Christian temporalities: Living between the already fulfilled and the not yet completed. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion Book Series.By Anna‐KarinaHermkens, SimonColeman, MattTomlinson (Eds.). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2024. pp. xiii + 237, har

This thoughtfully curated collection tackles a difficult and important task: showing how Christians experience and make time across diverse settings. How do communities use the past to shape their future? Framed by Simon Coleman's concept of historiopraxy, the seven ethnographic chapters and epilogue in this volume examine the practical work of mobilising history in the present. The ambition is admirable and the materials rich and strong. The book's signal achievements lie in its precise, well-crafted ethnographies; the unifying framework is stimulating, though it sometimes stretches further than it can carry. The volume's greatest strength is its coherent, conversation-like structure. In his own contribution, Coleman masterfully demonstrates the value of ‘historiopraxy’—which he defines as ‘an opportunistic attitude towards historical resources… allied with anxieties over what it might mean to “dwell” in the past’ (p. 48). He deftly applies this lens to a contemporary moment, showing how Donald Trump's claim, “We did win this election,” uses a tense-shift to perform immediate political work (p. 49). This is historiopraxy at its best: the concept reveals how claims about time are not just descriptions, but tools for world-making. The stand-out chapters deepen this insight by specifying how temporalities are made. Paula Pryce's (chapter 6) analysis of contemplative ‘Wisdom Christians’ is exemplary in showing why dominant scholarly model of Christian time as a simple dualism between chronos (mundane, linear time) and kairos (sacred, rupturing time) is inadequate. Performative rites both “invoke history and make history,” (p. 132) as participants connect with sacred figures from the past and integrate their spiritual meaning into present lived experience—thereby both remembering history and actively creating new religious meaning. Her attention to posture, gesture, and—ritual as technique—shows temporal layering as an embodied practice. This is a concrete account of technique—gestures, postures, and directed attention—that makes temporality empirically tractable. The argument stands without theoretical scaffolding: ritual practice, not terminology, does the analytic work. Karen J. Brison's chapter (chapter 3) on Suva's Harvest Ministry likewise links temporal talk to authority with admirable clarity. What convinces here is not the banner of historiopraxy but the identification of pastoral orchestration linking time-talk to institutional power. The Harvest Ministry's discourse mixes contradictory models of time—a future rupture with present-day blessings and individual agency—where logical consistency is subordinated to pastoral pragmatism (p. 62). She traces how by framing obedience to leaders as synonymous with faithfulness to God's plan, the church discourages dissent, justifies difficult or arbitrary reassignments, and motivates members to contribute labor and resources, all under the promise of finding one's “true calling” and ultimate peace (p. 66–67). Leanne Williams Green's study of Zimbabwean New Calvinists (chapter 5) offers a compelling ethnographic account of providential temporality under conditions of economic and political precarity. Her central argument—that these believers “align themselves to the metanarrative of God's divine sovereignty and downplay the possibility of human intervention in time” (p. 111)—becomes vivid through concrete examples that resist easy categorization within standard debates about providence and theodicy. Take the case of Fairside Baptists and their promotional water bottles (p. 103). When a printing error produced bottles with the wrong Bible verse, church members didn't treat this as a mistake requiring correction. The mistake itself became the message: divine purpose shows up most clearly when human plans fail. Green shows how this providential worldview functions not as abstract doctrine but as a practical interpretive apparatus for navigating uncertainty. The detail she provides—situating these beliefs within Zimbabwe's volatile economic and political landscape—makes the chapter particularly useful for comparative teaching on how religious communities construct meaning from precarity. A different tension surfaces in chapters where ‘Christian temporality’ may be a thin gloss on postcolonial predicament. The volume is also commendably reflexive about tensions and its limits. Isabelle Di Rosa's chapter on the Kerewo (chapter 4) asks bluntly whether the material she presents can be understood as an instance of “Christian temporality” (p. 86), precisely because the case resists easy alignment with established models of Christian time. The chapter centres on a Peace and Reconciliation ceremony (p. 83) convened by local clergy to address colonial trauma and to reassert communal agency. The ritual was intended to gather Kerewo leaders with representatives of Australia, Britain, and the national government. Instead, all external officials refused to attend, effectively boycotting the event. In ordinary terms, the ceremony “failed”: no reconciliation occurred, no dialogue unfolded, and no promised “development” followed—what she calls a “frustrated modernity … the non-materialisation of the promised ‘development’” (p. 87). Yet the failure proved generative. The officials' refusal made the structural “We/They” divide starkly visible, while the Kerewo's refusal to abandon the ceremony became a moral performance in its own right—a deliberate