Das Verhaltnis christlicher Missionare und Missionsgesellschaften gegenuber den politischen Machthabern und Bewegungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert steht im Mittelpunkt des Sammelbandes. Die Beitrage analysieren sowohl die wechselseitigen Beziehungen der Leitungen von Missionsgesellschaften zu den jeweiligen Regierungen in Europa als auch das Verhaltnis ihrer Missionare - Manner und Frauen - auf den Arbeitsfeldern in Asien und Afrika zu den lokal bzw. regional maageblichen politischen Kraften (Kolonialmachte eigener oder fremder Nationalitat, souverane Staaten, lokale politische Systeme und Unabhangigkeitsbewegungen) in den einzelnen Facetten. Aus dem Inhalt C. Auffarth: aWeltreligiono als ein Leitbegriff der Religionswissenschaft im Imperialismus T. de Souza: D. Jose da Costa Nunes - a Patriarch who Cared for More than Souls: a Case of Caesaro-papism in Portuguese India, 1942-1953 R. Elphick: Dutch Reformed Missions and the Roots of the Apartheid Ideology W. Ustorf: Kairos 1933 - Occidentosis, Christofascism, and Mission K. Poewe: Liberalism, German Missionaries, and National Socialism u.a.

Mohammad Salama teaches Arabic in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at San Francisco State University. --Book Jacket.

A lot of what we know about “exotic languages” is owed to the linguistic activities of missionaries. They had the languages put into writing, described their grammar and lexicon, and worked towards a standardization, which often came with Eurocentric manipulation. Colonial missionary work as intellectual (religious) conquest formed part of the Europeans' political colonial rule, although it sometimes went against the specific objectives of the official administration. In most cases, it did not help to stop (or even reinforced) the displacement and discrimination of those languages, despite oftentimes providing their very first (sometimes remarkable, sometimes incorrect) descriptions. This volume presents exemplary studies on Catholic and Protestant missionary linguistics, in the framework of the respective colonial situation and policies under Spanish, German, or British rule. The contributions cover colonial contexts in Latin America, Africa, and Asia across the centuries. They demonstrate how missionaries dealing with linguistic analyses and descriptions cooperated with colonial institutions and how their linguistic knowledge contributed to European domination.

Motivated by a theology that declared missionary work was independent of secular colonial pursuits, Protestant missionaries from Germany operated in ways that contradict current and prevailing interpretations of nineteenth-century missionary work. As a result of their travels, these missionaries contributed to Germany’s colonial culture. Because of their theology of Christian universalism, they worked against the bigoted racialism and ultra-nationalism of secular German empire-building. Heavenly Fatherland provides a detailed political and cultural analysis of missionaries, mission societies, mission intellectuals, and missionary supporters. Combining case studies from East Africa with studies of the metropole, this book demonstrates that missionaries’ ideas about race and colonialism influenced ordinary Germans’ experience of globalization and colonialism at the same time that the missionaries shaped colonial governance. By bringing together religious and colonial history, the book opens new avenues of inquiry into Christian participation in colonialism. During the Age of Empire, German missionaries promoted an internationalist vision of the modern world that aimed to create a multinational, multiracial "heavenly Fatherland" spread across the globe.

The First World War led to a fundamental reorganization of international relations. This had a profound impact on churches and mission agencies and their ecumenical networks. European Christianity was increasingly questioned. The shock was all the greater since the war alliances were formed without taking religious orientation into consideration. This volume examines the impact of the war on church and mission especially in Africa and Asia. The contributions provide a wide scope of historical analyses with a focus on the Hermannsburg Mission. The symposium was organized by the Ludwig-Harms-Kuratorium and the Fachhochschule für Interkulturelle Theologie Hermannsburg in 2018.

In German Religious Women in Late Ottoman Beirut. Competing Missions, Julia Hauser offers a critical analysis of the German Protestant Kaiserswerth deaconesses’ orphanage and boarding school for girls in late Ottoman Beirut as situated within the larger field of educational development in the city. Drawing, among other sources, on the deaconesses’ largely unpublished letters home, her study illuminates that the only way missionary organizations like the deaconesses' could succeed was by entering into negotiations with their local environment, adapting their agenda in the process. Mission, therefore, was shaped not merely at home, but by conflictual negotiations on the periphery ‒ a perspective quite different from the top-down isolationist perspective of earlier research on missions.

With its rapid industrialization, modernization, and gradual democratization, Imperial Germany has typically been understood in secular terms. However, religion and religious actors actually played crucial roles in the history of the Kaiserreich, a fact that becomes particularly evident when viewed through a transnational lens. In this volume, leading scholars of sociology, religious studies, and history study the interplay of secular and religious worldviews beyond the simple interrelation of practices and ideas. By exploring secular perspectives, belief systems, and rituals in a transnational context, they provide new ways of understanding how the borders between Imperial Germany’s secular and religious spheres were continually made and remade.