This book investigates the art and architecture of Papua New Guinean spirit structures with a multi-perspectival approach that combines cultural and social sciences with building, architectural, and spatial research. It offers the first comprehensive study of the spirit houses of New Guinea that exists to date. The book’s aim is twofold: First, it aims to investigate the spirit structures and their associated cultural cosmos in detail. For this purpose, a representative selection of traditional buildings and artworks from different regions of Papua New Guinea is documented and analyzed, and theories for their understanding are formulated. In this course, the author develops a spatial theory of anthropological concepts – such as myths, signs, persons, and rituals. Secondly, this analysis is then situated in the broader context of the Anthropocene/Kaiaimunucene. Transforming the historical spirit structures into models for future-oriented cultural imagination, the consequences for contemporary productions of space and ways of worldmaking in light of existential challenges are traced. The book thus offers more-than-human and more-than-secular concepts for building, art, and worldmaking that are of critical importance in the ongoing Anthropocene/Kaiaimunucene. It will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, anthropology, cultural studies, environmental humanities, and adjacent disciplines. Part I of the book was translated from German by Melanie Janet Sindelar.

Selfless is the story of Sister Theophane, a passionate, driven nun dedicated to serving the poor around the world. Discover the inspiring story of how a precocious young girl from upstate New York became a servant and apostle to the poor in the jungle missions of Papua New Guinea, and, eventually, a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II. "Selfless: The Story of Sr. Theophane's Missionary Life in the Jungles of Papua New Guinea" was written in 1946 by a fellow sister of the Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters, but it is just now being published for the first time. Long held in anonymity, Sr. Theophane's amazing life of service and apostolic zeal is now finally being revealed to the world. Her story is a breathtaking tale that will inspire a new generation of Catholics to heed the call of service to Christ and others.

An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific brings together fifty writers and artists from across Moananuiākea working in myriad genres across media, ranging from oral narratives and traditional wonder tales to creative writing as well as visual artwork and scholarly essays. Collectively, this anthology features the fantastic as present-day Indigenous Pacific world-building that looks to the past in creating alternative futures, and in so doing reimagines relationships between peoples, environments, deities, nonhuman relatives, history, dreams, and storytelling. Wonder is activated by curiosity, humility in the face of mystery, and engagement with possibilities. We see wonder and the fantastic as general modes of expression that are not confined to realism. As such, the fantastic encompasses fantasy, science fiction, magic realism, fabulation, horror, fairy tale, utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction. We include Black, feminist, and queer futurisms, Indigenous wonderworks, Hawaiian moʻolelo kamahaʻo and moʻolelo āiwaiwa, Sāmoan fāgogo, and other non-mimetic genres from specific cultures, because we recognize that their refusal to adopt restrictive Euro-American definitions of reality is what inspires and enables the fantastic to flourish. As artistic, intellectual, and culturally based expressions that encode and embody Indigenous knowledge, the multimodal moʻolelo in this collection upend monolithic, often exoticizing, and demeaning stereotypes of the Pacific and situate themselves in conversation with critical understandings of the global fantastic, Indigenous futurities, social justice, and decolonial and activist storytelling. In this collection, Oceanic ideas and images surround and connect to Hawaiʻi, which is for the three coeditors, a piko (center); at the same time, navigating both juxtaposition and association, the collection seeks to articulate pilina (relationships) across genres, locations, time, and media and to celebrate the multiplicity and relationality of the fantastic in Oceania.

Is the Abrahamic blessing of Genesis 12:1-3 still active in the world today? Does God still extend his blessing to the nations through his people? The author found the answer to these questions in one of the most isolated regions of the world, Papua New Guinea. In this book Sarita D. Gallagher compares the missional nature of the Abrahamic blessing motif in Scripture to a national revival that took place in Papua New Guinea. By identifying the shared missional patterns, she illustrates the continued fulfillment of the Abrahamic blessing through the Old and New Testaments and the contemporary Papua New Guinean Church. The significance of this research is multifaceted: the text contributes new insights to the global Church's understanding of the missio Dei, records an unexplored chapter of Melanesian indigenous mission history, and impacts the foundational motivations and methodology of contemporary mission praxis.

A ground-breaking book that examines the uneasy relationship between archaeology and education. Argues that archaeologists have a vital role to play in education alongside other interpreters of the past. Contributors from different countries and disciplines show how the exclusion of aspects of the past tends to impoverish and distort social and educational experience.

Scholars of religion and policy makers may be surprised at the changes occurring on the second largest island of the world that straddles one of the most Christianised and least Christianised areas of the world. This book provides an accurate and deeper understanding of the nature of Islam in Papua New Guinea, and determines the causes and processes of recent growth in the country’s Muslim population. Combining ethnographic, sociological and historical approaches to understanding Islam’s growth in Papua New Guinea, the book uses extensive fieldwork, interviews and archival records to look at the establishment, institutionalization and growth of Islam in a country that is predominantly Christian. It analyses the causes and processes of conversion, and presents a new analytical approach that could be used as a basis for analysing Islamic conversions in other parts of the world. Presenting an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Islamic conversion thorough the examination of the causes and process of Islamic conversion in Papua New Guinea, the book is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Religion, Islamic Studies and Cultural Studies.