Robert Campbell

You Are There

Robert Campbell

You are There: Restoring Churches, People, and Places is a pastoral conversation about creation care. It is a pastoral voice shepherding Christian people in Christian churches towards discipleship that is all the way down to the dirt. In it you will find a pastor with time to talk with you and walk with you so that the fruit of the redemption earned by Jesus' life, death, and resurrection will make a real and substantial difference in your very own backyard. This book is not actually about you; it's about us as local churches. Each local church should care about its place because the church is where God uses the gospel to restore people, and God's restored people restore both people and places. This is what we mean by creation care. You, church, are a gathering of people defined by your faith in Jesus and the dirt you walk on. You are a people sent to that place. This is why it is good news that you are there.

In Darkest Alaska

Robert Campbell

Before Alaska became a mining bonanza, it was a scenic bonanza, a place larger in the American imagination than in its actual borders. Prior to the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, thousands of scenic adventurers journeyed along the Inside Passage, the nearly thousand-mile sea-lane that snakes up the Pacific coast from Puget Sound to Icy Strait. Both the famous—including wilderness advocate John Muir, landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, and photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Edward Curtis—and the long forgotten—a gay ex-sailor, a former society reporter, an African explorer, and a neurasthenic Methodist minister—returned with fascinating accounts of their Alaskan journeys, becoming advance men and women for an expanding United States. In Darkest Alaska explores the popular images conjured by these travelers' tales, as well as their influence on the broader society. Drawing on lively firsthand accounts, archival photographs, maps, and other ephemera of the day, historian Robert Campbell chronicles how Gilded Age sightseers were inspired by Alaska's bounty of evolutionary treasures, tribal artifacts, geological riches, and novel thrills to produce a wealth of highly imaginative reportage about the territory. By portraying the territory as a «Last West» ripe for American conquest, tourists helped pave the way for settlement and exploitation.