Protestant Missionaries in the Levant

Protestant Missionaries in the Levant
Author: Samir Khalaf
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0415505445

This book examines the work of protestant missionaries in the 19th century Levant, their interaction with the local population, and religious and cultural legacy.

Report to the Prudential Committee of a Visit to the Missions in the Levant (Classic Reprint)

Report to the Prudential Committee of a Visit to the Missions in the Levant (Classic Reprint)
Author: Rufus Anderson
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Total Pages: 58
Release: 2018-01-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780483017429

Excerpt from Report to the Prudential Committee of a Visit to the Missions in the Levant Protestant preachers of every name, episcopal and non-episcopal, are looked upon as unbaptised heretics. There is, moreover, the tyranny of the Greek church, and the dreadful terror'of excommunication on the part Of the people, requiring the deepest convictions of the truth to sustain the inquirer against the threats of his spiritual guides; and, connected with this, there is the almost universal and decided hostility of the Greek clergy to every Protestant movement. The patriarch and synod at Constantinople are believed to be not less Opposed to the circulation of the Scriptures in the vernacular tongue, than the Pope and Cardinals at Rome. And it is time for us to consider the disproportion that exists between the means that have been employed, and the results. Twenty-seven ordained missionaries of different denominations have labored more or less in this field. A million copies of books and tracts have been printed by different missionary societies, and scattered broad cast over the Greek community. Two hundred thousand copies of the New Testament and parts of the Old, have been put in circulation in the modern Greek language. Not a small number of Greek young men have been educated in America and England, by benevolent individuals and societies; and more than ten thousand Greek youth have been more or less educated in Greece and Turkey at the schools of the various missions. And yet, not ten persons are known, who are confidently believed to have been truly converted to God by these means! How unlike these results to those we find among the Armenians! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

American Apostles

American Apostles
Author: Christine Leigh Heyrman
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2015-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0809023989

In "American Apostles" Christine Leigh Heyrman chronicles the first fateful collision between American missionaries and the diverse religious cultures of the Levant. Pliny Fisk, Levi Parsons, and Jonas King became the founding members of the Palestine mission and ventured to Ottoman Turkey, Egypt, and Syria, where they sought to expose the falsity of Muhammad's creed and to restore these bastions of Islam to true Christianity. Not only among the first Americans to travel throughout the Middle East, the Palestine missionaries also played a crucial role in shaping their compatriots' understanding of the Muslim world. "American Apostles "brings to life evangelicals' first encounters with the Middle East and uncovers their complicated legacy. The Palestine mission held the promise of acquainting Americans with a fuller and more accurate understanding of Islam, but ultimately it bolstered a more militant Christianity, one that became the unofficial creed of the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. The political and religious consequences of that outcome endure to this day.

After-Mission, Beyond Evangelicalism

After-Mission, Beyond Evangelicalism
Author: Najib George Awad
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2020-11-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 900444436X

After-Mission touches on on three questions.The first question is about self-perception and identity-formation strategies, and the various views that we have on the Protestants’ relation to their Arab Muslim Middle Eastern context. The second question, about the theological dimension, asks what kind of a theological discourse do the Protestants need to develop, and how do they need to re-form their own theological heritage, in such a manner that will allow them to heal the historical enmity and suspicion towards them from the Eastern Orthodox Christian community in the region? Finally, the third question touches on the Protestants’ future in the Arab Muslim Middle East by viewing this inquiry from a broader perspective that is related to all the Middle Eastern Christian communities’ presence and role in the Muslim-majority context. The question of identity formation, and the managing of difference without trapping it in the mud of ‘otherizing and self-otherizing’, will also be tackled, so that the theological dimension is integrated with the broader, multifaceted contextual one.

Artillery of Heaven

Artillery of Heaven
Author: Ussama Makdisi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2011-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801457742

The complex relationship between America and the Arab world goes back further than most people realize. In Artillery of Heaven, Ussama Makdisi presents a foundational American encounter with the Arab world that occurred in the nineteenth century, shortly after the arrival of the first American Protestant missionaries in the Middle East. He tells the dramatic tale of the conversion and death of As'ad Shidyaq, the earliest Arab convert to American Protestantism. The struggle over this man's body and soul—and over how his story might be told—changed the actors and cultures on both sides. In the unfamiliar, multireligious landscape of the Middle East, American missionaries at first conflated Arabs with Native Americans and American culture with an uncompromising evangelical Christianity. In turn, their Christian and Muslim opponents in the Ottoman Empire condemned the missionaries as malevolent intruders. Yet during the ensuing confrontation within and across cultures an unanticipated spirit of toleration was born that cannot be credited to either Americans or Arabs alone. Makdisi provides a genuinely transnational narrative for this new, liberal awakening in the Middle East, and the challenges that beset it. By exploring missed opportunities for cultural understanding, by retrieving unused historical evidence, and by juxtaposing for the first time Arab perspectives and archives with American ones, this book counters a notion of an inevitable clash of civilizations and thus reshapes our view of the history of America in the Arab world.

Spreading the Word

Spreading the Word
Author: Peter J. Wosh
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2018-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501711458

Civil war, the completion of transcontinental railroads, rapid urbanization and industrialization, the rise of managerial capitalism, and new entanglements abroad rent the fabric of life in nineteenth-century America. Through all the turmoil, the American Bible Society thrived. This engaging book tells how a modest antebellum reform agency responded to cataclysmic social change and grew to be a nonprofit corporate bureaucracy that managed, among other projects, what was one of the largest publishing houses in the United States.