Vastness to Intimacy: Place, Identity, and the Missionary Dilemma

Maasailand, Kenya, 1996.

I. Coming Home

Georgia rolls on forever. There are some mountains in the north of the state, and some swamps in the south, but my experience is mostly of superroads thrusting mindlessly through countryside, a chainmail of billboards fixing my eyes to the road. The interstates release me to highways winding through forest and farmland, eventually to the antebellum capital of Milledgeville, on the edge of the piedmont, where water oak and willows hint at the coastal flats. I cross the state in half a day. Yet the world must be infinite, because I can only ever see so far.

Near Milledgeville is one of the thousands of lakes created across the Southeast in a wave of midcentury terraforming, building the dams that generate the electricity that powers the sprawling grid. It also created a lakeside suburbia—lawns and longings all an inch deep. My great-grandfather Paul James Farr, after whom I am named, bought a plot on Lake Sinclair in the '70s, and thereupon built a pleasant house. My mother's parents moved in after Paul. All told, we have about fifty years of history on that land, not even the age of my parents.

I turn onto the gravel drive and crunch down the hill to the downstairs carport. It's the first time I've visited this house since my grandmother Polly passed and my parents have moved in. I've been in East Africa for the past four years. My family, who were Christian missionaries to Kenya since before I was born, have only returned to Georgia recently. When they left Kenya, I was deeply grieved. The premise of my place in that country had evaporated.

I park the car and step inside through the carport door into the downstairs great room. On one wall are bookshelves I've grown up with in Kenya with soapstone and cedar statuettes of wildlife standing on top, and on the other side an antique cabinet with my great-grandfather's travel journals and a little pocket guide to Scottish clan tartans. Farr was likely an Anglicization of Farquhar, though when and why I don't yet know. I suddenly feel that I know very little at all; something in me cracks. It is as though I am suddenly continuous with the space, as though the very walls are me, and my heart is at once bound up and freed. I weep for the loss of a home—I weep for being found by one.

I walk slowly up the stairs and into the foyer, two steps on hardwood and a few more on carpet. On the north side of the central brick chimney, facing the front door, hangs a painting. The light is dim but I know it well, and I vanish from the world.

II. The Landscape

The gilded golden frame holds a hazy image of savanna. The grass grasps the bottom corners and a cumulonimbus storm cloud weights the sky. Successive gentle drainages tighten towards the horizon until gray-green turns to blue-gray on a thin escarpment. Along the rivulets are brushy thickets, and solitary acacia thorntrees stand in the open grass. There is something somber about it all. There is nothing animate to be seen; it is grand, aching, somehow lonely.

My mother bought it the first time they left Kenya, in 1999, after six years of living in a rural area amongst a community of Maasai pastoralists. It is of no named place, its ambiguity like a dream, but both her and my father say it recalls the view from the prefabricated house we all lived in, situated on a hillside near the border with Tanzania, looking out toward the Maasai Mara National Reserve to the west. We would often drive the rough hour to the park gate and venture inside for a safari.

III. The Frame

"Missionaries were part of the ruling race; they could not help that." [1] This is the reality behind the web of contradictions that is the Christian missionary project. Since the church first justified the civilizing mission of European empires in the fifteenth century, exploration, exploitation, and evangelism have probed the globe like the three points of a trident, aimed to pierce the place, bodies, and minds of "these very peoples living in the said islands and countries… [to whom] it is hoped that, were they instructed, the name of the Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, would easily be introduced." Pope Alexander VI declared that these prospective converts were to be sought alongside "gold, spices, and very many other precious things of divers kinds and qualities," like so many more objects to be mined. [2] Thus the violent transformation of boundless worlds into a single unified empire under God was enacted through both an economic and theological "thingification." [3] This dualism [4] in the marrow of the mission meant that whatever liberatory seed might lie dormant in the Christian gospel was automatically obfuscated by its carrier host.

