American Protestant Missionaries Research Articles

Astronomy for Girls

Abstract In 1874–75 American Protestant missionaries in Beirut published two astronomy textbooks in Arabic. While male students at the Syrian Protestant College studied Cornelius Van Dyck’s Foundations of Astronomy, girls at secondary schools—the highest level of female education—studied Eliza Everett’s Principles of Astronomy: For Use in Schools. These texts appeared at the height of a cross-cultural encounter between American Protestants and the inhabitants of Beirut and Mount Lebanon that added new meanings to the Arabic concept of science (ʿilm). Historians have analyzed men’s discussions to chart how ʿilm, once a broad category akin to “knowledge” in English, came to include a neo-Baconian understanding of the modern English “science.” This article turns to science pedagogy, a field that included both men and women, to argue that the conceptual transformation of ʿilm also entailed an epistemological division along lines of gender and age. Overall, the story reveals how a study of women in science sheds light on the gendered history of science in Arabic.

Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea

The feminist work of reimagining women’s fraught subjecthood under empire has prompted many inquiries into the everyday negotiations colonized women made to survive and even thrive. Hyaeweol Choi’s Gender Politics at Home and Abroad: Protestant Modernity in Colonial-Era Korea demonstrates how “Protestant modernity” shaped gender relations in colonial Korea, reframing the iconic figure of the New Woman emblematic of elite learning and the questioning of tradition. A culminating work of Choi’s pioneering scholarship on New Womanhood, Gender Politics builds upon her previous publications such as Gender and Mission Encounters in Korea: New Women, Old Ways (2009) and New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook (2013). The book theorizes beyond binaries of colonized and colonizer and agency and passivity, situating a subset of Korean women as creative negotiators of gender under Japanese empire, Korean neo-Confucianism, and American Protestantism.Gender Politics argues that gender norms and material practices embedded in modern domesticity in colonial Korea were the result of “border crossing” in both a literal and a figurative sense (198). Choi shows how transnational encounters—more specifically, encounters between native Korean women and white American Protestant missionary women—“played a role in shaping modern gender ideology, reforming domestic practices, coming to grips with a sense of locality and the world, and claiming new space for women in the public sphere” (ix). Choi uses the phrase “Protestant modernity,” which she explains as “a composite of religious morality, historical outlook, and material practices that could mean different things to different historical subjects,” as a heuristic device to trace the formation of modern gender relations fostered by the global Christian network in colonial Korea (15). The purpose of the book is to move beyond “the nexus of the metropole and colony” (195) and examine the transnational encounters that illuminate the resistance and appropriation of “both native and foreign ideas and practices” (200).The first half of Gender Politics traces how Protestant modernity shaped colonial Korean gender ideologies of woman and home. Chapter 1 explores the ways in which the colonial ideology of “wise mother, good wife” was influenced by Protestant Christianity in Korea. Choi argues that the ideology of “wise mother, good wife” in Korea was a “transcultural modern construct” that was a result of the convergence of the Chosŏn dynasty’s Confucian ideal of pudŏk (womanly virtues), Japan’s Meiji gender ideology of ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother), and American Protestant missionaries’ Victorian ideology of domesticity (41). She introduces a transcultural, transpacific framework to understand a gender ideology inextricable from the making of Korean national subjecthood and womanhood. Chapter 2 situates the modern house and home in colonial Korea as a point of convergence for national, colonial, and missionary projects inflected by the local and the global (75–76). Choi utilizes a “multivalent” approach that considers how “Western modernity, Japanese colonial imperatives, and Korean nationalist desire” (107) influenced colonial domesticity in Korea, further building upon her emphasis on the transcultural in chapter 1. She highlights the transpacific nature of colonial-era home economics, with a particular emphasis on the American Protestant domestic ideology of “sweet home,” which New Women such as Kang Kyŏngae and Ch’oe Isun subverted and reshaped. Choi argues that the construction of modern domesticity in colonial-era Korea “illustrates the complex interplay among competing forces that defied the typical nexus of the colonizer and the colonized” (108). In chapter 2 and throughout the volume, the United States is referred to as a “non-colonial power” that refashioned modern domestic ideals and practices under Japanese colonial constraints (108).The latter half of the volume explores how New Women’s experiences of crossing borders of gender, class, and nation produced transnationally articulated identities and practices. Chapter 