Protestant Missions And Local Encounters In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

This book makes visible an important but neglected aspect of Christian missions: its transnational character. Missionaries considered themselves global actors, yet they operated within a variety of nation-states. The volume demonstrates how processes on a national level are closely linked to larger transnational processes.

Addressing an important social and political issue which is still much debated today, this volume explores the connections between religious conversions and gendered identity against the backdrop of a world undergoing significant social transformations. Adopting a collaborative approach to their research, the authors explore the connections and differences in conversion experiences, tracing the local and regional rootedness of individual conversions as reflected in conversion narratives in three different locations: Germany and German missions in South Africa and colonial Australia, at a time of massive social changes in the 1860s. Beginning with the representation of religious experiences in so-called conversion narratives, the authors explore the social embeddedness of religious conversions and inquire how people related to their social surroundings, and in particular to gender order and gender practices, before, during and after their conversion. With a concluding reflective essay on comparative methods of history writing and transnational perspectives on conversion, this book offers a fresh perspective on historical debates about religious change, gender and social relations.

From the early phases of modern missions, Christian missionaries supported many humanitarian activities, mostly framed as subservient to the preaching of Christianity. This anthology contributes to a historically grounded understanding of the complex relationship between Christian missions and the roots of humanitarianism and its contemporary uses in a Middle Eastern context. Contributions focus on ideologies, rhetoric, and practices of missionaries and their apostolates towards humanitarianism, from the mid-19th century Middle East crises, examining different missionaries, their society’s worldview and their networks in various areas of the Middle East. In the early 20th century Christian missions increasingly paid more attention to organisation and bureaucratisation (‘rationalisation’), and media became more important to their work. The volume analyses how non-missionaries took over, to a certain extent, the aims and organisations of the missionaries as to humanitarianism. It seeks to discover and retrace such ‘entangled histories’ for the first time in an integral perspective. Contributors include: Beth Baron, Philippe Bourmaud, Seija Jalagin, Nazan Maksudyan, Michael Marten, Heleen (L.) Murre-van den Berg, Inger Marie Okkenhaug, Idir Ouahes, Maria Chiara Rioli, Karène Sanchez Summerer, Bertrand Taithe, and Chantal Verdeil

‘Mana’, a term denoting spiritual power, is found in many Pacific Islands languages. In recent decades, the term has been taken up in New Age movements and online fantasy gaming. In this book, 16 contributors examine mana through ethnographic, linguistic, and historical lenses to understand its transformations in past and present. The authors consider a range of contexts including Indigenous sovereignty movements, Christian missions and Bible translations, the commodification of cultural heritage, and the dynamics of diaspora. Their investigations move across diverse island groups—Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Hawai‘i, and French Polynesia—and into Australia, North America and even cyberspace. A key insight that the volume develops is that mana can be analysed most productively by paying close attention to its ethical and aesthetic dimensions. Since the late nineteenth century, mana has been an object of intense scholarly interest. Writers in many fields including anthropology, linguistics, history, religion, philosophy, and missiology have long debated how the term should best be understood. The authors in this volume review mana’s complex intellectual history but also describe the remarkable transformations going on in the present day as scholars, activists, church leaders, artists, and entrepreneurs take up mana in new ways.

What kind of men were missionaries? What kind of masculinity did they represent, in ideology as well as in practice? Presupposing masculinity to be a cluster of cultural ideas and social practices that change over time and space, and not a stable entity with a natural, inherent meaning, Kristin Fjelde Tjelle seeks to answer such questions.

In German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut. Competing Missions, Julia Hauser offers a critical analysis of the German Protestant Kaiserswerth deaconesses’ establishment in late Ottoman Beirut as situated within the larger field of educational development in the city.

The-five volume Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions series is governed by a motif of migration ('out-of-England'). It first traces organized church traditions that arose in Britain and Ireland as Dissenters distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and Royal Supremacy, but then follows those traditions as they spread beyond Britain and Ireland--and also analyses newer traditions that emerged downstream in other parts of the world from earlier forms of Dissent. Secondly, it does the same for the doctrines, church practices, stances toward state and society, attitudes toward Scripture, and characteristic patterns of organization that also originated in earlier British and Irish dissent, but that have often defined a trajectory of influence independent of ecclesiastical organizations. The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume V follows the spatial, cultural, and intellectual changes in dissenting identity and practice in the twentieth century, as these once European traditions globalized. While in Europe dissent was often against the religious state, dissent in a globalizing world could redefine itself against colonialism or other secular and religious monopolies. The contributors trace the encounters of dissenting Protestant traditions with modernity and globalization; changing imperial politics; challenges to biblical, denominational, and pastoral authority; local cultures and languages; and some of the century's major themes, such as race and gender, new technologies, and organizational change. In so doing, they identify a vast array of local and globalizing illustrations which will enliven conversations about the role of religion, and in particular Christianity.

Essays written in honour of Brian Stanley on the entangled nature of ecumenism and independency in the modern global history of Christianity. They demonstrate transnational connectivity as well as local and contextual expressions of Christianity.