The Conversion of Missionaries

The Conversion of Missionaries PDF Author: Xi Lian
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271064383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Like many of her fellow missionaries to China, Pearl Buck found that she was not immune to the influence of her adopted home. Some missionaries even found themselves "convert[ed] ... by the Far East." In this book Lian Xi tells the story of Buck and two other American missionaries to China in the early twentieth century who gradually came to question, and eventually reject, the evangelical basis of Protestant missions as they developed an appreciation for Chinese religions and culture. Lian Xi uses these stories as windows to understanding the development of a broad theological and cultural liberalism within American Protestant missions, which he examines in the second half of the book.

The Conversion of Missionaries

The Conversion of Missionaries PDF Author: Xi Lian
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271064383
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Like many of her fellow missionaries to China, Pearl Buck found that she was not immune to the influence of her adopted home. Some missionaries even found themselves "convert[ed] ... by the Far East." In this book Lian Xi tells the story of Buck and two other American missionaries to China in the early twentieth century who gradually came to question, and eventually reject, the evangelical basis of Protestant missions as they developed an appreciation for Chinese religions and culture. Lian Xi uses these stories as windows to understanding the development of a broad theological and cultural liberalism within American Protestant missions, which he examines in the second half of the book.

The Conversion of Missionaries

The Conversion of Missionaries PDF Author: Lian, Xi
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Like many of her fellow missionaries to China, Pearl Buck found that she was not immune to the influence of her adopted home. Some missionaries even found themselves "convert(ed) ... by the Far East". In this book Lian Xi tells the story of Buck and two other American missionaries to China in the early twentieth century who gradually came to question, and eventually reject, the evangelical basis of Protestant missions as they developed an appreciation for Chinese religions and culture. Lian Xi uses these stories as windows to understanding the development of a broad theological and cultural liberalism within American Protestant missions, which he examines in the second half of the book.

Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion

Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion PDF Author: Eleanor Tejirian
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231138652
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion surveys two thousand years of the Christian missionary enterprise in the Middle East within the context of the region's political evolution. Its broad, rich narrative follows Christian missions as they interacted with imperial powers and as the momentum of religious change shifted from Christianity to Islam and back, adding new dimensions to the history of the region and the nature of the relationship between the Middle East and the West. Historians and political scientists increasingly recognize the importance of integrating religion into political analysis, and this volume, using long-neglected sources, uniquely advances this effort. It surveys Christian missions from the earliest days of Christianity to the present, paying particular attention to the role of Christian missions, both Protestant and Catholic, in shaping the political and economic imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon delineate the ongoing tensions between conversion and the focus on witness and "good works" within the missionary movement, which contributed to the development and spread of nongovernmental organizations. Through its conscientious, systematic study, this volume offers an unparalleled encounter with the social, political, and economic consequences of such trends.

Mission and Conversion

Mission and Conversion PDF Author: Martin Goodman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
This book tackles a central problem of comparative religious history: proselytizing by Jews and pagans in the ancient world, and the origins of missions in the early Church. Why did some individuals in the first four centuries of the Christian era believe it desirable to persuade outsiders to join their religious group, while others did not? In this book, the author offers a new hypothesis about the origins of Christian proselytizing, arguing that mission is not an inherent religious instinct, that in antiquity it was found only sporadically among Jews and pagans, and that even Christians rarely stressed its importance in the early centuries. Much of the book focusses on the history of Judaism in late antiquity. Dr Goodman makes a detailed and radical re-evaluation of the evidence for Jewish missionary attitudes in the late Second Temple and Talmudic periods, questioning many commonly held assumptions, in particular the view that Jews proselytized energetically in the first century CE. This leads him on to take issue with the common notion that the early Christian mission to the gentiles imitated or competed with contemporary Jews. Finally, the author puts forward some novel suggestions as to how the Jewish background to Christianity may nonetheless have contributed to the enthusiastic adoption of universal proselytizing by some followers of Jesus in the apostolic age.

