Holy Humanitarians
American Evangelicals and Global Aid
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- 26,99 €
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- 26,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
On May 10, 1900, an enthusiastic Brooklyn crowd bid farewell to the Quito. The ship sailed for famine-stricken Bombay, carrying both tangible relief—thousands of tons of corn and seeds—and “a tender message of love and sympathy from God’s children on this side of the globe to those on the other.” The Quito may never have gotten under way without support from the era’s most influential religious newspaper, the Christian Herald, which urged its American readers to alleviate poverty and suffering abroad and at home. In Holy Humanitarians, Heather D. Curtis argues that evangelical media campaigns transformed how Americans responded to domestic crises and foreign disasters during a pivotal period for the nation.
Through graphic reporting and the emerging medium of photography, evangelical publishers fostered a tremendously popular movement of faith-based aid that rivaled the achievements of competing agencies like the American Red Cross. By maintaining that the United States was divinely ordained to help the world’s oppressed and needy, the Christian Herald linked humanitarian assistance with American nationalism at a time when the country was stepping onto the global stage. Social reform, missionary activity, disaster relief, and economic and military expansion could all be understood as integral features of Christian charity.
Drawing on rigorous archival research, Curtis lays bare the theological motivations, social forces, cultural assumptions, business calculations, and political dynamics that shaped America’s ambivalent embrace of evangelical philanthropy. In the process she uncovers the seeds of today’s heated debates over the politics of poverty relief and international aid.
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In this useful study, Curtis (Faith in the Great Physician), associate professor of religion at Tufts University, broadly examines evangelical Christian humanitarianism at the turn of the 20th century by focusing on the efforts of organizations associated with the Christian Herald newspaper. Much of her material comes from the archives of the paper, a popular evangelical publication in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Herald's owners and editors, Louis Klopsch and Thomas Talmage, used the newspaper's reach to inform American evangelicals of international disasters and solicit funds for disaster relief. Curtis explores the difficulties this presented for Klopsch, Talmage, and the associated relief organizations in their evangelical context. For example, when they solicited funds for victims of an earthquake in Constantinople, readers responded with anti-Muslim backlash. Klopsch and Talmage, Curtis writes, thought of aid as a way of not only Christianizing international populations but of Americanizing them as well. This ideological bent inevitably led to the Herald frequently clashing with non-sectarian organizations such as the American Red Cross. The final chapters of the book wrap up the story of the Christian Herald it ceased publication in 1992 and take a too-brief glance at the history of Christian evangelical humanitarian efforts through the end of the 20th century. Despite the narrow focus, Curtis's study sheds new light on the development of evangelical aid relief in America.