International Religious Networks. Edited by Jeremy Gregory and Hugh McLeod. Studies in Church History. Suffolk, U.K.: Boydell, 2012. xxii + 298 pp. $70.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)International Religious Networks . Edited by Jeremy Gregory and Hugh McLeod . Studies in Church History. Suffolk, U.K. : Boydell , 2012. xxii + 298 pp. $70.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesUsing the theme of international networks, twenty-two historians and theologians fill this conference-originating book with careful studies of missionary projects, the reception of saints, women's societies and their role in sustaining missions, the place of friendships in the making of twentieth-century ecumenism, and much else. As the two British editors point out in their introduction, the contributors were encouraged to use network as a point of departure, always with the caveat that these be international. A common sense objective has yielded a set of essays that, in the editors' words, open up a number of questions rather than providing definitive answers (xx). As we approach the present (the essays are arranged chronologically), the emphasis falls on personal encounters and their consequences. Those that deal with the early modern period are more likely to connect life histories or local circumstances with large-scale events and, for this reason, seem more satisfying. The seven essays on the medieval period expose ecclesiastical and theological politics within the international, doing so in ways that are usually particular to a saint, a place, a person, or an archive.The 2005 conference that led to International Religious Networks arose out of an academic venture at networking, a British-Scandinavian Conference for Church Historians. Ten years after an initial conference in York, England, in 1995, a conference in Sweden yielded the papers that appear in this book. The Scandinavian connection explains why several of the essays are rooted in nineteenth and twentieth-century Norwegian, Swedish, and Scandinavian religious history. Dag Thorkildsen reminds us in Revivalism, Emigration, and Religious Networks in Nineteenth-Century Norway of the severe difficulties that arose when evangelicalism abruptly emerged within the Norwegian state church, and calls our attention to the very substantial mid-nineteenth century emigration States of Norwegians to the United (second only, he says, to the Irish), many of them evangelical in their orientation. In the only essay that focuses specifically on women, Cecilia Wejryd evokes the emergence of sewing circles in nineteenth century Sweden and their role in funding overseas missions; although much diminished in numbers since the 1970s, these circles continue to this day. Five essays deal in one way or another with the global visions of Protestant missionary movements circa 1910. For the Scandinavians, of particular interest is the way in which organizations like the Student Christian Movement sowed the seeds that flowered into the ecumenical movement of the late thirties and beyond, a story that touches on the struggle among German Protestants to define their situation vis-a-vis Fascism. To the question, did personal friendships formed in the context of the various missionary societies bring about mid-century ecumenism, the answer is both yes and no. As we learn from John Wolffe's essay on Transatlantic Visitors and Evangelical Networks, 1829-61, the sense of common purpose that united evangelicals who traveled between Britain and America was compromised by strong feelings of difference--over slavery, which the British could condemn at a moment when some American evangelicals were silent or apologetic, and over church and state, the Americans inflexible or myopic in favoring the voluntary principle. He concludes that, by the 1860s, connections had been disrupted. In the single essay that stands outside the Euro-American focus of these pieces, Shin Ahn tells the story of a Korean who converted to Christianity in his homeland in 1887. Thereafter, via studies in America and involvement with the YMCA here and in Korea, he witnessed the functioning of international religious networks and wrestled with their pertinence to his homeland. …