Sex, Missions, and Historiography

There was a curious confluence of reading material on my desk this week. I finally got around to reading Trinity Evangelical Divinity Professor Robert Priest’s article in Current Anthropology: "Missionary Positions: Christian, Modernist, Postmodernist.” (42:1, Feb 2001). This insightful piece examines the origins of the phrase “missionary position” and the way it has found its way into various scholarly discourses about power, sex, and cultural encounter. A dated article, I am nevertheless grateful to my good friend Carlos Tellez for pointing me to this source. The latest issue of  the Journal of Moravian History also arrived in my mailbox this week – a special issue devoted to “Moravians and Sexuality.” The Moravians have been getting a lot of interest these days, especially over sex. In the eighteenth-century, Moravians made marital relations a sacred rite and, somewhat controversial for the time, encouraged their married congregants to try more than just one position. The issue includes articles by Paul Peucker, Peter Vogt and Katherine Faull. The historiography of missions draws all of these threads together. The Moravians, of course, loom large in missions history and as they fanned out across the Atlantic World, they grappled with the same questions of power and cultural relationships that Priest explores so thoroughly. Who knew the history of missions could be so sexy!