The Evacuation of Shekomeko and the Early Moravian Missions to Native North Americans

The Evacuation of Shekomeko and the Early Moravian Missions to Native North Americans
Author: Karl-Wilhelm Westmeier
Publisher: Lewiston, N.Y. : Edwin Mellon Press
Total Pages: 480
Release: 1994
Genre: History
ISBN:

Based on extensive handwritten Moravian sources, but also using ethno-historical methods, this study evaluates the approach of the missionaries and the Native Americans' response in light of the reactions of the colonial whites who desired the destruction of the mission. It explores the conflict between Church/mission and State/society in view of Americanization processes, examining early American racism and its effects beyond the closing of Shekomeko to the Native American communities at large, especially with regard to their growing resistance to the Christian message. It seeks to contribute not only to missiology but also to the ethnohistory of America and anthropology and sociology, especially in the narrower fields of peace and racial studies.

Moravian Soundscapes

Moravian Soundscapes
Author: Sarah Justina Eyerly
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253047730

In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments—or soundscapes—characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhütten, and Friedenshütten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds—musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman—shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.

From Homeland to New Land

From Homeland to New Land
Author: William A. Starna
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2020-03-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496210581

This history of the Mahicans begins with the appearance of Europeans on the Hudson River in 1609 and ends with the removal of these Native people to Wisconsin in the 1830s. Marshaling the methods of history, ethnology, and archaeology, William A. Starna describes as comprehensively as the sources allow the Mahicans while in their Hudson and Housatonic Valley homel? after their consolidation at the praying town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts; and following their move to Oneida country in central New York at the end of the Revolution and their migration west. The emphasis throughout this book is on describing and placing into historical context Mahican relations with surrounding Native groups: the Munsees of the lower Hudson, eastern Iroquoians, and the St. Lawrence and New England Algonquians. Starna also examines the Mahicans’ interactions with Dutch, English, and French interlopers. The first and most transformative of these encounters was with the Dutch and the trade in furs, which ushered in culture change and the loss of Mahican lands. The Dutch presence, along with the new economy, worked to unsettle political alliances in the region that, while leading to new alignments, often engendered rivalries and war. The result is an outstanding examination of the historical record that will become the definitive work on the Mahican people from the colonial period to the Removal Era.

Encounters of the Spirit

Encounters of the Spirit
Author: Richard W. Pointer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2007-09-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253116899

Historians have long been aware that the encounter with Europeans affected all aspects of Native American life. But were Indians the only ones changed by these cross-cultural meetings? Might the newcomers' ways, including their religious beliefs and practices, have also been altered amid their myriad contacts with native peoples? In Encounters of the Spirit, Richard W. Pointer takes up these intriguing questions in an innovative study of the religious encounter between Indians and Euro-Americans in early America. Exploring a series of episodes across the three centuries of the colonial era and stretching from New Spain to New France and the English settlements, he finds that the flow of cultural influence was more often reciprocal than unidirectional.

Early American Indian Documents

Early American Indian Documents
Author: Alden T. Vaughan
Publisher: Washington, D.C. : University Publications of America
Total Pages: 720
Release: 1979
Genre: Indians of North America
ISBN: 9780890931806

Tears of Repentance

Tears of Repentance
Author: Julius H. Rubin
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2013-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 080324567X

Tears of Repentance revisits and reexamines the familiar stories of intercultural encounters between Protestant missionaries and Native peoples in southern New England from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Protestant missionaries’ accounts of their ideals, purposes, and goals among the Native communities they served and of the religion as lived, experienced, and practiced among Christianized Indians, Julius H. Rubin offers a new way of understanding the motives and motivations of those who lived in New England’s early Christianized Indian village communities. Rubin explores how Christian Indians recast Protestant theology into an Indianized quest for salvation from their worldly troubles and toward the promise of an otherworldly paradise. The Great Awakening of the eighteenth century reveals how evangelical pietism transformed religious identities and communities and gave rise to the sublime hope that New Born Indians were children of God who might effectively contest colonialism. With this dream unfulfilled, the exodus from New England to Brothertown envisioned a separatist Christian Indian commonwealth on the borderlands of America after the Revolution. Tears of Repentance is an important contribution to American colonial and Native American history, offering new ways of examining how Native groups and individuals recast Protestant theology to restore their Native communities and cultures.

Missions and Unity

Missions and Unity
Author: Norman E. Thomas
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1608996026

This study is the first comprehensive history of the impact of the modern missionary movement on the understanding of and work toward Christian unity. It tells stories from all branches of the church: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant in its many types (conciliar, evangelical, Pentecostal, and independent). Part 1, "Historical," highlights the contribution of modern missions to Christian unity, from William Carey and his antecedents and peers to present-day missions. Part 2, "Ten Models of Unity," takes an inductive approach to history, asking not "how should Christians cooperate?" but "how has the missionary movement helped Christians to work together at the local, national, regional, and global level?" Part 3, "Wider Ecumenism," broadens the evidence to include how the missions movement has helped not only institutional churches but also broader society to have concern for the unity of the entire human family. Included here is the story of how the Protestant missionary movement influenced the forming of the United Nations as well as the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The study also covers the movement's impact on Christian attitudes toward, and relations with, persons of other faiths. Mission and Unity is the standard reference work in the field for persons studying modern history, modern church history, missions, and ecumenics.

A Biographical Study of Ingwer Ludwig Nommensen, 1834-1918

A Biographical Study of Ingwer Ludwig Nommensen, 1834-1918
Author: Martin E. Lehmann
Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 1996
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780773489639

Based on primary and secondary sources, this study evaluates Nommensen's basic beliefs, his missionary methods, collegial spirit, and his strategy from missiological, ecclesial and sociological perspectives.

Religion and Profit

Religion and Profit
Author: Katherine Carté Engel
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2013-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 081220185X

The Moravians, a Protestant sect founded in 1727 by Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and based in Germany, were key players in the rise of international evangelicalism. In 1741, after planting communities on the frontiers of empires throughout the Atlantic world, they settled the communitarian enclave of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in order to spread the Gospel to thousands of nearby colonists and Native Americans. In time, the Moravians became some of early America's most successful missionaries. Such vast projects demanded vast sums. Bethlehem's Moravians supported their work through financial savvy and an efficient brand of communalism. Moravian commercial networks, stretching from the Pennsylvania backcountry to Europe's financial capitals, also facilitated their efforts. Missionary outreach and commerce went hand in hand for this group, making it impossible to understand the Moravians' religious work without appreciating their sophisticated economic practices as well. Of course, making money in a manner that be fitted a Christian organization required considerable effort, but it was a balancing act that Moravian leaders embraced with vigor. Religion and Profit traces the Moravians' evolving mission projects, their strategies for supporting those missions, and their gradual integration into the society of eighteenth-century North America. Katherine Carté Engel demonstrates the complex influence Moravian religious life had on the group's economic practices, and argues that the imperial conflict between Euro-Americans and Native Americans, and not the growth of capitalism or a process of secularization, ultimately reconfigured the circumstances of missionary work for the Moravians, altering their religious lives and economic practices.

Protestant Pentecostalism in Latin America

Protestant Pentecostalism in Latin America
Author: Karl-Wilhelm Westmeier
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 178
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780838638347

This book is a theological-missiological study on the intercultural communication of Faith, drawing heavily from anthropological, sociological, and historical sources. The book is helpful to church workers in Latin America, to colleagues who teach both on college and seminary levels, to scholars who research the phenomenon of Latin American Protestantism, to students to Latin American studies, and in religion and culture in general.