I would venture that any missionary to date that was or is a product of the dominating culture carries this inherent presupposition—that there is some one thing that all men need to believe—and any white Western Christian who "pursue[s] this holy and praiseworthy undertaking" [5] has no other course but to ride the rails laid down by colonialism, both materially and in their own psychologies. It is therefore the essential hypocrisy of missionaries that they come to "save." The missionary-cum-linguist Daniel Everett remembered how his "evangelism professor at Biola University, Dr Curtis Mitchell, used to say, 'You've got to get 'em lost before you can get 'em saved.'" [6] The blind leading the blind, surely. If missionaries thought or think of themselves as the "better angels" of the West, as they often did and do, they enunciate the very dualism that has captured them.

The nature of this "disease of the West" is to infect others with one's own fearfulness. From whatever time God was first banished to Heaven, this "transcendent organization" has ironically desacralized the worlds of even the most devoutly religious. Missionaries can be seen as the ultimate poignant expression of this "social and cosmic homelessness," [7] bewitched by something holy but so spiritually displaced that they seek their salvation by religious acquisition (that is, conversion). This logic of acquisitive-identity-stabilization shoots through all the associated ideologies of colonialism. To facilitate this desperate consumption, a grayscale graticule overlaid their world; a toolbox of categorical devices for seeing what they could measure up, botanically, racially, and spatially.

"Those Christians went unknowingly beyond geography into identity. They entered what for them was a frontier of strangeness. Already fearful…they enacted a spatial vertigo, renaming places, peoples, and animals and reconfiguring life," writes Willie Jennings of the early missionaries. [8] This ontological reconfiguration, within a devastating reconfiguration of land itself, was prolific—a dark veil laid down over a bright continent. "The significance of this transformation cannot be overstated. The earth itself was barred from being a constant signifier of identity. Europeans defined Africans and all others apart from the earth even as they separated them from their lands." [9]

The site of the missionary became most especially the school and the church, where their colonization was of the mind more so than the land explicitly. As the Dr. Jekylls of imperial schizophrenia, missionaries could at times even assert a self-righteous scorn towards settlers. The settlers often distrusted them in turn, sensing with some prescience the inherent incoherence of the colonial project, extraction masked over by salvation. [10] In either case, however, the image of Africa in the European imagination was quickly shorn of its people. Jennings writes that it was "the loss of a world where people were bound to land." [11]

The modern phenomenon of landscape conservation in Africa can be seen as the strange lovechild of these different prongs of colonialism, as suggested by the famous aphorism about land and Bibles. [12] The nomadic Maasai once called much of the Great Rift Valley and its adjacent highlands home, but were slowly hemmed in by force and coercion to a "Maasai Triangle" that was further sliced through by the colonial border between the British protectorates of Kenia and Tanganyika. The world-famous Maasai Mara and the Serengeti reserves are now largely closed to their own humans. Clearly, "efforts to preserve wilderness can still be based on a green imperial romance that historically enabled colonial dispossession through images of pure, untouched natural landscapes in need of protection and, in the process, reinforce new forms of imperialism…Africans fit into this picture either as human manifestations of Africa's wild, dangerous essence or by being erased from the picture altogether." [13]

The Maasai Mara National Reserve. My own image and imaginary, 2019.

Today, one finds short-term Christian mission teams from the West that continue this project along the same contradictory lines. After a week spent in a rural village constructing cinderblock walls for a church, they will camp in a nearby missionary compound (replete with barbed-wire fences) and enjoy a safari through the Maasai Mara National Reserve. The total mundanity of the image reflects how deeply buried the roots of this conception of place have become, and how difficult it is to dig them up, as the philosopher Kyle Whyte refers to in his idea of "vicious sedimentation." [14]

I have been on many of these "mission trips," and I have often wondered what the animals think of us when we drive around this land, quite literally failing to put our feet on the ground. They do their best to avoid us and, if that is impossible, to ignore us. There is a kind of shame in my stomach when I feel, for a moment, their ambivalence towards beings who have so alienated ourselves from the land. Sometimes it even feels like contempt.

