Missionary Calculus
Missionary Calculus

Author: Anilkumar Belvadi

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-09-17

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0190052430

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How are religious educational institutions built? In histories of evangelical institution-building in the Victorian Indian colonial period (1858-1901), this question has mostly been addressed from the perspective of the religious ends that Christian missionaries sought to achieve and the ideological obstacles they encountered. This may be called the 'values' approach. Missionary Calculus sets this aside and examines, instead, the most routine transactions of missionaries in building an evangelical institution, the Sunday school. Missionaries daily struggled with and acted upon certain questions: How shall we acquire land and money to set up such schools? What methods shall we employ to attract students? What curriculum, books, and classroom materials shall we use? How shall we tune our hymns? Shall we employ non-Christians to teach in Christian Sunday schools? The makers of colonial Sunday schools focused obsessively on the means, the material and symbolic resources, with which they felt they could achieve certain immediate objectives. Such a transactional or 'instrumental' approach resulted in stated religious 'values' being insidiously compromised. Using insights from classical Weberian sociology, and through a close scrutiny of missionary means, this book shows how the success or failure of meeting evangelical ends may be assessed. With extensive archival research, chiefly on American missionaries in colonial India, this work examines the formation of Sunday schools at the point of transnational, intercultural contact. Readers interested in religion, education, and colonial history should find the matter, method, outcomes, and narration of Missionary Calculus new and thought-provoking.

Gender, Religion, and the Heathen Lands
Gender, Religion, and the Heathen Lands

Author: Maina Chawla Singh

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-31

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 1135653453

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Seeking to extend existing scholarship on gender and colonialism and on women and American religion, this cross-cultural study examines the work of American missionary women in South Asia at several levels. A primary concern of the study is to historicize the interventions of these women and situate them within the dual contexts of the sending society and the receiving culture. It focuses on missionaries Isabella Thoburn and Ida Scudder, who founded some of the premier women's colleges and hospitals in British colonial India. The book also draws upon the narratives and reminiscences of South Asian women, now in their seventies, who attended such institutions in the 1940s, and whose voices texture our understanding of American women's missionary work in "Other" cultures.

American Philanthropy Abroad
American Philanthropy Abroad

Author: Merle Curti

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 946

ISBN-13: 1351532472

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This book tells for the first time, in rich detail, and without apologetics, what Americans have done, in the voluntary sector and often without official sanction, for human welfare in all parts of the world. Beneath the currently fashionable rhetoric of anti-colonialism is the story of people who have aided victims of natural disasters such as famines and earthquakes, and what they contributed to such agencies of cultural and social life as libraries, schools, and colleges. The work of an assortment of individuals, from missionaries to foundation executives, has advanced public health, international education, and technical assistance to the Third World. These people have also assisted in relief and relocation of refugees, displaced persons, and those who suffered religious and racial persecution. These activities were especially noteworthy following the two world wars of the twentieth century. The United States established great foundations—Carnegie, Rosenwald, Phelps-Stokes, Rockefeller, Ford, among others—which provided another face of capitalist accumulation to those in backward economic regions and those suffering political persecution. These were meshed with religious relief agencies of all denominations that also contributed to make possible what Arnold Toynbee called “a century in which civilized man made the benefits of progress available to all mankind.” This is a massive work requiring more than five years of research, drawing upon a wide array of hitherto unavailable materials and source documents.