3 examines the gender politics of New Women’s travel overseas with an emphasis on how the global missionary network acted as a means for these women to pursue advanced study and move beyond the domestic sphere. Choi utilizes the term “crossing” as an interpretive framework that evokes (1) women crossing the divide between traditional gender roles and new expectations for women in the modern era, (2) overcoming hierarchical order of the social classes, and (3) going beyond the nexus of the metropole and colony under Japanese rule. Choi argues that New Women’s everyday experiences of “crossing” enabled by their mobility influenced their national identity and gendered bodily practice, thus developing “a sense of colonized self” (148). Chapter 4 shifts the book’s attention to Protestant missionary involvement in rural revitalization programs in colonial-era Korea. The chapter discusses how Protestant Korean women intellectuals shared practical knowledge about nutrition, hygiene, family budgeting, and child-rearing with rural women despite colonial constraints. These New Women consciously took an apolitical approach in executing their rural programs, which emphasized enlightenment and moral spiritual cultivation for the purpose of national restoration (154). Choi proposes that these rural programs produced a “locally sensible modernity” facilitated by transnational encounters and native traditions (188–89).Gender Politics illuminates the triply transcultural subjecthood of New Women who lived under Japanese empire. The book is impressive in its scope and approach, performing both literary and visual analyses of primary sources such as essays by American Protestant missionaries, photographs of Korean New Women, and colonial-era Korean women’s magazines. The book succeeds in communicating the colonial grammars influenced by Protestant missionary culture that regulated Korean women’s gender and sexuality, as well as how colonized Korean women channeled the resources provided by missionaries to negotiate their own womanhood. Choi conducts an expansive feminist rewriting of colonial-era Korean women intellectuals as resourceful agents triply influenced by Japanese, American, and Korean gender norms.A potential point of critique is the brevity of the book’s explorations of certain productive tensions such as the opacity of native Korean women in the eyes of white Protestant missionaries, which Choi briefly mentions in chapter 2. How might such opacity be further contextualized in New Women’s “crossing,” which generated racial and ethnic identities? Choi’s characterization of white Protestant missionaries as noncolonial Western forces partly obscures the very complexity of coloniality that the book is positioned to communicate. Would it be accurate to characterize Protestant missionaries in colonial Korea as noncolonial simply because they were not Japanese, or direct colonizers of Korea? Or could what Choi has termed Protestant modernity be inextricable from the history of American empire? One could note that the approaches of these Protestant missionaries are deeply colonial in their fixation with managing the gendered other—in this case, native Korean women. More attention to how the nexus of the colonizer and the colonized haunts the dynamics of organized religion—even if used as a means for native women’s self-actualization—could add to the impressive contributions this book makes.Gender Politics shares critical sensibilities with a robust body of postcolonial and feminist work that examines how native subjects negotiate their own ambiguous agencies under empire and theorizes womanhood from a non-West-centric feminist perspective. Works with similar interventions include Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s Scattered Hegemonies (1994), Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2011), and Sungyun Lim’s Rules of the House (2018). The book is also in conversation with Korean cultural studies on New Women such as Ji-Eun Lee’s Women Pre-Scripted (2015) and Sunyoung Park’s The Proletarian Wave (2015). In addition, Gender Politics joins a dialogue generated by scholars who have been pushing the boundaries of what constitutes Koreanness beyond an ethnonational understanding. These scholars include David S. Roh, who examines connections between Zainichi and Korean American literatures in Minor Transpacific (2021), and Yoon Sun Yang, who in From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men (2017) explores how individuality was translated into Korean in the form of the early colonial domestic novel inflected by Japanese and Chinese literary traditions. Choi’s Gender Politics will be useful not only for specialists of colonial-era Korea but also for postcolonial and feminist scholars working in a variety of transnational cultural contexts.

Saving the Overlooked Continent: American Protestant Missions in Western Europe, 1940–1975

Saving the Overlooked Continent: American Protestant Missions in Western Europe, 1940–1975

H. Fujimoto, <i>Medicine and Christianity: American Protestant Missionaries and their Medical Work in Japan</i>

H. Fujimoto, <i>Medicine and Christianity: American Protestant Missionaries and their Medical Work in Japan</i>

[A statistical measurement of diseases recorded in The Quarterly Reports of the Ophthalmic Hospital at Canton].