The peoples of East Africa, too, have recognized this alienation since we first arrived on shore. In the Swahili language, the word for white people or foreigners is wazungu. It shares a root with kuzunguka, meaning to wander, aimlessly. "The white man, where viewed in this context," writes Vine Deloria Jr., "appears as a perennial adolescent. He is continually moving about, and his restless nature cannot seem to find peace. Yet he does not listen to the land and so cannot find a place for himself." [15]

IV. The Place

A whistling intermingles with the wind on the stony hillsides of mara, the Maasai name for this speckled rangeland. Leaves in clusters clatter and the air blusters through pockets of heat and cool, up dry ridges and down valleys to the riverine trees. Everything here plays a strange game of survival and cooperation, befriending one creature to fend off another. One of the smaller acacias is known for hollow growths at the base of its wicked thorns, wherein dwell communities of ants that swarm forth to defend their territory if an elephant comes by to pry off branches. The doorways of the ants become tiny wind tunnels and a haunting tone sings from the whistling thorn. Here, the trees speak for themselves.

The bush as I know it is not quiet or peaceful, merely spacious. Its shades and its sounds surrounded my childhood. There are blessed days between when an infant realizes it is not the same as its mother and before it is taught it is not the same as the world itself. Those were the days I spent in Losho, as the Maasai called the valley we lived alongside. Between the caterwauling chorus of morning birdsong and the whooping and moaning of predators into the night, there are long, shadowless hours of white sun where mostly crickets drone and the wind whistles whatever news. If you move, soon you'll hear the lowing of cattle and their ringing bells. If you don't, soon they'll come to you. The Maasai walk gently through the land—a man called Olodekany would look after my brother and I, weaving down to the river and back, showing us plants.

Dad was a veterinarian, and the rich, absorbing odor of manure, the throaty presence of cattle, hold my memories of that time with him. He is an action-oriented man from a family of hog farmers in Georgia. Though I think he was really most at peace when shoulder-deep up a camel's posterior, fishing for a breech calf, the visions of his theology projected across the landscape like a glorious grid.

"That plain out in Losho was a very spiritual place for me," he remembers, "because in those years when I was starting to go teach Bible stories in the village, I had a habit of just going out for a walk on the plains, and I memorized several psalms. Psalm 19: 'The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech. Night after night, they proclaim knowledge.' It kind of balanced against the feeling of smallness and insignificance I often felt. I was like, 'What are you doing?' You know, all these people spending all this money, [16] and you're out here standing under a tree with 15 people, and about half of them aren't half paying attention."

My mother, too, would go wandering and praying in the mornings. She had been a schoolteacher in Georgia. "I would go out for a walk, and I'd take the dogs and I'd have those stones in my hand to throw at the baboons, and I'd go down our driveway," she said. "I'd cross the creek, I'd go out where the little boys were shepherding the sheep and just walk across the plains. And I just remember feeling like this, this place is no place on the map, you know, in the world, this, this place isn't on it. These people aren't on it. I'm not on it."

After we left Losho, the house we lived in was soon dismantled and driven off to some other place not on the map for some other missionaries preaching to people not paying attention. The bush quickly grew up and around the concrete steps to the old back porch that were left behind, now leading nowhere.

V. The Story

Kyle Whyte writes that "Vicious sedimentation refers to how constant ascriptions of settler ecologies onto Indigenous ecologies fortify settler ignorance against Indigenous peoples over time." [17] The scholar is speaking especially to matters of environmental transformation under settler colonialism, but in the spirit of un-dualizing, I wish to extend this to our conceptual schema as well. Our ideas, psychological, philosophical, and theological, are intertwined with our relationship to the land. The "material" sedimentation leads to the world where the missionary-tourist does not question the troops of Maasai in ceremonial attire hawking bangles by the park gate, who would be arrested for trespassing if they stepped into their own eponymous mara. But it is a conceptual layering that has predisposed them to accepting such material lines as obvious or natural.

