Drawing on new archival resources, and opening up an entirely new research agenda in the field, David Woodbridge has written an outstanding new book. Missionary Primitivism and Chinese Modernity: The Brethren in Twentieth-Century China (Brill, 2019) focuses on a small but very significant evangelical community, the so-called Plymouth Brethren, and documents ... Show More
Yesterday
Judith M. Lieu "Explorations in the Second Century: Texts, Groups, Ideas, Voices" (Brill, 2025)
As allegiance to Jesus Christ spread across the Roman Empire in the second century, writings, practices, and ideas erupted in a creative maelstrom. Many of the patterns of practice and belief that later become normative emerged, in the midst of debate and argument with neighbours ... Show More
43m 39s
Nov 24
Maia Kotrosits, "After Transformation: Rewriting Time, Christian Late Antiquity, and the Present" (Duke UP, 2025)
In After Transformation, Maia Kotrosits offers a lyrical history of Christian late antiquity as it lives on in and with the present. Recasting the monumental changes that occurred between the second and fourth centuries, when Rome transitioned from pagan to Christian worship, Kot ... Show More
52m 17s
Nov 22
David Chanoff, "Anthony Benezet: Quaker, Abolitionist, Anti-Racist" (U Georgia Press, 2025)
Wilberforce, Clarkson, Wesley. Britain’s great abolitionist activist Granville Sharp. Each of these consequential figures of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world were galvanized by the moral power of a modest Quaker teacher who never ventured more than a few miles from his home ... Show More
46m 50s
Sep 2015
103-Back in the East Part 2
This episode of CS is titled, Back in the East – Part 2Last time we took a brief look at the Jesuit missions to the Far East; namely Japan, China, Vietnam and India.We encountered the revolutionary approach to mission work of Alessandro Valignano and his spiritual heirs, Michele ... Show More
12m 5s
Aug 2021
Daryl R. Ireland, "John Song: Modern Chinese Christianity and the Making of a New Man" (Baylor UP, 2020)
Dubbed the "Billy Sunday of China" for the staggering number of people he led to Christ, John Song has captured the imagination of generations of readers. His story, as it became popular in the West, possessed memorable, if not necessarily true, elements: Song was converted while ... Show More
1h 41m
Jan 2018
Tam T. T. Ngo, “The New Way: Protestantism and the Hmong in Vietnam” (U. Washington Press, 2016)
Think of Christianity in Southeast Asia today and what might come to mind is the predominantly Catholic Philippines, or the work of the Baptist church among linguistic and cultural minorities in Myanmar, or any one of the thousands of Christian communities scattered throughout In ... Show More
46m 43s
Sep 2015
102-Back in the East – Part 1
This episode of CS is titled, Back in the East – Part 1In our last foray into the Church in the East, we stopped our review with the Mongols. You may remember while the Mongols started out generally favorable to Christianity, when later Mongol Khans became Muslims, they embarked ... Show More
10m 48s
Apr 2025
Anna Maria Busse Berger and Henry Spiller, "Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago" (U California Press, 2025)
Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture.
Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago ... Show More
1h 6m
Jun 2022
James Elisha Taneti, "Telugu Christians: A History" (Fortress Press, 2022)
Telugu Christians: A History (Fortress Press, 2022) narrates the history of Telugu Christians, a faith community located in the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Pondicherry in southern India. A social history of a faith community, this volume analyzes how social aspiratio ... Show More
1h 28m
Nov 2023
Briana L. Wong, "Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023)
The Cambodian Civil War and genocide of the late 1960s and ’70s left the country and its diaspora with long-lasting trauma that continues to reverberate through the community. In Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023), B ... Show More
56m 1s