The Quarterly Reports of the Ophthalmic Hospital at Canton written by Rev. Peter Parker, an American protestant missionary in China, were serialised in The Chinese Repository from 1836 to 1850. Each report provided the number of patients treated in the corresponding period and described in detail the treatment of diseases which were difficult to deal with. However, due to historical conditions, these reports were inconsistent in terms of the disease classification standards, let alone the statistical deficiencies. This paper aims to regroup the diseases recorded in the 15 reports according to the classification from the eleventh to fifteenth report and recount the patient number of each disease systematically in different periods, with reliable historical data to support such relevant studies as the history of the Ophthalmic Hospital at Canton and the introduction of Western Medicine into China and the development of International Classification of Diseases.

Around the World in 283 Days: Traveling with the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry Commission of Appraisal

The Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry was an ambitious attempt by seven mainline Protestant denominations to evaluate the state of American foreign missions in 1931–32. It consisted of two parts, a fact-finding mission and the Commission of Appraisal, the findings of which are known as the Hocking Report. The Report stirred quite a bit of controversy and helped shape American Protestant missions for years to come. This article is based on a collection of letters written by the secretary of the Commission; it offers a glimpse into the inner workings of the Commission as it traveled around the world.

American Philhellenes, Protestant Missionaries and the “Orphans” of the 1821 Hellenic War of Independence: The Case of Christodoulos Evangelides

The declaration of the Greek War of Independence and emancipation from the long Turkish enslavement was heralded by enthusiasts, romantics, abolitionists and philhellenists in both Europe and the United States of America. Eventually, most of them assumed the role of philhellenes, and contributed to the success of the Greek cause either by their actual presence, or by their fund raising campaign, or by the personal influence they exercised on hesitant American governments. American Philhellenism took many forms, one of which was that of the protestant denominational committee support whose endowment, although open to interpretation, contributed significantly to both the civilians’ relief and to the development of the Greek educational system. The particular paper discusses the role the American Protestant missionaries played within this wider atmosphere of support and their Greek “orphans” project pertaining to several boys being taken by American missionaries back to their homeland to be given a new home, education and job opportunities either in the United States or in Greece. In my discussion of the American Protestant contribution to the Greek War of Independence in 1821, I have chosen to discuss Christodoulos Evangelides’ American experience as he is one of the very few “orphans” who left a diary behind shedding light to the conditions of the particular project.

Hans Krabbendam, Saving the Overlooked Continent. American Protestant Missions in Western Europe, 1940-1975

Hans Krabbendam, Saving the Overlooked Continent. American Protestant Missions in Western Europe, 1940-1975

The effect of social capital on organizational repertoires of American Protestant missions

A religious organization’s choice of activities is shaped not only by theological goals but also the capital available to it. Prior research has shown how economic and religious capital influence Protestant missionary organizations’ repertoires of activism but has largely ignored the role of social capital. Using the most recent data on transnational American Protestant mission agencies, this study aims to fill this gap. Using a Bourdieuian field approach and multiple correspondence analysis, the study finds that linking and bonding social capital both shape whether an agency generalizes rather than specializes in specific ministry activities. Both bonding and bridging social capital, in turn, prompt a more other-worldly than this-worldly ministry orientation, but this is a pattern most characteristic of Evangelical agencies, suggesting an intersection between religious identity and organizational network size. The study concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for interorganizational collaboration and resource use.

Hans Krabbendam, Saving the Overlooked Continent. American Protestant Missions in Western Europe, 1940–1975. Leuven, Leuven University Press 2020

Article Hans Krabbendam, Saving the Overlooked Continent. American Protestant Missions in Western Europe, 1940–1975. Leuven, Leuven University Press 2020 was published on December 1, 2021 in the journal Historische Zeitschrift (volume 313, issue 3).

Saving the Overlooked Continent: American Protestant Missions in Western Europe 1940–1975. By Hans Krabbendam. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020. 248 pp. $59.00 paper.

