This chapter considers compassionate experience, using as examples the Pietist diaconate movement in Germany in the nineteenth century, the Catholic Worker, and the L’Arche movement. The chapter shows that such compassionate practice is usually motivated by a recognition of precarity and need, a “seeing” of suffering or “hearing” of the cry of the other. Those who engage in compassionate experiences identify with the poor and suffering, often to the point of joining them or sharing in their plight. Their actions are marked by compassion, which is more than a feeling of pity, but involves deep commitment to understanding and ameliorating the plight of others or enabling them to improve it themselves. Such generous acts of hospitality often go far beyond the bounds of what seems reasonable or even humanly possible. Compassionate experience is focused less on the religious self but instead is devoted to the other, whether religious or not.

This essay challenges readings of American puritanism as a primarily inward-looking and self-contained affair, whose main significance lay in foreshadowing the rise of the United States and being the root cause of a national ideology of exceptionalism. The aim is to put New England religion and culture back into a European perspective, by demonstrating how large the Continent loomed in the puritan mind and emphasizing the significance of the many exchanges with like-minded groups on the Continent throughout the colonial period. Drawing on a growing body of revisionist scholarship, the chapter discusses what we have learned of these Continental-European connections, while offering new insights into the dialogue between American puritans and German-speaking Pietists. In doing so, it also pays attention to how these relations were often triangulated with Britain. Three aspects are treated in summary overview but always with special reference to the works of the leading Boston theologian Cotton Mather: (1) the general perception of Europe, in particular, how puritans looked at the varieties of European Protestantism and through that lens at themselves; (2) the networks and collaborations on mission, reform, and revival between New Englanders and groups on the Continent; and (3) the many theological and intellectual exchanges that took place through these networks.

In the early eighteenth century, Pietist networks in Germany initiated missionary projects in South India and over the years in different parts of the world. Millenarian expectations and their distinctive concept of the future, shaped the Protestant mission to South India in every respect from planning and communication, medialization and fundraising, right down to the local missionary work. Four dynamics of the globalization of Protestantism are central to the contribution: (1) transregional and transnational network building with the participation of women and men in Protestant Europe; (2) the transfer of knowledge and objects from Europe to India and vice versa; (3) transcultural interactions and the importance of converted Indians for the local missionary work; (4) the consolidation of the European religious Identity through the medialization of the mission with the narrative of progress. The article examines letters between the organizers of the mission to South India in Halle, London, and at the Danish court; the correspondence between Halle and male and female donators for the mission in Europe; and the published mission journal.