

Studying World Christianity

“…This angle was taken up by assessing spectrums of “ecumenism‐independency” in modern church history (Chow and Wild‐Wood 2020). By situating new inquiries in the Majority world, outside or alongside familiar inquiries regarding doctrine or mission emanating from central ecclesial networks, the connections and disconnections of comparative lived religious experience tested familiar understandings of “ecumenism” and “independence.” Shobana Shankar (2021) and Dorottya Nagy (2021) proposed attending to the “world‐mindedness” in the study of Christianity as a way of responding to the boundary‐defying nature of lived religion. In doing so, they proposed to address religious phenomena that occur in “in‐between” spaces, for instance, where Christian and non‐Christian intersect, thus further interrogating familiar comprehensions of confessional particularity.…”