God in the Rainforest
A Tale of Martyrdom and Redemption in Amazonian Ecuador
-
- USD 29.99
-
- USD 29.99
Descripción editorial
In January of 1956, five young evangelical missionaries were speared to death by a band of the Waorani people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Two years later, two missionary women--the widow of one of the slain men and the sister of another--with the help of a Wao woman were able to establish peaceful relations with the same people who had killed their loved ones. The highly publicized deaths of the five men and the subsequent efforts to Christianize the Waorani quickly became the defining missionary narrative for American evangelicals during the second half of the twentieth century.
God in the Rainforest traces the formation of this story and shows how Protestant missionary work among the Waorani came to be one of the missions most celebrated by Evangelicals and most severely criticized by anthropologists and others who accused missionaries of destroying the indigenous culture. Kathryn T. Long offers a study of the complexities of world Christianity at the ground level for indigenous peoples and for missionaries, anthropologists, environmentalists, and other outsiders. For the first time, Long brings together these competing actors and agendas to reveal one example of an indigenous people caught in the cross-hairs of globalization.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Long (The Revival of 1857 58) examines the 1956 killings of five missionaries in Ecuador in this intense, demanding book. The missionaries, all young men from Protestant evangelical denominations, were killed by local Waorani, a small, reclusive tribe known for their violence whom the missionaries were trying to reach. The story of continuing attempts to reach the Waorani as well as accounts of the deaths of the five young men became, Long argues, of vital importance for American Protestant evangelicals, key to fund-raising efforts as well as to the design of other missions. This is a complex, nuanced story with multiple, competing narrators from the missionary, Ecuadorian, international, and Waorani communities. Long is careful to give as much attention as possible to Waorani voices, which is particularly difficult given that the tribe had no consistent written language before the intervention of the missionaries. Long makes good use of oral histories and interviews as well as the more complex life of Dayomae, a long-time Christian convert who worked closely for many years with Protestant missionaries. This is a diligent, open-ended exploration of a little-known international incident.
