Hearing Faith Across Borders: HTI Scholars in Global Conversation
HTI Scholar Armindo Ferreira presents internationally at the World Christianity Conference in Recife, Brazil, exploring faith, sound, and culture across global contexts.
~4 min read
What can music teach us about faith, culture, and the global church?
For HTI First-Year Scholar Armindo Ferreira, that question led him to Recife, Brazil, where he joined scholars from around the world at the World Christianity Conference, held March 9–13, 2026. The gathering explored how Christian faith is expressed through sound, memory, worship, and lived experience across diverse cultural contexts.
Armindo presented his research on the panel, "Sounding World Christianity: Exploring Congregational Singing through Ethnography and Ethnomusicology in India, Nigeria, and Brazil." His paper, "Dialogues Between Ethnomusicology and World Christianity: Musical Expressions of Protestantism in Brazil and Beyond," examined how music serves as a window into the ways communities understand, practice, and transmit faith.
For Armindo, the conference reinforced an important insight: Christianity is not experienced in the same way everywhere. It is sung, remembered, embodied, and expressed through the unique histories and cultures of local communities.
"What stayed with me from Recife was the realization that faith is not only spoken or taught, but also sung, remembered, and lived in ways that cannot be separated from place and people.”
— Armindo Ferreira
His research highlights the growing importance of ethnomusicology within World Christianity studies, demonstrating that music is not simply an accompaniment to worship but a source of theological meaning and cultural identity.
“Listening across cultures means treating sound as a site of theology, where my vocation is to attend carefully to how communities voice their faith, and to let those voices reshape how I understand and study Christianity.”
— Armindo Ferreira
Armindo was not the only HTI scholar contributing to these international conversations. Present at this conference were HTI graduates, Dr. Joao Chaves, Dr. Raúl E. Zegarra, Dr. Grace Vargas, Dr. Erica Ramirez, Dr. Maria Monteiro, Dr. Héctor Varela Rios, HTI mentor Dr. Raimundo Baretto, and HTI scholar Fernando Berwig Silva demonstrating the breadth of HTI's scholarly engagement and the growing influence of its scholars in global academic networks.
Their participation reflects a hallmark of HTI's mission: cultivating scholars who engage complex questions across disciplines, cultures, and borders. Whether through theology, history, ethics, biblical studies, or— as in Armindo's case— music, HTI scholars are helping expand how faith is understood in an increasingly interconnected world.
From Recife, Brazil, to classrooms, churches, and conferences around the globe, HTI scholars continue to demonstrate that the most meaningful scholarship often begins by listening carefully— to communities, to cultures, and to one another.
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