It was the privilege of members of the Global Bible project team to travel to São Paulo for the Yale-Edinburgh conference on the theme for 2025, ‘Christianity, Democracy, and Nationalism.’ Approximately 100 delegates from all over the world met to discuss this challenging topic over three days, from 28 – 30 May 2025.
We thank our hosts at the Universidade Mackenzie, São Paulo, and the conference team of Pedro Feitoza, Sérgio Santos, Ronaldo Cavalcante, Suzana Coutinho, Adriano Godoy, Erika Helgen, and Helen Teixeira, for their hospitality and excellent organisation.
The journey from Bristol and Muenster to São Paulo was a big undertaking, but we were committed to participating in the first meeting of the Yale-Edinburgh conference in the global south. WIth its remarkable traffic, diverse population of Afro-Brazilian, Japanese and Portuguese heritage, this was the right place to be discussing the impact of colonalism on the Bible translation movement.
For our session, Hilary Carey discussed the progress of the project, and in particular the argument of Adrian Hastings that the creation of a national literature, especially a Bible in the mother tongue of a particular people, was a critical step in the creation of a national consciousness. She discussed this in relation to the case studies from Greenland, Ghana and Australia. While each translation project was a unique intellectual achievement, there was a wide variety of outcomes for the elevation of these Bibles to national significance.
Felicity Jensz’s paper, entitled ‘German Colonialism, the Global Bible and National Identity in the Age of Empire’, focused on micro studies from the German colonial world including the translations in Ewe in Togo, and work on the Duke of York Bible translations. She demonstrated that through a triangulation of sources we have been able to uncover the names and contributions of various local translators in the project of creating a global bible, thus contributing to the decolonisation of knowledge.
Benjamin Weber spoke on the Digital Humanities aspect of our project. He described the process of compiling a project data base from multiple sources to enable a large-view analysis of the spread of the bible translations over the nineteenth century and presented this digital tool.
Having completed our own contribution in the first session, this left us free to enjoy other contributions throughout the conference. Sessions were in both Portuguese and English, with Portugues sessions skillfully translated for the less linguistically adept. In this way we learnt about Christian nationalism in Lain America, and the unique identities created by religious minorities in regions as diverse as Hungary, Malta, and Ghana. Eric Miller introduced me to Milton Nascimento, the wildly popular singer songwriter and voice of Brazil. For the final session, Emma Wild-Wood had the unenviable task of summing up the main themes, and bidding us gather and return for the next Yale-Edinburgh meeting.
In between sessions, we continued to discuss the future of our own project, possible grant developments that can build on what we have done so far, and – with Ben Weber’s help – thinking about developing the Global Bible missionary map using AI to allow plain language queries of our data. We also visited the extraordinary Afro-Brazilian Museum which helped us gained further insight into this exciting city and its colonial heritage.