The Conversion of Missionaries

1997 History

Author : Xi Lian
Release : 1997
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 383/5 ( reviews)

Book Synopsis The Conversion of Missionaries by : Xi Lian

Download or read book The Conversion of Missionaries written by Xi Lian. This book was released on 1997. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Mission and Conversion

1994 History

Author : Martin Goodman
Release : 1994
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Mission and Conversion by : Martin Goodman

Download or read book Mission and Conversion written by Martin Goodman. This book was released on 1994. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Beyond Conversion and Syncretism

2011-10-01 History

Author : avid,
Release : 2011-10-01
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 185/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Beyond Conversion and Syncretism by : avid,

Download or read book Beyond Conversion and Syncretism written by avid,. This book was released on 2011-10-01. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The globalization of Christianity, its spread and appeal to peoples of non- European origin, is by now a well-known phenomenon. Scholars increasingly realize the importance of natives rather than foreign missionaries in the process of evangelization. This volume contributes to the understanding of this process through case studies of encounters with Christianity from the perspectives of the indigenous peoples who converted. More importantly, by exploring overarching, general terms such as conversion and syncretism and by showing the variety of strategies and processes that actually take place, these studies lead to a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural religious interactions in general—from acceptance to resistance—thus enriching the vocabulary of religious interaction. The contributors tackle these issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives—history, anthropology, religious studies—and present a broad geographical spread of cases from China, Vietnam, Australia, India, South and West Africa, North and Central America, and the Caribbean.

Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion

2014-10-07 History

Author : Eleanor Tejirian
Release : 2014-10-07
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 652/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion by : Eleanor Tejirian

Download or read book Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion written by Eleanor Tejirian. This book was released on 2014-10-07. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Artillery of Heaven

2011-10-15 History

Author : Ussama Makdisi
Release : 2011-10-15
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 742/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Artillery of Heaven by : Ussama Makdisi

Download or read book Artillery of Heaven written by Ussama Makdisi. This book was released on 2011-10-15. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

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