It is always difficult to review a Festschrift because of its strange nature. Its main purpose is to honour a colleague, often a friend, as I know from own experiences as contributor and in particular as editor of a Festschrift for my ‘doctor father’. Usually, the editor(s) try to collect contributors that represent the academic life of the honorand. But the interest of a scholar changes over a lifetime. We start at one point – usually the topic of the PhD thesis – and arrive at a very different point by the age of retirement. Consequently, a Festschrift may combine a wide range of themes that are frequently arranged without a clear concept or a common motif.

This is the case with this Festschrift for Professor Irving Hexham, published in honour of his sixty-fifth birthday. His list of publications in the Festschrift demonstrates the wide range of his research interests. A former student of Ninian Smart at Lancaster, Hexham went to Bristol for his postgraduate studies. Afterwards he taught at several universities (mainly in Britain and Canada) before he became Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary. Fluent in a number of languages (for instance German), he studied religions in Southern Africa, in particular the impact of English and German missionaries, as well as new developments in North America. The thirty-one chapters in this Festschrift represent this range of themes but speak also of his character as colleague and friend. Some of the papers are clearly written for Hexham and include memories about a certain stage of his academic life. For instance, when Robert Morgan reflects upon their common Lancaster time we learn something about the unusual educational background of the honorand (Morgan calls him ‘one of the dozen “odd balls”’, p. 129) and how fortunate to destiny one can be. And his colleague Hugo Meynell expresses his gratitude to Hexham for his support in a difficult time. Some authors explicitly explain the topic of their chapter with reference to Hexham or include a dedication to him (for example Poewe, Veit, Waltke). Other articles represent the academic field(s) to which Irving Hexham has contributed and is still contributing (though not everyone refers to Hexham's contributions). For instance, his interest in African religions can be recognised in Raum's chapter, and his interest in new religious movements in Mullins's. However, most of the chapters deal with Hexham's (and the editors’) main interest, mission studies.

The editors decided to publish the chapters in alphabetical order, according to the contributors' last names; hence they are not grouped by subject area, and nor is the the diversity of themes addressed in the short introduction. Every reader of this Festschrift has therefore to be open-minded and even multi-lingual for six of chapters are in German and one contains quotations in Swahili (at least my guess is that Nzalayaimisi quotes from Swahili), with an English translation. However, it is worth the effort, not only because of Irving Hexham but also because of the quality of some of the contributions.

Most of the chapters present case studies in the field of mission studies, often biographies of missionaries. The difficulty of biographies in academic publications lies often in combining descriptive information about interesting lives with an academic interpretation. Ursula Trüper, for instance, presents the life story of Hanna Kleinschmidt in South Africa but little else. We learn much about this woman, a daughter of a Namaquain (=Nama woman) and a London missionary, her marriage to a German missionary and her own work, but we learn little about the racial tensions that she had to confront due to her parentage and the political context. Karla Poewe's contribution, on the other hand, incorporates details about Martin Jäckel, a German missionary in South Africa, and his publications into a discussion of participant observation and publishing. By offering a detailed contextualisation of the material Poewe demonstrates the significance of biographical case studies for a wider field. Wilfried Wagner, who in his short chapter discusses the death of August Lett, a German missionary in Indonesia, also shows very well the ambiguity that led to the killing and made Lett a martyr after the event.

Another group of contributions discusses selected themes (such as sexuality and morality: Pakendorf) or events (such as the ‘cattle killing delusion’: Raum). Outstanding is, for instance, Walter Veit's contribution. He focuses on an often overlooked type of literature: indigenous texts such as praise songs that were transmitted to Europe mainly by missionaries. While the ethnographic contributions of missionaries to the development of anthropology and religious studies have been discussed elsewhere, the impact that they had on European art is still neglected. Veit goes so far as to compares the impact of this type of oral art on European poets (such as the Dada modernist movement) with the impact of indigenous material art on artists such as Picasso, Kirchner and Heckel.

Not all contributions are in the field of mission studies; some reflect Hexham's interests in philosophy, theology and religious studies. I want to single out Mark Mullins's chapter on new religious movements because it reflects an important development in missionary activities that should be further studied. While representatives of the established Churches still dismiss indigenous movements, a simple study of the membership numbers of independent Churches in Asia and elsewhere demonstrate that these new ‘spontaneous’ forms of Christianity are much more successful than those transplanted by European missionaries. Mullins argues therefore that it is necessary to move from a Eurocentric to a polycentric perspective when looking at the interaction between different religions. Christianity became so successful in Japan and other countries that missionary initiatives from the former periphery to the old centre, Europe, can now be observed. Mullins, together with Veit and other contributors, demonstrates important new developments that will lead mission studies as well as religious studies into new areas, an excellent result for a Festschrift.