—Mark
A. Noll, Wheaton College
“This is a creative, well-constructed book. I found every single essay to
be unexpectedly provocative, informative, or both.” —Mark
A. Noll, Wheaton College
This collection of 15 essays provides a fully developed account of the domestic significance of foreign missions from the 19th century through the Vietnam War. U.S. and Canadian missions to China, South America, Africa, and the Middle East have, it shows, transformed the identity and purposes of their mother countries in important ways.
Topics in the collection range from John Saillant’s essay on the missions of free African Americans to Liberia in the 19th century to Grant Wacker’s essay on the eventual disillusionment of noted writer Pearl S. Buck. Kathryn T. Long’s essay on the “Auca martyrs” offers a sobering case study of the missionary establishment’s power to, in tandem with the evangelical and secular press, create and record the stories of our time. William L. Svelmoe documents the improbable friendship between fundamentalist Bible translator William Cameron Townsend and Mexico’s secular socialist president Lázaro Cárdenas. And Anne Blue Wills details the ways many American groups—black, Protestant, Catholic, and Mormon—sought to convert one another, stead-fastly envisioning “others” as every bit as “heathen” as those in far-off lands.
Contributors: Alvyn Austin, Daniel H. Bays, Jay S. F.Blossom, Edith Blumhofer, Jay R. Case, Scott Flipse, Mark Y. Hanley, Nancy A. Hardesty, Kathryn T. Long, Laurie F. Maffy-Kipp, Russell E. Richey, John Saillant, William L. Svelmoe, Grant Wacker, Marilyn Färdig Whiteley, Anne Blue Wills
Daniel H. Bays is Professor
of History at Calvin College, and author of Christianity in China: From the
18th Century to the Present. Grant Wacker is Professor of Church
History at Duke University and author of Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals
and American Culture.
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University of Alabama
Press
February 2003
427 pages
ISBN 0-8173-1245-5
$60.00 cloth