Reflections on the Contemporary World Mission

1976 ◽  
Vol os-26 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Eugene L. Stockwell

We come together today as a new Unit Committee of the Division of Overseas Ministries (DOM) at the beginning of the 1976–1978 triennium of the National Council of Churches. During this meeting, and in the months ahead, we will face important decisions which, given the magnitude of both the problems we confront and the resources we can tap, will be pressing and fateful. It would be foolish to exaggerate our role — there is very real sense in which our ecumenical vehicle is fragile and weak, far less influential on the world, national, ecclesiastical, scenes than we are prone to admit — but it would be folly as well to underrate the realistic and timely role we can assume in the exercise of the Christian stewardship expected of us in our day. Allow me to commence with a very personal recollection — perhaps unduly personal. Exactly fifty years ago this year – in 1926 — my father and mother sailed out of New York harbor bound for Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was three years old at the time and they took me along. They were setting out on an overseas ministry in the year of our nation's sesquicentennial though I doubt that they gave that fact much importance. I now look back on this ministry from the year of our nation's bicentennial and wonder at the immense changes in the context of mission and ministry between 1926 and 1976. My father was quite clear about one purpose in 1926, a clarity he never lost however unclear he might have felt in other areas of his work — he was determined to do what he could to train young men and women for the fulltime

1987 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 112-117

Eugene L. Stockwell is Director of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, where his father was studying theology, and was raised from the age of three in Argentina, where his father served as president of Union Theological Seminary in Buenos Aires. As a young man Stockwell studied and practiced law before deciding to enter Union Theological Seminary (New York) and the ministry. He and his wife worked as United Methodist missionaries for ten years in Uruguay, from 1952 to 1962. This was followed by two years as Latin American Secretary of the Methodist Board of Missions and then eight years as Assistant General Secretary for Program Administration. In 1972 Stockwell became Associate General Secretary for Overseas Ministries of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. He took up his present responsibilities in Geneva in 1984. While visiting at the Overseas Ministries Study Center recently, Stockwell shared some of his thoughts on developments and directions in world mission with Editor Gerald H. Anderson and Research Assistant Robert T. Coote of the International Bulletin.


1979 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-9
Author(s):  
Eugene Carson Blake

Eugene Carson Blake has in recent years been actively associated with the Christian citizens' movement, Bread for the World. Before retiring as Secretary of the World Council of Churches in 1972, he served both church and society in many leading capacities, as a distinguished pastor, the chief executive officer of his denomination (the United Presbyterian Church), university and seminary trustee, and president of the National Council of Churches. In 1960, he preached a sermon in the Episcopal Cathedral of San Francisco, where the late James A. Pike was Bishop. This sermon, welcomed by the Bishop, led to the establishment of the Consultation on Church Union. In the forefront of the civil rights movement, Blake was jailed, vilified, and denounced as a communist. In 1978, he was made the subject of a biography, Eugene Carson Blake: Prophet With Portfolio, by R. Douglas Brackenridge (Seabury Press). This present essay is a revised version of an address delivered at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, as “The Willson Lecture.”


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 84 (1) ◽  
pp. 164-164
Author(s):  
Student

AIDS quickly became a global event—discussed not only in New York, Paris, Rio, Kinshasa but also in Helsinki, Buenos Aires, Beijing, and Singapore—when it was far from the leading cause of death in Africa, much less in the world. There are famous diseases, as there are famous countries, and these are not necessarily the ones with the biggest populations. AIDS did not become so famous just because it afflicts whites too, as some Africans bitterly assert. But it is certainly true that were AIDS only an African disease, however many millions were dying, few outside of Africa would be concerned with it. It would be one of those "natural" events, like famines, which periodically ravage poor, overpopulated countries and about which people in rich countries feel quite helpless. Because it is a world event—that is, because it affects the West—it is regarded as not just a natural disaster. It is filled with historical meaning. (Part of the self-definition of Europe and the neo-European countries is that it, the First World, is where major calamities are history-making, transformative, while in poor, African or Asian countries they are part of a cycle, and therefore something like an aspect of nature.)


Author(s):  
Russell Janzen

This chapter seeks to determine what makes for a contemporary partnership on the ballet stage through an examination of gender roles and choreographic invention in three works created for the New York City Ballet in 2017. While choreographers often strive to make new, of-the-moment dances, traditional ballet training still holds strong, turning out dancers whose bodies and abilities adhere to ideals established long ago. This perpetuation of antiquated ideas of masculinity and femininity limits the ways in which ballet partnerships are able to reflect the world of today. After a brief overview of the expectations put on men and women in ballet, with an emphasis on partnering class and partnering techniques, the chapter looks at how Pontus Lidberg, Justin Peck, and Lauren Lovette, each utilizing different approaches, used choreography to craft contemporary partnerships in their new works for the New York City Ballet in 2017.


1992 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 495-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
C Katz

Feminism, decolonization, and ‘new social movements’ have decentered the geopolitical power of the ‘First World’ and ruptured the relations of exploitation, domination, and imperialism that undergird it and the authority of the white, male, ruling class, Western subject. The tensions and reorientations in the macrological sphere resonate in social and cultural discourse where feminist theory, poststructuralism, and subaltern studies have called into question the subject positions associated with these relations of power. Rather than making clear that all observers and commentators stand someplace, this ‘sea change’ left many intellectuals adrift, flirting with disabling relativism. Given the projects of representing how others stand and understanding the ground on which they stand, ethnographers have been late to recognize their complicity in masking their own positions as they construct the objects of their inquiry. As intellectuals operating in a postcolonial world, we must take seriously Spivak's admonition about representation as a staging of the world in a political context and begin to connect the ‘micrological textures of power’ with larger political-economic relations. In this expanded field, we can no longer valorize the concrete experience of oppressed peoples while remaining uncritical of our role as intellectuals. Neither can we presume to speak for or about peoples and nations as if they were outside of the contemporary world system, refusing to recognize that our ability to construct them as such is rooted in a larger system of domination. In this paper the author develops these themes by offering a critique of familiar modes and practices of representation and draws on ethnographic research in New York City and rural Sudan to argue that by interrogating the subject positions of ourselves as intellectuals as well as the objects of our inquiry we can excavate a ‘space of betweenness’ wherein the multiple determinations of a decentered world are connected. Appropriating this knowledge we may develop enabling analyses of power and difference to find collective paths toward change.


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