Encountering the Other, Engaging the World: Christian Short-Term Mission as Ordinary Ethics and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism

Team Members/Contributors

Letitia M. Campbell Emory University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

Each year, more than 1.5 million Americans travel beyond the United States to participate in religiously motivated service projects, mostly in impoverished communities of the global south. For Americans, these trips are a significant source of both knowledge about and a sense of connection to the world beyond the United States, and they help to define and reinforce ethical narratives about the nature and sources of global connections, conflicts and obligations. The dissertation is organized around an extended case study of the relationship between a large, affluent, and predominantly white mainline congregation in the U.S. south and a faith-based NGO in rural Malawi, and the histories, institutions and relationships in which it is embedded. I use this account to explore ethical narratives in the wider culture which shape popular understandings of short-term mission, and to open space for a conversation between the “ordinary ethics” of short-term mission and philosophical descriptions of the “encounter with the Other” that emerge in liberal cosmopolitan ethics and the “ethics of alterity.” In doing this, I am to identify resources for an ethnographically grounded Christian ethic of encounter and engagement.