Mission In Terms Research Articles

The Oblate Assault on Canada's Northwest by Robert Choquette

BOOK REVIEWS159 elusive forms of social behavior (e.g., racial tolerance/violent discrimination)? Others might bristle at the exclusion of African-American perspectives and voices, charging that Parish Boundaries inadvertently repUcates the pattern of eUsion for which it asks CathoUcs to repent. (Clearly, McGreevy would be the first person to celebrate a careful study written about or from AfricanAmericans ' perspectives.) Nor wiU historians of gender be completely satisfied with the treatment of the agency and experiences of women—despite the fact that women reUgious play a prominent role Ui parts of the narrative. But when sociologists, historians, and theologians come to write their own books and articles on American reUgion, race, and community, they will find themselves deeply indebted to McGreevy's history of white ethnic (and postethnic ) Catholics Ln the urban North. It is a work bridging several fields. For, in Uluminating the ironies and complexities of white Catholic motivations, intentions , and outcomes in their specificity,Parish Boundaries invites a wide-ranging series of studies modeled on its own fruitful method of interdisciplinary historical research. R. Scott Appleby University ofNotre Dame Canadian The Oblate Assault on Canada's Northwest. By Robert Choquette. [ReUgions and Beliefs series, No. 3] . (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. 1995. Pp. xü, 258. Paperback.) Some readers wiU find Robert Choquette's history of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in the Canadian Northwest to be irritating, as weU as interesting.The miUtary analogy he uses does not indicate the gender side of many Oblates. Instead he discusses their mission in terms of "conquerors," "white juggernaut," "strategic position." Choquette equates the bringing of the Gospel message to various miUtary coups. However, as the author writes concerning the efforts of the Oblates: Their apostolic methods were fundamentaUy determined by their CathoUc doctrine and theology, which in turn determined specific policies, methods , and tactics in relation to Indians, their evangeUzation, and their conversion to Christianity, (p.200) Choquette explores the CathoUc/Protestant missionary relationship, as both sides struggle to convert aboriginal peoples to the true religion ofJesus Christ in its nineteenth-century incarnation. His book also surveys the clash ofFrenchspeaking and EngUsh-speaking missionaries.As an author, Choquette seems like a juggler, trying to keep CathoUcs,AngUcans, Methodists, French Canadians, and English Canadian settlers balanced whUe in constant movement.The juggling author puts the baUs in motion by relying on the strength oftwo "foreign" arms: 160BOOK REVIEWS the ultramontane CathoUc energizer (centered in Rome) and the evangeUcal Protestant thrust from societies in England. Amid this divergence is the somewhat neutral Hudson's Bay Company.TotaUy lost, in my opinion, is the voice of the "conquered." Given the expanse of geography, poUtics, and time he covers, Choquette manages the juggling with few mishaps. Repetition, redundancy, and some errors are but annoying mosquito bites that distract readers foUowing the miUtary analogy. Today's students, though, might find the analogy and Choquette's analysis lacking in respect to Amerindians, as noted above. Furthermore, he gives short shrift to CathoUc sisterhoods who allied themselves with the Oblates to serve the peoples of the Northwest. His nominal acknowledgment of the Sisters in the text is compensated for, somewhat, by Ulustrations. Unfortunately, the Ulustrations only depict these women cutting fish, feeding chickens, or demurely sitting with staid settlers. Choquette's bibliography provides serious readers with possibiUties for deeper, more specific, studies. For example, the Sisters of Saint Ann preceded the Oblates at Dawson in theYukon in 1898.These women brought to the northwest missions decades of experience in education and health care in British Columbia and Alaska. Accounts of Oblate interaction with the various sisterhoods sharing mission experiences in the North would have added important nuances to Choquette's weU-documented story. AU in aU, Robert Choquette is to be commended for his contribution to the ReUgions and BeUefs series. His book does enlighten the reader about the organization and immensity of the project that, wiUy-nUly, forever now wiU be Ln my mind as the Oblate assault on Canada's Northwest. Margaret Cantwell, S.S.A. Victoria, British Columbia Latin American Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America. Edited by Robert H. Jackson...

