Christian Encounter Research Articles

Islam among African-American Prisoners

African American prison inmates convert to Islam at a rate faster than any other demographic group in the United States. In this article, I focus on the Christian encounter with Islam among African Americans in prison. First, I examine the wider demographic and historical context influencing the rise of Islam among prisoners. I trace the tendency of African Americans initially to join heterodox Black Nationalist Islamic groups and then to move toward Sunni orthodoxy. I then explore why some African Americans, especially inmates, find Islam more attractive than other Americans do. I discuss prison policy changes that seek to accommodate Muslim practices within a society where the predominant faith is Christianity. Finally, I offer recommendations for Christians to meet challenges and seize opportunities in the encounter with Islam among African American prisoners.

Frontiers of Faith: The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in the Acts of Archelaus (review)

Reviewed by: Frontiers of Faith: The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in the Acts of Archelaus Nils Arne Pedersen Jason BeDuhnPaul Mirecki, eds. Frontiers of Faith: The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in the Acts of Archelaus Nag Hammadi & Manichaean Studies 61 Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007 Pp. viii + 178. €93.00/$139.00. In recent years there has been a growing interest in anti-Manichaean literature, which was an important branch of the heresiological genre. One of these texts, the fourth-century Acts of Archelaus (AA) by the otherwise unknown Hegemonius, [End Page 435] appeared in a new English translation by Vermes in 2001 which gave the impetus for Frontiers of Faith. Frontiers of Faith consists of a preface and eleven chapters with bibliography, table of biblical references, and indexes. It is a very successful achievement which, as the first book-length study of AA, deserves to be used and discussed in future studies of Manichaeism. The first chapter, by the editors themselves, attempts to contextualize AA and discusses its provenance, structure, and sources in connection with an introduction to the subsequent chapters. A main characteristic of both this and the other contributions is to see Manichaeism in its roots and self-understanding as a “Christian” movement. I share this view, which is becoming increasingly common, though there is not yet a consensus within the scholarly community. BeDuhn and Mirecki subscribe to the more convincing part of the “Bauer Thesis” that the original Christianity of eastern Syria was of a “heterodox” character. They also accept the late Drijvers’s additional argument that Addai, the legendary Christian missionary to Edessa, was a fictional imitation of the Manichaean Adda. This theory, however, now seems less convincing in the light of Addai’s appearance in the First Apocalypse of James. BeDuhn and Mirecki convincingly suggest that the “heterodox” character of eastern Syrian Christianity should be linked to the cultural and linguistic separateness of the region. I would add that since other parts of the Bauer Thesis seem less convincing—e.g., that Colin Roberts could show that the literary remains of early Egyptian Christianity were not predominantly “heterodox”—we should probably not follow Bauer in linking regional differences with the emergence of early “catholic”/“proto-orthodox” and “heterodox” diversities of Christianity in the rest of the Roman Empire, where early Christians used Greek as their medium. These diversities are better explained by assuming that house-churches and lack of well-organized offices in first-century Christianity stimulated the emergence of fractions and differences. Coyle sharply characterizes the polemical character of AA, while Sala, by means of structuralism and narratology, challenges the scholarly tradition of assuming that a monolithic and somehow logically coherent entity lies behind the largely fragmentary Manichaean sources. This is a most welcome contribution, since too often there has been little attention to the diversity in Manichaeism. It seems, however, less persuasive when Pettipiece, in a study of competing ideas of kingship in AA, argues that a dichotomy exists between Manichaean ideas of the kingdom of Light as non-violent and Archelaus’s idea of Christ as a triumphant king. Pettipiece thinks that the Manichaean view is the older one, closer to the New Testament, and he assumes that the different ideas can be connected to diverging views about authority and response to suffering and persecution. Hegemonius’s arguments, however, seem so bound up with the polemical context that it is unsound to assume too much about his more complete views. It is a fact, moreover, that the Manichaeans also used military metaphors. Kaatz deals with the “two natures,” free will and scriptural evidence in AA. Other contributions treat the sources of AA, the use of rituals in AA (Mirecki) and the Basilides fragment (Bennett). Gardner compares Mani’s Letter to Marcellus in AA with fragments of other Mani Letters and establishes convincingly that [End Page 436] this Letter is either by Mani himself or is a close imitation of him; it may be at least partly authentic. On this basis BeDuhn attempts to find more remnants of the Letter in AA. This contribution is at the same time an interesting and careful study of Manichaean biblical interpretation. Elsewhere BeDuhn argues that the...

