Missions and media

Misisons and Media. The Politics of Missionary Periodicals in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2013

The nineteenth century saw the establishment of multitudes of missionary organisations , with many connected to evangelical Protestantism in Britain, continental Europe, North America and the British colonial world. To facilitate the dissemination of information about their work, missionary societies drew upon a variety of media available to them including the rousing immediacy of lectures from missionaries on furlough, the anonymity of missionary monographs and pamphlets, or the exotic nature of photographs and magic lantern shows from far flung places. All of these forms of missionary propaganda attempted to reach a broad range of people in order to engage them in the support of the missionary endeavour. Of these forms, one of the most enduring and multifaceted is that of the missionary periodical. Periodicals had a synthesise function as they were able to incorporate other media, such as reprints of missionary lectures, copies of sketches or photographs , serialised monographs, letters or reports. They differed from newspapers in so far as they appeared at greater intervals, and were more specialised. They were seen at the beginnings of the nineteenth century as closer in form to books, and by the end as part of mass consumption culture. 1 As missionary intelligence was often needed to be drawn together from disparate places, their regularity was more important than their actuality, with many societies relying upon old narratives , or those from other societies to fill the pages. Moreover, their preparation and dissemination was dependent upon vast geographical networks that often went beyond the confines of one missionary society, and thus were a product of, as well as contributing to, the web of missionary connections. Their function was multifaceted being utilised to influence the readership, to conjure support for missions , to construct images of the foreign 'other', and to help legitimise the missionary endeavour. They were in and of themselves a political media that both hoped to shape the beliefs of those who read them, as well as themselves being affected by church and state politics. Within this edited collection, the term politics is broadly understood to encompass activities pertaining to the acquisition or exercising of authority or status of one group or individual over another group or individual though either formal or informal means. This definition includes both the effects of the state on the

Nineteenth-Century Prose, 2005

Literature and Theology, 2004

analyses missionary writing under the aegis of the British Empire. Johnston argues that missionaries occupied ambiguous positions in colonial cultures, caught between imperial and religious interests. She maps out this position through an examination of texts published by missionaries of the largest, most influential nineteenth-century evangelical institution, the London Missionary Society. These texts provide a fascinating commentary on nineteenthcentury evangelism and colonialism, and illuminate complex relationships among white imperial subjects, white colonial subjects, and non-white colonial subjects. With their reformist and often prurient interest in sexual and familial relationships, missionary texts focussed imperial attention on gender and domesticity in colonial cultures. Johnston contends that in doing so, they rewrote imperial expansion as a moral allegory and confronted British ideologies of gender, race, and class. Texts from Indian, Polynesian, and Australian missions are examined to highlight their representation of nineteenth-century evangelical activity in relation to gender, colonialism, and race. anna johnston is Lecturer in Australian and Postcolonial Literature in the School of English, Journalism, and European Languages at the University of Tasmania. She is the co-editor of In Transit: Travel, Text, Empire (2002) with Helen Gilbert, and has published articles on missionary writing, postcolonial literature, and autobiography.

Church History, 2013

Missionary periodicals, like their secular counterparts (newspapers and magazines), had the potential to create and sustain media events—those rare and precious times when news coverage breaks out of the confines of its daily routines, allowing contemporaneous themes to surface and occupy center stage. However, mission publications had their specific ways of presenting these issues, which are cast most sharply into relief when the underlying occurrences affected both missions and society at large. It is at those junctures that mission publications became more receptive towards broader political, social, and cultural trends; conversely, society took greater notice of missionary activities than usual during these times.

The Review of English Studies, 2004

HTS teologiese studies, 2024

Christianity further advanced the dynamics of evangelical Protestantism, which played an important role in the tasks of internal expansion and nation-building which occupied Baptist Mission Society (B.M.S) in the nineteenth century and their interaction with the varied socioreligio-politico culture of India.

Semeia, 2001

S emeia is an experimental journal devoted to the exploration of new and emergent areas and methods of biblical criticism. Proposals for volumes employing the methods, models, and findings of linguistics, folklore studies, contemporary literary criticism, structuralism, social anthropology, and other such disciplines and approaches are invited.

Victorian Studies, 2012

Religious Periodicals and Publishing in Transnational Contexts: The Press and the Pulpit, 2017