#majorityworld

[globalcastresources]

Unleashing Action: How Mobilization is Learned Through Experience, Not Just Instruction

Mobilization is more Caught than Taught; here is how they are doing it in Malawi. Recently AfriGO Magazine interviewed Rev. Reuben Kachala, a pastor from Malawi, who is discussing effective missions mobilization in Malawi. He talks about his journey with salvation and missions, and how he started his organization, Frontier Missions International, to mobilize Malawi for world missions. He defines…

[floralfantasy]

Neurodiversity in the Majority World

Online Seminar 

How do Neurodivergent Therapists Engage with Social Justice?  Anna Maria Joseph 

Anna is a public mental health researcher and writer with OCD, based in Bangalore, India. As a researcher, she is engaged with projects studying the rehospitalisation of psychiatric patients, impact of arts based interventions for gender violence prevention, and suicide prevention among young people. Through her writing, she prioritises lived experience to discuss disability, queerness, and the climate crisis. Her work has been featured on spaces like Women Enabled International, Disability Debrief, Revival Disability India, and Gaysi Family. She was awarded the SCARF (Schizophrenia Research Foundation) Media for Mental Health Award in 2022. 

Vocabularies of inclusion: How Autistic voices in India are reframing personhood. Shubha Ranganathan

Shubha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. Her background is eclectic and interdisciplinary, having been trained in psychology but drawing on ethnographic approaches to questions around health, gender, and disability. Her research draws on a range of disciplines such as anthropology, gender studies, disability studies, and alternate paradigms within psychology such as critical and qualitative psychology. She has been engaged in qualitative explorations of local practices of healing among marginalized groups, as well as health and disability-related projects in India. Her work is framed by critical and social justice perspectives, focusing on lived experiences and the role of advocacy for social change. Currently, she is exploring questions about parenting and care in the context of autism as part of her engagement with the neurodiversity discourse in India.

The event is free of charge however, participants must register. 

Date: Tuesday 23rd July 2024

Time: 

20.30 hours - 22.00 hours (Tokyo Time)

1700 hours - 1830 hours (Indian Standard Time)

12.30 hours - 14.00 hours (UK Time) 

13.30 hours - 15.00 hours (Johannesburg Time)

7.30 am- 9.00 am (New York Time) 

8.30 am -10.00am (Buenos AiresTime)

Registration link https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=ofZoiROsL0e4mfcxbkOfQ2R-n7SIUR9Pj2px-QrEZi1UMFkzOFVUMk5aVlY4MkxVSzNPVUxWTUhUUy4u

Link to our website https://afroasiancriticalpsychology.wordpress.com/2024/06/26/neurodiversity-in-the-majority-world/

#ActuallyAutistic #Neurodiversity #AutisticRights #Autism #ADHD #SocialJustice #MajorityWorld #Inclusion #Psychology #India

[z-rah-blog]

Getting new perspectives online; listening to the 'majority world'

Majority World feminism

Summary: I'm on the hunt for examples of feminism and gender equality from the majority world, AKA low-income countries. I'm collecting them in this custom timeline, and tagging the stories with #mwfem. Join me! 

At the end of last year, I wrote about how, to my annoyance, most of the end of year 'feminist roundups' covered only achievements happening in the US, or in Europe. To counter this, I did my own round up of examples of feminism that happened in the 'majority world' in 2013- a term referring to what's also known as the developing world, or low-income countries, which also serves as a good reminder that the majority of people in the world live in these conditions. 

While I was doing this research, I found it harder than I had thought to come across these events. This is an excuse often used by, for example, men organising conferences with a poor showing of women speakers - "I looked, but I couldn't find any!" - and I hate that excuse. You're looking in the wrong places, or looking in the wrong way. So instead of searching for (clearly geographically focused) hashtags related to feminism campaigns that I had come across (#fem2, #twitterfeminism, for example) - I looked for activities related to gender equality, or 'strong women', or other ways of describing what I was looking for, and in different languages, too. 

This was a lot more fruitful, but still, unsurprisingly, difficult. While the majority of the world is living in conditions of poverty, the majority of the internet is clearly not.

So, since the beginning of 2014, I've been keeping a 'custom Twitter timeline' of Majority World feminism: tweets that I've come across that relate to brilliant activities on gender equality in the majority world. I'm entirely sure that I've missed so many great activities (and all this in the certain knowledge that the majority of shows of strength and inspiration by women across the world don't make it on to the internet) but that said, there's some interesting stuff in there.

I've also made a conscious effort to try focus my online habits to material that is written by people who have different perspectives in life to me, from the majority world (ie. outside of the US + Europe). In practice, this has meant looking up international news stories in the local or national news outlets of the countries where this is happening to read (in theory) the perspective of someone who knows the culture and the country, and following people on Twitter who are based in other countries, living in different situations to me, with very different priorities and interests.

