The Five Distinctives of World Christianity: A Framework for Understanding a Global Faith proposes a model for conceptualizing the processes and themes shared across World Christianity. The volume builds out of and honors the work of Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi who, through a career’s worth of engagement with World Christianity, has identified the following distinctives as essential to the ways in which Christianity interacts with its cultural contexts: 1) cross-cultural diffusion, 2) translatability, 3) polycentricity, 4) indigenous expressions of the divine, and 5) biography. This volume draws together a range of World Christianity scholars in critical and collaborative discourse about these distinctives, built around their own research areas. It is a contribution to the study of World Christianity that distills its founding insights while pushing them, through the contributors’ essays, toward deeper engagement.
Though crucial for the way his students approach World Christianity, these themes are yet to receive collective attention in a single volume. The volume is designed for teaching, with ten essays from an array of scholars of World Christianity, focused around these five themes. Each theme contains one Latin American-focused essay paired with either an African- or Asian-focused essay tending to the same distinctive. Each distinctives’ section also contains a brief introduction, highlighting the development of the distinctive within the discourse, and each section ends with select bibliographies.
In the spirit of Cardoza-Orlandi’s character and scholarship, this volume’s essays exemplify, evaluate, critique, and even imagine what these distinctives may be beyond the original formulation. Moreover, the volume is a collaboration between World Christianity’s established and emerging scholars. In doing so, it hopes to embody the best of the existing discourse and tradition while looking toward its future.