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Saving the Overlooked Continent. American Protestant Missions in Western Europe 1940-1975 Hans Krabbendam

Summary This book presents research into North-American evangelical missionary initiatives in Europe between 1940 and 1975. It investigates the motives and aims of the American interest in Europe and describes the further development of the American-European relationship among evangelicals. Regarding the first decades, the author deals with the competition within the conservative American camp between traditional fundamentalists and evangelicals for influence in Europe (which the fundamentalists lost) and contrasts developments in the evangelical space with those of traditional inter-church relations in the context of the World Council of Churches between North America and Europe. Krabbendam makes an important contribution to the history of the evangelical movement in Europe and the influence of North America. Zusammenfassung Dieses Buch präsentiert nordamerikanische evangelikale Missionsinitiativen in Europa in den Jahren zwischen 1940 und 1975. Es erarbeitet Motive und Ziele des amerikanischen Missionsinteresses an Europa und schildert die verschiedenen Phasen der weiteren Entwicklung des amerikanisch-europäischen Verhältnisses unter Evangelikalen. Dabei geht der Autor hinsichtlich der ersten Jahrzehnte auf den Wettstreit innerhalb des konservativen US-amerikanischen Lagers zwischen traditionellen Fundamentalisten und Evangelikalen um Einfluss in Europa ein (den das fundamentalistische Lager verlor) und stellt die Entwicklungen im evangelikalen Raum denen traditioneller zwischenkirchlicher Beziehungen im Umfeld des Weltkirchenrates zwischen Nordamerika und Europa gegenüber. Krabbendam legt einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Geschichte der evangelikalen Bewegung in Europa und des Einflusses Nordamerikas in diesen Jahrzehnten vor. Résumé Ce livre traite des initiatives missionnaires évangéliques nord-américaines en Europe entre 1940 et 1975. Il examine les motifs et les objectifs de l’intérêt américain pour l’Europe et décrit le développement de la relation américano-européenne dans la sphère évangélique. S’intéressant aux premières décennies, l’auteur étudie la compétition opposant, au sein même du camp américain conservateur, fondamentalistes traditionnels et évangéliques pour le gain d’une influence prépondérante en Europe (compétition perdue par les fondamentalistes) et compare les développements perceptibles dans l’espace évangélique à ceux des relations inter-Églises traditionnelles dans le cadre du Conseil Œcuménique des Églises entre l’Amérique et l’Europe. Krabbendam apporte une contribution importante à l’histoire du mouvement évangélique en Europe et de l’influence nord-américaine.

Diversity within Protestant Transnationalism: Differences in the Scope and Reach of Pentecostal/Charismatic and Evangelical Missions

Background: A growing number of studies have begun to emphasize differences between Pentecostals and Charismatics (P/Cs), on the one hand, and Evangelicals, on the other. Yet few of these studies have considered differences in transnational missions. Purpose: This study explores the extent to which P/C and Evangelical organizations vary in their transnational outreach, both in terms of what they do and where they operate. Methods: To examine these differences, I explore data on transnational American Protestant mission agencies using descriptions of trends over time and time series logistic regressions. Results: Although both P/Cs and Evangelicals tend to be concerned with otherworldly soteriological issues, I find that P/Cs are even more likely to engage in otherworldly types of activities that allow for the propagation and proliferation of the Gospel, especially with respect to evangelism and the publication and distribution of Christian literature. In addition, although both P/C and Evangelical agencies gravitate towards countries where the percentage of Protestants is low, P/C agencies are comparatively less active in countries with the lowest percentages. However, there is little evidence of differences between P/C and Evangelical agencies’ ministries when it comes to countries’ varying levels of development. Conclusions and Implications: The study concludes with several implications. First, although many differences may be more salient when distinguishing Evangelicals and P/Cs together from other Protestant traditions, there are sufficient important variations between the two former traditions to warrant treating them as analytically distinct, at least with respect to their organized transnational activism. Second, at the same time, non-findings in the study also suggest that differences between Evangelicals and P/Cs are not as pronounced at the organizational as compared to the individual level. Finally, the study reflects on the limitations of the data with recommendations for further research.

