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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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The neglected intersection between religion and disaster relief should be given much greater attention. This emerging field is an intellectually compelling area for study, though much work stills needs to be done to explore the processes that take place on the ground in different settings. It is also important for practitioners and policy makers involved in disaster response to have a nuanced understanding of the work that religious actors undertake. This special issue begins with an interview with representatives of prominent humanitarian organizations, all of whom call for greater attention to the work of religious actors in disaster relief. The following case studies provide a textured empirical analysis of religious responses to disasters in contemporary Asia. By attending to particular contexts it is shown that religious actors can and do play important yet complex roles in relief processes. This special issue – edited by Philip Fountain, Robin Bush, and R. Michael Feener – aims to critically examine these diverse intersections and also help set future research agendas on the subject.

This chapter presents an ethnography of Christian theology. It does so by examining theological articulation in and through the creedal form. Creeds may be taken as an archetypal monologic mode of expression due to their monovocal presentation of standardized, non-debatable claims. Through close attention to how and why creeds are created it is possible to examination the contours and operations of the monological imagination. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, this chapter explores the creedal articulation, as well as instances of disarticulation, within two North American Anabaptist service organizations, namely the Mennonite Central Committee and Christian Aid Ministries. Their differing strategies of theological articulation illuminate the uses and limits of monological discourse.

Development scholarship in the social sciences has an awkward relationship with development things, often ignoring or sidelining materiality for analysis of cultures, discourses and power dynamics. Yet things are pivotal for how development works. This paper brings the anthropology of development into conversation with the burgeoning field of the anthropology of materiality. It focuses on a particular development thing: canned meat. The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a North American Christian NGO, has facilitated the production of canned meat for relief since the mid-1940s. Despite ideological shifts in conceptualising development, fluctuating financial constraints, changing hygiene regulations, arguments over labels, and the spectre of mad cow disease, canned meat remains a fixture in MCC’s programmatic repertoire. Every winter 10,000 volunteers from rural Mennonite communities can a million pounds of meat for relief. In tracing the surprising voyages of canned meat to Indonesia I probe into how material things might be relocated as a vital area of research on development and in so doing open new lines of investigation. Specifically, and despite the apparent paradox, I propose that a focus on material things can help invigorate research into the emerging field of “religion and development” by drawing attention to what can be called the theological life of things.

The discipline of anthropology is dominated by a secular analytical approach which requires the bounding of religion and its exclusion from anthropological ways-of-knowing. This is premised on a historical understanding of the discipline as scientific, rational, objective and modern. While these norms are now routinely critiqued, theology remains peculiarly marginalised. This article probes the contours of an anthropology beyond the secular which involves both critical reflection on the secularity of the discipline and a willingness to experiment with new ways of doing anthropology with/in theology.

This ethnography examines the disaster relief work of the Mennonite Cen tral Committee (MCC) in Aceh, Indonesia, following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. MCC’s work is informed by the theologies and historical experiences of the North American Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition. An intentional focus of mcc’s work was a substantive interfaith encounter between MCC workers, all of whom identified as Christian, and Acehnese Muslims. Through an examination of interpersonal relationships, organizational partnerships, and materiality, I trace the ambiguities and transformative potential within these interactions. Encounters are not simply the unfurling of predetermined scripts, but rather dynamic spaces of negotiation. Focusing on encounters counteracts tendencies to reify and essentialize religious disaster relief.

THE WOUNDS OF this world – ecological and humanitarian – require a re-thinking of our educational systems. Building upon a shalom model of education, the authors argue that questions of space and location are critically important to Christian pedagogies. Our education praxis must move beyond the classroom to engage students empathetically in the world around us. Doing so will necessarily be a subversive endeavor. The Creation Care Study Program in Belize is presented as a case study of “study abroad” and field-intensive education.

Following Jesus in invaded spaces: Doing theology in Aboriginal land, by Chris Budden. James Clarke & Company, Cambridge, 2009, 179pp., bibliography. ISBN: 978-0-227-17358-9 (paperback).As a genera...

In the early evening of Friday, 17 July 1998, three giant waves, each fifteen meters high, crashed into an isolated part of the coast in Sandaun Province, Papua New Guinea. The disaster event was sudden and devastating. With practically no warning, about fifty kilometers of the coast became inundated by the waves: houses were smashed, coconut trees were uprooted, and people were flung, helpless, into the sea. The Aitape tsunami, as it came to be known, killed over 2,000 people, and many more were left suffering. Such disaster events are relatively common in Melanesia and the Pacific generally. Indeed, there may well be a close connection between increasing vulnerability to disasters and “development” in the Pacific (see McEntire 1999). The number of organizations that seek to provide relief in disaster situations also appears to be on the rise. These organizations are diverse, operating on a variety of scales and within disparate organizational types and sociocultural frameworks. In the wake of the Aitape tsunami, one such group was the Combined Churches Organization (cco)— a small, ephemeral conglomeration of Christian organizations that provided a distinctive form of relief aid, informed by the local Melanesian culture and the Christian faith of its workers. In this paper, we aim to highlight the paucity of scholarly research exploring the relationships between Christianity and disaster relief in the Pacific. This task is set in the context of the relationships between Christianity, aid, and development more broadly, which is a limited but growing field. In seeking to address this gap, we provide a case study from Melanesia focusing on the Combined Churches Organization and its

This volume, and the discussions out of which it developed, has aimed to expand upon and redirect work on the intersections of religion and development through examinations — on both conceptual and ethnographic levels — of the changing configurations of these categories within and across particular political contexts. In the late 1990s, a number of major development donors “re-discovered” religion, and against a long history of neglect and omission, began a remarkable new phase of proactive engagement (Jones and Petersen 2011; Marshall and Keough 2004; Rees 2011). Following on from this, the topic of religion and development has received increasing attention in international development circles, as scholars, practitioners, and policymakers sought to understand religious actors and the relevance of religion to their work. This has generated a significant number of reports, conferences, policy statements, and academic commentary.

