James G. Bleak's Annals of the Southern Mission (1900-1907) number 2,266 loose and lined pages and represent the finest early history of Southern Utah stretching from its initial Mormon settlement in 1849 into the early years of the twentieth century. Bleak submitted the first portion of the history, numbering over 500 pages, to the Church Historian's Office in April 1903. He submitted additional increments of the manuscript when he visited Salt Lake City, usually for general conferences. He delivered the final installment of his Annals to the Historian's Office in October 1907. The complete holograph manuscript has been in the continuous custody of the Church History Department (formerly the Church Historian's Office) ever since. Carefully transcribed and annotated by Aaron McArthur and Reid L. Neilson, this important work provides a detailed historical, ecclesiastical, agricultural, governmental, and cultural record of Southern Utah in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Southern Baptists had long considered themselves a missionary people, but when, after World War II, they embarked on a dramatic expansion of missionary efforts, they confronted headlong the problem of racism. Believing that racism hindered their evangelical efforts, the Convention's full-time missionaries and mission board leaders attacked racism as unchristian, thus finding themselves at odds with the pervasive racist and segregationist ideologies that dominated the South. This progressive view of race stressed the biblical unity of humanity, encompassing all races and transcending specific ethnic divisions. In All According to God's Plan, Alan Scot Willis explores these beliefs and the chasm they created within the Convention. He shows how, in the post-World War II era, the most respected members of the Southern Baptists Convention publicly challenged the most dearly held ideologies of the white South.

Honourable Intentions? compares the significance and strategic use of ‘honour’ in two colonial societies, the Cape Colony and the early British settlements in Australia, between 1750 and 1850. The mobile populations of emigrants and sojourners, sailors and soldiers, merchants and traders, slaves and convicts who surged into and through these regions are not usually associated with ideas of honour. But in both societies, competing and contradictory notions of honour proved integral to the ways in which colonisers and colonised, free and unfree, defended their status and insisted on their right to be treated with respect. During these times of flux, concepts of honour and status were radically reconstructed. Each of the thirteen chapters considers honour in a particular sphere - legal, political, religious or personal - and in different contexts determined by the distinctive and changing matrix of race, gender and class, as well as the distinctions of free and unfree status in each colony. Early chapters in the volume show how and why the political, ideological and moral stakes of the concept of honour were particularly important in colonial societies; later chapters look more closely at the social behaviour and the purchase of honour among specific groups. Collectively, the chapters show that there was no clear distinction between political and social life, and that honour crossed between the public and private spheres. This exciting new collection brings together new and established historians of Australia and South Africa to highlight thought-provoking parallels and contrasts between the Cape and Australian colonies that will be of interest to all scholars of colonial societies and the concept of honour.

Three master narratives currently dominate the analysis of modern mission history.?One puts foreign missionaries at the heart of the story.?A second emphasizes the colonial aspect of modern missions.?Here, missionaries are not heroes but villains, who are implicated in hegemonic schemes of imperial domination.?Thirdly, mission history is subordinated to one of its outcomes, the advent of World Christianity.?In this master narrative, the concept of contextualization looms large, bolstered by Sanneh's notion of translatability and emphasis on the agency of non-Westerners, who participate in and subtly shape the complex social processes of evangelization.?While all three of these master narratives are insightful, none of them adequately balances concern for missionary initiative and indigenous agency.?? Borrowing from speech-act theory, Skreslet offers a new analytical approach to the modern roots of World Christianity that differentiates between what a speaker might intend to communicate and the effects of what has been said or actions taken both in the moment and over time.?Corresponding to the concepts of illocution and perlocution as these technical terms are used in speech-act theory, the book is structured in two main sections.?Initially, the focus is on expressed missionary motives. Part two engages a representative set of modern-era mission performances involving many more actors than just the foreign evangelizers whose stated or implied intentions are emphasized in part one.

The Farmerfield Mission explores the history of a residential Christian community in South Africa established for Africans in 1838 by Methodist missionaries, destroyed in 1962 by the apartheid government when it was zoned as an exclusive area for white occupation, and returned to the descendants of the community under South Africa's land reform program in 1999.