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International
Bulletin july 2003
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Doctoral Dissertations on Mission: Ten-Year Update, 1992�2001
The Teacher observed, with some heaviness, �Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh� (Eccl. 12:12). Had he been able to foresee the invention of the printing press some two and a half millennia later, tapping intellectual wellsprings that would issue in the still building tidal wave of printed and digital materials in hundreds of languages that now engulfs the planet, his mental fatigue would have been even more marked.
Take, for example, the largest library in the world, the U.S. Library of Congress. Its 530 miles of bookshelves hold more than 18 million books and 54 million manuscripts, in addition to 4.5 million maps, 12 million photographs, and 2.5 million recordings.
Among the
myriad of scholarly books, not a few began their gestation as doctoral
dissertations. Back issues of the Chronicle
of Higher Education�s Almanac
indicate that the number of doctoral degrees conferred in the United
States each year since 1985 has exceeded 41,000.
Last year the number of doctoral dissertations approved totaled
46,010. A modest proportion of these has always related to mission
studies.
Twenty years ago the International Bulletin of Missionary Research published its first directory of 934 doctoral dissertations on mission-related subjects produced at 23 theological schools and 122 universities in the United States and Canada. This groundbreaking directory, undertaken by E. Theodore Bachman, covered almost four decades of research, from 1945 through 1982. In 1993, ten years later, William A. Smalley fashioned the IBMR�s second directory, listing and classifying 512 mission-related dissertations submitted to 114 North American secular and religious institutions. Again, the result was highly instructive, indicating shifts and emerging trajectories in mission historiography, theory, and practice. But all 1,446 of these dissertations were produced in North American institutions and in English. Now, a decade further on, the aperture through which the world of academic mission studies is viewed has been widened slightly. In the present report American institutions still predominate, and the registry is still restricted to English-language dissertations. This time, however, the 210 academic institutions that conferred the degrees represented by these dissertations are scattered across twenty-one different countries. That is a hopeful beginning.
We acknowledge with gratitude the hard work of Stanley H. Skreslet, who, almost three years ago, enthusiastically agreed to take on this assignment. Professor of Christian Mission at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, Virginia, Dr. Skreslet is an ordained Presbyterian minister who taught at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo, Egypt, for ten years. He is the author of an Arabic introduction to New Testament Greek, published by the Bible Society of Egypt. No stranger to our readers, his article �Impending Transformation: Mission Structures for a New Century� appeared in the January 1999 issue of the IBMR.
Tribute
is due likewise to each one whose scholarly odyssey made this issue
possible, for behind each title lies an unrecorded epic, replete with
heroics, passion, struggle, sacrifice, and . . . a happy ending. With this
issue we congratulate them!
JULY 2003
Doctoral Dissertations on
Mission:
Ten-Year Update, 1992�2001
Stanley H. Skreslet
Degree-Granting Institutions
Here Represented, with the Number of Doctoral Dissertations from Each
Dissertations Listed Alphabetically by Author
Index of Subjects
In Coming Issues
Migration and Mission
Jehu Hanciles
Christians and Indians:
Conflict, Compromise,
or Completion?
John F. Gorski, M.M.
Conversion in Christian
History
Andrew Walls
Church-Mission Dynamics in
Northeast India
Lalsangkima Pachuau
�Blessed Reflex�: Mission
as God�s Spiral of Renewal
Kenneth R. Ross
The Religious Worldview of
the Indigenous Population of the Northern Ob� as Understood by Christian
Missionaries
Anatolii M. Ablazhei
Pre-Revolution Russian
Mission to Central Asia: A Contextualized Legacy
David M. Johnstone
In our Series on the Legacy of Outstanding Missionary Figures of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, articles about
Norman Anderson
Thomas Barclay
Rowland V. Bingham
George Bowen
H�l�ne de Chappotin
Dorothy Davis Cook
Robert Codrington
Fran�ois Daubanton
John Duncan
Nehemiah Goreh
Pa Yohanna Gowon
Hannah Kilham
Rudolf Lechler
George Leslie Mackay
Leslie E. Maxwell
Lesslie Newbigin
Vincent O'Donovan
Constance E. Padwick
Peter Parker
James Howell Pyke
Pandita Ramabai
Julius Richter
Elizabeth Russell
Bakht Singh
James Stephen
Philip B. Sullivan
John V. Taylor
James M. Thoburn
M. M. Thomas
William Cameron Townsend
Harold W. Turner
Johannes Verkuyl
William Vories