Protestants, Gender, and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria, by Deanna Ferree Womack

Numerous studies have discussed the influence of American Protestant missionaries on Ottoman Syrian society during the second half of the nineteenth century known as the nahda period, that is, the Arab awakening. Some discuss the ways in which local intellectuals (nahdawi) made these missionaries’ views the lynchpin for constructing their own views and thoughts.American (but also British and German missionary) archives have only recently been acknowledged as valuable sources not only to explore the political, social, and educational history of the region of Greater Syria but also to better understand cultural and gender history, and—in the last few years—children’s history. Womack’s book reveals an additional unexplored facet of the encounter between local Arabs and the Protestant American missionaries by documenting the religious lives of nahdawi Arab Protestant men but more particularly women’s lives and their contributions to religion and society in this region.In the first two chapters, the author defines the nahdawi’s religious identity, especially among men, and shows how they employed Arabic as a language of Protestant spirituality and participated in the nahda as a cultural and religious movement. The author emphasizes that these men considered that “the Protestant faith and the secular literary forms of the nahda blended together” (94). Womack argues that through the mutual encounter between missionaries and local residents they became what she terms “enmeshed in each other’s history” (7).Chapter 1 deals with basic questions of Syrian evangelical identity. The author emphasizes that most studies on the nahda have not raised the issue of what the evangelical faith or Protestant conversion meant to the nahda but instead have discussed the nahdawis’ commitment to the formation of modern Arab identity. She points out “the false notion of a dichotomy between religiously committed and secular-leaning Christians in the nahda” (28) and is right to note that most Protestant Arab writers of the nahda were not secularists.These insights are supported by a comparative analysis of five Syrian Protestants and their encounters with American missionaries. These life stories are the basis for Womack’s exploration of religious change in their lives and identities. She shows how these Protestant Syrians defined their own Protestant identity and asserted their independence from American hegemony although they still maintained ties with American missions. Chapter 2 discusses the ways in which Syrian Protestants used the American press to spur cultural debates and harness their religious writings to contribute to nahdawi discourse.The last three chapters focus primarily on the initiatives of Syrian Protestant women and men in the intersection between missionary and Ottoman Syrian society. Chapter 4 presents Syrian Protestants’ critiques of American missionaries and the tension between the missionaries and the first generation of nahdawi Protestants.Chapters 3 and 5 discuss the activities of Syrian Protestant middle- and lower-class women and elaborate on the ways they founded and ran local churches in urban and rural areas. These chapters illustrate the ways in which these teachers and graduates of mission schools used their training, adapted but also redefined the American missionaries’ message, and benefitted from the cultural and intellectual movements of the nahda to participate more fully in literary, educational and evangelistic activities (e.g., writing texts on education, child-rearing, sermons , teaching the scripture and medical work) through the American Syrian mission. Womack thus identifies the gendered aspects of the missionary encounter, not only the male narratives. By showing the contrast between men’s theological debates and the genres of nahdawi women’s writing she charts how these women expanded their intellectual and religious activity within the boundaries of male writing and contributed to the religious discourse of the nahda beyond the domestic sphere.A few caveats should be mentioned. The introduction could have benefited from a subsection on the growing gender literature and narratives of nahdawi women’s history in the region, in addition to the missionaries’ historical narrative. It also would have been worthwhile elaborating on the relationships between Syrian Protestant women, especially between the urban middle-class and lower-class women from rural areas. This could have provided the reader with a better sense of how religious sisterhood helped these Protestant women redefine themselves in their society.Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria makes an important contribution to the field. It provides an engaging, thoughtful examination of the nahda period. It offers a compelling analysis and an innovative take on the dynamics between the American missionaries and local population by identifying the agency and input of Protestant Syrians in general and Protestant Syrian women evangelists in particular to both the history of Ottoman Syria and the history of Protestant Christianity in the region. Case studies such as the American missionary encounter with the Syrian population also enrich scholarship on Middle East History and the history of missions and world Christianity in the modern era. The book offers rich new primary sources (rare Arabic manuscripts/life stories of the nahda, unpublished Syrian Protestant letters and diaries) on this subject and presents the lives of new figures who should be taken into account; the appendices are very valuable and useful for future research.

Distinction through Religious Activism: How Capital Shapes the Organizational Repertoires of Transnational Protestant Outreach

AbstractHow religious organizations distinguish themselves from one another influences the extent to which they compete (or cooperate) with other similar organizations, thus serving to shape both their survivability and efficacy in achieving their goals. Although theological differences provide one source of distinction, organizations also strategically distinguish themselves not only by what they do but also what they avoid doing. Adopting a Bourdieu(s)ian field theory approach to the study of transnational American Protestant mission agencies, this article explores how agencies’ ministry activities are organized into symbolically distinctive repertoires of activism that vary by agencies’ differing levels of religious and economic capital. Based on how these repertoires are diversified (versus concentrated) and focused on inner- (as opposed to other-worldly) goals, the article discusses the implications of these organizational patterns for the survivability and efficacy of agencies in the transnational missions field, as well as their prospects for interorganizational cooperation and coordination.