This is why philosopher Brian Burkhart suggests that unbinding our mental framework may be a necessary prerequisite to unbinding the world: "This movement back to the land is not merely material as it is prematerial, reconfiguring our concepts and ways of thinking and speaking out of the land, out of locality, including our Westernized concept of land itself as well as materiality itself." [18] If one's theology conceptualizes a supernatural God of dominion, and this projection precedes any direct experience of place, must we undermine theology with a counter-theology before the essential error is revealed? Or is the quality of locality that Burkhart speaks to "continually fracturing and seeping through the colonial mask that attempts to cover it?" If the white man does not know how to listen, how insistently does the land speak?

Missionaries are once again in a complex position: they are the sediment itself, or driving the conceptual bulldozer, as it were. Yet they are also, especially when in "remote" placements, immersed in at most semi-colonized worlds and exposed to a land-relation that defies colonial logic. It is a land-relation that can also reveal radical new things about whatever-God-might-be. This may be why so many missionaries took up quixotic sociopolitical roles throughout the history of colonization—sometimes willing to stand with Indigenous communities against further dispossession [19], sometimes losing the faith altogether. Daniel Everett later expressed that the community he worked with in the Amazon "did not feel lost, so they didn't feel a need to be 'saved' either." The dualist ontology had "no epistemological grip on their minds." He renounced Christianity entirely. [20]

The little house on the hill.

But most missionaries remain somewhere on the continuum of sedimentation, and even for those who believe that "the gospel casts light on the cultural moorings of the carrier culture," [21] it is an uphill battle when one returns routinely to that culture, where you are expected to perform a redemptive teleology for "all those people spending all that money." In a prayer letter that my mother sent back during their time in Losho, she wrote facetiously about "wearily" going about her days on "dirt floors," sending her husband down "to the river" to collect water—intending to crack the glass of missionary martyrdom. However, when I opened up a book detailing the history of their mission, I saw that same prayer letter quoted in full earnestness. "It is difficult to adjust to life in the bush, but it is a time of spiritual growth," the author reflected seriously. [22]

This is all to say: whatever slow process of erosion might be at work on missionaries is often totally lost on those that send them. Such dynamics of power and projection make it all the more difficult to embrace the process of "epistemic locality." [23] The sedimentation is also in the storytelling.

Back in the south, on a posterboard in the church reception hall hung a large world map, cut-outs of continents against a black background. Stabbed into unwitting nameless places across the flat earth with thumbtacks were the prayer cards of missionary families. I could be misremembering, but in my mind's eye there are lines of twine held taut by a center tack in Greenville, South Carolina, where the Presbyterian church sat, exploding out in spokes to "the ends of the earth."

The church was putting us up in a little 'mission' house while my dad pursued a seminary education. In good Protestant fashion, we had left Kenya in part over a theological dispute. Another missionary in the area, of the same outfit, took issue with my parents' less rigid understanding of the sacrament of baptism. He, so I'm told, considered baptism an irreplaceably essential act for one's salvation. My parents, however Evangelical, saw this as an idolatrous attachment, believing that the gospel was more a matter of heart orientation—one could almost say a process. Hoping to avoid muddying the waters of the nascent Maasai church, they decided it would be better for everyone if they left.

I have always thought this story, like most missionary stories, full of "ambiguity, irony and growth." [24] In a dispute over dogmatism, they chose to believe that salvation was a matter of personal faith rather than material action. Though this theology was "individual, not social," [25] they also knew that they were entangled with the community and that conflict, especially among missionaries and with the given power dynamics, would be deleterious. Though perhaps unconscious to the imperialistic premise of their "overseas" work in the first place, they were not unaware of their impact on their neighbors once in place. They grappled with the "insignificance," in a sense the unreality of Losho according to a colonial logic, yet their time there gradually unveiled an entirely new sense of connectivity.

