Emotions and Christian Missions

This book explores the ways in which emotions were conceptualised and practised in Christian mission contexts from the 17th-20th centuries. The authors show how emotional practices such as prayer, tears, and Methodist 'shouting', and feelings such as pity, joy and frustration, shaped relationships between missionaries and prospective converts.

Autorentext

Claire McLisky is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Research Fellow at Griffith University in Australia. She has published articles on humanitarianism, settler colonialism and the role of emotions in Christian mission. Her current project compares the emotional economies of early colonial missions to Greenland and Australia.

Daniel Midena is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia, working on the intersection between science, religion and colonialism in the South Pacific. His past research was on the ethnographic activities and natural world view of German missionaries in New Guinea from 1886 until 1930.

Karen Vallgårda is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is the author of Imperial Childhood and Christian Mission: Education and Emotions in South India and Denmark, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) as well as articles on Christian mission, colonialism, religious conversion, the history of emotions, gender, race, and childhood. Her current project explores the emotional practices of divorce in Denmark.

Inhalt

Contents

Faith through Feeling: An Introduction; Claire McLisky and Karen Vallgårda 1. 'What Do You Mean by Prayer?': Emotion and Devotion in Thomas Wilson's Essay Towards an Instruction of the Indians (1740); Laura M. Stevens 2. German 'Shouting Methodists': Religious Emotion as a Transatlantic Cultural Practice; Monique Scheer 3. Neuendettelsau Missionaries, Objectivity and the Ethno-musicological Study of Papuan Emotions; Daniel Midena 4. Errant Hearts: Melancholy and Mission in the Spanish Philippines; Maria Cecilia Holt 5. A Complicated Pity: Emotion, Missions and the Conversion Narrative; Elizabeth Elbourne 6. Affective Circuits: Emotional transfer and Christian mission in Early Colonial Greenland and Australia; Claire McLisky 7. Converting Emotions: Domesticity and Self-Sacrifice in Female Missionary Writing; Angharad Eyre 8. The Evocation of Emotions in a Swedish Missionary Periodical; Hanna Acke 9. 'I feel that we belong to the one big family': Protestant Childhoods, Missions and Emotions in British World Settings, 1870s-1930s; Hugh Morrison Emotions, Missions and Colonial Histories: An Epilogue; Jacqueline Van Gent