A study tracing the relationships between missionaries and African Church workers in Kenya in the years 1850-1900, as missionaries increasingly adopted imperial assumptions of Western superiority.
It tells the story of the first Anglican clergy in Kenya, their wives and colleagues; their rescue from slavery, their education in India and their subsequent work in East Africa. It demonstrates their contribution to the rapid growth of the Church and of indigenous Christian communities. Yet later missionaries were not willing to accord to the Africans the position they had a right to expect....

"The Missionary Lives" is the first comprehensive literary examination of the biographies and autobiographies of Canadian missionaries at home and abroad.

The purpose of this book is to gather in a single narrative the rather disparate stories of Dominican friars in Southern Africa over the past four centuries. Dominicans from Portugal and Portuguese India were present in South-East Africa from 1577 to 1835. Patrick Raymond Griffith, an Irish Dominican, became the first resident bishop in South Africa in 1837. A Dominican mission was established in 1917 with the arrival of a group of English friars. A second group arrived from the Netherlands in 1932. The aim is to provide a social history of the Dominicans in Southern Africa, that is, a...

This study deals with the interaction between neo-Thomism and African traditional thinking in Charles Nyamiti's theological methodology. The approach of the study is groundbreaking as it is the first monograph published on the theological method of any African theologian. The question about the position and relevance of Western philosophical-theological systems in a non-Western context also has a wider relevance concerning contextual theologies in general. Nyamiti's theology is a germane and a fruitful choice for the study of this issue because of his programmatic attempt to build a coherent...

Raimon Panikkar (b. 1918), a Catalan-born Hindu-Christian, is a prominent theorist of interreligious dialogue. This study gives a detailed analysis of his theology of religions. On the basis of the most recent sources available, it appears that even his "radical pluralism" cannot eschew the inherent problems characteristic of pluralistic theologies of religions. Unlike other pluralists, Panikkar does not subscribe to the Enlightenment tradition. Instead, his plea for the transformation of existing religions is based on an idiosyncratic "cosmotheandrism," which draws on both primordial...

This volume presents a range of up-to-date studies on nineteenth-century Christian missions in the Middle East. Important themes are the history of Christian geopiety and the tensions between nationalist and internationalist interests, rival missionary organisations and conversionalist and civilizational aims.

The growth of Christianity in Africa during the twentieth century is one of the most fascinating shifts in the history of religions. This book presents a history of the Tanzanian Seventh-day Adventist Church, which is representative of this shift in many respects: slow beginnings, struggles over cultural issues, the emergence of a unique church life combining denominational heritage and African elements, frictions with governments, and the development of popular theology. Yet Tanzanian Adventism also exemplifies an important phenomenon which has been given little attention so far - the...

Indonesia is the home of the largest single Muslim community of the world. Its Christian community, about 10 per cent of the population, has until now received no overall description in English. Through cooperation of 26 Indonesian and European scholars, Protestants and Catholics, a broad and balanced picture is given of its 24 million Christians. This book sketches the growth of Christianity during the Portuguese period (1511-1605), it presents a fair account of developments under the Dutch colonial administration (1605-1942) and is more elaborate for the period of the Indonesian Republic...

This book, connecting the fields of social anthropology and missiology, presents a body of colonial ethnographic writing applied to highland societies in the southern portion of the Mainland Southeast Asian massif. The writers under scrutiny are Catholic priests from the Societe des Missions Etrangeres de Paris. Their texts from the Upper-Tonkin vicariate, in today's northern Vietnam, are paid special attention, notably through its major contributor, F.M. Savina. The author locates this ethnographic heritage against its historical, political and intellectual background. A comparison is...

This book offers a pioneering account of the relationship between missionary work and masculinity. By examining four individual men this study explores how self-making occurred within foreign missions, but also how conceptions of male gender informed missionary work.