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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Christian institutions & organizations > Christian mission & evangelism
Rebecca's Revival is the remarkable story of a Caribbean woman--a
slave turned evangelist--who helped inspire the rise of black
Christianity in the Atlantic world. All but unknown today, Rebecca
Protten left an enduring influence on African-American religion and
society. Born in 1718, Protten had a childhood conversion
experience, gained her freedom from bondage, and joined a group of
German proselytizers from the Moravian Church. She embarked on an
itinerant mission, preaching to hundreds of the enslaved Africans
of St. Thomas, a Danish sugar colony in the West Indies. Laboring
in obscurity and weathering persecution from hostile planters,
Protten and other black preachers created the earliest African
Protestant congregation in the Americas. Protten's eventful
life--the recruiting of converts, an interracial marriage, a trial
on charges of blasphemy and inciting of slaves, travels to Germany
and West Africa--placed her on the cusp of an emerging
international Afro-Atlantic evangelicalism. Her career provides a
unique lens on this prophetic movement that would soon sweep
through the slave quarters of the Caribbean and North America,
radically transforming African-American culture. Jon Sensbach has
pieced together this forgotten life of a black visionary from
German, Danish, and Dutch records, including letters in Protten's
own hand, to create an astounding tale of one woman's freedom
amidst the slave trade. Protten's life, with its evangelical
efforts on three continents, reveals the dynamic relations of the
Atlantic world and affords great insight into the ways black
Christianity developed in the New World.
A pioneer in the commercialization of religion, George
Whitefield (1714-1770) is seen by many as the most powerful leader
of the Great Awakening in America: through his passionate ministry
he united local religious revivals into a national movement before
there was a nation. An itinerant British preacher who spent much of
his adult life in the American colonies, Whitefield was an
immensely popular speaker. Crossing national boundaries and
ignoring ecclesiastical controls, he preached outdoors or in public
houses and guild halls. In London, crowds of more than thirty
thousand gathered to hear him, and his audiences exceeded twenty
thousand in Philadelphia and Boston. In this fresh interpretation
of Whitefield and his age, Frank Lambert focuses not so much on the
evangelist's oratorical skills as on the marketing techniques that
he borrowed from his contemporaries in the commercial world. What
emerges is a fascinating account of the birth of consumer culture
in the eighteenth century, especially the new advertising methods
available to those selling goods and services--or salvation.
Whitefield faced a problem similar to that of the new Atlantic
merchants: how to reach an ever-expanding audience of anonymous
strangers, most of whom he would never see face-to-face. To contact
this mass "congregation," Whitefield exploited popular print,
especially newspapers. In addition, he turned to a technique later
imitated by other evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody, Billy
Sunday, and Billy Graham: the deployment of advance publicity teams
to advertise his coming presentations. Immersed in commerce
themselves, Whitefield's auditors appropriated him as a
well-publicized English import. He preached against the excesses
and luxuries of the spreading consumer society, but he drew heavily
on the new commercialism to explain his mission to himself and to
his transatlantic audience.
Christianity is often praised as an agent of Chinese modernization
or damned as a form of cultural and religious imperialism. In both
cases, Christianity's foreignness and the social isolation of
converts have dominated this debate. Eugenio Menegon uncovers
another story. In the sixteenth century, European missionaries
brought a foreign and global religion to China. Converts then
transformed this new religion into a local one over the course of
the next three centuries. Focusing on the still-active Catholic
communities of Fuan county in northeast Fujian, this project
addresses three main questions. Why did people convert? How did
converts and missionaries transform a global and foreign religion
into a local religion? What does Christianity's localization in
Fuan tell us about the relationship between late imperial Chinese
society and religion? Based on an impressive array of sources from
Asia and Europe, this pathbreaking book reframes our understanding
of Christian missions in Chinese-Western relations. The study's
implications extend beyond the issue of Christianity in China to
the wider fields of religious and social history and the early
modern history of global intercultural relations. The book suggests
that Christianity became part of a preexisting pluralistic, local
religious space, and argues that we have so far underestimated late
imperial society's tolerance for "heterodoxy." The view from Fuan
offers an original account of how a locality created its own
religious culture in Ming-Qing China within a context both global
and local, and illuminates the historical dynamics contributing to
the remarkable growth of Christian communities in present-day
China.
![Practicing the Kingdom (Paperback): Justin Bronson Barringer, Maria Russell Kenney](//media.loot.co.za/images/x80/3498611139866179215.jpg) |
Practicing the Kingdom
(Paperback)
Justin Bronson Barringer, Maria Russell Kenney; Foreword by David P. Gushee
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R805
R661
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