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News, events, updates, and tidbits from the Presbyterian Historical Society. Use tags to read related articles or sort by author for similar posts written by PHS staff members and volunteers.

Korea Resources at PHS

February 13, 2018

The 2018 Winter Olympics kicked off last week in Pyeongchang, South Korea. PHS is celebrating the Games by sharing some of our Korea-related resources.

In 2017, the Presbyterian Church of Korea celebrated the 110^th Anniversary of their first Presbytery meeting. Missionaries from the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., including several physicians, were welcomed to Korea in the 1880s. These PCUSA missionaries remained under the auspices of the...

Author:

Kristen

Tags:

Korea, Mission History

The Missionary as Change Agent

February 9, 2018

--By Richard Poethig

A recent Wall Street Journal article caught my attention, its title, “Christian Missionaries Against Colonialism,” setting my mind in motion back through time. In the article the historian David A. Hollinger makes the case that missionary work stopped being a carrier of colonial imperialism in the 20^th century. Hollinger’s recent book, Protestants...

Author:

Guest Blogger

Tags:

Mission History, Poethig

A Missionary Calling: “God is better to me than I expect”

January 2, 2018

Mary Parke Thompson and her husband David Thompson served as missionaries to Japan for over five decades. In the last installment of this continuing series, Mary recorded how the tensions with fellow missionaries over the direction of Japanese Christianity weighed on her—even as their vision of a Union Church (Protestant rather than just Presbyterian) run by its Japanese congregants with its own building was close to fruition. In this selection, she...

Author:

Collections

Tags:

Mission History, Japan, Mary Parke Thompson

Armenian Presbyterians in the United States

December 28, 2017

--by Rev. Vartkes M. Kassouni

The story of Armenian Presbyterians in America is closely intertwined with the story of Armenians and their immigration to the United States. It is distinctly so in California, where the first Armenian immigrants began to settle in Fresno in the mid-1880s.

The oldest Armenian church of any denomination in California was organized in 1897 as the First Armenian Presbyterian Church. Its first pastor was a former American missionary to Armenia, Rev. Lysander Burbank, who had...

Author:

Guest Blogger

Tags:

Congregations, Mission History, Armenia, Immigration

Jibrail 1958-1967: Revolution, CROP, and Small Animal Husbandry

November 15, 2017

This is the second installment of a series on rural agricultural work in Lebanon. Read the first installment, Jibrail 1943-1958: An Answer to Communism.

Word to evacuate came in the night by radio, in late May 1958. The Hannas—Ed, Arpiné, their six-year-old son Philip, and Arpiné’s parents, Levon and Josephine Yenovkian—hurriedly packed a jeep and a Ford and fled their two...

Author:

David S

Tags:

Lebanon, Agriculture, Cold War, Mission History

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Korea Resources at PHS

The Missionary as Change Agent

A Missionary Calling: “God is better to me than I expect”

Armenian Presbyterians in the United States

Jibrail 1958-1967: Revolution, CROP, and Small Animal Husbandry