Christian missionaries have regularly been at the forefront of travel adventurism over the last 500 years, sent by their churches to parts of the world few back home knew much about, and often at great personal risk.
And while they were regularly showing up in regions that hadn’t invited them and weren’t always receptive to what they were selling, their stories remain some of the most fascinating that history has to offer – particularly those of the missionaries who were more ambitious than most
.In this episode, we take a closer look at the efforts of Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit priest who set out to convert China from the emperor on down; Mary Slessor, who tried to personally save as many Nigerian-born twins from infanticide as she possibly could; and Samson Occom, a Mohegan convert whose fundraising tour of England aimed to fund a school for training other Native Americans – a school better known today as Dartmouth College. Yes, that one. (But also this one. And this one, too.)
And yet their accounts of the places they visited didn’t just shift opinions back home or capture something significant about a moment in time – sometimes their efforts genuinely changed the lives of the people they encountered, and, just as often, ended up changing the missionaries themselves.
Sarah and Jeremiah discuss the complicated legacy of missionaries like Slessor, who found herself simultaneously opposing and embedded within colonial British rule in Africa; the advantage of being a novelty in a foreign land; and whether any of the three actually converted the people they set out to bring into the house of God.