Japanese Encounters with Latin America and Iberian Catholicism (1549–1973): Some Thoughts on Language, Imperialism, Identity Formation, and Comparative Research

PROLOGUE Almost one century after Cortes had conquered Nuova Espana in 1519, the Japanese delegation on board the San Juan Baptista docked in Acapulco on January 28, 1614. Consisting of more than 100 Japanese members, this delegation was lead by Hasekura Rokuzaemon Tsunenaga (1571-1622), a vassal of the Lord Date Masamune (1567-1636). The ship had set sail on October 28, 1613 from the port of Tsukinoura and took nearly three months to cross the Pacific Ocean. On board was Luis Sotelo (1574-1624), a Franciscan priest from Seville, who had accompanied the delegation. Upon his return to Europe, Sotelo dictated his experiences to an Italian archivist, Scipione Amati, who compiled the document Historia del Regno de Voxu in 1615. (1) In this history, Luis Sotelo triumphantly reported that seventy-eight Japanese were baptized in Mexico City, although the extant church records, as noted by Van C. Gessel, (2) make no mention of such event. It was also reported that a group of twenty or so Japanese sailed from Veracruz on June 10, 1614. One may presume that they passed Puebla in 1614 on their way to the Gulf of Mexico. They were probably the first Japanese countrymen to make the journey across the Atlantic Ocean. On November 3, 1614 they met Pope Paul V, but this audience produced little in terms of concrete results. The Tokugawa Shogunate, founded by Ieyasu (1543-1616), had expelled the Christians in 1613, the year of Hasekura's departure. So, while the delegation was abroad, its goals had already been abandoned in Japan. On his way home, Hasekura received orders to stay in Manila for several years. It was only in 1620 that the Japanese authorities allowed him to return home. When Hasekura died two years later in 1622, his diary was confiscated and destroyed. The loss of this first-hand document makes it difficult to reconstruct this initial Japanese encounter with the new world. It was also in 1622 that Luis Sotelo disguised himself and made his way back to Japan. The priest was arrested and executed. His martyrdom took place on August 25, 1624. This diplomatic mission fascinated Endo Shusaku (1923-1996), the Japanese Catholic writer, and it became the inspiration for his novel The Samurai (1980; translated into English by Van C. Gessel in 1982). (3) The narrator of the novel, Velasco, is faithfully modeled after Luis Sotelo. In this book, Endo examines his own faith while, at the same time, his psyche while analyzing the mental and spiritual suffering of the Japanese people as a whole. Endo asks: why did all those who were involved in the mission have to suffer for the sake of Christianity? Was their suffering redeemed? Indeed, the writer's life-long concern was with human suffering and, in particular, the passion of Christ. Recent studies in comparative literature have re-examined Endo's novels from the post-colonial perspective. In this paper, I would like to briefly discuss three issues that are relevant to the historical and cross-cultural range of Endo's literary creation and place them within the larger context of our discipline. (4) I Christian encounters with Japan challenged the notion of universality. Firstly, European exposure to the Japanese language raised fundamental questions concerning how to incorporate it into the pre-existing system of knowledge. It is well known that Saint Francois Xavier's (1506-1552) letters from Japan led Guillaume Postel (1510-1581) to believe that Japan was the Kingdom of Prester John. Postel believed that the Japanese language offered the key to solving the Christian mystery. (5) Half a century later, in 1606, the Jesuit Joan Rodriguez (1561?-1639), a famous interpreter who was based in Japan, compiled and published Arte da lingoa de Iapam in Nagasaki. The book was the first grammar of Japanese ever written in a European language. Its description of Japanese grammatical structure was groundbreaking. Rodriguez regarded the particles of the Japanese language (the so-called te-ni-woha) as equivalent to the inflections in European languages. …