We live in a world where extreme disparities challenge notions of basic morality and human rights — in Singapore today, the ultra rich can sip on $26,000 cocktails, while globally 18,000 people die every year of hunger and poverty-related causes; 1,020 million people are chronically undernourished; 884 million people lack access to safe drinking water; and 2,500 million lack access to basic sanitation. In his impassioned moral critique, Politics as Usual, Thomas Pogge (2010) cites these and other statistics to show that the toll of global poverty today far exceeds the total devastation of the Second World War. Indeed, 360 million people have died from hunger and remediable diseases since the end of the Cold War, amounting to a third of all deaths on the planet during that period (p. 11).

Direct Action: An Ethnography David Graeber Oakland, California, AK Press, 2009 568 pp., references, index, ISBN: 9781904859796, US$25.95 (paperback) Direct Action—a thorough analysis of the ‘invis...

بعد تغيير مفاجئ وعجيب في الموقف، يكتشف المتخصصون في التنمية مجددا و أخيرا، دور الدين وينهمكون بجدية منذ الآن في دراسة المنظمات اللاحكومية (ONG) الدينية. لكن ما هو هذا "الدين" الذي يدور الحديث بصدده إلى هذا الحد ؟ بالارتكاز الى قراءة متأنية لبعض النصوص المرجعية، يتحرى هذا المقال عن الأسلوب الذي بْنِي على أساسه الدين وما هي الغايات من ذلك. في الوقت الذي لم يول فيه منظرو التنمية مطلقا عناية بمسائل التعريف، يستخلص مع ذلك، تصور افتراضي– جوهراني، ماهوي، مجرد من اي أساس تاريخي وكوني. إن فكرة التنمية التي يطبعها التعارض السائد بين اللائكية والدين، تشبه كل ما له علاقة بالميدان العلماني، على هامش نطاق الدين. تكشف هذه المقالة التي تستلهم من أبحاث مختصين متضلعين في الدين، كيف أن دراسات التنمية تؤبد "أسطورة المنظمات اللاحكومية الدينية"، وهي الأسطورة التي تحيل بطريقة تعسفية مختلف فاعلي التنمية إلى مكانة "آخر ديني لا سوي"، رغم أنه قد يكون نافعا. هكذا، فان الخصوصية التاريخية للتنمية السائدة كما طبيعتها المشحونة بالقيم مغيبة تماما. وبدلا من النقاشات الكبيرة المجردة حول الدين التي تشكل اليوم موضة، يكون من المفضل لدينا إبداء عناية دقيقة بالممارسات الخصوصية والتقاليد النوعية بما فيها التنمية العلمانية والاهتمام أكثر بالتوظيفات السياسية لـ"الدين".

Katherine Marshall’s thorough and thoughtful critique of my chapter raises a number of important objections. However, it appears that among her most important criticisms is that I didn’t write a different chapter. To clarify, my chapter was not a general survey of the literature on ‘religion and development’ (which has already been admirably carried out by Jones and Peterson, whom I cited). It was not an attempt to present a systematic analysis of Marshall’s substantial corpus and its evolution over time. Nor, indeed, was it intended to be a comprehensive and detailed proposal as to where to go from here. These are all useful and valuable tasks – some are arguably more pressing than the argument I provided – but none were the goals of the chapter.

In a remarkable about-turn, development studies has discovered religion and considerable attention is now dedicated to analysing religious nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). How can we understand the concept of ‘religion’ that is now being so widely discussed? Through a close reading of key texts, this chapter examines how religion has been constructed and for what purposes. While development scholars have given little attention to definitional concerns, a default conceptualisation – substantivist, essentialised, ahistorical and universal – is nevertheless apparent. A pervasive secular-religious dichotomy is implicit within this conceptualisation, constructing development as located within the secular domain, set apart from religion. Drawing upon critical scholars of religion, this chapter argues that development studies has perpetuated a ‘myth of religious NGOs’. This myth arbitrarily assigns to a diverse set of development actors the status of abnormal, if still potentially useful, religious Other(s). The myth conceals the historical specificity and value-laden nature of mainstream development. The current vogue for abstracted discussions of religion should be replaced with closer attention to specific practices and particular traditions, including secular development. Studies should also show greater awareness of the political uses of ‘Religion’.

In a ground-breaking article Joel Robbins analysed what he characterises as the ‘awkward’ relationship between anthropology and theology and invited greater anthropological engagement with its disciplinary cousin. This Special Issue responds to this provocation by using Robbins' argument as a bouncing board for wide-ranging forays into a common set of concerns. In investigating anthropological theologies the collection critically attends to the kinds of engagements and encounters that already take place and also lays out future agendas for further interactions. We call for an anthropology that is open to provisional, dialogic and potentially transformative interactions across diverse theologies and suggest that such a move will help shed light on the possibilities of re-modelling the practice of anthropology.

International audience

International audience