The author of this book, a professor of history at the University of Delaware, is an academic of diverse interests, having published volumes on the maritime communities of colonial Massachusetts and the origins of fervent Protestantism in the American South. She is also married to a retired Pentagon official who survived the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001.
These varied concerns are brought together in the present account of Evangelical Protestant missionary activity in the Middle East during the 1820s. The institution she treats was the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The efforts it made among Muslims, after an early feint toward the Hindus of India, came under the rubric of a “Palestine mission.” Heyrman has chosen to concentrate on two American preachers of the Evangelical word, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, who made for the Holy Land via Christian Malta in 1819. They were graduates of Andover Theological Seminary, as it is known today, founded as a redoubt of strict Calvinism.
Read Full Article »