Globalizing Mission Studies

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444). This special issue belongs to the section "Religions and Health/Psychology/Social Sciences".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2024) | Viewed by 319

Special Issue Editors


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of History, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA
Interests: spanish borderlands of early america; american west; california history; california indigenous peoples

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of History, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203, USA
Interests: colonial latin american history; mission history; borderlands studies

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In this increasingly connected global world, religious missions have played a formative role for thousands of years.  Religious missionaries have crossed the globe, often in advance of colonizers and at other times in support of imperial expansions.  Thus, they are at the heart of the encounters of diverse peoples. In the missionaries’ wake has followed enormous and lasting change that has helped to form the globalized modern world.

This Special Issue of Religions will highlight new approaches to the study of religious missions across the globe and through millennia. Whereas an older historiography might have focused on the missionaries themselves and glorified their deeds, and contemporary scholarship often highlights the cultural losses suffered by “missionized” Indigenous peoples, our project hopes to reveal the effects and enduring legacies of the missionaries’ work among local peoples, the ways in which colonial encounters were shaped and influenced by religious thought, and how these colonial encounters affected local communities. Hence, this Special Issue proposes a forum for new and emerging scholarship that will expand our understanding of missions, missionaries, and their work while also attending to cultural exchanges and the lives of the missionized.

Historically, scholarship has focused nearly exclusively on Catholic missions and missionaries. Yet we encourage a decentered approach that encompasses other missionary and evangelical traditions from different times and regions across the globe. Overall, we hope to engage different periodizations and conceptualizations of mission studies and new theoretical approaches.   

  • We invite contributions that envision missions as global institutions of conquest and colonization as well as demographic, social, cultural, economic, religious, and political change;
  • We invite contributions that are explicitly comparative and take up questions that involve examining the differences and similarities between missions in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, as well as between Catholic and Protestant missions and other evangelical traditions;
  • We further invite contributions that address race and gender as significant influences in the missionary experience;
  • We encourage investigations of new ways of understanding Native and local responses to missionary programs;
  • We also invite contributions to the growing historiographical literature on missions and the conceptual understandings of the missionary enterprise as seen by different religious traditions;
  • We invite studies that are explicitly interdisciplinary.

Finally, we encourage studies of missions that interrogate how societies have remembered and commemorated missionaries and their legacies, not just in words, but in other forms of cultural expression also.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Steven Hackel
Dr. David Rex Galindo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • globalization
  • missions
  • missionaries
  • evangelism
  • religious change
  • acculturation
  • indigeneity

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Published Papers

There is no accepted submissions to this special issue at this moment.
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