Frontiers of Faith: The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in The Acts of Archelaus– Edited by Jason BeDuhn and Paul Mirecki

Frontiers of Faith: The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in <i>The Acts of Archelaus</i>– Edited by Jason BeDuhn and Paul Mirecki

The Friar and the Sultan: Francis of Assisi’s Mission to Egypt

In September, 1219, Francis of Assisi went to Egypt to preach to Sultan al-Malik al-Kâmil. Although we in fact know very little about this event, writers from the 13th century to the 20th have portrayed Francis alternatively as a new apostle preaching to the infidels, a scholastic theologian proving the truth of Christianity, a champion of the crusading ideal, a naive and quixotic wanderer, a crazed religious fanatic, or a medieval Gandhi preaching peace, love and understanding. This study of the varying depictions of this lapidary encounter throws into relief the changing fears and hopes that Muslim–Christian encounters have inspired in European writers over eight centuries.

The Christian Encounter of Paul Tillich and Michael Polanyi

The Christian Encounter of Paul Tillich and Michael Polanyi

Encountering The World's Religions: Nathan Söderblom and the Concept of Revelation

Abstract: Nathan Söderblom's research on the Christian concept of revelation vis‐à‐vis the encounter of Christianity and the world's religions is identified as a rich historical resource for the contemporary discussion on that topic. An appropriation of Söderblom's thought is proposed, particularly by recontextualizing the issue of non‐Christian religions as an opportunity for the doctrine of revelation rather than a “problem” for soteriology. The article makes special mention of Söderblom's writings on revelation as “genius,” as experiencing holiness, and as intrinsic to the task of theology, and concludes with strategies for a practical appropriation of Söderblom.

‘TALMUDICAL COMMONWEALTHSMEN’ AND THE RISE OF REPUBLICAN EXCLUSIVISM

ABSTRACTThis article makes the case that modern ideological republicanism has its roots, not in Athens or Rome, but in Jerusalem. It begins from the observation that republican political theory underwent a dramatic transformation in the middle of the seventeenth century. Before 1650, republicanism had always been a ‘relative’ position: those who argued in favour of republican government did so because they believed that republics were better than monarchies for various reasons. None of them had any interest in arguing that monarchy was an illegitimate constitutional form. In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, we see for the first time the appearance of what we might call republican ‘exclusivism’, the claim that republics are the only legitimate regimes. This article argues that the ‘exclusivist’ turn was prompted by the Christian encounter with a tradition of rabbinic commentary on two chapters of the Hebrew Bible (Deut. 17 and 1 Sam. 8), according to which the Israelite request for a mortal king was regarded as an instance of the sin of idolatry. It further demonstrates that the English pamphleteers at the centre of this story – John Milton, James Harrington, and Algernon Sidney – were themselves deeply conscious of the degree to which their views had been shaped by the writings of the ‘Talmudical commonwealthsmen’.

Muslim Christian Encounters in Africa * EDITED BY BENJAMIN F. SOARES.

Muslim Christian Encounters in Africa * EDITED BY BENJAMIN F. SOARES.