"On the other hand," my mother told me, "There was also this sense of, God knows exactly where this is, you know, God knows exactly where I am. He knows exactly where this church is. He knows exactly where these villages are." My father echoed this: "And yet, it was the richest of times in my life. Another one of the Psalms that really enhanced that was Psalm 8, when it talks about 'What is man, that you are mindful of him, the Son of Man, that you care for him?' It catches that thing that this big God is real, and somehow, unfathomably, he cares about and is with me, and not only with me, but these people who the world would say are much, much lower than me as well, and they experience him in different ways that are powerful to them." It is of the utmost importance to note that the subtle distinction between what "the world would say" and what God was really like was mediated through an experience of the land.

I have often wondered about these dissonances between process and performance, personal experience and cultural expectation. The painting on my parents wall bears a distinct stylistic similarity to the paintings of American landscape artists of the Manifest Destiny period of expansion. Some of them, such as Frederic Edwin Church of the Hudson River Valley School, even visited the young colonies in Africa in the nineteenth century, and in most of these works the landscape is idealized, empty of humanity, majestic and mute. Often, however, like the savanna, there is something dreamlike that makes me question if the artist himself did not know that the view he painted was a kind of fantasy. A notable piece by Church that resides in the Harvard Art Museum implies the "star-spangled banner" in the negative space between parallel wisps of cloud at dusk. [26] Empire cannot see land without seeing itself projected upon it. But what did the artist, or the storyteller, feel? Before they reduced it back into something intelligible to the colonial mind, were they not entirely in place? Was the wind at their backs?

VI. The Reflection

I feel a rush of air and turn to see my father opening the front door, coming in from the summer heat. I quickly turn back to the painting, and now, with the daylight in the room, I see my own reflection in the glass before anything else. I am back. It was like a dream. I greet Dad, and as we walk over to the dining room, I see Mom out in the yard beneath the tall windows. She has been replanting all of her father's gardens with native pollinators with the help of my brother. Bees are humming around the black-eyed susans; two pileated woodpeckers have made a home in the dead oak that's been left standing and their shuddering song punctuates the lakeside stillness. There is a denser presence in this place than I recall.

"I don't think I consciously thought this at the time that I got the painting," Mom would tell me later, "but you know, it fills the frame, right? When you look at the painting, it's like, that's it. That's the world. That's all that's there. You know, it's not like a little dot somewhere in this vast place, you know, it fills the frame." She told me that over her years in Kenya, her sense of the presence of God deepened, began to touch the ever more familiar, infinitely immediate world, "like vastness to intimacy."

The church historian of missions Lamin Sanneh wrote that the "remorseless [divine] consistency drives a sword through the heart of our cultural complacency, and by its thrust we are healed." [27] He believed "that the practice of translation engaged in by the missionaries opened to them the possibility of repudiating cultural imperialism." [28] Jennings disputes that the trajectory is so consistent, but he agrees that "the multiple levels of translation, that is, of transference, transformation, transliteration of land, animals, space, language, and bodies, mean that worlds overlap and in that overlap they are altered irrevocably, hybridized, and cross-pollinated." [29] In either case, there is a sense that the missionary, in professing some knowledge about ultimate reality, has opened the door for reality to speak back.

I believe that it does, however slowly, quietly. I have observed a subtle unmooring of dualistic theology from process-experience in my parents lives over the years. It is not as though all conceptions have evaporated, but they no longer seem so "unrelinquishable," to use my father's phrase. "I feel like the more evangelical branch of Christendom has certainly in many cases dichotomized a relationship with God and salvation so much that it's neglected the broader sense of what is 'kingdom,'" he told me. "That's why we get so screwed up, is that we mistake dominion for exploitation. Obviously, that's happened all over the world. And it's not just Europeans, but we set the pattern, which many, many, many, have followed."

