Missionary Families Find a Sense of Place and Identity

Book excerpt: Missionary Families Find a Sense of Place and Identity is a community history of members of nineteen Lutheran missionary families who served in Tanzania. Based on over ninety interviews and John Benson’s extensive knowledge of cultural geography, he compares the lives of the missionary generation who grew up in the United States and went to Tanzania as missionaries to those of their children who grew up in Africa but settled in the United States as adults. Benson blends his personal experiences as a child of missionaries in Tanzania to tell the story of both generations. Missionary Families is centered on the themes of connection to place and religious development and will appeal to scholars of geography, cultural studies and religion.