Inner-worldly and other-worldly outreach: organizational repertoires of protestant mission agencies

Over the last few decades, an increasing number of American Protestant mission agencies have been engaging in evangelism and humanitarian activities. What explains this growth and what are its future implications? Applying theories of organizational ecology and religious identity, I examine intra- and inter-organizational factors influencing rates of engagement in the Evangelism and Relief & Development sectors. The study finds that ecological theories, especially of density dependence, that have more commonly been used to study secular organizational foundings and deaths prove compelling in explaining mission agencies’ transnational behaviors. Second, contrary to some common assumptions, Evangelical agencies are no different than Mainline Protestant agencies in expanding their activism to include evangelistic or humanitarian activism, suggesting that despite their theological differences, agencies that are commonly dedicated to transnationalism have more that unites than divides them. I conclude by reflecting on what these patterns imply about continued growth prospects in each sector.

Black Hand [黑手]/ Red List [红名单]: China, Law and the Foreigner; Mutual Engagements on a Global Scale

This essay considers the cultural and discursive tropes, their political and social effects, that have marked the way in which comprehensible mutual engagement between China and foreigner have been constructed. These forms of engagement with the “foreign” has ancient discursive roots in China. It suggests the character of the mutual engagement between China and foreigners (especially foreigners viewed as representatives of equal or dangerous powers) as a form of cultural discourse that reflects an oscillation between caution and utility for which a set of definitive cultural tropes of the foreigner have been constructed with the participation of those foreigners who have embraced or at least utilized these discursive tropes. After an Introduction, Part 2 examines the model through the lens of a 1911 essay authored by Edward Capen, an American protestant missionary. Capen’s report suggests the seven archetypes of the foreigner around which engagement is constructed: (1) the missionary; (2) the expert; (3) the sycophant; (4) the colonizer; (5) the expatriate; (6) the entrepreneur; and (7) the company person (or salaryman). Part 3 then suggests internal and external lessons that might be drawn. Internal lessons are first centered on the challenges for those designated to receive and transpose such knowledge — Chinese scholars who serve as the internal intermediaries for foreign knowledge. The second relates to the mechanics for managing acceptable and dangerous knowledge for intermediaries and for the masses. The external lessons will be more difficult — these center on the consequences of replication of the patterns of Chinese engagement with foreigners when China itself becomes the foreigner. The dangers of the inverse replication of these archetypes is already lurking in China’s Belt and Road Initiative relations. But one might acquire a more definitive sense of those challenges in the Chinese “Black Hand” campaign in Hong Kong in 2019.

Agency, Identity and Ecumenicalism in the American Missionary Schools of Tripoli, Lebanon

ABSTRACTWhen the American Protestant Mission in Syria entered the educational arena of nineteenth-century Tripoli, its administrators founded long-lasting educational institutions primarily for the purpose of converting souls to Protestant Christianity. Secondarily, missionaries sought to impose ideas of gender and class on their students. Through previously unexamined memoirs, school records, and missionary writings, this article offers a microhistorical analysis of the Tripoli Girls' School (est. 1873) and the Tripoli Boys' Boarding School (est. 1904). This study begins by situating the schools within the broader context of an increasingly peripheralized and predominantly Sunni Muslim city, showing that the geographical, social, and educational environment of Tripoli shaped and was shaped by the boarding schools. It explores two trends within the Tripoli schools, namely, the ‘professionalization’ of female students, and the reification of class divisions, as Tripoli was integrated into a system of global capitalism. Finally, it moves beyond narratives of ‘secularization’ and argues that students played a significant role in shifting the emphasis of missionary education away from religious conversion to an educational model of interreligious cooperation that saw Muslims and Christians as partners in a syncretic endeavour.

