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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Grant Wacker and Daniel H. Bays, editors. The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History. (Religion and American Culture.) Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 2003. Pp. x, 332. $60.00.
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| This stimulating volume looks at the foreign missionary enterprise through the "wrong" end of the telescope: that is, it examines the effect of missions abroad chiefly on the society back home. In so doing, the many contributors provide a perspective as rare as it is informative. In the nice phrasing of editors Grant Wacker and Daniel H. Bays, "The essays gathered here offer an introduction to this craggy and barely explored terrain" (p. 9). While much of the terrain may remain craggy, helpful paths have been laid out, with extraordinarily valuable notes offering further guidance along the way. |
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The book is divided into three chronological parts, with shifting sentiments at home requiring such separations. Part one, "The National Era: Years of Expansion," takes its rise with the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810; this era is characterized by perfervid optimism and breath-taking ambition. Part two, "The High Imperial Years of Maturity," moves from the latter decades of the nineteenth century to the middle decades of the twentieth. Part three covers the post-World War II years, marked by restraint in the mainline denominations and exuberance in the independent, faith-based missions. |
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Space considerations require that comment be limited to a half-dozen of the essays, these chosen for their contrasts geographically as well as for their particular strengths. Laurie Maffly-Kipp concentrates on Haitian missions and an African Methodist Episcopal female preacher, Amanda Berry Smith. Mining Smith's prodigious autobiography, along with other sources, Maffly-Kipp illustrates how Haiti became a more promising land for America's blacks and, at the same time, how it could carry "'civilization and education to less advanced peoples in other parts of the world'" (p. 31). |
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Mark Hanley uses the sermons of the American Board of Commissioners to reveal the degree of Protestant triumphalism in the early period. "Aggressive, collective self-confidence flowed freely at [the Board's] gatherings, reflecting the prevailing postmillennial core of nineteenth-century evangelical mission theology" (p. 45). Because of his sources, Hanley's analysis rests heavily on the northeastern United States. However, his remarkably detailed notes open many windows to the wider scene. |
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Edith Blumenhofer tells a most fascinating story of Pandita Ramabai, a female preacher in India of unusual power and magnetic attraction. Turning her attention to the depressed status of women in India, Ramabai saw "self-reliance, education, and native women teachers as the chief needs of Indian women" (p. 157). Her personal charm worked wonders in the United States, no less than in her native land, as she found the network of the Women's Christian Temperance Union a most convenient vehicle for getting her message across to American female audiences. But Ramabai's American audiences shifted as her own "spiritual pilgrimage took her from Anglo-Catholicism through middle class moderate Protestantism to participation in radical expressions of holiness and faith" (p. 169). Although she was in the United States only from 1886 to 1889, Ramabai's influence continued to be felt here until her death in 1922, and even beyond. |
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