1. Together with Judaism and Islam, Christianity belongs to the scriptural religions ( Monotheism), whose common origin is in the Near East. With a membership of almost one-third of the world population, it is the most widespread of individual religions. Its greatest dynamism within contemporary culture is in South, Central, and North America. There are Christian majorities in many lands of sub-Saharan Africa, on the western rim of the Pacific between Australia and the Philippines, and, in a shrinking active membership, in broad regions of Europe. On the Asian continent, including the region of its rise, Christianity finds itself constituted by small minorities at most. In its expansion, Christianity was the forerunner of today's awareness of a worldwide network of humanity (‘globalization’). Here it did not primarily follow the expansion of modernity; the historical connection is rather the other way around, and Christianity was mainly a European religion during only a small part of…