While, of course, this is nowhere near as good as being able to spend time, or visit, these countries, cultures and people, I'm learning a lot. It's one of my favourite things about Twitter; while it's a good way of keeping up to speed with topics I work on or I'm interested in, from experts in the field, it's also an incredible way of getting insights from people who have been left out of 'mainstream' media, or who are experiencing things that I don't come across in my everyday life. 

Finding out what is important to people from a wide range of backgrounds is, for me, a great way of getting perspective on what's important to me, in literally real time. Curating the examples that I come across online of women doing amazing things under the most difficult of circumstances into this custom timeline is another way of getting that perspective. 

It surprised me how much I've had to think about my habits in doing this, and how clearly geographically, and topically, focused I've been in my choices. I realised I had been focusing on material from institutions or outlets based in the UK, the US, or most likely somewhere in Europe; articles written by well-renowned experts or people with established online profiles; links tweeted by people I'd met, or whose work I'd come across (through one of the above sources, most likely), or people who had been recommended to me (eg. I'd seen online interactions between) - others I already knew. These methods were excluding so many perspectives from 'my' internet.

Now, I'm learning an incredible amount from people I've never met, about things I've never heard of, and coming across all sorts of interesting, and important, perspectives. I have a long way to go in changing my habits, (and suggestion of how to do this more are so welcome) and a whole lot more to learn, but it's been so much fun; thank you, internet! 

(If there are topics or tweets you think I should add to the custom Majority World Feminism timeline, tweet me @zararah. Thank you!) 

  // <![CDATA[ !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); // ]]>

[kissmakush]

#ZakiIbrahim the song #MajorityWorld is so current right now. Thank you for recording that timeless song. Shö (Iqra in Orange... The Ep) #RELEASE IT please!!

[xgenesisrei]

Re/Doing Theology

For Jaroslav Pelikan, theology is what the church believes, teaches, and confesses based on the word of God. I think, this is fair summary with a specific attention to how 'doctrines' or Christian teachings were formulated and articulated over time, of which some get 'systematized' in particular faith traditions, e.g, Patristic theology, Reformed theology, Wesleyan theology, Dispensational theology, Roman Catholic theology. Tracing how all these 'theologies' developed and got to 'interact' with each other is more properly treated in the field of Historical Theology. A very important development in recent years in this discipline is the increasing awareness of how deep theologizing were taking shape in early centers of the faith most notably Africa and Asia, in the so-called 'lost' or forgotten history of Christianity' as highlighted in the scholarly works of Philip Jenkins and Andrew Walls. An era so often overshadowed (sometimes even erased) by what transpired in the European Medieval and Modern period, e.g., 16th Century Reformation and Counter-Reformation. But theology will receive a vista wider than the summary provided by Pelican.

Consider for example the kind of theological works done in Central and South America, especially in the postcolonial era. The works of Gutierrez, Cardenal, and Padilla, to mention a few, paid attention on how reading the 'text' (word of God) is fundamentally shaped by the 'context' from which such reading is done. A context that demands liberation more than anything else, cf., Liberation Theology. 

In Africa, the role of worldviews, culture and language became more pronounced as an indispensable aspect of any context from which theologizing is to be conducted. 

In Asia, doing theology needed to situate itself in relation to (and conversation with) the imposing religious diversity and traditions of spirituality in the region.

This kind of study about theologies constructed from outside the Western centers of Christianity, what is now called as the Majority World, came to be regarded as Contextual Theology -an unfortunate label considering that all theologies did develop from a particular context -including those from the West!

Now, that we are also talking of people inhabiting a digital world, the metaverses, with AIs capable of theological articulation, the new emerging field of Digital Theology can only get even more interesting!

In all these, one realizes that theology not only has a 'history', it also has a 'geography'!

Tell me from which city your theology was forged, and it will show how much of your city is in that theology, an elderly church leader once said. An exciting development that is conscious of this geographical reality is the push to do Decolonial Theologizing. This is to highlight the necessary delinking or uncoupling of epistemic assumptions involved in theological studies to pave way for the pursuit of re-rooting theological work not only in specific places but in the very 'soul' of the destituted people who inhabit those spaces.

We see today the re/emergence of multiple centers of Christianity in the regions of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Unfolding with it is the story of theology that is way older than how it has been popularly taught, wider than how it has been normally conceived, and deeper than how it has been usually portrayed. Indeed it is an exciting time to re/do theology as most of us have known it.

-Rei Lemuel Crizaldo (February 8, 2023)

[xgenesisrei]

Reimagining Works of Theology

Fortunately, the Bible was written not in didactic, propositional, and academic genre, ways of writing so usual of what is considered as ‘serious works of theology.’ Instead it was written in stories, poetry, personal narratives, anecdotal accounts, etc., genres and ways of writing that Randy Woodley followed in his book 'Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview' (Baker: 2022).

