Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion surveys two thousand years of the Christian missionary enterprise in the Middle East within the context of the region's political evolution. Its broad, rich narrative follows Christian missions as they interacted with imperial powers and as the momentum of religious change shifted from Christianity to Islam and back, adding new dimensions to the history of the region and the nature of the relationship between the Middle East and the West. Historians and political scientists increasingly recognize the importance of integrating religion into political analysis, and this volume, using long-neglected sources, uniquely advances this effort. It surveys Christian missions from the earliest days of Christianity to the present, paying particular attention to the role of Christian missions, both Protestant and Catholic, in shaping the political and economic imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon delineate the ongoing tensions between conversion and the focus on witness and "good works" within the missionary movement, which contributed to the development and spread of nongovernmental organizations. Through its conscientious, systematic study, this volume offers an unparalleled encounter with the social, political, and economic consequences of such trends.

Explores how Catholic missionaries, merchants, and adventurers brought their faith to the strategically and commercially crucial region of Southeast Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Is the language of mission clearly evident across the broad reaches of time? Or has the modern missionary enterprise distorted our view of the past? Michael Stroope investigates how the modern church has come to understand, speak of, and engage in the global expansion of Christianity, offering a hopeful way forward in this pressing conversation.

This volume takes its title from the first-century Christian catechism called the Didache: “Even as this broken bread was scattered over the hills . . . gathered together and became one, so let Your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth.” For Christians today, these words remain relevant in an era of massive human movements (voluntary and coerced), hybrid identities, and wide-ranging cultural interactions. How do modern Christians live as both a “scattered” and “gathered” people? How do they live out the tension between ecclesial universality (catholicity) and particularity (distinctive ways of being church in a given culture and context)? Do Christians today constitute a “diaspora,” a people dispersed across borders and cultures that nonetheless maintains a sense of commonality and mission? Scattered and Gathered: Catholics in Diaspora explores these questions through the work of fourteen scholars in different fields and from different corners of the world. Whether through reflections on Zimbabweans in Britain, Levantines in North America, or the remote island people of Chiloé now living in other parts of Chile, they guide readers along the winding road of insights and challenges facing many of today’s Christians.

This book focuses on history, and the use of Mary as either a bridge or barrier between Islam and Christianity.

Across the Middle East in the post–World War I era, European strategic moves converged with late Ottoman political practice and a newly emboldened Zionist movement to create an unprecedented push to physically divide ethnic and religious minorities from Arab Muslim majorities. States of Separation tells how the interwar Middle East became a site for internationally sanctioned experiments in ethnic separation enacted through violent strategies of population transfer and ethnic partition. During Britain’s and France’s interwar occupation of Iraq, Palestine, and Syria, the British and French mandate governments and the League of Nations undertook a series of varied but linked campaigns of ethnic removal and separation targeting the Armenian, Assyrian, and Jewish communities within these countries. Such schemes served simultaneously as a practical method of controlling colonial subjects and as a rationale for imposing a neo-imperial international governance, with long-standing consequences for the region. Placing the histories of Iraq, Palestine, and Syria within a global context of emerging state systems intent on creating new forms of international authority, in States of Separation Laura Robson sheds new light on the emergence of ethnic separatism in the modern Middle East.