For my mother, this shift has drawn her closer and closer to contemplative streams within the Christian tradition. For dad, less prone to the meditative posture, it appears as a gradual expansion in his attention. He told me about recently returning to Kenya on a work trip and taking an American friend on safari in the Maasai Mara, this time with a proper guide rather than bootstrapping it himself. He reflected that although he'd "always been able to name all the animals," he observed this guide reading radically more subtle cues from the environment, "listening to the tone of the monkeys to know if there was a leopard nearby."

I believe that this is "epistemic locality" at work. To translate it back to the Christian vocabulary, perhaps we could call it a kind of Grace. For it is an amazing grace indeed that can wake us up from our sense of separation from the world around us, from God. For the land, for place itself, to press upon our imagination in spite of ourselves, to grow up and around our concrete steps to nowhere, must be a mercy. It is easy to embrace an anticolonial fatalism without realizing that this is the vicious sedimentation itself at work. We must learn to look for signs of life, even in those most deeply buried.

It is possible that the entire colonial project was destined to fail in its stated aims. If colonialists and missionaries "in acts of breathtaking hubris imagined the interlocked nature of all people and things within their own independence of those very people and things" [30] there was an unsustainable illusion at the heart of the mission from the very beginning. This paradox of universalism of any kind (imperial, colonial, religious, scientific, or otherwise) is that by signifying the Other, it inevitably creates a mirror that reveals the "unitary" [31] dimension in which they both stand. Honestly seeing ourselves in the mirror can offer us what Édouard Glissant calls "the strongest kind of knowledge: that the place grows bigger in its irreducible centre, just as much as in its incalculable borders." [32]

The missionary, therefore, has a strange opportunity to be truly found because they are perhaps the most truly lost. "It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God," my dad says, "and it's really nothing to do with riches. It's this sense of self-dependence. If we're denied some of it, we really panic and despair. I think when you live more in the margins, there's more of a sense of dependence on something beyond you all the time, that I do think gives you some perspective that most of us struggle to have." Perhaps that "something beyond you" is a true sense of place, a personhood with "incalculable borders."

Glissant says that "distancings are necessary to Relation and depend on it." [33] In my parents, I see a new sort of presence embracing their lives; they have journeyed and returned to their roots altered. Their children, too, will now always be migrants, more rhizomatic than rooted. Kyle Whyte suggests that this is not a curse but a blessing: "Migration suggests that relationships of interdependence and systems of responsibility are not grounded on stable or static relationships with the environment. Rather, these relationships arise from contexts of constant change and transformation…relationships that are constantly shifting do not sacrifice the possibility of continuity." [34]

Awakening to the continuity of presence and place should also, necessarily, alert us to our long-neglected responsibility for the damage our ideology has done. In a very Christian sense, repentance is actualized through a fundamental change in our behaviour. Perhaps that seed of the gospel that Christian missionaries carried with them will only give birth to new life once its shell of delocality, of dualism, has died. "If Christianity is going to untangle itself from these mangled spaces," writes Jennings, "it must first see them for what they are: a revolt against creation…Christianity is in need of place to be fully Christian." [35]

VII. Becoming Home

My dad and I walk down to the dock and drift out onto Lake Sinclair in the pontoon boat. As we float by islands and powerlines, hidden coves and thickets of hydrilla, he tells me the stories that arise as we move. Here, there's an island where my brother comes to birdwatch. Here, a beach where he brings my niece Polly, named after my grandmother, to play. Here, the dog had a fright and leapt into the lake. It reminds me of how much of his memory has been stored across Maasailand, too, where I can only hear about particular adventures if I travel with him along those very roads. The presence I felt here was the thickening web of place, story, and belonging that we are all creating together.

Through this, I begin to realize that my distaste for what I felt was Georgia's shallow roots was equally a fear of my own complicated belonging to it. If Kenya has taught us to open, Georgia asks us to be consistent—I must pay attention, always, to where real life and locality seep through the mask. I must ask, always, how much of the mask is my own projection. I must keep digging. "Our identities are, one can say, intricately and inevitably place-bound," [36] and place binds us more elementally and more forcefully than any idea ever can.