Worlds of Memory and of Wisdom: Encounters of Jews and African Christians. Edited by Jean Halpérin and Hans Ucko

Worlds of Memory and of Wisdom: Encounters of Jews and African Christians. Edited by Jean Halpérin and Hans Ucko

The Burning Wood: A Christian Encounter with Jewish Midrash – By Judith M. Kunst

The Burning Wood: A Christian Encounter with Jewish Midrash – By Judith M. Kunst

Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter With Reality ? John Polkinghorne

Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter With Reality ? John Polkinghorne

Book Review: Worlds of Memory and Wisdom: Encounters of Jews and African Christians

Book Review: Worlds of Memory and Wisdom: Encounters of Jews and African Christians

Faith Transformed: Christian Encounters with Jews and Judaism (review)

Reviewed by: Faith Transformed: Christian Encounters with Jews and Judaism Carl D. Evans Faith Transformed: Christian Encounters with Jews and Judaism, edited by John C. Merkle. Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2003. 216 pp. $23.95. This book is a gem. Twelve Christian scholars give their autobiographical reflections on how their encounters with Jews and Judaism, primarily through Jewish-Christian dialogue, have transformed their faith and life-work as Christians. The editor, John Merkle, deserves high praise for conceiving and bringing to fruition such a fine collection. Contributors are Walter Harrelson, Alice Eckardt, Eva Fleischner, Franklin Sherman, Norman Beck, Clark Williamson, [End Page 151] John Pawlikowski, Eugene Fisher, Michael McGarry, Mary Boys, and John Merkle. The first thing that struck me about these essays is that all of them are both personally reflective—the authors' first encounters with Jews and Judaism, their early impressions, how they became aware of deeper issues, and their reflection on what they have learned—and thoughtful contributions that enrich, correct, and transform the way Christianity has been understood and practiced. Response to the "teachings of contempt" against Jews and Judaism occupies a central place in most of the essays. Several authors cite Fr. Edward Flannery's oft-quoted statement—"The pages Jews have memorized have been torn from our histories of the Christian era"—to talk about how unfamiliar they were, initially, with this part of Christian history. Its "discovery" has prompted deep soul-searching, repentance, and extensive theological re-thinking in Christian circles. The essays by Clark Williamson and John Pawlikowski are especially effective in responding to the history and teachings of anti-Judaism. Pawlikowski is convinced that reconciliation with Jews will never be full and complete until the lost pages that Flannery refers to are restored to Christian textbooks. Christians need to know that history and to repent "as the first and necessary step in any process of reconciliation between Christians and Jews" (p. 116). While Pawlikowski alludes to the torn-out pages, Williamson devotes several pages to retelling what one finds in those pages and then shows how the realizations about anti-Judaism have transformed his understanding and practice of the Christian faith. Among other important points, Williamson avers that "we need to find more adequate ways to tell the Christian story" (p. 104). The typical way of telling the story of Christian redemption—Adam's sin is passed on to all; Christ's redeeming work is available to those who believe in him—relegates the redemptive work of God with Israel to irrelevance and encourages a triumphalist articulation of the Christian message. As an alternative, Williamson recommends a theology of blessing in which Jews and Christians can draw insights about redemption from both religious traditions. In various ways the contributors acknowledge their (and Christianity's) profound indebtedness to Judaism. The spiritual vitality reflected in the Hebrew Scriptures, the power of the prophetic message, the authentic yearnings for God in the Psalms, the transformations in Post-Biblical Judaism, and the importance of land and people receive the attention of several writers. All of these points provide ways to correct notions of Christian superiority and to rethink relationships untainted by the false assumptions that underlie the teachings of anti-Judaism. [End Page 152] The most important contributions of the book are on those topics where Christians continue to learn from Jews and Judaism as they seek to understand and articulate their faith. Eckardt makes a plea to incorporate the Shoah in reflections about the Christian faith, and to develop a theology of a suffering God: "I am convinced that only a suffering God, one who continues to suffer with human beings, can speak to us since the Shoah's whirlwind of destruction, and that we mortals, empowered by God, have the obligation to help each other overcome suffering" (p. 29). Eugene Fisher discusses the centrality of the family to the Jewish experience of worship, and commends its potential for deepening the sense of God's presence in all of life. Mary Boys stresses the importance of interreligious learning for transformation: "interreligious learning takes dialogue to a greater depth by involving persons in a relationship of mutual study" (p. 171). Michael McGarry asserts, along...