Missionary Impositions

Missionary Impositions PDF Author: Hillary K. Crane
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739177885
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
In this collection of essays, anthropologists of religion examine the special challenges they face when studying populations that proselytize. Conducting fieldwork among these groups may involve attending services, meditating, praying, and making pilgrimages. Anthropologists participating in such research may unwittingly give the impression that their interest is more personal than professional, and inadvertently encourage missionaries to impose conversion upon them. Moreover, anthropologists' attitudes about religion, belief, and faith, as well as their response to conversion pressures, may interfere with their objectivity and cause them to impose their own understandings on the missionaries. Although anthropologists have extensively and fruitfully examined the role of identity in research--particularly gender and ethnic identity--religious identity, which is more fluid and changeable, has been relatively neglected. This volume explores the role of religious identity in fieldwork by examining how researchers respond to participation in religious activities and to the ministrations of missionaries, both academically and personally. Including essays by anthropologists studying the proselytizing religions of Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, as well as other religions, this volume provides a range of responses to the question of how anthropologists should approach the gap between belief and disbelief when missionary zeal imposes its interpretations on anthropological curiosity.

The Politics of Conversion

The Politics of Conversion PDF Author: Christopher M. Clark
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Spanning over two centuries of protestant missionary activity, this book examines the ways in which theological, social, and racial themes intertwined in the relationship between the Christian majority in Prussia and the Jewish minority in its midst. Making comprehensive use of the archives and publications of the various Prussian institutions and societies which set out to convert Jews to Christianity, this study sheds light on a facet of Jewish-German history which has been overshadowed by the ultimate tragedy of the Holocaust.

Artillery of Heaven

Artillery of Heaven PDF Author: Ussama Makdisi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801457742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The complex relationship between America and the Arab world goes back further than most people realize. In Artillery of Heaven, Ussama Makdisi presents a foundational American encounter with the Arab world that occurred in the nineteenth century, shortly after the arrival of the first American Protestant missionaries in the Middle East. He tells the dramatic tale of the conversion and death of As'ad Shidyaq, the earliest Arab convert to American Protestantism. The struggle over this man's body and soul—and over how his story might be told—changed the actors and cultures on both sides. In the unfamiliar, multireligious landscape of the Middle East, American missionaries at first conflated Arabs with Native Americans and American culture with an uncompromising evangelical Christianity. In turn, their Christian and Muslim opponents in the Ottoman Empire condemned the missionaries as malevolent intruders. Yet during the ensuing confrontation within and across cultures an unanticipated spirit of toleration was born that cannot be credited to either Americans or Arabs alone. Makdisi provides a genuinely transnational narrative for this new, liberal awakening in the Middle East, and the challenges that beset it. By exploring missed opportunities for cultural understanding, by retrieving unused historical evidence, and by juxtaposing for the first time Arab perspectives and archives with American ones, this book counters a notion of an inevitable clash of civilizations and thus reshapes our view of the history of America in the Arab world.

Cultural Conversions

Cultural Conversions PDF Author: Heather J. Sharkey
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815652208
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The essays in this volume study cultural conversions that arose from missionary activities in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries effected changes that often went beyond what they had intended, sometimes backfiring against the missions. These changes entailed wrenching political struggles to redefine families, communities, and lines of authority. This volume’s contributors examine the meanings of "conversion" for individuals and communities in light of loyalties and cultural traditions, and consider how conversion, as a process, was often ambiguous. The history of Christian missions emerges from these pages as an integral part of world history that has stretched beyond professing Christians to affect the lives of peoples who have consciously rejected or remained largely unaware of missionary appeals.

A Global Testimony

A Global Testimony PDF Author: Bremen Leak
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781942311003
Category : Mormon converts
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Ordinary people, extraordinary miraclesThese are journeys--from addiction to liberation, from complacency to purpose, from loneliness and pain to joy and fulfillment. Discover the greatest journey of all--to faith and conviction--as converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from all corners of the earth recognize and embrace this one eternal truth--that God lives. Through their inspiring accounts, readers will transcend geography and time, traverse miraculous paths to Christ's fold, and witness the remarkable power of faith.Compiled by a Croatian now living in New York City, the stories in this collection document the courageous journeys of modern-day pioneers and serve as an important historical record as well as a source of light and hope to all who wander spiritually or physically. "And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things." Moroni 10:5

Redeemed by Fire

Redeemed by Fire PDF Author: Lian, Xi
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300123396
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
This text addresses the history and future of homegrown, mass Chinese Christianity. Drawing on a collection of sources, the author traces the transformation of Protestant Christianity in the 20th-century China from a small 'missionary' church buffeted by antiforeignism to an indigenous opular religion energized by nationalism.