This book assesses the mediating role played by 'affections' in eighteenth-century contestations about reason and passion, questioning their availability and desirability outside textual form. It examines the formulation and idealization of this affective category in works by Isaac Watts, Lord Shaftesbury, Mary Hays, William Godwin, Helen Maria Williams, and William Wordsworth. Part I outlines how affections are invested with utopian potential in theology, moral philosophy, and criticism, re-imagining what it might mean to know emotion. Part II considers attempts of writers at the end of the period to draw affections into literature as a means of negotiating a middle way between realism and idealism, expressivism and didacticism, particularity and abstraction, subjectivity and objectivity, femininity and masculinity, radicalism and conservatism, and the foreign and the domestic.
It was not the European and American churches which evangelised Africa, but the mission societies. The missions from the Great Awakening such as the London Missionary Society and Church Missionary Society, or the Holy Ghost Fathers and the White Fathers, which started the process of Sub-Saharan Africa becoming a Christian continent are well known and documented. Less known, and less documented are the interdenominational faith missions which began in 1873 with the aim of visiting the still unreached areas of Africa: North Africa, the Sudan Belt and the Congo Basin. Missions such as the Africa Inland Mission or Sudan Interior Mission gave birth to some of the big churches like ECWA in Nigeria and Africa Inland Church in Kenya. It is the aim of this book to describe faith missions and their theology and to present an overview of the early development of faith missions insofar as they touched Africa.