908 Encyclopedia of Religious Ethics 3 Volume Set, First Edition. Edited by William Schweiker. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Christianity (Global Interactions) Devaka Premawardhana Introduction Today, Christianity is growing most robustly far beyond the regions with which it has long been associ- ated. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, European and, later, North American missionaries labored to evangelize populations of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Yet it is in the postcolonial period that the greatest demographic expansion has occurred. With the globalization of Christianity beyond the West and the rise of secularization within it, the twentieth century saw a dramatic drop in the worldwide proportion of Christians residing in Europe, from two thirds to roughly one quarter. Observers speak of this as a shift in Christianity’s center of gravity, from the Global North to the Global South. This entry explores some implications of that shift for the field of religious ethics. It considers the specificities of Christian ethics in the formerly colonized world, a world marked by legacies of political subjugation and economic exploitation, of racial domination and cultural derogation. There can be no doubt as to why an investigation into the global dimensions of Christian ethics mat- ters – certainly not after 2013. That is the year the archbishop of Buenos Aires adopted the name Francis upon being elected to the papacy. With that, the Roman Catholic Church came for the first time to have as its leader a denizen of the Global South. Pope Francis has become known, however, for far more than his geographic origins. He has famously and forcefully pronounced on a range of ethical issues. He has challenged the consumerism at the root of environmental degradation, for example, and critiqued the economic structures underlying global inequality. Yet Pope Francis’s ethical engagements have gone beyond even such overt pronouncements. At the heart of his papacy is his choice of name, and what it says about his regard for a thirteenth‐century moral exemplar. Also noteworthy is that, as a Jesuit, Pope Francis performs the Ignatian spiritual exercises each year, a series of self‐evaluative meditations intended to connect practitioners to the ultimate exemplar, Jesus Christ (Molina 2013). The case of Pope Francis raises numerous issues pertaining to Christian ethics. The two upon which this entry focuses include: first, the articulation of norms and values respecting the demands of justice; and, second, the formation and flourishing of the self, often through embeddedness in communities beyond the self. Historically and in the global scope of contemporary Christianity, these two orientations have overlapped in a variety of ways. This entry begins by considering the ethical dimensions of modern European missions, then turns to issues of colonization, class, race, culture, and religion addressed by contextual theologians of the Global South. While Christianity’s geographic reach certainly extended 3 Global Interactions CHAPTER 102