An article I wrote in 2023 is finally seeing the light of day, or getting published, as the case may be. I had delivered a paper at a joint conference of the Evangelical Missiology Society and the International Society for Frontier Missiology in October 2022 (read it here). That was my second draft of thoughts I had entertained for three years at that point. The first draft was a book proposal written to the main editor (Prof. Kirsteen Kim) of the series, "Theology and Mission in Global Christianity," at Brill Publishing (Leiden, The Netherlands) already in 2019. Her answer was a tentative green light ("Let's have a look at it when you've finished").
It all started at the end of 2018 and the beginning of the next year. Protests were exploding in many parts of the world and spilling out into the streets as people aired their grievances about economic hardship, but most of all about the lack of government transparency and oppressive policies enacted without any regard for their own wishes and demands. In other words, they were witnessing a rise in autocracy. Pictures of crowded protests and brutal police repression filled the pages of the news media reporting on places like Hong Kong, Chile, France (the yellow vests), Sudan, Iraq and Lebanon, and more. [see my blog post of March 2020 on this, and my 2-part series on the massive protests in Algeria where I lived for nine years in the 1970s and 1980s ("Algeria and the Postcolonial Straightjacked"; "Algeria: The Hirak Phenomenon").
Was God the Holy Spirit stirring the hearts of people and, building on deep aspirations instilled in them at creation, was he pushing the needle toward greater democracy? In terms of political theology, is there a connection between human flourishing, good governance, and the values of God's Kingdom as announced and lived out by Jesus Christ -- values to be fully implemented in the New Jerusalem that one day will come down from heaven? The last two chapters of the Bible describe the nations of the world pouring into that city and contributing their own unique gifts for the well-being of all in this completely renewed creation of God, where tears, sorrow, disease and death are no more, and where God takes up residence for the first time.
This article lays out the main themes of the book, which is now being reviewed and should be published in 2016 (The City Where All May Flourish: The Holy Spirit in Mission and Global Governance). It's title is "Mission and Global Governance: Convergence of Pneumatology and Human Flourishing."
This is a keynote address I delivered virtually at a conference on Faith and the Environment sponsored by the Oxford Centre for Muslim and Christian Studies, March 1, 2024. My title is "Is the Human Vicegerency Bad Theology in the Anthropocene?" The term "vicegerency" is a bit archaic, but it is the word used most often in Muslim academic circles for the "human caliphate" mentioned in several places in the Qur'an, referring to God's creating humankind as deputies or trustees over his creation. The Genesis 1 creation account has God deputizing humanity in this way as well: filling the earth and ruling over it (v. 28). This was a central theme of my 2010 book, Earth, Empire and Sacred Text: Muslims and Christians as Trustees of Creation.
This is an article that I submitted to the academic journal Missiology. After the first round of peer reviews, the editor said they were interested in the article, but some changes needed to be made. I am still waiting to hear back from them about the second draft I sent which took account of the advice proffered. Yet whether this article is actually published by them or by some other journal, I wanted it to be available to those with an interest in these topics. In any case, missiology (the academic study of Christian mission), pneumatology (the branch of theology that studies the Holy Spirit), and global governance, are prominent themes running through the book project I am working on at the present.
The full title is "Mission and Global Governance: A Convergence of Pneumatology and Human Flourishing."
On October 8, 2022, I presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Missiological Society. It was a joint session with the International Society for Frontier Missiology and the paper’s title is, “Caring about Global Governance for the sake of Human Flourishing.” This was an opportunity for me to put on paper some of the material I have been working on for my book on Christian mission and human flourishing. I had already posted a two-part blog post related to this topic (“The New Economy and the SDGs”), but this was the opportunity to ground this project more specifically in mission theology.
In particular, this paper highlights some of the interviews I have been conducting with Christians actually involved in some aspect of global governance. Following John Kirton of the University of Toronto, I have defined global governance as including the plurilateral summit institutions (PSIs like the G7/G8, G20, BRICS); the many United Nations summits on specific subjects, but especially the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Summit on Climate Change, both in 2015; intergovernmental and multilateral agencies like the World Bank and regional ones like the EU, the African Union, etc.; and finally, NGOs, both in the business and development communities, and more broadly, civil society. All are stakeholders trying in one way or another to eradicate poverty and build a more peaceful and just world.
This is the fourth review of my 2020 book, Muslims and Christians Debate Justice and Love. The reviewer is Joshua Canzona, who teaches at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. The journal in which it appears (Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology) is related to my publisher, Equinox Publishing in Sheffield, UK. That issue came out in February 2021, about when the other three were published. Of all the reviews, this one emphasizes the most the case study approach I used and notes that it goes a long way in avoiding any temptation on the part of the reader to "essentialize" either Islam or Christianity (meaning, to paint either faith with a wide brush). There is so much diversity of schools and currents in both of these top two world religions! Generalizing is a pitfall that can lead to a lot more tensions between followers of both faiths.
Canzona also welcomes the contribution of this book in our present, often polarized, context, and widely recommends its reading: "In its clarity and emphasis on real-world implications, this volume will be useful to a wide audience of students, scholars, practitioners, and interested readers generally." That said, I wrote it as a textbook I wanted to use personally, and I hope that many colleagues will do the same, whether at the undergraduate or graduate levels. Still, if you exclude the sometimes technical legal/hermeneutical details of Chapter 5 relative to Yusuf al-Qaradawi's work, this is a book most people could easily pick up and read.
This review by Martin Awaana Wullobayi, a Ghanaian scholar who teaches and writes at The Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI), was published in their journal in 2021: Islamochristiana 47. I take heart that an African scholar welcomes this work so enthusiastically. I hope with him that at a time when “hate speeches which divide and deprive humanity of all kinds of friendship and peace, the research topics discussed in Johnston’s book will be useful for reinforcing peaceful positive world view of coexistence between Muslims and Christians.”