Cultural Anthropology in Christian Perspective (original) (raw)
2019, Concordia Seminary St. Louis
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Abstract
A graduate seminar that explores the understandings and tools of cultural anthropology and their usefulness in communicating the Christian message in mission and congregational contexts.
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begin by telling their journeys as anthropologists both motivated by faith. While Janell's research was about ghetto formation and resident activism like racial and economic issues, Brian specialty is Global Christianity, short-term mission and church organization. A few technical terms were introduced like anthropos which is the Greek word for human and cultural anthropology as the description, interpretation and analysis of similarities and differences in human cultures.
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This article critiques the way in which the discipline of anthropology has construed Christianity, arguing that too narrow and ascetic a model of Christianity has become standard and questioning the claims of the 'secular' social sciences to have severed themselves entirely from their Christian theological underpinnings. The article is in conversation with other writers on related themes, including Jonathan Parry on Mauss's The gift, Talal Asad, John Millbank, and Marshall Sahlins. Here, however, established anthropological assumptions on topics including transcendence, modernity, asceticism, and genealogy are reconsidered through a fieldwork-based examination of American Mormonism, a religion which posits relationships between the mortal and the divine that are unique in Christianity. Despite their strong belief in Christ, Mormons have often been labelled as 'not really Christian' by mainstream churches. It is argued here that such theological position-taking is echoed in the social sciences and that this reveals some of its (that is, our own) unrecognized orthodoxies.