Anthropology has two tasks: the scientific task of studying human beings and the instrumental task of promoting human flourishing. To date, the scientific task has been constrained by secularism, and the instrumental task by the philosophy and values of liberalism. These constraints have caused religiously based scholarship to be excluded from anthropology's discourse, to the detriment of both tasks. The call for papers for the 2009 meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) recognized the need to "push the field's epistemological and presentational conventions" in order to reach anthropology's various publics. Religious thought has much to say about the human condition. It can expand the discourse in ways that provide explanatory value as well as moral purpose and hope. We propose an epistemology of witness for dialogue between anthropologists and theologians, and we demonstrate the value added with an example: the problem of violence.Since its inception, anthropology has been engaged in two main tasks. The first is the scientific task of seeking to understand the full dimensions of the nature and expressions of humankind. The second, based on the first, is the instrumental task of using those understandings to press for processes, projects, and policies that will protect and nourish the best of that nature and its expressions.It is our contention that the depth of anthropology's perspective on humanity, and therefore the relevance of its instrumental uses, has been constrained by the modernist epistemological assumptions and commitments that have generally governed Western academic discourse. In particular, the commitments to secularism and to liberalism, operating in the background of the discourse, have led to the exclusion of religiously based perspectives as intellectually coequal. That exclusion has resulted in a limiting of the theoretical and practical insights available for the advancement of anthropology's perspective in the contemporary world.

Christian development agencies have been the primary vehicle of choice for holistic involvement and witness. This has played straight into an Enlightenment manner of thinking that compartmentalizes values, limiting the opportunities for explaining the theological and conceptual foundations for development practice and for public witness concerning religious faith. New institutional models appropriate to witness and holistic Christian service need to be considered. An 'S4' type organization, explored in practice in Indonesia in an interfaith setting, allows for a more effective sharing of the gospel and robust development work.

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