John Polkinghorne. Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality. xvii + 184 pp., table, index. New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 2004. $24 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewJohn Polkinghorne. Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality. xvii + 184 pp., table, index. New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press, 2004. $24 (cloth).Thaddeus J. Trenn Thaddeus J. Trenn Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 96, Number 4December 2005 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/501415 Views: 16Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha (review)

Reviewed by: Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha Aaron Gross Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha, edited by John Keenan, Linda Klepinger Keenan, and Harold Kasimow. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2003. 288 pp. $14.95. Beside Still Waters wears its tremendous significance lightly. This readable volume provides a unique combination of reflection on the transformative power of inter-faith encounter and documentation of that encounter in the lives of committed Christians and Jews. The bulk of the book consists of a collection of remarkably candid, autobiographically driven essays by seven Jewish and seven Christian scholars and religious leaders. Though the form is personal testimony, taken as a whole these essays present an argument for the value of the inter-faith encounter in conscious opposition to those who fear its effects. A stimulating final section consists of four essays respectively written from a sociological, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist perspective by authors who have read the fourteen primary essays and are reflecting on the inter-faith encounter more broadly in light of their own experience and research. This final section is implicitly a model of the sort of discussion the book hopes to stimulate; indeed, providing a platform for further reflection and analysis—and getting that process started—is the great merit of this volume. Those who pick up this book as seekers will find themselves in the company of fellow travelers who will offer them life stories filled with keen observation and theological nuance. Readers with scholarly interests in pluralism, inter-faith encounter/dialog, or the modern and contemporary Western religious landscape more generally, will find a groundbreaking collection of primary sources on how the encounter with Buddhism is propelling Jews and Christians towards their tradition in new ways. Both audiences will benefit from the book's useful, partially annotated list of suggested reading and helpful index. The contributors are all "seniors" in the Jewish and Christian encounter with Buddhism who first were exposed to Buddhism 20 to 40 years ago. Significantly, many are also professional clergy, popular writers, or are otherwise active in the mainline Jewish and Christian community; they are mediators as well as representatives of this encounter. Among the seven Jewish contributors we find Sylvia Boorstein, a highly regarded Buddhist meditation teacher, who tells of the great trepidation with which she "came out" to her fellow meditation teachers as a "nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn" (p. 21). As it turned out, Boorstein's "confession" was what Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi—another contributor—called a "no-karma event," meaning, in part at least, that no one was surprised or worried by her dual identity. This is a theme that runs throughout the volume. While many of the contributors had setbacks along they way, these are largely stories [End Page 197] of individuals who have found acceptance in their respective Jewish and Christian communities. A closely related theme that is found particularly in the Jewish respondents is how the contributors' encounter with Buddhism, and sometimes other Asian traditions, led them back to their birth tradition—that is, to the degree they ever left it. Professor Nathan Katz's puts it simply, "I don't believe I would have found my way into an Orthodox Jewish life had it not been via a Buddhist/Hindu route." In all cases, the contributors share how their encounter with Buddhism has deepened their own—and sometimes their communities'—religious life as Jews or Christians. Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi's essay, the only one which takes the form of an interview, is particularly informative on this point, for he has been at the hub of the Jewish-Asian encounter and has served as mentor and guide to many of the most prominent figures in that encounter, including several of the Jewish contributors to this volume. He suggests that Buddhist mindfulness has helped people recover aspects of Judaism that were previously obscured, "It's been there all along! But it's almost as if the scales fell off the eyes because we went next door" (p. 90). The theme of rediscovering aspects of one own tradition is another that runs through the volume. As Dr. Maria Reis...

