Christianity Commons^™

Telling Fisk’S Story, John Hubers

Northwestern Review

Pliny Fisk (1792-1825) was one of two missionaries sent in 1819 by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to the Ottoman Empire. This made them not only the first American missionaries in the Muslim majority world, but two of the first Americans to make a permanent move to the Middle East. Hubers’ book explores what it meant for Pliny and his companion Levi Parsons to make that trip, exploring in particular the impact this had on their perceptions of the religious other.

What makes this an interesting study is noting that Fisk never met a Middle Easterner …