And also, this is the reason why his book would be widely accessible to more people, ordinary people most especially, who would like to learn the ways of God and the life of shalom (aka life in all its fullness) God desired for all of his creation. In the same way that the Bible has content for the philosophical (Ecclesiastes), the musical (Psalms), the poetic (Proverbs and Job), the romantic (Ruth), the non-conformists (Micah, Revelation), and those who simply wish to hear a ‘good story’ (the Gospel accounts), there is surely room for deep theology aimed and articulated in the language of normal human beings.

Some more personal reflections below arising from my encounter with Woodley's wonderful work:

If only we would have books on theology that are written in ways of how the Bible was written. Perhaps, more people would realize that theology is for all of God’s people, not just a privileged few who have access and are conversant with the technical ‘language’ that has characterized most of Western theologizing. 

If only we would have non-Western theologians who would write ‘for’ their people and in ‘ways’ that their own people could read, understand, and enjoy. In the Philippines, we distinguish between writings that are written about us with other people in mind as audience (pang-‘kami’) and those written ‘for us’, ‘by us’ and ‘about us’ (pang-‘tayo’). Sadly, so much of contextual theology even those written by non-Westerns were aimed for Western readership. For sure, works like these have their purpose, e.g., to engage and hopefully challenge the dominant and homogenizing voices . But for works aimed for those in the context themselves, much work is still needed.

If only we would have publishers who would be willing to take risks in publishing works of theology that are ‘differently formed,’ in genres of poetry, stories, parables, and conversations (and categorize it under ‘theology proper’, not sci-fi, or teens). I learned from Dr. Perry Shaw how lots of deep theological reflections are in Arabic poetry. Also, if we could finally drop the use of ‘contextual’ theology as a terminology! Why? Well, what kind of theology is not in itself rooted and shaped in a specific context and most appropriately applicable within the dynamics of that context? 

 And fortunately, these things can be done!

For those who would be brave enough to sail beyond the borders of Western theologizing, you won’t fall off the edge of the world. The world is not flat.

If my personal story of publishing would be of any encouragement, I’ve written almost all of my books, for my fellow kababayans, in the genre of creative non-fiction (CNF), exploring autobiographical reflections, story-telling, dialogical conversations, etc. But make no mistake about it, I consider all of them as works of theology.

My first book (originally titled ‘God Knows Hu Das Not Pray’) is my attempt to articulate a theologizing on the practice of prayer/spirituality anchored on the fusion of local and digital culture. It is built on a 3-year primary research I conducted at the University of the Philippines. The most recent book I worked on dealt with ecclesiology ('Bili Na Kayo ng Church') and what will happen if the next generation of God's people shall resist the force of consumer culture and starts to reimagine the church anew.

Kudos to my publisher OMF Literature for being willing to take a chance on the non-conventional and the experimental, not only in terms of content and form but also with regards to language -the curious mix of English and the vernacular or what in the Philippines is more popularly known as Taglish.

-Rei Lemuel Crizaldo 

Note: Here's a helpful overview of R. Woodley's work in Englewood Review of Books. 

[globalcastresources]

We must not only view unreached as a harvest field, but also as a potential harvest force. -David Platt #majority #majorityworld #harvestforce #harvestfield #newworkersfromnewnations #endsoftheearth #greatcommission #mobilizationmatters #missionsmobilization #mobilisation #davidplatt #majorityworldmobilization

[globalcastresources]

Toward True Globalism in World Missions The Audio of an important article from the Lausanne Movement Photo by Jhon David on Unsplash

[globalcastresources]

Via @gostoryline - The recently reached, going to the remaining unreached. #sent #globalchurch #emergingchurch #ChristianMission #GreatCommission #1040window #movement #innovation #story #newworkersfromnewnations #majorityworld #mobilization #mobilisation #majorityworldmobilization #missionsmobilization @uofnbattambang

[globalcastresources]

Hablemos Sobre Movilización – Talking About Mobilization

[globalcastresources]

A Vision For Launching Missionaries FROM Papua New Guinea Scopy Uwako shares his vision for sending 100's of missionaries FROM Papua New Guinea! Photo by Trevor Cole on Unsplash

[globalcastresources]

Jale’s Testimony – An Islander’s Journey into Missions Don't miss this great testimony from Jale! Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

[globalcastresources]

An Islander’s Challenge: “Say Yes, Have Faith, and GO!” Photo by adrian on Unsplash

[globalcastresources]

Seven Lies I Once Believed about Missions by Conrad Mbewe

Seven Lies I Once Believed about Missions by Conrad Mbewe

This is a repost from Conrad Mbewe’s Chancellor of the African Christian University in Zambia. Conrad Mbewe’s Blog can be found here.

The work of missions is one of the most important that any church can engage in. It is the responsibility of every Christian. We are either supposed to go into the mission field or we should be supporting those who have gone with our prayers and our finances.…

[globalcastresources]

Movilizando Misioneros Latinos al Sudeste de Asia