This book takes a global approach to violence between husbands and wives in faith contexts. Focusing primarily on Christians, the book uses anthropological, theological and historical methods, which intersect with, and are challenged by, lay and ordained women and men from sixteen countries. Focusing on marital violence, the book explores ways to understand how various churches, their priests, preachers, theologians and members, approach the topic, interpret the texts, and, with often thoughtless complicity, hide from the sin. Drawing on over a decade researching marital violence in Christian contexts across five continents, Elizabeth Koepping, an anthropologist and priest, presents testimonies from abused women, as well as theological and cultural justifications for spousal abuse employed by perpetrators and bystanders. She argues that if violence against the (female) spouse is understood as proper behaviour by manly men towards unruly wives, Christians may set aside the core text ‘Men and women are made in the Image of God’, enabling and silently colluding in abuse. The book shows that spousal abuse is an ecumenical phenomenon present all over the inhabited world, and therefore in all Christian churches and indeed other faith traditions.

Two-thirds of the world's Christians live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and this new interdisciplinary Routledge Major Work brings together specialist contributions from around the world, from Europe and North America as well as from the developing world, to present a collection that truly represents World Christianity. It includes Pentecostal and various Reform churches, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, and independent churches.

The materials have been arranged around the core themes of contextualization, external and internal power, theological and ethnic marginalization, civic and ancestral identity, mission and conversion, and cover Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and South America, Oceania, and Australasia.

The collection draws on the latest work from theology, anthropology, the sociology of religion, missiology, and religious studies, enabling users to grasp the very varied presentation of the Christian faith, the socio-cultural negotiation, accommodation, renovation, and the challenges to what the collection editor calls a 'Euro-American Christian taken-for-granted' understanding of theology and praxis from 'the world within and beyond'.

Fully indexed, and containing comprehensive introductions newly written by the editor, World Christianity is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research resource.

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.

Eliabeth Koepping teaches World Christianity and Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

This book takes a global approach to violence between husbands and wives in faith contexts. Focusing primarily on Christians, the book uses anthropological, theological and historical methods, which intersect with, and are challenged by, lay and ordained women and men from sixteen countries. Focusing on marital violence, the book explores ways to understand how various churches, their priests, preachers, theologians and members, approach the topic, interpret the texts, and, with often thoughtless complicity, hide from the sin. Drawing on over a decade researching marital violence in Christian contexts across five continents, Elizabeth Koepping, an anthropologist and priest, presents testimonies from abused women, as well as theological and cultural justifications for spousal abuse employed by perpetrators and bystanders. She argues that if violence against the (female) spouse is understood as proper behaviour by manly men towards unruly wives, Christians may set aside the core text 'Men and women are made in the Image of God', enabling and silently colluding in abuse. The book shows that spousal abuse is an ecumenical phenomenon present all over the inhabited world, and therefore in all Christian churches and indeed other faith traditions.