World Cultures

After years of being dragged through classical and Christian studies, many students feel sort of adrift at the end. What was it all for? Just going off to college or trade school like anybody else, then joining the American professional world?

I would submit that good students who spent so much time studying classical culture and Christian culture should spend a year or two studying studying a foreign culture. Ideally, this would take the form of missionary internships overseas, while following a curriculum that takes the cultural and intellectual traditions of that target society very seriously. This training could be a useful time of preparation for many different paths the youth might pursue: whether they decide to stay longer and seek some work in that land, or return to pursue further academics, politics, or a professional vocation at home.

After all, what was all the Christian education for? Preparing people who can make disciples of all nations.

"The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations."

Goals

How to carry yourself in global professional society around many different peoples, without compromising your Christian or American values

Exposure to world literature, languages, and foreign cultures

International relations, geography, post-colonialism, area studies ... for the conservative evangelical

Understanding modern institutions and the global role of academia and NGOs

Understanding political philosophy and geopolitics.

Missionary Cultural Criticism

Missionaries should engage in the literary and philosophical traditions of the nation that they are seeking to discipline to Christ. In the past often missionaries were the ones creating an alphabet and introducing a given tribe to civilization. (That still goes on by friends of mine like Reuben.) But I think full cultural gospel engagement should be emphasized by missionaries to other countries, rather than just 'getting along.' Now, a foreigner might not be as insightful as a native, or risk stirring up needless conflicts by targeting the wrong sort of cultural issues, in their ignorance. But at the very least they should be training up natives who are capable of this kind of insightful self criticism on the culture. It should be a challenge of how families, Christian or nonChristian, deliberately want to choose to live within their national context. Whether in America, Europe, Turkey, Russia, Iran, Japan, Korea, China, India -- there are countless cultural practices to debate if they are proper for the Christian life. They should not just be blindly passed down, but meticulously revised. Because we want to revive nations dying under their long dead traditions and intergenerational sins and present them before Christ full of wisdom and life, a purified generation.

Liberal Arts Overseas: Mission Bureaus

Cities as global cultural centers? Anglosphere: The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand

France

Germanic

Nordic

Baltic States

Portuguese States

Italian

Balkans

Greece & Turke

Sinosphere

Indosphere

Russian World

Central Asia

Caucusus

Hispanosphere

The Islamic World

Iran

Japan

Korea

Sub-Saharan Africa

Caribbean

East Indies

South Pacific

Indochina

Himalayan