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This article describes two journeys. The first is the journey undertaken by Christian missionary John Allen Chau to North Sentinel Island, where he planned to preach the Christian gospel to the island's inhabitants despite the fact that they have been cut off from the outside world for sixty thousand years. Chau's efforts ended in his death at the hands of the islanders. The second journey recounted in the article is that from missionary to saint undertaken following Chau's death. The article examines several issues related to certain philosophical problems in respect of the authority required to designate a victim of violent death a martyr or a saint. Keywords: colonialism, evangelism, martyrdom, philosophy of religion, rhetorical analysis, saints, spiritual journeys, Martyrdom is the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith. -Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1995 That martyrs prove anything about the truth of a cause is so [...]

Evangelicalism, a primary driver of the emergence of modernity, has enormous consequences for Peter Berger's two pluralisms. It greatly increases the salience of religion and religious difference; it tends to undermine the religious unity of society and to foster over time societies in which 'many altars' coexist and compete for influence and adherents; it supports religious freedom and undermines the power of political elites in religion; and it radically challenges the status, authority, and even existence of inherited religious traditions, hierarchies, and clerical leaders. At the same time, Evangelical social activism relates much more naturally to the first pluralism than to the second. Evangelicals have few existing resources for peaceful coexistence with secularism, and a typical Evangelical would be likely to reject significant elements of Berger's description of the so-called 'secular discourse.' Evangelicals face great challenges in the modern world but also have substantial resources, and a case can be made either for optimism or pessimism about their prospects as the two pluralisms increase., Author(s): Timothy Shah[sup.1] , Greg Forster[sup.2] Author Affiliations: Timothy Shah is Associate Director, and Scholar in Residence, Religious Freedom Project, Georgetown University. Greg Forster is Director of the Oikonomia Network, [...]

On a balmy August morning in 1837, congregants of Zion Baptist Church in Newton County, Georgia, filed into a weathered clapboard meetinghouse for their monthly Saturday conference. An undoubtedly restless [...]

Growing up in a Southern Baptist church in the 1970s and '80s, I heard quite a bit about 'the Rapture.' This was the dispensationalist apocalyptic teaching that some day, some [...]

Given that a significant band in the spectrum of Lutheran theology has for some time identified itself as 'Evangelical Catholic,' the first surprise for a reader of that stripe is [...]

Long confused with fundamentalism by most of the academy and dismissed as intellectually inadequate, evangelical theology has in the last two decades become one of the liveliest and most creative [...]

At the end of the 1880s the British South American Misionary Society (hereafter SAMS) established its first missionary station in the Paraguayan Chaco, on the shore opposite the city of [...]

Abstract: This article explores the cultural significance of faith among US evangelical Protestants. It is argued that evangelical conceptions of faith provide an idiom for expressing religiosity that transcends conventional [...]

Social scientists typically examine social movements as grassroots phenomena, yet public leaders and elite actors also play important roles. This article examines their role in one contemporary social movement, American evangelicalism. Through semistructured interviews with 360 elite informants, as well as archival and ethnographic research, I explore the mechanisms through which leaders have sought to advance evangelicalism between 1976 and 2006. These public leaders founded organizations, formed networks, exercised convening power, and drew on formal and informal positions of authority to achieve movement goals. Results suggest that salient religious identity and cohesive networks have played important roles in shaping the goals and ambitions of leaders within the evangelical movement. Structural coincidence provided by governance structures at evangelical organizations, as well as evangelical programs directed toward elite constituents, have facilitated the formation of overlapping networks across social sectors. Institutional inertia and internal factions, however, have been countervailing forces. This empirical study demonstrates the persistence of institutional differentiation among America's leadership cohort, but it also points to a religious identity that can provide vital, cross-domain cohesion within the structure of elite power.

The association between evangelicalism and political behavior from 1980 to 2004 are explored. Results reveal changes in the evangelical political behavior over the period, which indicate an electoral realignment in American politics.

The argument advanced by Zev Chafers-with an engaging mix of urgency, frustration, and humor both high and low--is really quite simple: American evangelicals are, next to American Jews, Israel's best [...]

The article examines the impact of Catholic evangelization on the migration of Latin people to Rome.

The reasons behind the judgment of the US President George W. Bush's presidency in the US as the most resolutely faith-based in modern times, is explored. It is argued that such a judgment is plausible enough to merit serious consideration if it is self-evidently true only if modern times began on January 20, 1989, when George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan.

IT WAS OVER CANTALOUPE AND COTTAGE CHEESE THAT the Lord told Pat Robertson to build a university. The year was 1975, and the minister, then 45, was running so late […]

It has been widely reported that evangelicals have a dangerous ulterior motive for backing Israel: the belief that the Jews' return to their biblical home will lead to their mass [...]

The theme of the WCC's eighth assembly, 'Turn to God -- Rejoice in Hope', is music to evangelical ears. Yet for the large segments of evangelicalism which are not involved [...]

Research indicates that Venezuelan evangelists use religion to provide structure in society. Flexible attitudes towards patriarchy and egalitarianism have been adopted by men and women within society to serve a useful purpose. Dual patriarchal and egalitarian practices have not evolved naturally but are used with deliberation.

Certain parallels can be drawn between evangelical religion and biomedicine, including the conviction of each that it provides access to vital knowledge, the perceived need to change human behavior without regard to race or culture, and a tendency toward cultural intolerance. These parallels are illustrated in the history of missionary and medical activity among the Cree of the James Bay region in northern Quebec. Three distinct phases of medical evangelism, defined by the activities of missions, the federal government, and an autonomous Cree health board, show a movement toward the redefinition of local healing practices and greater medical pluralism.

42. Grant Wacker, 'Second Thoughts on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions, 1890-1940,' in Earthen Vessels, ed. Carpenter and Shenk, pp. 281-300. 43. See, for example, Allen V. [...]

This paper examines how theological discourse creates particular types of interpretive codes. Dominant religious communities rely upon received theological traditions to enforce a hegemony of acceptable thought and action upon their members. Within that hegemonic structure, alternative communities offer oppositional interpretive codes to reinterpret the received theology and thus call into question the dominant tradition. Evangelical Christian feminist literature is examined as an exemplar of how one such alternative community articulates oppositional interpretive codes. This study investigates hegemony and opposition in religious discourse by stressing the interplay among texts and audiences in creating meaning, and by highlighting the social dimensions of religious belief and spiritual experience.

It was rolled out at the National Press Club on May 7 with the usual bells and whistles of the public relations machinery. Whether it will survive its much less [...]