Between Humanitarianism and Evangelism in Faith-based Organisations

Between Humanitarianism and Evangelism in Faith-based Organisations
Author: May Ngo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-04-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317201450

Religion has always played an important, if often contested, role in the public domain. This book focuses on how faith-based organisations (FBOs) interact with the public sphere, showing how faith-based actors are themselves shaped by wider processes and global forces such as globalisation, migration, foreign policy and neoliberal markets. Focusing on a case study of an FBO in Morocco which gives aid to sub-Saharan African irregular migrants, the book reveals some of the challenges the organisation faces as it tries to negotiate at once local, national and international contexts through their particular Christian values. This book contends that the contradictions, tensions and ambiguities that arise are primarily a result of the organisation having to negotiate a normative global secular liberalism which requires a strict demarcation between religion and politics, and religion and the secular. Faith-based actors, particularly within humanitarianism, have to constantly navigate this divide and in examining the question of how religious values translate into humanitarian and development practices, categories such as religion, the secular and politics and the boundaries between them will need to be interrogated. This book explores the diversity and complexity of the work of FBOs and will be of great interest to students and researchers working at the intersections of humanitarianism and development studies, politics and religion.

God's Internationalists

God's Internationalists
Author: David P. King
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2019-05-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0812250966

Over the past seventy years, World Vision has grown from a small missionary agency to the largest Christian humanitarian organization in the world, with 40,000 employees, offices in nearly one hundred countries, and an annual budget of over $2 billion. While founder Bob Pierce was an evangelist with street smarts, the most recent World Vision U.S. presidents move with ease between megachurches, the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, and the corridors of Capitol Hill. Though the organization has remained decidedly Christian, it has earned the reputation as an elite international nongovernmental organization managed efficiently by professional experts fluent in the language of both marketing and development. God's Internationalists is the first comprehensive study of World Vision—or any such religious humanitarian agency. In chronicling the organization's transformation from 1950 to the present, David P. King approaches World Vision as a lens through which to explore shifts within post-World War II American evangelicalism as well as the complexities of faith-based humanitarianism. Chronicling the evolution of World Vision's practices, theology, rhetoric, and organizational structure, King demonstrates how the organization rearticulated and retained its Christian identity even as it expanded beyond a narrow American evangelical subculture. King's pairing of American evangelicals' interactions abroad with their own evolving identity at home reframes the traditional narrative of modern American evangelicalism while also providing the historical context for the current explosion of evangelical interest in global social engagement. By examining these patterns of change, God's Internationalists offers a distinctive angle on the history of religious humanitarianism.

Faith-Based Organizations in Development Discourses and Practice

Faith-Based Organizations in Development Discourses and Practice
Author: Jens Koehrsen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2019-11-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000734641

Exploring faith-based organizations (FBOs) in current developmental discourses and practice, this book presents a selection of empirical in-depth case-studies of Christian FBOs and assesses the vital role credited to FBOs in current discourses on development. Examining the engagement of FBOs with contemporary politics of development, the contributions stress the agency of FBOs in diverse contexts of development policy, both local and global. It is emphasised that FBOs constitute boundary agents and developmental entrepreneurs: they move between different discursive fields such as national and international development discourses, theological discourses, and their specific religious constituencies. By combining influxes from these different contexts, FBOs generate unique perspectives on development: they express alternative views on development and stress particular approaches anchored in their theological social ethics. This book should be of interest to those researching FBOs and their interaction with international organizations, and to scholars working in the broader areas of religion and politics and politics and development.

Religion, Welfare and Social Service Provision

Religion, Welfare and Social Service Provision
Author: Robert Wineburg
Publisher: MDPI
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2019-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3038977608

Religion, Welfare, and Social Service Provision: Common Ground delves deeply into the partnerships forged between religious communities, government agencies and nonprofits to deliver social services to the needy. These pages offer a considered examination of how local faith entities have served those in their midst, and how the provision of those services has been impacted by evolving social policies. This foundational volume brings together the work of more than two dozen leading researchers, each providing long overdue scholarly inquiry into religiously affiliated helping and the many possibilities that it holds for effective cooperation.

Secular and Religious Dynamics in Humanitarian Response

Secular and Religious Dynamics in Humanitarian Response
Author: Olivia J. Wilkinson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2019-11-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 042958198X

This book investigates the ways in which the humanitarian system is secular and understands religious beliefs and practices when responding to disasters. The book teases out the reasons why humanitarians are reluctant to engage with what are seen as "messy" cultural dynamics within the communities they work with, and how this can lead to strained or broken relationships with disaster-affected populations and irrelevant and inappropriate disaster assistance that imposes distant and relatively meaningless values. In order to interrogate secular boundaries within humanitarian response, the book draws particularly on qualitative primary data from the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. The case study shows how religious practices and beliefs strongly influenced people's disaster experience, yet humanitarian organisations often failed to recognise or engage with this. Whilst secularity in the humanitarian system does not completely exclude religious participation and expression, it does create biases and boundaries. Many humanitarians view their secularity as essential to their position of impartiality and cultural sensitivity in comparison to what were seen as the biased and unprofessional beliefs and practices of religions and religious actors, even though disaster-affected people felt that it was the secular humanitarians that were less impartial and culturally sensitive. This empirically driven examination of the role of secularity within humanitarianism will be of interest to the growing field of "pracademic" researchers across NGOs, government, consultancy, and think tanks, as well as researchers working directly within academic institutions.

