Books on the topic 'Missionary conflicts'

This book provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of the scholarship on religion, conflict, and peacebuilding. Extending that inquiry beyond its traditional parameters, the volume explores the legacies of colonialism, missionary activism, secularism, orientalism, and liberalism. While featuring case studies from diverse contexts and traditions, the volume is organized thematically, beginning with a mapping of scholarship on religion, violence, and peace. The second part scrutinizes challenges to secularist theorizing of questions of conflict transformation and broadens the discussion of violence to include an analysis of its cultural, religious, and structural forms. The third part engages contested issues such as religion’s relations to development, violent and nonviolent militancy, and the legitimate use of force; the protection of the freedom of religion in resolving conflicts; and gender as it relates to religious peacebuilding. The fourth part highlights the practice of peacebuilding through exploring constructive resources within various traditions, the transformative role of rituals, spiritual practices in the formation of peacebuilders, interfaith activism on American university campuses, the relation of religion to solidarity activism, and scriptural reasoning as a peacebuilding practice. It also offers extended reflections on the legacy of missionary peacebuilding activism and the neoliberal framing of peacebuilding schemes and agendas. The volume is innovative because the authors grapple with the tension between theory and practice, cultural theory’s critique of the historicity of the very categories informing the discussion, and the challenge that the justpeace frame makes to the liberal peace paradigm, offering elicitive, elastic, and context-specific insights for strategic peacebuilding processes.

The fight against religious deviance and heresy was among the missionary activities of Columbanus’s followers, but the struggle for orthodoxy was also a problem the community had to face, most notably during the Agrestius affair after his death. In 626 Eustasius of Luxeuil had to answer charges of religious deviance at a council in Mâcon. In the end, the abbot of Luxeuil and his counterpart were forced to reconcile, but the conflict still smoldered. This chapter sheds light on the tensions between the missions among the gentes and the role of allegations of heresy in the internal conflicts of the Columbanian community in the 620s against the backdrop of the wider worries about orthodoxy in the seventh century. It also addresses the textual dimension of the issue and tries to illuminate the reasons for how Jonas of Bobbio presents Eustasius and the Agrestius affair in the Vita Columbani.

This book examines the United States' early global influence as the fledgling nation that inserted itself in conflicts that were oceans away. It focuses on the American fascination with and involvement in the Greek Revolution in the 1820s and 1830s. That nationalist movement incited an American philhellenic movement that pushed the borders of US interests into the eastern Mediterranean and infused a global perspective into domestic conversations concerning freedom and reform. Perceiving strong cultural, intellectual, and racial ties with Greece, American men and women identified Greece as the seedbed of American democracy and a crucial source of American values. Grassroots organizations sent men, money, and supplies to aid the Greeks. Philhellenes, often led by women, joined efforts with benevolence and missionary groups and together they promoted humanitarianism, education reform, and evangelism. Public pressure on the US Congress, however, did not result in intervention on behalf of the Greeks. Commercial interests convinced US officials to remain out of the conflict. The book analyzes the role of Americans in the Greek Revolution and the aftermath of US involvement. In doing so, it revises understandings of US involvement in foreign affairs, and shows how diplomacy developed at the same time as Americans were learning what it meant to be a country, and what that country stood for.

This chapter provides broad brush strokes of Christian mission in the twentieth century, highlighting the emergence of native education, translation, native elites, and nationalism. It reviews the nature of charismatic Christianity, its engagement with expansive American Christianity and the unprecedented change contingent on the expansive globalization and revolution of technology. It surveys important themes such as: the demographic shift of Christianity, the rise of religio-cultural fundamentalism, women’s empowerment, the global movement of peoples, rising socio-economic inequality and conflicts of many types. In the face of a growing moratorium on Christian foreign missions, minority world missionary agencies were forced to deal with growing grass-roots missions movements, and to hand over agency of the Christian project in many localities around the world. Rising nationalist movements, fuelled by native educational efforts, informed a turn to contextualizing theologies, in which women and the Pentecostal upsurge have played an important role.

