Pope Francis’s visit to Canada will offer him an opportunity to apologize for the harms of the Catholic-run Indian Residential Schools.
(AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
Pope Francis’ visit concerns all Canadians. It’s about our relationship to history and the construction of a state that marginalized Indigenous people and tried to assimilate them.
Detail from the cover of the book Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual.
UKZN Press
Lisa Bitel, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
The Irish government recently declared a national holiday for St. Brigid. A medieval historian explains her fascinating life and history.
Missionary Annie Lock with Enbarda (Betsy) left, and Dolly Cumming, both children from the Alice Springs area in Central Australia. Photo taken in Darwin.
National Archives of Australia
I thought I had uncovered a feminist heroine, but for all her intrepid and gutsy behaviour, Lock held intensely socially conservative views in line with her religious conviction.
Young Kikuyu women lined up outdoors at a Church of Scotland mission school in Kenya.
Bristol Archives/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
As missionaries expanded into Africa, they held a special grudge against polygamy. Here’s how that affected education.
J.D. Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, has called on the denomination to focus on its theological mission.
AP Photo/Jay Reeves, File
The SBC is meeting amid divisions, controversy and dwindling numbers. But in pushing rhetoric over its theological mission, the denomination is tapping into a history of white supremacy.
A masquerade during the celebration of an Igbo ritual.
Jorge Fernández/LightRocket/Getty Images
Over the past 15 years there’s been a revival of young people - mostly Christians - participating in traditional masquerades, despite these being branded as pagan.
An evangelical outreach in Uganda led by the prominent and wealthy pastor Robert Kayanja.
WALTER ASTRADA/AFP via Getty Images
African evangelism is born from – and often funded by – American evangelism, and with it comes a damaging cocktail of rightwing ideologies, especially during the Donald Trump years.
Counting Americans is a complicated process.
Tada Images/Shutterstock.com
Rebecca Tippett, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The 2020 census will now count some groups differently than it has in the past. That could make a difference in the final count – affecting which states receive funding and congressional seats.
A Zulu household, from an 1895 book called The Colony of Natal: An Official Illustrated Handbook and Railway Guide.
J Causton and Sons /University of California Libraries/ Flickr
A new history book shows how entanglements of race, gender, class and sexuality in South Africa flow from the moral contradictions of the settler colonial state.
Purity Malinga, the new Presiding Bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa.
Supplied
Not everyone’s a fan of this fundraising approach. But it does bring the needs of children in developing communities to the attention of many Americans.
Pope Francis at the Monument Mary Queen of Peace, in Port Louis, Mauritius on Sept. 9, 2019.
AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino
Pope Francis recently completed a tour of three African nations. His visit needs to be understood in the context of the church’s long history in Africa and its modern-day difficulties.
President Dwight Eisenhower signs the bill to make Hawaii the 50th state at the White House on March 18, 1959.
AP/Charles Gorry
Hawaii’s fight for statehood was long and waged primarily against racist US lawmakers who feared admitting a majority Asian territory. But 60 years ago, President Eisenhower signed the statehood bill.
A still from Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.
Courtesy 20th Century Fox.
When it was released 15 years ago, Mel Gibson’s ‘Passion of the Christ,’ was a box-office success. The theme of Jesus has been a successful one that many filmmakers around the globe have cashed in on.
What might have motivated the young missionary killed on a remote island in India?
AP Photo/Sarah Prince
In their zeal to evangelize the world, at the end of 19th century, young families were sent overseas with little to no training in anything beyond the Bible and no promise of funding.
Evangelist Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network has launched the first Christian 24-hour TV channel. History shows that missionary media has played a key role in providing information from around the world.
Students at the American Memorial School, Tabriz, 1923.
shahrefarang.com
There was a time when Iran and America were friends. Americans founded schools there, helped Iran handle financial crises and trained the country’s first generation of doctors. Could that happen again?
Full Professor of Ethics and Head of Department, Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology, Director of the Beyers Naudé Centre for Public Theology, Stellenbosch University