Muslim-Christian Encounters

Muslim-Christian Encounters
Author: Mona Siddiqui
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-08-15
Genre: Christianity and other religions
ISBN: 9781138937918

While the subject of Christian-Muslim or Muslim-Christian interaction is still not a traditional or systematic discipline, interest in the encounter of these two religions has grown considerably over the last decade. Historians, including historians of Islam and Christianity have always been interested in the civilizational meeting of the two religions, in conflict or in times of peace. This includes aspects of post-colonial studies, which incorporate cultural, literary and political writings which consider the intellectual and social ruptures in so much of the Islamic world in the 19th and 20th centuries. Theologians however have only recently begin to appreciate the amount of material which illustrates the extent to which Christians and Muslims wrote about one another's faith and spoke of each other in a variety of contexts in both polemical and eirenic terms. These resources serve to enrich the understanding of one's own faith and the changing historical relationship with the other. Today, Muslim-Christian is often understood as Islam/West where the Christianity and secularism are either conflated or Christianity subsumed within the larger cultural framework of the west. Either way, Islam is a foreign presence and its points of reference not easily assimilated in the narrative of a Judaeo-Christian West. Nevertheless this has created an interesting intellectual and scholarly dynamic in a wide range of disciplines. This includes ethics, politics, gender studies and the emergence of an interfaith' literature which is increasingly used in scholarly as well as grass roots settings. The collection will comprise around sixty pre-published journal articles and some book chapters. Each volume will contain around 15 articles/chapters. The articles will be secondary sources analysing the works of individual Christian and Muslim scholars, so will not be extracts of primary material thought it is hoped that the majority will contain some primary material. Volume One will contain an Introduction to the whole collection. The volumes will provide a unique and rich reflection of Muslim-Christian encounter. This work will introduce the scholar and the student to the variety of approaches people of faith/no faith have taken to thinking about the two religions. The volumes will cover doctrine, interfaith practice as theory and lived realities and philosophical and literary themes and approaches.

Building Noah’s Ark for Migrants, Refugees, and Religious Communities

Building Noah’s Ark for Migrants, Refugees, and Religious Communities
Author: Jin-Heon Jung
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2015-06-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137496304

Building Noah's Ark for Migrants, Refugees, and Religious Communities examines religion within the framework of refugee studies as a public good, with the spiritual and material use of religion shedding new light on the agency of refugees in reconstructing their lives and positioning themselves in hostile environments.

Missionary Interests

Missionary Interests
Author: David Golding
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2024-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 150177445X

In Missionary Interests, David Golding and Christopher Cannon Jones bring together works about Protestant and Mormon missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, charting new directions for the historical study of these zealous evangelists for their faith. Despite their sectarian differences, both groups of missionaries shared notions of dividing the world categorically along the lines of race, status, and relative exoticism, and both employed humanitarian outreach with designs to proselytize. American missionaries occupied liminal spaces: between proselytizer and proselytized, feminine and masculine, colonizer and colonized. Taken together, the chapters in Missionary Interests dismantle easy characterizations of missions and conversion and offer an overlooked juxtaposition between Mormon and Protestant missionary efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

International Development and Local Faith Actors

International Development and Local Faith Actors
Author: Kathryn Kraft
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 100005327X

This book explores the interplay and dialogue between faith communities and the humanitarian-development community. Faith and religion are key influencers of thought and practice in many communities around the world and development practitioners would not be able to change behaviours for improved health and social relations without the understanding and influence of those with authority in communities, such as religious leaders. Equally, religious leaders feel responsibilities to their communities, but do not necessarily have the technical knowledge and resources at hand to provide the information or services needed to promote the well-being of all in their scope of influence. The book demonstrates that partnerships between humanitarian-development practitioners and religious communities can be mutually beneficial exchanges, but that there are also frequently pitfalls along the way and opportunities for lessons to be learned by each party. Delving into how humanitarians and faith communities engage with one another, the book focuses on building knowledge about how they interact as peers with different yet complementary roles in community development. The authors draw on the Channels of Hope methodology, a tool which seeks to engage faith leaders in addressing social norms and enact social change, as well as other related research in the sector to demonstrate the many ways in which humanitarian and development policy makers and practitioners could achieve more systematic engagement with faith groups. This book is an important contribution to the growing body of literature on faith and development, and will be useful both to researchers, and to practitioners working with faith communities.

Handbook of Research on Development and Religion

Handbook of Research on Development and Religion
Author: Matthew Clarke
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 613
Release: 2013-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0857933574

With eighty percent of the world's population professing religious faith, religious belief is a common human characteristic. This fascinating and highly unique Handbook brings together state-of-the-art research on incorporating religion into development studies literature and research. The expert contributors illustrate that as religious identity is integral to a community's culture, exclusion of religious consideration will limit successful development interventions; it is therefore necessary to conflate religion and development to enhance efforts to improve the lives of the poor. Issues addressed include: key tenets, beliefs and histories of religions; religious response to development concerns (gender, environment, education, microfinance, humanitarian assistance); and the role of faith based organisations and missionaries in the wider development context. Practical case studies of countries across Africa, Eastern Europe and the Pacific (including Australia) underpin the research, providing evidence that the intersection between religion and development is neither new nor static. By way of conclusion, suggestions are prescribed for extensive further research in order to advance understanding of this nascent field. This path-breaking Handbook will prove a thought-provoking and stimulating reference tool for academics, researchers and students in international development, international relations, comparative religion and theology.