Channing of Tanta
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
Benjamin Channing was born into a prominent New England family with a respectable fortune, an Ivy League pedigree, and stalwart Presbyterian values of rectitude and public service. Friendly, helpful, honest, and optimistic, Ben excelled at school and sports, unwittingly becoming just the kind of young man that recruiting mission agencies longed for in their wildest dreams. In 1918, his peers at Yale and Princeton were humming with idealism and a desire for challenge and adventure. The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions absorbed this energy and redirected it. Ben soon found himself committed to the evangelization of the world and on his way to Egypt. But the ancient land of Egypt in the 1920s was balanced on the edge of enormous social and cultural change. Centuries of foreign domination were creating an indigenous rebellion against Ottoman and British imperialism. Forces were struggling against the heavy hand of Western economic and military assets, grappling with the decidedly mixed legacy of European and American Christian missionary work in Egypt, and engaging with a radically new concept of powerful political Islam. Tested in many ways, Benjamin Channing did his best … and somehow both succeeded and failed.
Endorsements (2)
“The subject of American Christian missions in Egypt in the twentieth century has been a topic of immense interest as of late. The topic has been studied from many different perspectives. However, rarely do we have the opportunity to experience this era of intense American and Egyptian intercultural relations. E. M. Clifford has provided us the opportunity to peek into and imagine this past. Based upon actual persons and events, Channing of Tanta brings this important era to life.”
“Channing of Tanta helps us imagine the early twentieth-century American Protestant missionaries in Egypt as complex human beings: in their hubris and privilege, in their courage and piety, in their warm or prickly relationships with one another, and in their struggles between theological correctness and personal connection and friendship. This is a work of fiction that stands alongside and breathes life into the corresponding academic histories.”
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