REL 253-4 : Foundations of Mission

"I can merely admire his courage in tackling so complex and difficult a subject; he should succeed in stimulating a fresh generation of research ... this well-written, intelligent and lively study will greatly stimulate anyone fortunate enough to read it."Christianity provided the constitutive identity of historic Ethiopia. From the sixteenth century, and increasingly from the nineteenth, it entered decisively into the life and culture of an increasing number of other African peoples. In the course of the twentieth century, African Christians havebecome a major part of the world Church, and arguably modern African history as a whole is not intelligible without its powerful Christian element. Yet despite the great advance in African historiography over the last forty years, this is the first major volume to consider the historical developmentand character of the Christian Church in Africa as a whole, linking together Ehtiopia Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and the numerousm 'Independent' churches of modern times. The book focuses throughout on the role of coversion, the shaping of Church life and its relationship totraditional values, and the impact of political power. Professor Hastings also compares the relation of Christian history to the comprable development of Islam in Africa.

This collection of essays explores the ways in which late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionaries to Africa contributed to various academic disciplines, such as linguistics, ethnography, social anthropology, zoology, medicine, and many more. This volume includes an introductory chapter by the editors and eleven chapters that analyze missionary research and its impact on knowledge about African contexts.

For twenty-five years, Vincent J. Donovan's epistle from the Masai has inspired countless readers by telling the story of what happened when he, an American Spiritan missioner working among the Masai, began listening to how they were interpreting the Gospel in their own terms. Donovan's work has become a bible for men and women seeking to move beyond colonial missionary relations with Africans, revealing both the creativity and humanity of the Masai in a way no other book has ever done.

Does religion reinforce the balkanization of cultural attitudes or does it help people transcend their culture? A noted scholar of world Christianity, Lamin Sanneh offers Westerners a perspective on such questions, a way to test the religio-cultural water and air in which they live. He shows how modernity has made of moderns "cultural believers" and "religious agnostics," and how the stubborn refusal to confront this bias in both secular and religious culture depletes both Christianity and Western culture.

In its earliest days, photography was seen as depicting its subjects with such objectivity as to be inherently free of ideological bias. Today we are rightly more skeptical -- at least most of the time. When it comes to photography from the past, we tend to set some of our skepticism aside. But should we? T. Jack Thompson, a leading historian of African Christianity, revisits the body of photography generated by British missionaries to sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and demonstrates that much more is going on in these images than meets the eye.