By the early 1700s, the vast scale of Spanish empire led crown authorities to rely on local institutions to carry out their political agenda, including religious orders like the Franciscan mission of Santa Rosa de Ocopa in the Peruvian Amazon. This book follows the Ocopa missions throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period marked by events such as the indigenous Juan Santos Atahualpa Rebellion and the 1746 Lima earthquake. Caught between the directives of the Spanish crown and the challenges of missionary work on the Amazon frontier, the missionaries of Ocopa found themselves at the center of a struggle over the nature of colonial governance. This book examines the changes that Spain’s far-flung empire experienced from borderland Franciscan missions in Peru to the court of the Bourbon monarchy in Madrid, arguing that the Bourbon clerical reforms that broadly sought to bring the empire under greater crown control were shaped in turn by groups throughout the Americas, including Ocopa friars, the Amerindians and Africans in their missions, and bureaucrats in Lima as well as Madrid. Far from isolated local incidents, the book argues, these conflicts were representative of the political struggles over clerical reform occurring throughout Spanish America on the eve of Independence.

Indigenous words offered a rich resource for rescripting national and colonial narratives in a time of intensified imperial conflict. Millennial zeal pitted Jesuit and Protestant forces against each other with renewed fervor during a purportedly secular period of diplomacy from the Glorious Revolution (1688) to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), even as developments in natural history undermined previously accepted truths of Mosaic history. The British sought national uniformity by imposing English-language instruction on Indian proselytes, while the French continued to augment their own linguistic skills through a rigorous culture of dictionary writing and hymnody that helped to secure military alliances. This chapter argues that missionary linguistics played an integral role in consolidating British and French nationalism among indigenous populations, even as the shared knowledge forged in specific missionary locations helped native populations undermine imperial scripts.

Adopting a grassroots approach, this chapter argues that in its response to, and appropriation of, missionary teachings, the early Anglican Church in Kenya was heavily indebted to indigenous models and experiences for its impetus, dynamism, and direction. The author’s findings are compared with related studies elsewhere in Africa, especially in Uganda, to ask why the Anglican Church in Kenya was different, and to point to what was distinctly its own. The study focuses on central Kenya because it is inhabited by a relatively homogeneous people. It discusses three elements of central Kenya’s culture that shaped its response to Christianity: its pragmatic nature, its conflict resolution mechanism, and its desire to master and exercise power. The period of study starts with the arrival of the first missionary in 1900 and ends in 1932 with the young Church having overcome its first major crisis.

Atlantic networks of Protestant and Jesuit letters fueled missionary linguistic activity in North America in the 1660s and 1670s, which influenced early modern debates about the representational power of words. A fragmented theological and philosophical context in Europe put pressure on New World missionaries to try to salvage mystical ideas about the representational power of words. Espousing the idea that Algonquian could be redeemed along with the souls of its speakers, missionaries John Eliot in New England and Chrétien Le Clercq in Nova Scotia transformed the New World into language laboratories, in which theological aspirations for Algonquian translation came into conflict with the practical and material reality of learning and proselytizing in Wampanoag and Mi’kmaq. Missionary linguistics revealed language to be socially and culturally contextual rather than universal, and signs to be material rather than metaphysical, thus forcing North American missionaries in dialogue with Enlightenment ideas about language.

The American missionaries and their wives who traveled to the Hawaiian Islands beginning in the 1820s arrived with a strict set of ideas about the supposedly different and inherent capacities of men and women. These views, consistent with nineteenth-century attitudes about gender, also drew strong support from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, which provided clear instructions for the roles that men and women could play in the mission field. Yet, missionaries’ assumptions about and interactions with Hawaiians came into conflict with missionary concepts about the immutability of gender. Missionaries and their wives relied on a conversion strategy that stressed Hawaiian conformity to New-England style gender roles. In seeking to remake Hawaiians in their own image, missionaries focused on the most private and intimate aspects of Hawaiian life. This approach took hold in the wider foreign mission movement, providing a blueprint for American missionary efforts around the globe.

