The Christian Century

For over a thousand years, Christian communities flourished in India. Their first real identity crisis? The arrival of European Catholics.

The vast majority of Africa's christians belong to familiar, mainstream denominations. But scholars give more attention to the minority.

In the ninth century, Timothy I was a global statesman. In the 20th, Raphael Bidawid led a tiny denomination in the paranoid Iraq of Saddam Hussein.

Ever since Westerners discovered Asian cultures they have been intrigued by possible relationships between Christianity and Buddhism.

If one moment symbolizes the unification of the continents, it might be the creation of the diocese of Manila—as a suffragan see of Mexico City.

Somehow, newspapers never publish banner headlines announcing "World's Largest Muslim State Fails to Persecute Christians."

Orthodoxy's roots in Egypt and Ethiopia are ancient. In East Africa there is a younger movement: a native Orthodoxy, locally grown.

Among modern nations, a British imperial background seems to be correlated to secularism. But in Australia, the story is more complex.

For some Christians, the menace of apostasy is anything but distant or theoretical.

“You are here to kneel,” wrote Eliot, “where prayer has been valid.” But which prayers are valid at the Mezquita Catedral, or at Hagia Sophia?

Any Christian who travels in Muslim countries or on the frontier between the faiths may well encounter the Gospel of Barnabas and be asked to respond to its claims.

The Christian population in Israel has begun to swell again, drawing on wholly different sources than in the past.

For many early Chris­tians, only at the moment of Jesus' baptism was he suddenly overwhelmed by the power of divinity.

Once upon a time—and not long ago—there was another Europe. The religious story of communist Europe, in which Christians suffered horrific persecutions, is forgotten by most Americans today.

Here is my unscientific rule: if Martin Luther treated a biblical book with disdain, then that book is really popular in modern Africa.