The Early Years of a Dutch Colonial Mission
The Early Years of a Dutch Colonial Mission

Author: Rita Smith Kipp

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780472101764

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This fascinating story of a Dutch Reformed mission among the Karo of North Sumatra chronicles the field's first fifteen years - 1889-1904. Plantation executives sponsored the mission, hoping to enlist the Karo as Christian allies in a colonial war against Muslim "fanatics." But the Karo hated the plantations, and likewise distrusted and resisted the missionaries. Civil servants saw the mission as a forerunner of the government's annexation of the Sumatran highlands, and in the military expedition to take the region, the missionaries played a prominent role. Consequently, the missionaries found their credibility diminished by their links to the despised colonial apparatus. Nonetheless, the missionaries' motives were religious, and they struggled with the compromises that made their work possible, yet ultimately precluded its success. Unlike other missionary studies - that focus on biography or on large regions - this historical ethnography concentrates on a single field, and on the personalities and activities of the several men who pioneered it in its formative years. It examines the missionaries' assumptions and values, describe how the missionaries contrasted themselves with the government and capitalist business, and explores the difficulties of translating Christianity across a great cultural gulf. The Early Years of a Dutch Colonial Mission will give pause to anyone who has thought missionaries heroic, or to anyone who has thought them mislead.

The Mission of Development
The Mission of Development

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-05-29

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 9004363106

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The Mission of Development interrogates the complex relationships between Christian mission and international development in Asia from the 19th century to the new millennium. Through historically and ethnographically grounded case studies, contributors examine how missionaries have adapted to and shaped the age of development and processes of ‘technocratisation’, as well as how mission and development have sometimes come to be cast in opposition. The volume takes up an increasingly prominent strand in contemporary research that reverses the prior occlusion of the entanglements between religion and development. It breaks new ground through its analysis of the techno-politics of both development and mission, and by focusing on the importance of engagements and encounters in the field in Asia.

Christianity and the State in Asia
Christianity and the State in Asia

Author: Julius Bautista

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-09-11

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 113401886X

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Christianity is one of the most rapidly growing religions in Asia. Despite the challenges of political marginalisation, church organisations throughout much of Asia are engaged in activities - such as charity, education and commentary on public morality - that may either converge or conflict with the state's interests. Considering Christianity’s growing prominence, and the various ways Asian nation states respond to this growth, this book brings into sharper analytical focus the ways in which the faith is articulated at the local, regional, and global level. Contributors from diverse disciplinary and institutional backgrounds offer in-depth analyses of the complex interactions between Asian nation-states and Christianity in the context of modernisation and nation-building. Exploring the social and political ramifications of Christian conversions in Asia and their impact on state policies, the book analyses how Christian followers, missionaries, theologians and activists negotiate their public roles and identities vis-à-vis various forms of Asian states, particularly in the context of post-colonial nation-building and socio-economic development. This volume represents a critical contribution to the existing scholarship on Christianity's global reach and its local manifestations, and demonstrates the significance of the Asian experience in our understanding of Christianity as a global religion.

Casting Faiths
Casting Faiths

Author: T. DuBois

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-03-31

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 023023545X

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How did European imperialism shape the ideas and practices of religion in East and Southeast Asia? Casting Faiths brings together eleven scholars to show how Western law, governance, education and mission shaped the basic understanding of what religion is, and what role it should play in society.

Unstable Images
Unstable Images

Author: Brenda Johnson Clay

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2005-07-31

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0824874617

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The subject of colonialism encompasses a multitude of analytic concerns about the nature and extent of political controls, economic inequalities, and social hierarchies. Underlying the varied conditions of power and subordination are the diverse, sometimes contested representations of human difference that motivate, support, or question colonial practices and projects. Unstable Images concentrates a critical gaze on this discursive side of colonialism through close readings of a series of Western texts on the people of New Ireland from the 1870s to the 1930s--when the status of the New Ireland-New Britain region changed from precolonial to German control and finally to a League of Nations mandated Australian administration.

Historical Dictionary of the Reformed Churches
Historical Dictionary of the Reformed Churches

Author: Robert Benedetto

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2009-10-06

Total Pages: 791

ISBN-13: 0810870231

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As its name implies, the Reformed tradition grew out of the 16th century Protestant Reformation. The Reformed churches consider themselves to be the Catholic Church reformed. The movement originated in the reform efforts of Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) of Zurich and John Calvin (1509-1564) of Geneva. Although the Reformed movement was dependent upon many Protestant leaders, it was Calvin's tireless work as a writer, preacher, teacher, and social and ecclesiastical reformer that provided a substantial body of literature and an ethos from which the Reformed tradition grew. Today, the Reformed churches are a multicultural, multiethnic, and multinational phenomenon. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Reformed Churches contains information on the major personalities, events, facts, movements, and beliefs of the Reformed churches. This is done through a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, a bibliography, and over 800 cross-referenced dictionary entries on leaders, personalities, events, facts, movements, and beliefs of the Reformed churches.

