Indigenous Christianities

I am primarily interested in indigenous Christianities.  This is not Christianity as practiced by indigenous peoples, which is in itself quite interesting, but rather Christianity as practiced by peoples who were traditionally Christian, but outside the purview of Christendom.  I am, therefore, most interested in the Christian practices of places whose population was largely Christian not only before the arrival of Western missionaries, but in many cases, before the West was itself Christianized.  This includes communities in such places as Armenia, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and India, all of which have such traditions.  These people and their practices are interesting in their own right and have interesting histories that can tell us much about the transformation of Christianity, but I am most interested in discovering ways that others have found to be Christian without necessarily needing to be Western.  This is in contrast to the process of indigenizing Christianity studied by anthropologists in many places, such as sub-Saharan Africa and New Guinea, where modernity and Christianity are often conflated. In studying indigenous Christianity I hope to gain an awareness of what being Christian without accepting all of the Western philosophical and cultural aspects often attached to Christianity would look like.  As more and more people come to question the legitimacy of the Western notions of progress, development, and modernity, Christianity is often seen as intimately connected to these processes of globalization and rejected by many as part-and-parcel of Western hegemony.  However, what the study of indigenous Christianities can bring is an awareness of how communities can and have been Christian on their own terms, apart from the imposition of colonial powers.

There is a general lack of knowledge among many in the West about the theological, spiritual, and liturgical traditions of Christianity as it grew up in places other than Greece, Rome, and their immediate neighbors.  When many people hear of "Orthodoxy," for example, they tend to think of the Greek or Russian Church.  For my purposes, these are churches that were intimately connected to the West, part of the Roman Empire, and heir to their traditions.  The traditions with which I am most interested are those that were removed, although never isolated, from the political West, and were rather to be found in the Persian Empire, Armenia, the Kerala, and the Ethiopian Empire.  It is in these places that Christianity was most removed from the political forces currently associated with Christianity and here that we need to study indigenous Christianities that are both historically and apostolically rooted.  Such Christianties may serve as examples for other parts of the world as to how they may listen and respond to the message of Christ on their own terms, not on the terms imposed by Western discourses associated with Christianity.  This has been done, if more in name than in substance, by members of some sub-Saharan communities, who have co-opted many aspects of the Coptic Church as representing that which is both indigenous to Africa and authentically Christian.

I first became interested in Eastern Christianity through my study of the Chaldean Catholic Rite. A rite is a particular way of being Christian—with a distinct liturgy, ecclesiology, theological tradition, and spirituality—yet still belonging to the Catholic Church, under the guidance of the Pope in Rome.  The majority of Chaldean Catholics are found in numbers in northern Iraq and in neighboring nations, where these Christian communities have lived for nearly millennia.  In the United States, Chaldean Catholics are concentrated around Detroit and in San Diego.  I conducted ethnographic observation and did some interviewing of a Chaldean priest in Troy, Michigan.  The Chaldean Catholic Church and its counterpart not in union with the Catholic Church the Assyrian Orthodox Church (known also as the Church of the East or the Assyrian Church of the East), are the heirs to the oldest known anaphora (Eucharistic Prayer), that of Addai and Mari. 

Most recently I have done research on the understudied Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, which both share a common history of using the Ge'ez liturgy and unique Christian practices that date back to the Christianization of the Aksumite Empire in the fourth century.  I did fieldwork for several months in Eritrea as well as among the Eritrean diaspora community in San Diego as part of this ongoing work.  As a side note, the image used for this website it taken from a fourteenth century Ethiopian manuscript of the Pauline Epistles.

One of the best introductory sources for the study of Eastern Christianity as a whole is the sixth edition of Ronald Robertson's The Eastern Christian Churches (Seventh Edition).

While I plan to add more content to this page in the future, you can look through papers I have written that are related to Eastern Christianity:

• Presentation:"East Syrian Liturgical Tradition" (2003)
• "The Chaldean Catholic Mass: Liturgical Mediation of Heaven and Earth, Negotiation of Chaldean Traditions and Contemporary American Society"  A study of the East Syrian Qurbana as Practiced by St. Joseph Chaldean Catholic Church of Troy, Michigan (2003)
• "The Explanation of the Pasch: The Liturgical Theology of Cyrus of Edessa" (2003)
• "The Liturgical Theology of Patriarch Išo'yabh IV in Nestorian Questions on the Administration of the Eucharist" (2003)
• "The Little Hours: An Analysis and Evaluation of the Restored Byzantine Rite According to the Tradition of the New Skete Monastic Community" (2003)

Lastly, I have several photographs from St. Joseph's Chaldean Catholic Church in Troy, Michigan that are associated with the second paper in the above list. A colleague of mine is also conducting ongoing research on the Syro-Malabar rite as celebrated in the United States at the newly dedicated cathedral of Mar Thoma Shleema in Chicago.