“In this book, Fr. Andrzej Miotk, SVD employs another approach to historiography, namely, looking at the history of a religious-missionary congregation through the lens of its general chapters over the years. It is a novel approach to writing the history of a religious congregation, one that can reveal features of the congregation that would otherwise remain hidden or only insufficiently given attention to. […] He exam-ines all 17 general chapters of the SVD in its 140 years of existence, and what emerges is an interesting story of a religious-missionary congrega-tion struggling to remain faithful to its original charism but also seek-ing to be responsive to the challenges of the times.And within that overarching story, we hear about different kinds of superiors and differ-ent styles of leadership, saintly and dysfunctional religious, heroic and failed missionaries, debates and disagreements, tried and old ways and bold and new approaches, traditional mentalities and new paradigm shifts, divergences and convergences, interculturality and unity in di-versity. It is a tale of the unfailing constancy of God’s grace in the midst of human weakness, frailty and limitations.” Antonio M. Pernia, SVD Andrzej Miotk, SVD is a historian at the SVD Archives of the Generalate in Rome. After his studies of Church History at the Pontifical Gregorian Uni-versity in Rome, he obtained in 1999 his Ph.D. in Missiology on “Under-standing of theMission in the Historical Process of Transformation Based on the Encyclical Maximum Illud,” at the Philosophisch-Theologische Hoch-schule SVD St.Augustin, Germany. Since 1999 he was a lecturer in Church and Mission History at the SVD Mission Seminary in Pieniężno, Poland. He was also anAssistant Professor in the Department of Church History at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Warmia- Masuria in Olsztyn from 2002 to 2009. He obtained his postdoctoral university degree by defending his work on “The Programs for the Christianization of Africa in the 19th Century Based on the Mission of the White Fathers.” He is the author of about 70 academic articles and two books, namely, “Until the Ends of the World. The Popular History of the Mission” (2005), and “History of the Miotk Family from Olszowe Błoto” (2009).weiterlesen