We enter the inlet where Paul James Farr built his little house, steering the boat straight into the setting sun, and a rush of wind picks my hat off my head and drops it into the water. After a single breath, it drops beneath the surface and is swallowed by the lake. For a moment, I am upset—until I realize that somehow this makes me even more a part of it all. That I, as place, roll on forever. We pass the final few docks and my dad says, "I hardly know our neighbors at the lake, and, you know, I should do something about that."

---

References

[1] Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle, Christian Missionaries and the State in the Third World (James Currey; Ohio University Press, 2002), 194.

[2] Papal Encyclicals Online, Inter Caetera, accessed December 10, 2024, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Alex06/alex06inter.htm.

[3] Aimé Césaire and Robin D. G. Kelley, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42.

[4] "The most central feature of the dominant single world doctrine has been a twofold ontological divide: a particular way of separating humans from nature (the nature/culture divide); and the distinction and boundary policing between "us" (civilized, modern, developed) and "them" (uncivilized, underdeveloped), who practice other ways of worlding (the colonial divide). These (and many other derivative) dualisms underlie an entire structure of institutions and practices through which the single world is enacted." Arturo Escobar, "Thinking-Feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South," Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 11, no. 1 (2016), 48.

[5] Inter Caetera

[6] Daniel L. Everett, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (Pantheon Books, 2008), 266.

[7] Brian Burkhart, Indigenizing Philosophy Through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures (Michigan State University Press, 2019), 105.

[8] Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale University Press, 2010), 42.

[9] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 43.

[10] "Colonial rulers and settlers in Africa were uncomfortable with Christianity's universalist claim to man's allegiance; its doctrine of human equality would crown the civilizing mission by dethroning white supremacy." Hansen and Twaddle, Christian Missionaries, 195.

[11] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 248.

[12] "When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land." Anecdotal; of disputed origin.

[13] Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology (University of Virginia Press, 2014), 12.

[14] Kyle Whyte and Jaskiran Dhillon, "Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice," in Indigenous Resurgence, NED-New edition, vol. 1 (Berghahn Books, 2022), 137.

[15] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 61.

[16] He is referring to "supporting" churches and individuals that conventionally fund missionary work.

[17] Whyte, "Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice," 137.

[18] Burkhart, Indigenizing Philosophy, xxvi.

[19] Laura Rademaker, "'A Relationship with the Land That Western Culture Knows Nothing Of': Sacred Claims of First Nations Australia, 1960–1990," in Alternative Spiritualities of Celebration, Resistance, and Accountability: Engaging Our Colonial and Decolonial Contexts (Cambridge, MA, 2024).

[20] Everett, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, 269-276.

[21] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 156.

[22] Arthur L. Dorminy, Mission Vets (Christian Veterinary Mission, 2003).

[23] Burkhart, Indigenizing Philosophy, xix.

[24] Hansen and Twaddle, Christian Missionaries, 194.

[25] Hansen and Twaddle, Christian Missionaries, 194.

[26] Frederic Edwin Church, Our Banner in the Sky, Terra Foundation for American Art. https://conversations.terraamericanart.org/artworks/our-banner-in-the-sky/.

[27] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 156.

[28] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 157.

[29] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 159.

[30] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 61.

[31] Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 185.

[32] Édouard Glissant and Celia Britton, Treatise on the Whole-World (Liverpool University Press, 2020), 37.

[33] Édouard Glissant and Betsy Wing, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997).

[34] Whyte, "Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice," 137.

[35] Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 248.

[36] Malpas, Place and Experience, 181.

Bibliography

Brian Burkhart, Indigenizing Philosophy Through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures (Michigan State University Press, 2019).

Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology (University of Virginia Press, 2014).

Aimé Césaire and Robin D. G. Kelley, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 2000).

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