Mission Station Christianity
Mission Station Christianity

Author: Ingie Hovland

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-08-08

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 9004257403

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In Mission Station Christianity, Ingie Hovland presents an anthropological history of the ideas and practices that evolved among Norwegian missionaries in nineteenth-century colonial Natal and Zululand (Southern Africa). She examines how their mission station spaces influenced their daily Christianity, and vice versa, drawing on the anthropology of Christianity. Words and objects, missionary bodies, problematic converts, and the utopian imagination are discussed, as well as how the Zulus made use of (and ignored) the stations. The majority of the Norwegian missionaries had become theological cheerleaders of British colonialism by the 1880s, and Ingie Hovland argues that this was made possible by the everyday patterns of Christianity they had set up and become familiar with on the mission stations since the 1850s.

In War and Famine
In War and Famine

Author: Erleen J. Christensen

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 9780773528536

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In War and Famine uses a small key - the author's family letters and infant memories - to unlock a whole world. Erleen Christensen was a "mish kid," the daughter of one of about two hundred missionaries who remained in China's Honan province during World War II and the civil war that followed. She provides an eye-witness account using letters, diaries, and personal accounts, many still in private hands, of one of the worst famines in China's history and the great devastation caused by advancing Japanese troops. Christensen chronicles how a religiously diverse group of Westerners tried to distribute famine relief and conduct humanitarian and educational missions in the face of rising nationalism, autonomy, and resistance to foreign intervention. While the principle narrator is Christensen's father, a young missionary doctor who, in a hair-raising journey, smuggled his family behind Japanese battlelines the year before Pearl Harbor, Christensen also tells the story of the many other missionaries who also sought to relieve the suffering of innocents caught in the crossfire of war and revolution - brave women who marched orphans through enemy lines, missionaries turned OSS intelligence officers, a Canadian Anglican cleric, a Swiss trainer of seeing-eye dogs, and a diplomat who travelled the province by bicycle.