Description:
This comprehensive reference volume covers every country in South and Central Asia, offering reliable demographic information and original interpretative essays by indigenous scholars and practitioners. It maps patterns of growth and decline, assesses major traditions and movements, analyses key themes and examines current trends.
Brief description: Kenneth R. Ross is Professor of Theology and Dean of Postgraduate Studies at Zomba Theological University in Malawi and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. His most recent monograph is Mission, Race and Colonialism in Malawi: Alexander Hetherwick of Blantyre (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).
Review Quotes: Christianity in South and Central Asia represents public recognition of the unprecedented explosion of World Christianity during the past half century. Ambitious and wide-ranging essays by forty authors from varied backgrounds and disciplines explore the highly complex and multiple forms of local and regional Christianities that now exist within fourteen countries. Complicating this work further are Christianities within India itself which, like a gigantic elephant among smaller creatures, embraces more countries and cultures and complexities than all the other thirteen countries combined. Cross-cutting essentials of institutions and ideologies of least seven major historic traditions, as well as of manifold minor traditions found within these countries, are essays that address key themes as these pertain to each country - namely: caste, demography, diaspora, evangelism, faith, freedom, gender, identity, inter-faith relations, socio-political contexts, theology and worship. This truly remarkable collection should appeal to a broad readership concerned with contemporary affairs in our world.-- "Robert Eric Frykenberg, University of Wisconsin - Madison"