Indigenous Christianity and Empire in the Middle East

HDS 2144 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course examines Christianity, indigeneity, and empire through Middle Eastern Christian communities and their diasporas. Where the study of World Christianity has emphasized growth, mission, and inculturation, this course foregrounds dispossession, displacement, and presence. It asks how war, colonial legacies, and secular governance shape the categories of "minority," "religion," and "indigeneity," and how Christian communities in/from the Middle East mobilize them to claim sovereignty, land, and recognition.

Coptic, Assyrian/Syriac, and Armenian traditions are placed in conversation with Indigenous movements in the Americas and Oceania. Readings from anthropology, history, theology, and Indigenous studies address the politics of recognition in postcolonial contexts; ecclesiastical division as a legacy of empire and mission; humanitarianism and the geopolitics of "persecuted Christians"; the secular as a mode of power; and comparative indigeneities. Students will develop tools to reimagine World Christianity beyond Western categories of mission and conversion, attending to how Eastern Christian rootedness in sacred landscapes is troubled by those categories.