Cultural Technologies: The long and unexpected life of the Christian mission encounter, North China, 1900–30

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (6) ◽  
pp. 2007-2040
Author(s):  
MELISSA WEI-TSING INOUYE
Keyword(s):  
North China ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Local Networks ◽  
Original Intent ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Alternative Sources ◽  
Church Councils ◽  
Bible Reading ◽  
London Missionary Society

AbstractThis article uses the case of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in China to argue that disruptive cultural technologies—namely organizational forms and tools—were just as significant within Christian mission encounters as religious doctrines or material technologies. LMS missionaries did not convert as many Chinese to Christianity as they hoped, but their auxiliary efforts were more successful. The LMS mission project facilitated the transfer of certain cultural technologies such as church councils to administer local congregations or phonetic scripts to facilitate literacy. Once in the hands of native Christians and non-Christians alike, these cultural technologies could be freely adapted for a variety of purposes and ends that often diverged from the missionaries’ original intent and expectation. This article draws on the letters and reports of missionaries of the London Missionary Society in North China from roughly 1900 to 1930—the period during which self-governing Protestant congregations took root in China and many places around the world. The spread of church government structures and a culture of Bible-reading enabled Chinese within the mission sphere to create new forms of collective life. These new forms of community not only tied into local networks, but also connected to transnational flows of information, finances, and personnel. Native Christian communities embraced new, alternative sources of community authority—the power of God working through a group of ordinary people or through the biblical text—that proved both attractive and disruptive.

scholarly journals Reconstructing an Ethics of Credit in an Age of Neoliberalism

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 484
Author(s):  
Ilsup Ahn
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Financial Capital ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Economic Process

One of the most formidable socio-economic challenges which Christian communities are facing today is the growing dominance of neoliberalism. From wheat fields in Brazil to Wall Street in New York City, neoliberalism is marching on everywhere with its massive credit (or credit money). The purpose of this paper is to address a key structural injustice of neoliberalism—the deepening colonization of “social capital” by “financial capital.” Since the 1980s, a new economic process known as “financialization” has structurally changed the global economic system entailing an extreme income and wealth gap between the haves and the have nots. It has also rendered a countless number of ordinary people vulnerable to various types of debt entrapment while destroying the environment on a global scale. Behind all these forms of social and natural disintegration lies a crucial neoliberal apparatus fueled by credit. This paper engages in such problems by attempting to reconnect the lost link between social capital and financial capital. In doing so, it first analyzes the genealogical origin of the separation between financial capital and social capital. The author then comes up with ethical principles to re-anchor financial capital in social capital through a critical and interdisciplinary exploration.

scholarly journals Missionaries, modernity and the moving image: Re-presenting the Melanesian Other to Christian communities in the West between the World Wars

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stella Ramage
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
The West ◽  
Alternative Source ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Commercial Market

<p>This thesis considers conflicting representational strategies used by Christian missionaries in displaying Melanesian people to white audiences in the West with particular reference to films made during the period of colonial modernity between 1917 and 1935. Most scholarly work on Christian mission in the Pacific has focussed on the nineteenth century and on the effect of Christianisation on indigenous populations, rather than on the effect of mission propaganda on Western communities. This thesis repositions mission propaganda as an important alternative source of visual imagery of the Melanesian ‘Other’ available to white popular audiences.  Within a broader commercial market that commodified Western notions of Melanesian ‘savagery’ via illustrated travelogue magazines and commercial multi-media shows, missionaries trod an uneasy knife-edge in how they transmitted indigenous imagery and mediated cultural difference for white consumers. Five case-studies consider missionary propaganda from four Christian denominations in disparate parts of Melanesia. They reveal a temporal trajectory in the conflicted but symbiotic relationship between, on one hand, missionary organisations interested in propagandising their work and, on the other, travelogue-adventurers operating with commercial motives. This trajectory follows missionaries as they move from facilitation of travelogue-adventurers, through passive commissioning of their services, then active collaboration, and finally to autonomous film-making in their own right.  I consider how white missionaries played a pivotal role in both enabling and subverting the dominance of the prevailing commercial paradigm of the period: that Melanesians are by nature and definition ‘savages’ and ‘head-hunters’ residing in a thrilling, timeless, virtual place called ‘Cannibal-Land.’ These contradictory impulses, I contend, destabilised both Christian and ‘Cannibal-land’ stereotypes. This destabilising effect was not restricted to film, but I suggest that it was amplified by the use of the quintessentially modern medium of moving images. I argue that film – particularly film made by missionaries – posed an implicit challenge to the essentially literary trope of ‘Cannibal-land’. Moving images offered a more unruly medium within and around which indigenous Melanesians of the colonial era could sometimes display what I term a radical visibility that escaped and transcended both types of Western stereotype.</p>

scholarly journals Do not worry in Kinywang’anga: Reading Matthew 6:25–34 in a Tanzanian village

2011 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sakari Häkkinen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The People ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
Harsh Conditions