A History of Christianity in Asia, Vol. II
A History of Christianity in Asia, Vol. II

Author: Samuel Hugh Moffett

Publisher: Orbis Books

Published: 2014-07-30

Total Pages: 702

ISBN-13: 1608331636

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The story of Christianity in the West has often been told, but the history of Christianity in the East is not as well known. The seed was the same: the good news of Jesus Christ for the whole world, which Christians call "the gospel." But it was sown by different sowers; it was planted in different soil; it grew with a different flavor; and it was gathered by different reapers. It is too often forgotten that the faith moved east across Asia as early as it moved west into Europe. Western church history tends to follow Paul to Philippi and to Rome and on across Europe to the conversion of Constantine and the barbarians. With some outstanding exceptions, only intermittently has the West looked beyond Constantinople as its center. It was a Christianity that has for centuries remained unashamedly Asian. A History of Christianity in Asia makes available immense amounts of research on religious pluralism of Asia and how Christianity spread long before the modern missionary movement went forth in the shelter of Western military might. Invaluable for historians of Asia and scholars of mission, it is stimulating for all readers interested in Christian history. --

Historical Dictionary of the Reformed Churches
Historical Dictionary of the Reformed Churches

Author: Benedetto

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 1999-11-03

Total Pages: 1122

ISBN-13: 0810866293

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As its name implies, the Reformed tradition grew out of the 16th century Protestant Reformation. The Reformed churches consider themselves to be the Catholic Church reformed. The movement originated in the reform efforts of Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531) of Zurich and John Calvin (1509-1564) of Geneva. Although the Reformed movement was dependent upon many Protestant leaders, it was Calvin's tireless work as a writer, preacher, teacher, and social and ecclesiastical reformer that provided a substantial body of literature and an ethos from which the Reformed tradition grew. Today, the Reformed churches are a multicultural, multiethnic, and multinational phenomenon. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Reformed Churches contains information on the major personalities, events, facts, movements, and beliefs of the Reformed churches. This is done through a list of acronyms and abbreviations, a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, a bibliography, and over 800 cross-referenced dictionary entries on leaders, personalities, events, facts, movements, and beliefs of the Reformed churches.

The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities
The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities

Author: Suzel Ana Reily

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-03-16

Total Pages: 745

ISBN-13: 0199860009

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The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities investigates music's role in everyday practice and social history across the diversity of Christian religions and practices around the globe. The volume explores Christian communities in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia as sites of transmission, transformation, and creation of deeply diverse musical traditions. The book's contributors, while mostly rooted in ethnomusicology, examine Christianities and their musics in methodologically diverse ways, engaging with musical sound and structure, musical and social history, and ethnography of music and musical performance. These broad materials explore five themes: music and missions, music and religious utopias (and other oppositional religious communities), music and conflict, music and transnational flows, and music and everyday life. The volume as a whole, then, approaches Christian groups and their musics as diverse and powerful windows into the way in which music, religious ideas, capital, and power circulate (and change) between places, now and historically. It also tries to take account of the religious self-understandings of these groups, presenting Christian musical practice and exchange as encompassing and negotiating deeply felt and deeply rooted moral and cultural values. Given that the centerpiece of the volume is Christian religious musical practice, the volume reveals the active role music plays in maintaining and changing religious, moral, and cultural values in a long history of intercultural and transnational encounters.

Performing Faith
Performing Faith

Author: Marzanna Poplawska

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-02-10

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0429996292

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This book is a study of music inculturation in Indonesia. It shows how religious expression can be made relevant in an indigenous context and how grassroots Christianity is being realized by means of music. Through the discussion of indigenous expressions of Christianity, the book presents multiple ways in which Indonesians reiterate their identity through music by creatively forging Christian and indigenous elements. This study moves beyond the discussion (and charge) of syncretism, showing that the inclusion of local cultural manifestations is an answer to creating a truly indigenous Christian expression. Marzanna Poplawska, while telling the story of Indonesian Christians and the multiple ways in which they live Christianity through music, emphasizes the creative energy and agency of local people. In their practices she finds optimism for the continuing existence of many traditional genres and styles. Indonesian Christians perform their Christian faith through music, dance, and theater, generating innovative cultural products that enrich the global Christian heritage. The book is addressed to a broad spectrum of readers: scholars from a variety of disciplines – music, religion, anthropology, especially those interested in interactions between Christianity and indigenous cultures; general music lovers and World Music enthusiasts eager to discover musics outside of European realm; as well as Christian believers, church musicians, and choir directors curious to learn about Christian music beyond Euro-American context. Students of religion, sacred music, (ethno)musicology, theater, and dance will also benefit from learning about a variety of indigenous arts employed in Christian churches in Indonesia.