Guido F. Verbeck has been viewed as a pioneer missionary, a key oyatoi gaikokujin (“foreign employee”) and a ‘foreign hero’ for modern Japan. This case-study focuses on one of the most prominent foreign figures in Bakumatsu-Meiji Japan, Guido F. Verbeck. Arriving in Nagasaki in 1859 when the ports opened, he was the only Protestant missionary in western Japan throughout the 1860s, where he taught or interacted with some of the future leaders of Meiji Japan. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, he served as the superintendent of the Daigaku Nankō, the government school of Western studies in Tokyo and as a translator and special advisor to the highest organs of the government. For the last two decades of his life, he returned to full-time missionary work, supporting Japanese Christians through translation, teaching and evangelism. Verbeck was decorated by the Meiji Emperor in 1877, granted special Japanese passports in 1891, and buried in Japan in 1898 with great honors. Arguably more respected than any other missionary or foreigner in Bakumatsu-Meiji Japan, he was a revered teacher and trusted advisor, as well as one of the most gifted foreign speakers of Japanese. 

In this dissertation, I analyze the literature and scholarship on Verbeck and examine how he has been perceived in various time periods. Though there are few biographies on Verbeck, the literature pertaining to Verbeck is much larger. The method I propose for considering why certain figures like Verbeck are attractive, is to view their lives as “enacted narratives”—that is, as figures that embody certain larger narratives for their societies. In the literature on Verbeck, for both Western and Japanese observers, he has enacted the narratives of the modern missionary movement, global modernization, and Japanese nationalism. I also argue that studying Verbeck could revive the lack of interest in Japan in recent literature on the history of missions, enrich the scholarship on intercultural exchanges and their role in modernization, and broaden the discussion of nationalism in Japan and elsewhere to include categories like “foreign heroes.”

Verbeck of Japan: Guido F. Verbeck as Pioneer Missionary, Oyatoi Gaikokujin, and "Foreign Hero"

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Between Nationalism and Internationalism; Yun Ch'I-ho and the YMCA in Colonial Korea

In conversation with recent scholarly approaches to the interrelationships of religion, media, and technology, this paper analyzes a neglected form of metaphysical religion within the rubric of Protestant experimentalism. The main sources are a group of early twentieth-century Anglican clerics with shared interests in telepathy, psychic research, psychology, and healing. The paper argues for attention to the "sensational forms" (or paths of transmission) through which these clerics understood divine-human communication to occur. Analyzing divine vibration, telepathy, and psychic energy as Protestant sensational forms has allowed me to set my analysis of experimentalist healing within intersecting historical contexts, including competing theological imaginations, new communication technologies, discourses of scientific authority, and cultural exchange on colonial frontiers.

Radio Mind: Protestant Experimentalists on the Frontiers of Healing

Focusing particularly on the Madras College of Physical Education opened in 1919, this article reconstructs the role of the United States of America-dominated Indian Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in the spread of physical-education schemes in South Asia between the beginning of the century and the outbreak of the Second World War. American YMCA secretaries stressed the scientific, liberal, and egalitarian character of their ‘physical programme’ aiming at the training of responsible and self-controlled citizens and therefore supposedly offering an alternative to British imperial sports. The study demonstrates that the Y indeed exercised a considerable influence by acting as adviser to provincial and ‘princely’ governments as well as through the graduates of the Madras College of Physical Education (MCPE), many of whom became physical directors in educational institutions in India, Burma, Ceylon and other Asian countries. At the same time, it also makes clear that North American models could not be transplanted in a simple or straightforward manner to South Asian contexts. For one, in spite of its representation as a ‘school for democracy’, the Y's supposedly inclusive and emancipatory discourses and practices of physical fitness remained over-determined by the powerful influences of the colonial discourse of race, and the programme of the Indian Y continued to be rife with the imperial tropes of somatic Orientalism predicated on the idea of fundamental difference between Westerners and South Asians. Likewise, the Y's sports mission turned out to be less American than its advocates had hoped: ‘sportified’ versions of local games and physical exercises played an ever-increasing role in the numerous institutions of the Y in South Asia, leading eventually to a thorough ‘pidginization’ of its fitness regime.

Fitness for Modernity? The YMCA and physical-education schemes in late-colonial South Asia (circa 1900–40)

By tracing the career of influential YMCA missionary Sherwood Eddy, this essay brings to light the origins of Christian internationalism in 1920s America. Far more than mere boosterism for Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations, and far more than mere “pacifism” or Social Gospel “idealism”(reductive categories with which activism in the period is often associated), Christian internationalism in the interwar period was a movement defined by three broad and far-reaching impulses. First, it was characterized by the proliferation of new enterprises such as travelling seminars, conferences and publications devoted to reflection on the ethics of international relations. Second, it comprised a holistic, oppositional and radical political orientation that went beyond legalist internationalism and encompassed agitation against imperialism and racism. Third, the movement was premised on a fundamental critique of the idea of America as a “Christian nation”. Eddy's career highlights the unique importance of the missionary enterprise in giving shape to these impulses in the 1920s and beyond.

/pdf/sherwood-eddy-the-missionary-enterprise-and-the-rise-of-1zb1mc7sbs.pdf

Sherwood eddy, the missionary enterprise, and the rise of christian internationalism in 1920s america*

https://static.my-shop.ru/product/pdf/93/929920.pdf

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