Comparative Religion

Global Christian Studies

Initiative for Global Christianity

Christianity today is the most populous religion in the world, with more than two and a half billion followers across Europe, North and South America, Africa, and many parts of Asia. In an initiative led by James Wellman, Chair of the University of Washington’s Comparative Religion Program, the University of Washington seeks to develop a robust program of teaching and research focused on the study of Christianity in its global context.

With this goal, Robert Stacey, Dean of the UW’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Reşat Kasaba, former Director of the Henry M. Jackson School for International Studies, authorized the Comparative Religion Program to seek funding for the creation of a new Center for Global Christian Studies. Central to this vision is the goal of endowing 6 new faculty positions exploring the history, culture, and spirituality of Christianity in Africa, Asia, Latin America, North America, and the Orthodox world. There is also strong interest in raising funds for a chair in the field of Catholic studies. With its focus on modern and contemporary forms of Christianity, the Center would vastly enhance the University of Washington’s capacity to foster teaching and research on the full spectrum of global Christian communities.

Interested in learning more about this exciting initiative at the University of Washington? Please contact Jim Wellman here.

Key faculty

James K. Wellman 

Associate Professor and Chair, Comparative Religion Program; Term Professor, Global Christianity 

James Wellman is Professor and Chair of the Comparative Religion Program in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. In 2017, he received a Five-Year Term Professorship in Global Christianity; this professorship supports his recent initiative to create a Center of Global Christian Studies in the Jackson School. He is also the director the new Carnegie grant on Cross Cultural Religious Literacy. His areas of expertise are in American religious culture, history, and politics. He also works on and teaches in religion and global issues, particularly related to religious violence, human security and US foreign policy.

He has received numerous nominations for the Distinguished Teaching Award. Wellman’s publications include an award-winning book, The Gold Coast Church and the Ghetto: Christ and Culture in Mainline Protestantism (Illinois, 1999); edited volumes: Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence Across Time and Tradition (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), and Religion and Human Security: A Global Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2012). His 2008 monograph, Evangelical vs. Liberal: The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest (Oxford University Press), received Honorable Mention for the Distinguished Book Award by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. In 2012, he published a biography on the megachurch pastor, Rob Bell and the New American Christianity. His forthcoming book, High on God: How the Megachurch Conquered America, will be published with Oxford University Press in 2019.

Wellman can be followed on twitter at wellman4444. He is a regular blogger for Patheos.com and can be read at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jameswellman/

Hajin Jun

Assistant Professor; James B. Palais Professor of Korean History;

Joint Appointment: Jackson School of International Studies

Hajin Jun specializes in the history of modern Korea, the Japanese empire, and Christianity in East Asia. Her current book project examines the politics of ritual reform in early twentieth-century Korea. She explores how marriage, funerary, and ancestral rites became heated sites of contestation as Protestant leaders, Korean cultural nationalists, and Japanese colonial officials sought to realize disparate visions for the Korean people, as well as for the proper place of religion in modern society.

James Felak

Professor, History; Newman Center Professor in Catholic Christianity

My research interest is in the intersection of religion, politics, and nationalism within the region, especially during the interwar, wartime, and Communist periods.My first book, ‘At the Price of the Republic’: Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, 1929-1938 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) is a study of the Catholic nationalist party that spearheaded the Slovak national movement in the decade before Czechoslovakia was crippled by the Munich Agreement. My second book, After Hitler, Before Stalin: Catholics, Communists, and Democrats in Slovakia, 1945-1948(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009) examines the complex relationship between Catholics, Protestants, and Communists in Slovakia during the period preceding the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia.

My current book project is a study of the visits of Pope John Paul II to his native Poland between 1979 and 1991. Spanning a period of dramatic change in which the Pope was a major player, my study will emphasize how John Paul spoke to his countrymen about their problematic historical and ethnic relationships (with Russians, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians), how he used the events and personalities of Poland’s religious, political, and cultural past to shape Polish attitudes in the present, and how he challenged Poland’s Communist regime before 1989 and its citizens and voters after 1989 from a Catholic, papal perspective. The book draws from Polish archival sources (state and personal), Catholic and secular media, contemporary Polish scholarship, and above all from the hundreds of homilies and speeches the Pope gave while in Poland.

Christopher Tounsel 

Associate Professor, History; Interim Director, African Studies Program

I am an historian of modern Sudan, with special focus on race and religion as political technologies. My first book, Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan, was published by Duke University Press in 2021. Chosen Peoples explores the ways that Southern Sudanese intellectuals used Judeo-Christian Scriptures to frame their revolutionary work against the Sudanese state. Chosen Peoples was named a Finalist for the 2022 Christianity Today Book Award (History/Biography).

My second book, Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity, is under contract with Cornell University Press. Expanding on my work on the Tuskegee Institute’s cotton-cultivation work in early twentieth-century Sudan, Bounds of Blackness aims to chart a new intellectual history of black America’s relationship with Africa from colonialism to the twenty-first century.

My articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Religious History, Journal of African American History, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Journal of Africana Religions, and Social Sciences and Missions. My words have also appeared in outlets Vox and The Conversation. Support for my research has come from institutions and organizations including the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Council of Overseas American Research Centers, and Doris G. Quinn Foundation.