Managerial objectives in the NHS.

Discusses managerial objectives in the National Health Service and compares service to patients with financial considerations. Reviews the growing influence of financial criteria and the manner in which financial objectives have been introduced. Asks if managers see their mission in terms of financial targets or patient service. Reports on the results of a questionnaire survey of all the managers in the provider units within two District Health Authorities. Managers were asked to rank a set of five statements in order of the extent to which they agree with them. Analysis of the overall results shows a large measure of agreement within the group of respondents that service to patients ranks first, with financial aspects coming last. The same outcome occurred when the results were disaggregated to NHS Trust/non-Trust level and between staff categories.

Greenness in the New Testament

The Jewish thought-world which influenced Christ and the first Christians was holistic. The Bible and extra-biblical literature picture God as rejoicing in His creation. If we are properly to understand Jesus and his first followers it is necessary to understand that thought-world, including ancient mythologies which predate the Exile and were still current.It is now commonly accepted that during Jesus’s lifetime there was, even in Palestine, a varied spectrum of Jewishness, including different degrees of adherence to the Jerusalem establishment. Not everybody acclaimed Jesus’s execution, and the conduct of persons like Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea and Jesus’s own Galilean disciples (the women particularly) suggests pluralism. It has been suggested that it may have been not the gentiles but disaffected Galileans who first accused Jews of deicide or Christicide.'According to the gospels Jesus understood his mission in terms of a cosmic conflict with fallen angels who tormented human beings. There is a remnant of this ancient mythology in Genesis 6:2 ‘The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose.’ Christ and his contemporaries still lived in a world peopled by angels—good as well as bad. This mythology also included memories of ancient Jewish kingship. The good king moved between heaven and earth, maintained cosmic order, and was in conflict with the fallen angels and their monstrous offspring. The king, God’s holy one, preserved the integrity of creation: humans, animals, plants, their habitats and the elements. Our best account of this mythology, so important for understanding Christ and his ecology, is almost certainly in 1 Enoch.

Bahá’u’lláh as “World Reformer”

Vindicating the mission of the Persian reformer known as the Báb (d. 1850) Bahá’u’lláh’s Book of Certitude (1862) focused on spiritual authority from an Islamic perspective. In this work, a subtext may be discerned, in which Bahá’u’lláh intimates his own mission in the same terms of reference. Later, in his epistles to the monarchs of Europe and West Asia (1866–1869), Bahá’u’lláh exercised that authority and spoke of world reform. This article places Bahá’u’lláh in the context of Islamic reform, with particular reference to the advocacy of constitutional democracy by prominent Iranian secularists. In an ideological ether pervaded by “Westoxication,” Bahá’u’lláh sought to reverse the direction of Western influence. Bahá’u’lláh prosecuted his own reforms in three stages: Bábí reform; Persian reform; and world reform. In the centrifugal sequence, Bahá’u’lláh is shown to have bypassed Islamic reform altogether in his professed role as “World Reformer.”

Effectiveness analysis of C3 systems

A methodology for analyzing and assessing the effectiveness of command, control, and communications (C <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> ) systems is developed. The analysis is carried out by characterizing separately both the system and the mission in terms of attributes. These attributes are determined as functions of primitives that describe the system, the mission to be performed, and their context. The system capabilities and the mission requirements are compared in a common attribute space. This comparison leads to the evaluation of partial measures of effectiveness that are then combined to yield a global measure. The methodology is illustrated through the assessment of the effectiveness of a communications network operating in a hostile environment.