One of the presumptions of this article is that most of the people in the nascent ‘Christian’ communities were ordinary people struggling with questions of living under harsh conditions in a country that was occupied by an enemy force. Another presumption is that the history of these ordinary people from antiquity needs to be heard. The article aimed, with the help of archaeology, cultural anthropology, social history of antiquity, literature of the time as well as other disciplines, to create a social context of Jesus and his disciples. The article approached the Gospels in the New Testament from the poor, the majority of people living in the 1st century Roman Empire. It gives a brief analysis of one of the poverty texts, namely Matthew 6:25–34. By means of interviews, stories of villagers in Tanzania, as well as their interpretations of the Gospel texts, have been documented. The people of Kinywang’anga serve as a test case for reading the ‘do not worry’ exhortation in the Matthean passage.

scholarly journals The unity of the Church in Saint Irenaeus’ ecclesiology

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 229-246
Author(s):  
Claudiu Marius Ciascai
Keyword(s):  
Christian Community ◽  
Essential Condition ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Stability ◽  
The Church

The unity of the Church from everywhere has always been of major concern for the early Christians. They understood this unity as an existing and tangible experience, and not as a remote perspective hidden in the uncertainty of the future. Besides, they believed that the unity of the Church can assure the cohesion between the Christian communities, and the communication inside the Christian community was, in its turn, the essential condition that provided the support for, the consolidation and the development of the ecclesiastic unity. The Fathers of the Church have understood the importance of keeping and supporting the unity and the stability inside the Church, in order to provide an efficient Christian mission everywhere in the world. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the evolution and complexity of the ecumenical dimension of the ecclesiology of Irenaeus of Lyon, one of the most representatives of the Fathers of the Church, during the early centuries. He understood the power of the dialogue and the pastoral mission, and he preached not only for the early Christians, who, at that time, found themselves surrounded and confused by different inaccurate doctrines, but also for the pagans. He preached to those pagans the message of Jesus Christ’s Gospel of love.

scholarly journals From Outsiders to Insiders? Strategies and Practices of American Film Distributors in Postwar Italy

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 546-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER MISKELL ◽  
MARINA NICOLI
Keyword(s):  
Structural Changes ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Business Networks ◽  
Local Networks ◽  
Popular Films ◽  
Box Office ◽  
Postwar Italy ◽  
Alternative Sources ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

This article examines the impact of structural changes in the postwar film industry on the activities and effectiveness of the foreign distribution subsidiaries of American firms. As these subsidiaries saw their regular supply of films from their in-house Hollywood studios decline, they sought out alternative sources of product content, often from local markets. Unable to rely on the traditional “ownership” advantages bestowed on them by their parent firms, these subsidiaries increasingly needed to integrate into local networks and forge closer relationships with local producers and exhibitors. Our focus is on Italy, one of the most important film markets for US companies in the 1960s. We collect data on the box office revenues and screen time allocated to every film released into the first-run cinema market and compare the effectiveness of American versus Italian distributors in maximizing the exposure of their most popular films. We explore the attempts by US firms to form partnerships with Italian distributors and producers. Finally, we examine available archival records to reveal the detailed activities of US distribution offices in Italy and their attempts to integrate into local business networks. We conclude that while US subsidiaries did not fully succeed in becoming “insiders” within the Italian film industry in this period, they did actively work toward such an objective.

scholarly journals Middelpuntvliedende en eenheidsoekende kragte in die 19 de eeu

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Spoelstra
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Dutch Reformed ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Christian Reformed ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Church Councils ◽  
The Church

In order to commemorate the unification of the Christian Reformed Churches (CGKN) and the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK) in 1892, this article recalls the centripetal and centrifugal events within the Reformed Church of the Netherlands (NHK) during the 19th century. This history, important to South Africa, is rather unknown. It is alleged that the Church Ordinance of King William 1 (1816) gave rise to a new idea of the Church as a societal entity, directed by political and ecclessiastical authorities. This idea was challenged by ordinary people in 1834 and more deliberately in 1886 by Church Councils maintaining that the unity of the church is de­monstrated by testifying to the traditional reformed faith. This belief brought about the remarkable fusion of two church communities in a century characterised by multiple ecclessiastical secession.

scholarly journals Missionaries, modernity and the moving image: Re-presenting the Melanesian Other to Christian communities in the West between the World Wars

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stella Ramage
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
The West ◽  
Alternative Source ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Commercial Market