In the early twentieth century, a good number of college-educated Protestant American women went abroad by taking up missionary careers in teaching, nursing, and medicine. Most often, their destination was China, which became a major mission field for the U.S. Protestant missionary movement as the United States emerged to become an imperial power. These missionary women formed a cohort of new women who sought to be liberated from traditional gender roles. As educators and benevolent emancipators, they attempted to transform Chinese women into self-sufficient middle-class professional women just like themselves. As this book shows these aspirations ran parallel to and were in conflict with those of the Chinese xin nüxing (New Women) they encountered. The subjectivity of the New Woman was an element of global modernity expressing gendered visions of progress. At the same time, it was closely intertwined with the view of historical progress in the nation. Though American and Chinese New Women emphasized individual autonomy in that each sought to act as historical agents for modern progress, their notions of subjectivity were in different ways linked to the ideologies of historical progress of their nations. This book's transnational history of these New Women explores the intersections of gender, modernity, and national identity within the politics of world history, where the nation-state increased its presence as a universal unit in an ever-interconnecting global context.

This chapter deals with the antagonistic relationship between American missionaries and American sailors, in which Hawaiians were caught in the middle. It shows how that conflict literally played out on theatrical and musical stages in Hawaii and on the mainland. It frames this struggle using the indigenous Hawaiian term hukihuki, which means “the constant, opposing emotional pull two or more persons in conflict may exert on a third person, ostensibly to win his love, loyalty or influence but actually to gain supremacy in the two way power struggle.” Missionaries sought to keep Hawaiians attached to their islands, working on plantations that fed the missionary families' wealth and power. At the same time, sailors encouraged Hawaiians to leave the islands and enter into a global economy where, with their new cosmopolitan identities, they were treated as skilled laborers and given freedoms unavailable to plantation workers.

John Wesley founded Methodism as an evangelical renewal movement within the Church of England. That structure encouraged both establishment impulses and Dissenting movements within Methodism in the North American context. In Canada, British missionaries planted a moderate, respectable form of Methodism, comfortable with the establishment. In Ontario, however, Methodism drew from a more democratized, enthusiastic revivalism that set itself apart from the establishment. After a couple of generations, however, these poorer outsiders had moved into the middle class, and Canadian Methodism grew into the largest denomination, with a sense of duty to nurture the social order. Methodism in the United States, however, embodied a paradox representative of a nation founded in a self-conscious act of Dissent against an existing British system. Methodism came to embrace the American cultural centre while simultaneously generating Dissenting movements. After the American Revolution, ordinary Americans challenged deference, hierarchy, patronage, patriarchy, and religious establishments. Methodism adopted this stance in the religious sphere, growing as an enthusiastic, anti-elitist evangelistic campaign that validated the spiritual experiences of ordinary people. Eventually, Methodists began moving towards middle-class respectability and the cultural establishment, particularly in the largest Methodist denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC). However, democratized impulses of Dissent kept re-emerging to animate new movements and denominations. Republican Methodists and the Methodist Protestant Church formed in the early republic to protest the hierarchical structures of the MEC. African Americans created the African Methodist Episcopal Church and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in response to racism in the MEC. The Wesleyan Methodist Church and the Free Methodists emerged in protest against both slavery and hierarchy. The issue of slavery divided the MEC into northern and southern denominations. The split reflected a battle over which religious vision of slavery would be adopted by the cultural establishment. The denominations remained divided after the Civil War, but neither could gain support among newly freed blacks in the South. Freed from a racialized religious establishment embedded in slavery, former slaves flocked to independent black Methodist and Baptist churches. In the late nineteenth century, Methodism spawned another major evangelical Dissenting movement, the Holiness movement. Although they began with an effort to strengthen Wesleyan practices of sanctification within Methodism, Holiness advocates soon became convinced that most Methodists would not abandon what they viewed as complacency, ostentation, and worldliness. Eventually, Holiness critiques led to conflicts with Methodist officials, and ‘come-outer’ groups forged a score of new Holiness denominations, including the Church of God (Anderson), the Christian Missionary Alliance, and the Church of the Nazarene. Holiness zeal for evangelism and sanctification also spread through the missionary movement, forming networks that would give birth to another powerful, fragmented, democratized movement of world Christianity, Pentecostalism.