Preliminary Programme

I would like to focus my proposal on the effects of globalization on the Scandinavian christian organizations, and specifically on foreign missions. The christian Scandinavian history seldom focuses on the concrete effects of globalization and late secularization. But the study of christian organisations’ evolution shows that missions have experienced two great changes in the last four decades.

Some missions are going through a highly fusioning process which is totally new in the Scandinavian mission history. This process combines regional and confessionnal integration and fusion. On the other hand, other missions are attracted by a confessional and identitary withdrawal, refusing traditionnal cooperation and emphazing their religious identities.

This is a radical turn in Scandinavia mission history that tends to respond to an extreme case of secularization and which reveals a new self-perception of christian community and vocation, polarized between extreme globalization and local withdrawal. (Show less)

European societies underwent a major cultural transformation since WWII, during which traditional Christianity, omnipresent until the 1950s, gradually evaporated from the minds of the people and alienated from mainstream culture, a sign of a deep memory crisis. This crisis opened up ways for different new interpretations of the sacred.
Arguably the most intriguing of theories about this change is the so-called ‘Easternization’ thesis, which claims that this transformation came about as a result from influence from the ‘East’ especially in the Sixties. This paper critically reviews the argumentation of the Easternization thesis both at theoretical level and empirically on the basis of an assessment of the religious and cultural changes in the Netherlands since the 1960s. We firstly argue that the East – West dichotomy on which the Easternization thesis is based, is far too simplistic. Especially the representation of the East is fundamentally flawed: we conclude it should be considered an orientalist myth. Moreover, because of its theoretical inadequacy the Easternization paradigm underestimates the existing continuities in European cultural practices and fails to grasp the complexities of cultural exchanges in a colonial and postcolonial ‘global’ world. Though not absolutely necessary, it does help to conceptualize the nature of the transformation, highlighting monism as cultural basis of Western self-understanding, as comes to the fore in the emphasis on the self as source of the sacred in most new and old religious and spiritual expressions since the Sixties. (Show less)