David Hilliard's God's Gentlemen, originally published in 1978, remains the only detached and detailed historical analysis of the work of the Melanesian Mission. Starting with its New Zealand beginnings and its Norfolk Island years (1867-1920), the work follows the Mission's shift of headquarters to the Solomon Islands and on until the beginning of the Second World War. The Mission, which grew out of the personal vision of the first Church of England Bishop of New Zealand, George Selwyn, formally defined its field of work as 'the Islands of Melanesia' although its activities were confined almo.
MURIEL MCCARTHY This volume originated from a seminar organised by Richard H. Popkin in Marsh's Library on July 7-8, 1994. It was one of the most stimulating events held in the Library in recent years. Although we have hosted many special seminars on such subjects as rare books, the Huguenots, and Irish church history, this was the first time that a seminar was held which was specifically related to the books in our own collection. It seems surprising that this type of seminar has never been held before although the reason is obvious. Since there is no printed catalogue of the Library scholars are not aware of its contents. In fact the collection of books by late seventeenth and early eighteenth century European authors on, for example, such subjects as biblical criticism, political and religious controversy, is one of the richest parts of the Library's collections. Some years ago we were informed that of the 25,000 books in Marsh's at least 5,000 English books or books printed in England were printed between 1640 and 1700.
The British country house has long been regarded as the jewel in the nation's heritage crown. But the country house is also an expression of wealth and power, and as scholars reconsider the nation's colonial past, new questions are being posed about these great houses and their links to Atlantic slavery.This book, authored by a range of academics and heritage professionals, grew out of a 2009 conference on 'Slavery and the British Country house: mapping the current research' organised by English Heritage in partnership with the University of the West of England, the National Trust and the Economic History Society. It asks what links might be established between the wealth derived from slavery and the British country house and what implications such links should have for the way such properties are represented to the public today.Lavishly illustrated and based on the latest scholarship, this wide-ranging and innovative volume provides in-depth examinations of individual houses, regional studies and critical reconsiderations of existing heritage sites, including two studies specially commissioned by English Heritage and one sponsored by the National Trust.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. A Vietnamese Moses is the story of Philiphê Binh, a Vietnamese Catholic priest who in 1796 traveled from Tonkin to the Portuguese court in Lisbon to persuade its ruler to appoint a bishop for his community of ex-Jesuits. Based on Binh’s surviving writings from his thirty-seven-year exile in Portugal, this book examines how the intersections of global and local Roman Catholic geographies shaped the lives of Vietnamese Christians in the early modern era. The book also argues that Binh’s mission to Portugal and his intense lobbying on behalf of his community reflected the agency of Vietnamese Catholics, who vigorously engaged with church politics in defense of their distinctive Portuguese-Catholic heritage. George E. Dutton demonstrates the ways in which Catholic beliefs, histories, and genealogies transformed how Vietnamese thought about themselves and their place in the world. This sophisticated exploration of Vietnamese engagement with both the Catholic Church and Napoleonic Europe provides a unique perspective on the complex history of early Vietnamese Christianity.
This book looks at how that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church, coped with mass migration from Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The book details the great array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the Church with the men and money that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and a common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. It also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. One of the book’s key aims is to show how the colonial Church should be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The colonial Church was an institution that played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and State.
While Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist government was persecuting Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses and driving forty-two small German religious sects underground, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continued to practice unhindered. How some fourteen thousand Mormons not only survived but thrived in Nazi Germany is a story little known, rarely told, and occasionally rewritten within the confines of the Church’s history—for good reason, as we see in David Conley Nelson’s Moroni and the Swastika. A page-turning historical narrative, this book is the first full account of how Mormons avoided Nazi persecution through skilled collaboration with Hitler’s regime, and then eschewed postwar shame by constructing an alternative history of wartime suffering and resistance. The Twelfth Article of Faith and parts of the 134th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants function as Mormonism’s equivalent of the biblical admonition to “render unto Caesar,” a charge to cooperate with civil government, no matter how onerous doing so may be. Resurrecting this often-violated doctrinal edict, ecclesiastical leaders at the time developed a strategy that protected Mormons within Nazi Germany. Furthermore, as Nelson shows, many Mormon officials strove to fit into the Third Reich by exploiting commonalities with the Nazi state. German Mormons emphasized a mutual interest in genealogy and a passion for sports. They sent husbands into the Wehrmacht and sons into the Hitler Youth, and they prayed for a German victory when the war began. They also purged Jewish references from hymnals, lesson plans, and liturgical practices. One American mission president even wrote an article for the official Nazi Party newspaper, extolling parallels between Utah Mormon and German Nazi society. Nelson documents this collaboration, as well as subsequent efforts to suppress it by fashioning a new collective memory of ordinary German Mormons’ courage and travails during the war. Recovering this inconvenient past, Moroni and the Swastika restores a complex and difficult chapter to the history of Nazi Germany and the Mormon Church in the twentieth century—and offers new insight into the construction of historical truth.
