Call for Papers: Global Perspectives on Peace, Conflict and Nineteenth-Century Christian Missions
Messengers of Peace? Global perspectives on peace, conflict and nineteenth-century Christian missions
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
12 July 2018
In a famous sermon launching the Missionary Society in 1795, Thomas Haweis proclaimed: ‘We meet under the conduct of the Prince of Peace; and unfurling the banner of his cross, desire to carry the glad tidings of his salvation to the distant lands sunk in heathen darkness, and covered with the shadow of death.’ Similar language was articulated in other places, suggesting that rhetorically, at least, peace language was prominent within the missionary world at the outset of the modern missionary enterprise. But what did such language amount to? How was peace understood, and how central and widespread were ideologies of peace and peacefulness within the global nineteenth-century missionary project? Were there distinctive missionary practices of peace, and what contingencies affected them?
Curiously, such questions have attracted little scholarly attention to date. The theme of peace has not been probed in detail, nor has there been any sustained analysis of nineteenth-century missionary peace ideologies more generally. This workshop aims to redress this situation, assessing missionary ideas and practices of the period in a global, comparative perspective.
While simplistic tropes of religion’s supposed propensity for violence ought rightly to be discarded, questions of peace must be understood in dynamic relation to violence, conflict and war – dimensions that have already received much greater attention. In the post-colonial context, for example, there has been widespread examination of the violence of colonial and imperial projects, and also, importantly, relationships between missions and empire. Burgeoning work on the history of humanitarianism has tended to emphasise moral ambivalence, including connections between violence, humanitarianism and empire.
The workshop will draw upon these strands of scholarship, but aims to move the research agenda forward, using peace as an analytical framework for examining nineteenth-century missionary Christianity and its contexts. I am seeking papers that will address the questions above, examining connections between missions and peace in a variety of settings, including a broad geographical scope. The focus is on the 1800s, especially up to the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The workshop will include papers that address the following sorts of themes:
- Theological understandings of the peace of the gospel and the place of peace in missionary moral imaginaries
- Relationships between peace and humanitarianism, and notions of civilisation and empire, within missionary discourse and practice
- Analyses of diverse forms of missionary peace rhetoric and its effects in and beyond the missionary enterprise
- Missionary ‘pacifism’ and opposition to war, and instances of peacemaking practice
- Missionary views on violence and justifications of war and how these were aligned with, or juxtaposed against, claims to peace
- Comparative perspectives between different missionary organisations, locations or personalities.
Paper proposals, including title, 150-word abstract, and 100-word bio, should be sent to Geoff Troughton (geoff.troughton@vuw.ac.nz) by 11 December 2017.
Successful applicants will be required to send full draft papers of 5000-6000 words by 30 June 2018. All papers will be distributed to participants prior to the workshop.