CCCW Day Lecture 2026, Tuesday 17 February 2026, 4.00-5.30 pm GMT
‘The Challenges of Sacred Charters for World Christianity‘
Prof Dana L. Robert, Centre for Global Christianity and Mission, Boston University
Tuesday 17 February 2026, 4.00-5:30pm GMT
Runcie Room, Faculty of Divinity, 25 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP & Online. The speaker will join in-person.
The proliferation of new Christian movements problematizes for historians of Christianity the relationship between writing history and constructing what could be called “sacred charters”—the commonly-accepted national or ethnic identity narratives that anchor groups of people in the divine and thereby justify their existence. In this lecture I shall discuss navigating the challenges of sacred charters in African Christianity today, and I shall put my experiences into dialogue with historians of African Christianity a century ago. Discussion of the ongoing challenges of sacred charters will follow.
Dana L. Robert is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University and the Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at the Boston University School of Theology. Her books include Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (2009), and edited with Judith Becker, Nationalism and Internationalism in the Young Ecumenical Movement, 1895-1920s (2025). Robert is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
