Professor Sung-Deuk Oak's recent monograph, "The Making of Korean Christianity," was awarded "Book of the Year" by Books and Culture: A Christian Review in December 2013. The magazine is a most widely-read Christian book review journal. Dr. Oak's book was published last September as the first volume of the Studies in World Christianity Series of the Nagel Institute of Calvin College and Baylor University Press.

BOOK OF THE YEAR

The Making of Korean Christianity: Protestant Encounters with Korean Religions, 1876-1915. Sung-Deuk Oak. "Historiography of early encounters between Protestantism and Korean religious culture should be rewritten from the perspective of cultural exchanges beyond cultural imperialism." Oak has given us a model for doing just that, not only for the Korean case in particular—his immediate subject—and not only for the phenomenal growth of Christianity in Asia more generally and in Africa over the last 150 years but also for church history over 2000 years, where we find—again and again, in wildly different circumstances—the "creative combination of the principle of Christian universality (vertical transcendence) and that of inculturation (horizontal adaptation)."

See http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2013/december/favorite-books-of-2013.html

Published: Tuesday, January 21, 2014