Echoes of the call : identity and ideology among American missionaries in Ecuador / Jeffrey Swanson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Swanson, Jeffrey, 1957-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Missions, American--Ecuador.

Missions, American.

Protestant churches--Missions--Ecuador.

Protestant churches.

Evangelistic work--Ecuador.

Evangelistic work.

Church history.

Protestant churches--Missions.

Ecuador--Church history.

Ecuador.

Physical Description:

viii, 204 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 1995.

Summary:

Drawing on the personal histories of one hundred evangelical missionaries in Ecuador, Echoes of the Call explores the lives of missionaries as sociological "strangers." Jeffrey Swanson illustrates how missionaries are distanced, not only from their culture and homeland, but also from their own era. The work begins with Swanson's interpretation of how his own experience as a child of missionaries shaped the viewpoint of estrangement from which the book is written. Swanson renders the formation of a missionary identity as the rhetorical composition of a personal testimony, in which life stories of separation, loss, conflict, and conversion are melded symbolically with historical mission themes of sacrifice, heroism, spiritual militancy, and divine calling. Relying on his subjects' own narratives, he traces the missionaries' personal journeys as their sense of calling first emerges, and then as it must be reinterpreted to account for unexpected, ambiguous, and often disillusioning experiences in their host country. Swanson argues that missionaries are marginal individuals who use their vocation creatively to produce a meaningful social world, and who use rhetoric effectively to maintain that world, for themselves and for supporters in their home countries.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0195068238

OCLC:

31605568