<p>This thesis considers conflicting representational strategies used by Christian missionaries in displaying Melanesian people to white audiences in the West with particular reference to films made during the period of colonial modernity between 1917 and 1935. Most scholarly work on Christian mission in the Pacific has focussed on the nineteenth century and on the effect of Christianisation on indigenous populations, rather than on the effect of mission propaganda on Western communities. This thesis repositions mission propaganda as an important alternative source of visual imagery of the Melanesian ‘Other’ available to white popular audiences.  Within a broader commercial market that commodified Western notions of Melanesian ‘savagery’ via illustrated travelogue magazines and commercial multi-media shows, missionaries trod an uneasy knife-edge in how they transmitted indigenous imagery and mediated cultural difference for white consumers. Five case-studies consider missionary propaganda from four Christian denominations in disparate parts of Melanesia. They reveal a temporal trajectory in the conflicted but symbiotic relationship between, on one hand, missionary organisations interested in propagandising their work and, on the other, travelogue-adventurers operating with commercial motives. This trajectory follows missionaries as they move from facilitation of travelogue-adventurers, through passive commissioning of their services, then active collaboration, and finally to autonomous film-making in their own right.  I consider how white missionaries played a pivotal role in both enabling and subverting the dominance of the prevailing commercial paradigm of the period: that Melanesians are by nature and definition ‘savages’ and ‘head-hunters’ residing in a thrilling, timeless, virtual place called ‘Cannibal-Land.’ These contradictory impulses, I contend, destabilised both Christian and ‘Cannibal-land’ stereotypes. This destabilising effect was not restricted to film, but I suggest that it was amplified by the use of the quintessentially modern medium of moving images. I argue that film – particularly film made by missionaries – posed an implicit challenge to the essentially literary trope of ‘Cannibal-land’. Moving images offered a more unruly medium within and around which indigenous Melanesians of the colonial era could sometimes display what I term a radical visibility that escaped and transcended both types of Western stereotype.</p>

Economics of practices

2019 ◽  
pp. 158-167
Author(s):  
Maijastina Kahlos
Keyword(s):  
Religious Group ◽  
Economic Aspects ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Roman Society ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Economic Support ◽  
Great Transformation ◽  
Church Councils ◽  
Late Roman

This chapter explores the economic aspects of religious dissidence, such as the confiscation of temples and churches, as well as competing philanthropic practices, civic euergetism, and ecclesiastical charity. In many instances, economic issues carried more weight than the solemn proclamations of emperors and church councils. When the emperor chose a cult or a group as something to support, he recognized that cult or religious group as a receiver of privileges and donations. The emperors’ economic support of Christian communities strengthened the position of the churches. The withdrawal of imperial support hit pagan cults that had traditionally been endowed with land, property, and exemptions from duties. Furthermore, late Roman society saw another great transformation in the economics of practices. The philanthropy of the Christian churches gradually replaced the traditional Graeco-Roman form of civic philanthropy in the fourth and fifth centuries.

Contextual Bible reading and intercultural Bible reading: Four Colombian experiences

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Edgar A. López
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
New Horizons ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Marginalised Groups ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Bible Reading

Contextual Bible Reading (CBR) and Intercultural Bible Reading (IBR) have enabled the cooperation between socially engaged scholars and marginalised groups to find new resources in biblical texts to interpret their contexts and fight against the surrounding violence. As the use of these two methods has not been the object of a comparative study based on concrete experiences, this article presents them through four cases of Christian communities in Colombia. This comparative study not only illustrates the differences between these two methods of Bible reading, but also shows how they open new hermeneutic and liberation perspectives in the struggle for social justice and the search for reconciliation. The article depicts the CBR of the story of the Levite’s concubine (Jdg 19:1–30) by a group of women living in vulnerable conditions as well as the CBR of the parable of the father and his two sons (Lk 15:11–32) by a group of violence victims’ relatives. It also depicts the IBR of the story of the widow and the judge (Lk 18:1–8) by four groups of Caribbean readers as well as the IBR of the garden story (Gn 2:4b–25) by two Andean indigenous groups. Ordinary readers’ central role as interpreters of biblical texts let them recognise their own capabilities to transform their contexts in an emancipatory way and challenge biblical scholars and theologians. Even though CBR and IBR pursue different hermeneutical goals, they converge in giving a central role to the community as the subject of counter-hegemonic interpretations that open new horizons starting from reality and triggering liberation processes.Contribution: Beyond their differences and tensions, CBR and IBR are inclusive and dialogical methods intended for liberation that should be used to transcend the limits of dominant interpretations of biblical texts as well as the isolation of marginalised ordinary readers.

Retrieving Hidden Traces of the Intercultural Past: An Introduction to Archival Resources in Cameroon, with Special Reference to the Central Archives of the Presbyterian Church in Cameroon

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 427-440
Author(s):  
Guy Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Target Groups ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
North West ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Basel Mission

Towards the end of 1886 four missionaries set foot on Cameroonian soil in the harbor of Douala. They were representatives of the Switzerland based Basel Mission (BM) who had arrived to take over from the pioneers of Christian mission work in Cameroon, the British Baptists, two years after this part of west-central Africa had been brought under German colonial rule in 1884. Their challenge was founded on the key objectives of consolidating and expanding the web of christian communities which had been established along the Atlantic coast north of the Wouri estuary.Today, just over 110 years later, traces of the Basel Mission's enterprise are widely spread over the Anglophone South West and North West Provinces of Cameroon. These remnants of the past have been partly reshaped to suit the specific patterns of church activities and administration among their African target groups; partly they have been effaced through the erosive impact of time. But only partly, for numerous episodes and aspects of this chapter on religious and social history are well documented both in substantial collections of records and in several publications.

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