Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Download or read book Protestant Missions and Local Encounters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries written by Hilde Nielssen and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes visible an important but largely neglected aspect of Christian missions: its transnational character. An interdisciplinary group of scholars present case-studies on missions and individual missionaries, unified by a common vision of expanding a Christian Empire “to the ends of the world”. Examples range from Madagascar, South-Africa, Palestine, Turkey, Tibet, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Canada and Britain. Engaging in activities from education, health care and development aid to religion, ethnography and collection of material culture, Christian missionaries considered themselves as global actors working for the benefit of common humanity. Yet, the missionaries came from, and operated within a variety of nation-states. Thus this volume demonstrates how processes on a national level are closely linked to larger transnational processes.