Book Review: Feminist Christian Encounters: The Methods and Strategies of Feminist Informed Christian Theologies

Book Review: Feminist Christian Encounters: The Methods and Strategies of Feminist Informed Christian Theologies

"Don Quijote" and 9-11: The Clash of Civilizations and the Birth of the Modern Novel

The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington's of aptly describes current world events as well as aspects of Don Quijote. In many ways, the conflict between Christianity and Islam defines Spanish history and One can look at the world during Cervantes's lifetime and see how a Muslim presence affected politics, society, and literature. Cervantes's military service, including his participation at Lepanto, and his captivity in Algiers naturally inform his writings. The Argel plays and Don Quijote?most notably, the captive's tale and the figure of Ricote? represent the clash of cultures. As always, Cervantes uses and revises history, so that his vision is both illuminating and distinct. It may sound odd to connect a novel from the seventeenth century with an event that some say marks the beginning of the wars of the twenty-first.1 Yet at least two episodes in Cervantes's Don Quijote and the attacks of 9-11 have in common that they are products of a clash of civilizations, and the 1996 book by that name by Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington offers us the opportunity to search for new meanings in the first modern novel. The thought of finding clues for modern problems in Cervantes's masterpiece is not new, but it has taken a new urgency because of recent developments in European society. Don Quijote takes place in a country that was almost overrun by Muslim armies in 711, but which managed to reverse the results ofthat invasion by 1492. By that time, the three cultures inhabiting the Iberian Peninsula?Christian, Muslim, and Jewish?had become enmeshed in one another, and the rela tionship among the three religions, all peoples of the book, gave Spain historical experiences that were unique among major Western European countries. Recent migration from Muslim countries has created in the continent the kind of situation that Spain faced for most of its medieval and early modern history (Huntington 198-260). It is not surprising, then, to find Europeans turning to Spain's greatest writer for some sort of reference on these matters. In 1994, in Berlin, a collo quium organized by the city's Technical University had as its topic as a cultural melting pot: the encounter of Islam, Judaism and Christianity in the works of Miguel de Cervantes Saa vedra. There were presentations by scholars from France, Spain, Turkey by way of Canada, and Germany. For the organizers of the event, the symposium is a sign of the importance of the ideas and perspectives contained in Cervantes's works in conflictive situations in today's culture. The editors of the proceedings find that Cervantes's thoroughly conscientious and competent handling of the mentality, the moral values, and the forms of representation by non Christian religions, contrasts markedly with the historical ineptitude in present-day Europe in its encounter with differences and cultural otherness (Schmauser 7). The words of the editors would place a heavy burden on any work of fiction, particularly one that is considered the first in the genre. But Don Quijote is no ordinary book. Its context has uncanny similarities to our current situation, as the German editors noticed, and the book itself is a critique of reading, which activity some contend may be the source of the tribulations in which we find ourselves since the wars of religion (as Andrew Sullivan would define them) in which we

The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650-1785 (review)

Chinese The Spirit and the Flesh in Shandong, 1650-1785. By David E. Mungello. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield. 2001. Pp. xiv, 210. $70.00 clothbound; $26.95 paperback.) Catholicism first reached China in the Mongol period, when Franciscan missionaries traveled through Central Asia to the court of the Khans. The early Catholic communities established by friars, however, had all but disappeared by the mid-Ming period (late fourteenth century). It was only in the late sixteenth century, with the arrival of the Jesuits in Macao, that missionary work resumed in earnest. The story of Matteo Ricci, S.J., and his confreres in the following generations has been told many times, and research on the encounter of Christianity and European knowledge as brought to China by the Jesuits, particularly within the upper echelons of Chinese society (literati and the imperial court), continues in full swing. It is only in recent years, however, that scholars in the English-speaking world have started to pay increasing attention to the diffusion of Christianity in rural and popular contexts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing more on devotion and ritual than on science and fine arts, and examining also the work of orders and congregations other than the Jesuits, such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, Propaganda Fide, and the Missions Etrangeres de Paris (on these missions, we already have a rich, although mostly dated, literature in European languages other than English). David Mungello's latest monograph is a pioneering effort in this direction. Through a number of books and articles published over the years, Mungello has explored the transmission of Chinese thought and culture to Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the inculturation of Christianity in China. In these earlier works, he has shown predilection for intellectual history, such as in his book on the native converted literatus Zhang Xingyao (1994), where he dissected Zhang's writings to prove how the new Christian creed was interpreted within prevailing Confucian intellectual context. Conversely, in The Spirit and the Flesh, Mungello directs his attention to the daily life of the Franciscan Christian communities in the northern Chinese province of Shandong between 1650 and 1785. He chronicles through the biographical experiences of Spanish and Italian Franciscans, belonging both to the Spanish Province of San Gregorio Magno and to Propaganda Fide, the difficult beginnings, the hard-won developments, and the eventual demise of the Shandong mission. …