The Bride in Redemptive Time: John Cotton and the Canticles Controversy

THAT Puritans in early days were fond of portraying the New England mission in terms of cultivating God's garden or vineyard in the midst of a hostile wilderness is well known. The metaphor, naturally appropriate to the task of establishing permanent settlements, also enhanced the degree to which the Puritans could assume their place in redemptive history by recapitulating the biblical journey from Egypt to Canaan. William Bradford, Edward Johnson, and Cotton Mather were among many early writers developed and sustained the contrast between holy garden and devilish wilderness, but perhaps the most articulate spokesman for the image was one of the earliest, John Cotton. If be the Gardiner, Cotton assured the departing settlers, who shall plucke up what hee sets downe? For Cotton, the garden metaphor offered a special sign that the mission would succeed, provided the saints took pains to looke that you be right planted. After all, God hath spoken it, I will plant them, and they shall not be moved, neither shall the sonnes of wickednesse afflict them any more.' Although Cotton and the others derived the garden image from many scriptural sources, notably the Psalms, its fullest expression could be found in the Song of Songs or Canticles, Solomon's enigmatic love song of the Bride and the Bridegroom. Because the Song was thought to celebrate in allegorical terms the holy love shared by the Christic Bridegroom and the devout soul, its lush garden became widely accepted as a representation of the earthly places where Christ and the elect could meet-the pure ordinances of the reformed congrega-

Divinity in use and Practice

It is good in this centenary year of his death to remember that the Chair of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology in the University of Edinburgh is successor to the Chair of Evangelistic Theology first occupied by Alexander Duff. Duff was a missionary strategist and statesman who saw the Christian mission in world-wide terms, yet found in his Scottish Reformed heritage treasures of immense value and relevance to the India of his day. Within a few short months of his arrival in Calcutta in 1830, Duff produced an assessment of the situation in Bengal of quite extraordinary shrewdness and insight, discerning the signs of the times and pinpointing the opportunities and dangers to the Christian witness. He looked, as any good practical theologian must, for the working of God in the context in which he found himself; he embraced not just the immediate opportunity but the long-term process, imbuing his converts—remarkable men that they were—with a vision of India as she might be, and of their own role as reformers, renewers and leaders of Indian society and culture in their ministerial and educational work. Duff saw himself not as handing on a closed and unexamined package of accumulated wisdom and orthodoxy, but as equipping a new generation to think for themselves and live creatively always looking, like the heroes of faith of Hebrews xi, to the future, to the city whose builder and maker is God.

A Mexican Flashback

He is a national pastor of considerable stature in his homeland, but he is as western as any missionary I know. When he talks of conversion it is western and individualistic. He thinks of mission in colonial terms. He is anchored to a foreign structure with its vested interests supported from outside his country. I get regular, but unsolicited, promotional material from his American support body, lauding his competence and seeking my financial assistance. Now he is in this country, becoming more western than ever. He talks of certain places being resistant to the Gospel, though he knows as well as I do that his whole land is dynamic with innovation.

The Play Element in the Poetry of Else Lasker-Schuler

The poetry of Else Lasker-Schiiler is distinguished by its rich and deceptively simple imagery and by the fact that almost all of it consists of love poems. Her poetic acts of love are at once ritual, entertainment, artistry, riddle-making, doctrine, persuasion, sorcery, soothsaying, prophecy, and competition: in short-play.' Gottfried Benn knew this and dedicated his volume of verse, S6hne, to her playfully: Ich griisse Else Lasker-Schiiler: ziellose Hand aus Spiel und Blut.2 The poetess was herself aware of the central position which play occupies in her work and frequently defined her poetic mission in terms of it: Spielen ist alles,3 she states simply, for Spielsachen sind wohl die Hauptsachen der Welt, die fal3baren und die unberiihrbaren (GW, II, 677).

Shall the Bible Constitute the Only Source of Instruction in the Sunday School?

The mission of the Sunday school must determine its ideals and its methods. It is not easy to define that mission in terms that will differentiate the Sunday school from all secular schools. For example, suppose the mission of the Sunday school be stated to be the development of life in harmony with Christian principles. Properly understood the religious or Christian life, in order to be symmetrical, intelligent, individually pure, and socially effective, certainly needs instruction in many subjects that could not be taken up in a Sunday school. Does not all knowledge, rightly used, contribute to the character and efficiency of its possessor ? No Christian today in business, in politics, or in the professions of law, medicine, teaching, and literature owes his effectiveness exclusively to what is popularly called religious instruction. Everything the Christian learns is of service in the development of his capacities, ministers to his larger usefulness as a citizen or in his vocation.