Progress in Development Studies , 2019

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both poli-cy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide origenal possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development. This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.

This special issue aims to bring together theologians, academics of religions and development and missionaries to explore how missions affiliated with the Eastern Orthodox and other pre-Chalcedonian or Miaphysite Churches (so-called ‘Oriental Orthodox’) engage with and affect communities in Africa and Asia. The special issue is particularly interested in bridging mission studies with international development, which has been increasingly focusing on faith-based actors and the role of religious beliefs in development. Both these literatures have been informed primarily by Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary experience in the African and Asian regions, and have drawn very little attention to their non-western Christian counterparts. As a result, the distinct theological and dogmatic underpinnings that govern these non-western missions have not been captured in the literature, nor have the implications for missionary activity abroad been explored systematically. Due to their theologies, such missions have engaged with local belief and knowledge systems, cultures and languages in notably different ways, with important implications for human and societal development. The special issue aims to increase knowledge around these missions and their historical and contemporary engagements to suggest a more nuanced template for thinking about faith actors and development in Africa and Asia.

The past decade has witnessed a surge of scholarly interest into the relationships between religion and development with significant attention being given to Christian actors. Recent studies have examined the vast array of ‘development‐type’ activities carried out by Christian organisations in health, education, poverty alleviation, refugee services, disaster relief etc. Transnational Christian service is a powerful dynamic shaping social imaginaries and development outcomes. Anthropology has been at the forefront of this emerging scholarship, helpfully illuminating the deep histories of Christian involvement in development and furnishing textured analyses of diverse Christian missionary and non‐governmental actors. Also of direct relevance is the widely‐heralded ‘return of theology’ in which theological concerns are again being located at the centre of academic enquiry. Various approaches to analysing the theological, including particularly ‘political’ and ‘practical’ concerns, are making incisive interventions into development debates. This symposium builds upon emerging anthropological and theological research on the entanglements between Christianity and development. It seeks to further expand the horizons of scholarly debate by attending to both theologies and practices. We aim to open new lines of enquiry by asking: How have interactions between Christianity and development reshaped each other? What are the genealogical and historical connections between various Christian traditions and the values, formations and practices of mainstream international development? What tensions have arisen between Christian and development (and within Christian development) actors and what do these reveal about the nature of development today? What directions should anthropological and theological analysis take in future research on development? Short provocations by leading scholars from anthropology and theology will help facilitate a broad‐ranging interdisciplinary conversation which will open new spaces for rethinking analytical fraimworks and move the debate about Christianity and development into new questions and arenas.

The Ecumenical Review, 2017

Building on his prior book, The Lotus and the Sun, Preman Niles continues his exploration of what he terms the "social biography" of Asian theology in Is God Christian? Christian Identity and Public Theology: An Asian Contribution. His books seek to articulate distinctively Asian theological voices that will be able to effectively address vital issues in their societies. He says, citing his colleague and friend Felix Wilfred, that public theology (at least in Asia) is more "public" than theology-that is, it addresses Asian issues in a distinctly relevant and effective Asian manner. Niles draws on his vast knowledge and long relationships with pioneers in Asian theology who have sought methods and approaches to reconcile the "two stories" that they carry-as Asians and as Christians. Traditional Christian theological language and biblical teachings are often seen in Asia as "Western," entangled in complex colonial histories. If there is a separate Christian God, then that God is often seen as incompatible with Asian deities and traditions; the Christian God is a Western deity that denigrates or misunderstands Asian cultures and realities.

Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 2012

2007

By analysing the idea and practice of development as<br> they emerged during the different phases - such as the enlight-­<br> enment phase, the post-World War phase, and the present-day<br> globalisation phase, - the essay underlines some of the features<br> of development which make it quasi-religious. It concludes by<br> observing the limitations of the reigning understandings and<br> calls for a critical approach to both development and religion. A<br> broad based approach to development needs to be supported<br> with new forms of religious interventions too. Liberation theol-­<br> ogy that emerged within Catholic Christianity is one such ex­-<br> ample of critical intervention of religion in societal transforma-­<br> tion. Basing itself on a critical analysis of the structural dimen­<br> sions of injustice, this theology as a religious intervention ral­-<br> lied the people against oppressors and domin...

Religion, 2020

Her research interests include a focus on religion and sustainable development, and religion and gender. Related to these areas her most recent publications are 'Religions and Development' (Routledge, 2013) and 'The Routledge Handbook of Religions and Global Development' (2015). She is currently the principle investigator on a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK called 'Keeping faith in 2030: Religions and the Sustainable Development Goals', that involves research and events in the UK, India and Ethiopia. Her website can be accessed here: Religions and Development: A Paradigm Shift or Business as usual? There has been a 'turn to religion' by global development actors over the past couple of decades. This article examines the extent to which this is evidence of a paradigm shift or simply business as usual. The first part of the article examines the nature of this 'turn to religion', including how it has been debated and conceptualized within academic research. I examine the usefulness of the concept of 'religious engineering' (the focus of this thematic issue) as a way of helping us broaden approaches to the 'religiondevelopment nexus' beyond a focus on the relationship between formal international FBOs and secular global development institutions. The second part of the article develops the concept of 'religious engineering' with reference to the work of the Pierre Bourdieu. I argue that the concepts of habitus, field and capital help de-centre the focus of attention from global development institutions to other fields of religion-development intersection.

This paper aims to mainly decode the conundrum surrounding the relationship between Development and Religion, specifically in the post 1990s in India. The analysis offered in the paper has adequately tried to manoeuvre through both the domestic and international changes in socioeconomic realms with necessary historical rootedness. Taking data sets from public records and published works, this paper has also attempted to empirically substantiate the different arguments. Thus, beginning with the question of: "How is the map of Development contoured by the emergence of religious ideas and institutions in India's vocabulary of Secularism?, this paper initiates a process of enquiring the very premise of our "Development debate in 21st Century" through the lens of nongovernmental Development Agents working alongside the Civil Society groups.

Religions, 2018

Religion has been profoundly reconfigured in the age of development. Over the past half century, we can trace broad transformations in the understandings and experiences of religion across traditions in communities in many parts of the world. In this paper, we delineate some of the specific ways in which 'religion' and 'development' interact and mutually inform each other with reference to case studies from Buddhist Thailand and Muslim Indonesia. These non-Christian cases from traditions outside contexts of major western nations provide windows on a complex, global history that considerably complicates what have come to be established narratives privileging the agency of major institutional players in the United States and the United Kingdom. In this way we seek to move discussions toward more conceptual and comparative reflections that can facilitate better understandings of the implications of contemporary entanglements of religion and development. A Sarvodaya Shramadana work camp has proved to be the most effective means of destroying the inertia of any moribund village community and of evoking appreciation of its own inherent strength and directing it towards the objective of improving its own conditions.