Eugenics and the Clergy in the Early Twentieth‐Century United States

Introduction When I tell people that I spent a considerable amount of time doing work in disciplines of both religion and biology, they almost always ask, do you think of evolution? They are, of course, referring to controversy that emerged in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between disciples of Darwinian evolution and those advocating Biblical literalism (Marsden 184-95). Yet during roughly this same period, an analogous (if less well remembered) encounter took place between liberal churches of day and of evolutionary biology. This was encounter of liberal Christianity and eugenics. In this article, I examine following questions: How did American churchmen and eugenicists view each other? What role, if any, did clergy play in American movement? Finally, what caused eventual termination of this relationship? Some background is called for first. The word eugenics was coined by English scientist Francis Galton in 1883. Galton defined term as of improving racial stock through giving the more races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over less suitable (Kevles ix). However, eugenic notions had existed in America even before Galton's definition; as early as 1863, Horace Bushnell had made hereditarian references in his bestselling Christian Nurture (Bushnell 195-96, 202-03). Eugenic theory and practice also occurred in John' Humphrey Noyes's perfectionist Oneida commune. As early as 1848, Noyes had written that amativeness should have its proper gratification without drawing after it procreation as a necessary consequence; he further argued that men and women should be able to control their fertility until science takes charge of business. Noyes later read both Darwin and Galton; finally, between 1869 and 1880, he presided over a eugenic breeding program that he called stirpiculture (Oneida Community 52; Parker 254-55). By turn of century, began moving out of avant-garde reform circles and into realm of both professional and popular science. In 1903, for example, American Breeders Association formed for professional breeders and university biologists. By 1906, group had a committee, with membership including such notables as biologist and Stanford University Chancellor David Stair Jordan, inventor and audiologist Alexander Graham Bell, University of Chicago sociologist Charles R. Henderson, plant breeder Luther Burbank, eugenicist Roswell Johnson, Stanford biologist Vernon Kellogg, and zoologist and eugenicist Charles B. Davenport. Popular articles on also began appearing in magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Popular Science Monthly. Books aimed at popular audiences bore titles such as The Task of Social Hygiene (1913), The Right to Be Well Born (1917), and Racial Hygiene (1929).1 What one may ask, what was goal of eugenics? What was it about that caught attention of Americans during this period? If we examine literature produced during period from roughly 1910 to 1930, we find that movement was concerned with more than simply breeding better physical specimens of humanity. Instead, provided a worldview in which value of anything-be it a physical object, a social structure, a philosophy, or an individual-could be determined according to degree to which it furthered cause of race, primarily through enhancement of society's gene pool. Eugenics thus served as a catch-all philosophy for many different social reforms, both conservative and liberal. Most sympathizers appear to favored immigration restriction on grounds that it diluted good puritan racial stock, or that it made America a dumping ground for dysgenic (that is, eugenically unfit) rejects from other countries (Popenoe and Johnson 298-317; Geothe 6-9). …