Beschreibung
This is a wide-ranging yet incisive text on ‘religion from below’ by an anthropologist, based on many years of field-work in Borneo and Australia and current teaching in practical theology and religious studies. It argues that rural Lutherans in Australia, and rural Anglicans, Muslims and local religionists in Malaysia, whose views form the core of the book, discern their religious identity primarily in terms of their food, friends and partners and funeral practices, and only secondarily – if at all – in terms of belief and doctrine. It also critiques ego-centred and ethnocentred approaches to religion too often apparent in religious studies and missiology.
She teaches World Christianity and Religious Studies at the University of
Edinburgh, regularly lectures in North America and Asia, and as well as
preparing separate ethnographies of Kadazan in eastern Sabah and Lutherans
of German origin in South Australia, is currently working on the
theological implications of domestic violence in Asia.
