The Christian Century

Sunday Adelaja's story sounds like the start of a bad joke: "Did you hear about the African who tried to start a church in the Soviet Union?"

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.