Pages

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Guest Book Review: The Next Christendom


Fellow blogger and American hero (he is in the navy so stuff it!) Eddie of Live from the FDNF was inspired to read The Next Christendom by Episcopalian Philip Jenkins.

Below are Eddie's thoughts on the book

This book fills a valuable gap that has been notable in many writings of strategists (with the exception of Ralph Peters who discussed it in detail in “Hidden Unities”): the rise of Christianity in the “Global South”, i.e. the Southern Hemisphere. Already there are far more Catholics in the non-Western world (Latin America, Philippines, Africa, increasingly China) than “Western” Catholics, and the numbers are only going to rise in the near to mid-future. The author offers a fascinating portrait of what kind of Christianity exists in the Southern Hemisphere (his conclusion is that many of the “Southern” churches are a return to the “roots” of Christianity, i.e. before the Romans “widely” sanctioned it.), what likely impact the rising Southern populations will have on the global church leaderships (Catholic, Pentecostal, etc) and policies (liberal churchgoers are in for a hell of a surprise when their campaigns to liberalize issues like gay marriage and abortion within the church come up against the even more conservative global South) and the impact of the two great surging (and often competing (in countries like Nigeria)) religions, Islam & Christianity, in the future.

Two other reviews can be found here and here. Both Eddie and I recommend the book as a well researched and written piece of religion and geopolitics.

Category: Books, Religion

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for posting about it. It really is a phenomonal book to help understand the most overlooked religious development of recent decades. The dynamics of this will affect in particular Latin American politics (hence theirs' and our future) and African economics and warfare. I wish more people were writing about this.

I'm not a hero though, folks on the ground in Iraq/Afghanistan, the medics on hospital ships sailing to impoverished islands in SE Asia and Africa, etc... these folks are heroes. I'm a desk bitch typing and filing NAVY TPS reports.. a waste of talent but probably fitting due to my past proposensity to screw it all up somehow. Thank you though.