6 Theological librarianship • Vol. 12, No. 1 april 2019

Jeschke’s efforts to develop Pitts Theology Library’s holdings in African religious monographs, periodicals, and archival materials began in 1975.7 Jeschke’s conversations with visiting scholar of world religions Harold Turner between 1971 and 1972 seem to have sparked initial attention to Christian communities and perspectives developing outside Western purview. Reading the United Methodist Church of Rhodesia’s (today Zimbabwe) publication Umbowo additionally prompted Jeschke to turn the library’s collecting attentions to the global south. He commented, “The resources and concerns of African churches are quite unlike those of European and North American Christians.” Accordingly, Jeschke argued that theological librarians needed to “anticipate the emerging needs of the scholarly community in the future.”8 Such emerging needs correlated with developing a collection of sources under-utilized within theological education/scholarship.

Matching his vision and words with actions, Jeschke committed several research trips to work tediously through bibliographies held at various university and mission studies libraries in the United Kingdom. He generated correspondence in the hundreds with notable African religion scholars, ecclesial organizations, national councils of churches, schools of theology, study centers, and individual pastors, bishops, priests, and missionaries in order to request periodicals, member church lists, and addresses for additional contacts. Along with Pitts staff members, most notably Cindy Runyon, Jeschke led Pitts Theology Library to acquire over eight hundred periodicals from over forty African countries. Pitts’ Cataloger Fesseha Nega determined that as of 2018, Pitts is the only North American theological institution to hold 209 of these periodicals. Within the fiscal year of 2017, Pitts continued to receive sixty-four issues of African periodicals. The collection cuts across languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Chichewa (Malawi), Dutch, English, Ewe (Ghana), French, Hausa (northern Nigeria), Kinyarwanda (Uganda/Rwanda), Malagasy, Portuguese, Shona, Siswati (Swaziland), Swahili, Twi (Togo/Ghana), and Yoruba (Nigeria), to name a few. In addition to periodicals, Jeschke increased Pitts’ acquisition of monographs not simply about African Christianity but by African historians and theologians.

As he developed the “African project,” as he referred to it, Jeschke admitted the “more subtle limitations of cultural and racial boundaries” that prevented him and others from hearing voices beyond Western Christianity. He wrote, “The voice of the Third World is rarely heard in the First, in part because the First World is not convinced that the peoples of the Third World have anything important to say to us. Our cultural arrogance has limited our capacities to hear. The effect is to silence the voice.”9 Jeschke intended that the African periodicals would demonstrate that “Emory shares in the cultural responsibility of preserving the literary remains of the past for future generations” of communities previously relegated to margins. To this end, he reasoned, the collection “is not a museum or exhibit collection but the stuff of serious, scholarly research.”10 He estimated that the Pitts collection could augment future research by providing accessible and preserved resources in coordinated efforts with other institutions to reflect a more complete set of histories and theological sources in the contemporary emergence of a global church. Jeschke’s appeal to his school’s administration noted that this effort went far beyond the library: “This decision—for or against the status quo—is a policy decision for which the administration is responsible. [The implications for the future shape of the library’s resources] are too important for the librarian to make on her/his own.”

Curating the Exhibition

Jeschke did not intend for the African periodicals, missionary postcards, and archives to be turned into items viewed behind glass. These were and are living documents from living communities that invite scholarly

7 Jeschke, “Acquisitions and the African Project at the Pitts Theology Library: A Reflection,” 75. In Jeschke’s 1986 address he notes “over the past decade,” thus I roughly calculate to late mid-1970s.

8 Jeschke, “Acquisitions and the African Project at the Pitts Theology Library: A Reflection,” 75.

9 Jeschke, 1986, 86.

10 Jeschke’s handwritten notes, Pitts Theology Library Records 1914-2016, Box 5, African Serials Project Corre-spondence 1982-1985 (Pitts Special Collections).