The Latourette Initiative for the Documentation of World Christianity
Kenneth Scott Latourette
D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity
1921-1953
The Latourette Initiative is a proactive program to preserve and provide access to the documentation of world Christianity. It provides funding for the microfilming of published and archival resources documenting the history of Christian missions and the life of the churches in countries where missionaries served.
The Initiative is named for Kenneth Scott Latourette (1884-1968), who was D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School. Latourette was instrumental in changing the focus of the Day Missions Collection at Yale from a resource for training missionaries to a collection documenting the history of Christian missions. The endowment he established to further the work of the Yale Divinity Library provides the funding for the Latourette Initiative.
Projects funded by the Latourette Initiative to this point include:
- World War II-era records of the World Council of Churches (distributed by IDC)
- World Student Christian Federation Archives, held by the World Council of Churches (IDC)
- WCC Programme to Combat Racism (IDC)
- WCC Dialogue with People of Living Faiths (IDC)
- Old Believers monographs, held at the Russian National Library (IDC)
- Regions Beyond Missionary Union Archives, held by the University of Edinburgh (Adam Matthew)
- Evangelical Lutheran Church in America mission archives (Scholarly Resources)
We welcome proposals from libraries, archival repositories, mission agencies, and others with collections of such documentation, for projects that would help carry forward the work of the Latourette Initiative. We are particularly interested in ways that the Latourette Initiative might provide "seed money" that would leverage other resources to preserve and provide access to this documentation.
For more information on the Latourette Initiative, or to discuss a possible project, please contact:
Paul F. Stuehrenberg
Yale Divinity Library
409 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT 06511
paul.stuehrenberg@yale.edu