insistence on narrating their history on their own terms. Anna-Karina Hermkens (chapter 7) shows how Bougainville's independence referendum is imagined as a divinely ordained rupture (p. 139)—a Kairos moment promising liberation—yet many Bougainvilleans cannot envision the practical future of an independent state as enduring trauma and cyclical violence constrain imagitation of life beyond the vote itself. Jaap Timmer (chapter 9) examines conversion from Catholicism to Islam among the West Papuan Asmat, arguing that the shift is less about faith than about historical consciousness. Islam promises a decisive break from the pre-Christian past in pursuit of future progress, whereas Catholic Asmat sustain an expanding, immanent connection to that past even within a linear Christian temporal framework (p. 184). Thus Asmat communities are ‘caught between past and future’ in an ‘enduring unresolved situation’, with conversions to Islam occurring less as temporal rupture than as a response to social expectations (p. 198). These chapters point to a theme that might have warranted more explicit theorisation: when Christianity is one thread among many in postcolonial projects of futurity, where exactly does ‘Christian temporality’ begin and end? The volume's intriguing comparative gesture comes in Jonathan Dalsheim's chapter (chapter 8) on Jewish temporality. Jewish temporal logic in which past redemptive events remain ever-present enables some religious settlers to collapse historical distance and frame contemporary territorial claims and violence as part of a timeless biblical struggle—putting this political theology at odds with secular notions of historical progress and with other Jewish interpretations (pp. 166–67). His claim that we must continually repeat the work done by ourselves and our predecessors—because no human act is ever final—and that the value of study lies in focused attention rather than time expended, provincialises assumptions about linear Christian time (p. 176–77). The contrast he draws is generous rather than adversarial: it clarifies which features of the Christian cases are truly tradition-specific and which, if any, might travel. Instead of simply complementing the Christian examples, this contrast suggests that what the volume frames as broadly Christian—cycles of rupture and providence, sacralised horizons of reform—are not universal patterns but particular configurations of Christian temporalities. Where, then, are further tensions? First, scope. The volume's ethnographic centre of gravity—Pacific and African contexts, with an emphasis on evangelical/charismatic and post-missionary settings—yields rich case material, but the title's universal horizon inevitably outruns the coverage. Scholars seeking sustained engagements with Orthodox liturgical cycles, Latin American Catholic sacramental time, or mainline Protestant historicity will find fewer touchpoints. This is not a flaw so much as a reminder that a genuinely comprehensive account will require additional volumes. Second, the elasticity of historiopraxy is both virtue and risk. Contributors frequently achieve clarity by stepping outside the volume's frame. Where the chapters are most compelling (Pryce, Brison), they rely on established tools—ritual analysis, authority, narrative causation—rather than on the new label; where the label is leaned on most heavily, the arguments tend to generalise away from Christian particularities. David Morgan's (chapter 10) elegant epilogue notes that ‘temporalities are strategies that must be updated, adjusted, even replaced’ (p. 218). This helpfully underscores practice and adaptability. Yet when a single term is asked to cover contemplative embodiment, congregational governance, referendum strategy, and the phenomenology of frustrated development, its boundaries become difficult to discern. The epilogue's universalism answers the book's jarring juxtapositions by dissolving them into human capacities for narrative adaptation; the specifically Christian content the title promises largely evaporates. Particularly exciting chapters—Pryce and Brison especially—already show how to proceed without heavy reliance on the label: specify the techniques (dramaturgy, pastoral sequencing), the institutions that sustain them, and the ethical stakes. Future work can build on this by articulating clearer criteria for when historiopraxy adds explanatory value beyond existing vocabularies (e.g., rupture/continuity, mediation, narrative causation). In relation to adjacent scholarship, the volume sits fruitfully alongside Joel Robbins' (2004) work on rupture and continuity and Webb Keane's (2007) account of Christian semiotic ideologies. It does not replace these frameworks. Rather, the book offers a more granular account of how temporalities are enacted in everyday religious practice. It shows, with ethnographic precision, how temporal frames are orchestrated in prayer, preaching, and politics. Compared with monographs such as Matthew Engelke's (2013) God's Agents or Naomi Haynes's (2016) Moving by the Spirit, this collection trades some depth for breadth, but gains a genuinely comparative vantage that will serve seminars well. On style and apparatus, the book is a pleasure to teach with: prose is clear, citations up-to-date, and the index (pp. 223–237) serviceable. Specialists will find much to appreciate—and to debate—in the ethnographic care and the invitation to think comparatively. The book succeeds in bringing into focus the practices by which Christians pace their pasts and futures, and it does so with generosity toward its diverse subjects. For that achievement, and for the conversations it will undoubtedly catalyse, it merits a place on syllabi and in library collections.