Women, missionaries, and medical professions: the history of overseas female students in Meiji Japan

The Meiji government did little to develop higher education for women in Japan, leading ambitious women, such as Tsuda Umeko, to cross the Pacific Ocean to seek opportunities for advanced studies. In the field of medicine, male physicians received training from their German counterparts, while female physicians, such as Yoshioka Yayoi, studied medicine under Japanese instructors. Nevertheless, some women did study medicine at American medical colleges in Meiji Japan. This article sheds light on seven American-educated female physicians who took advantage of a globalising trend – the rise of American Protestant missions. American female missionaries provided opportunities for Japanese women in both the teaching and medical professions. However, women’s overseas medical studies were short-lived because of the changing political climate and evolution in the medical domain at the end of the nineteenth century. At this point, as the likelihood of Japanese women going abroad for medical studies diminished, American missionaries shifted their focus to nursing education.

Guns and Gospel: Imperialism and Evangelism in China by Ambrose Mong

Reviewed by: Guns and Gospel: Imperialism and Evangelism in China by Ambrose Mong Christina Wong Wai-Yin Ambrose Mong, Guns and Gospel: Imperialism and Evangelism in China. Cambridge: James Clarke, 2016. 183 pp., £25 (PB). ISBN 9780227176252 In Guns and Gospel: Imperialism and Evangelism in China, Ambrose Mong analyzes the complicated and ambivalent attitudes with which Protestant missionaries treated imperialism in their missions. Examples of several famous Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are cited, including the Anglo-Scottish Presbyterian, Robert Morrison (1782–1834); the German Charles Gützlaff (1803–51), first Lutheran missionary to China; the non-sectarian British evangelist, James Hudson Taylor (1832–1905); the Welsh Baptist, Timothy Richard (1845–1919); and Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973), a daughter raised in China by Southern Presbyterian missionaries, to demonstrate their varied theological and philosophical concerns in reacting to Western imperialist powers. To present the context in which tensions arose between guns and gospel in Chinese Christianity, Chapter 1 briefly illuminates the relationship of imperialism and evangelism in the Catholic mission in the sixteenth century and the British and American Protestant missions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Christian missions connected with colonial powers shared a biased view that regarded the West as civilized and the East as backward. However, the attitudes of missionaries were complex and ambiguous, dependent on time, individual disposition, and institutional context. The second chapter discusses the background of the first unequal treaty during the First Opium War. The first group of Protestant missionaries to China expediently made use of imperialist forces in gaining entry for the missionaries, which eventually led to the Chinese people’s association of Christian [End Page 88] missions with colonial powers. In Chapter 3, Mong discusses the uprisings in China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the Taiping 太平 (1850–64) to the Boxer (Yihetuan 義和團) rebellions (1899–1901). With the exception of the Taipings, who combined local anti-Qing religiosity and Christianity, there was a strong sentiment of “anti-foreignism” among the Chinese. This also led to resistance against Christianity as a foreign religion. Mong has made great efforts to show the personalities of the above-mentioned Protestant missionaries and pinpoint their ambiguous roles in imperialism and evangelism. Their diverse responses are attributed to their denominations, socio-political contexts, and individual factors. Both Morrison and Gützlaff worked for imperial powers, namely, the East India Company and the British government. Gützlaff in particular was very controversial because of his implicit support for the opium trade and his work in military intelligence. In contrast, the founder of the China Inland Mission, Taylor, was explicitly against the opium trade and turned down indemnities after the Boxer Rebellion. To him, Christianity emphasized forgiveness and reconciliation. He worried that such compensation would associate his mission with Western imperialist powers. In contrast to the above three, Richard, from the American Baptist Missionary Society, was more eager to engage with Chinese Buddhism. Lastly, Buck, a missionary kid raised in China, was influenced by a critical view of the Christian missions by the American left wing. She strongly critiqued the previous missions which implicitly embraced Western civilization and superiority. She proclaimed that humanistic missions should promote “friendship and understanding between nations … [by]mutual respect and equality” (p. 155). This indeed opened up a new paradigm of missiology. My critique of Mong’s project is that he fails to address the subtlety and complexity of imperialism and evangelism between and among missionaries and local Chinese. He adopts a broad and universal missionary narrative of the tension between guns and gospel from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries by focusing on five well-known and well-researched missionaries. More could be done in Mong’s project to make it a significant study in Chinese Christianity. Differences between missionaries related to their nationalities, denominations, ethnicities, classes, and genders should be analyzed as well. The book also fails to articulate how regional and ethnic differences, denominational affiliations, diverse theological positions, as well as faith expressions in China worked together with missionary efforts in local interactions. As Ryan Dunch proclaims, it is important to question how local Chinese (including Chinese Christians) participated in and/or selectively appropriated...