Abstract/Sommario: George Leslie Mackay (1844-1901) was among the most remarkable missionaries of the Victorian era. During his three decades in Taiwan (1871-1901), he received little substantive assistance from other Canadian missionaries. At the time of his death he left a community of more than 2,400 baptized communicants and a much larger body of regular hearers who attended more than sixty churches led by full-time native preachers. Mackay established a hospital, a school for girls and 'Oxford Colle ...; [Leggi tutto...]
George Leslie Mackay (1844-1901) was among the most remarkable missionaries of the Victorian era. During his three decades in Taiwan (1871-1901), he received little substantive assistance from other Canadian missionaries. At the time of his death he left a community of more than 2,400 baptized communicants and a much larger body of regular hearers who attended more than sixty churches led by full-time native preachers. Mackay established a hospital, a school for girls and 'Oxford College', his training Centre for native church leaders. Just as important, as one of only three known missionaries in nineteenth-century China to have married an indigenous spouse, he left behind descendants who continued to play leading roles in Taiwan's Presbiterian Church after his death. For all his unusual characteristics, George Leslie Mackay was very much a man of the Victorian age. He shared his era's tendency to rank races and cultures along an evolutionary scale, sometimes asserting the inferiority of the island's indigenous tribal peoples to the dominant Chinese populace. He was no champion of interreligious goodwill, confidently predicting the future annihilation of Buddhism, Taosim. That he is still lionized in Taiwan by Christians and non-Christians alike, long after most other Victorian missionaries have been forgotten or deconstructed, testifies to the enduring bonds that mutual affection and respect can forge between people of sharply different cultures