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  All According to God's Plan: Southern Baptist Missions and Race, 1945-1970

  Southern Baptists had long considered themselves a missionary people, but when, after World War II, they embarked on a dramatic expansion of missionary efforts, they confronted headlong the problem of racism. Believing that racism hindered their evangelical efforts, the Convention’s full-time missionaries and mission board leaders attacked racism as unchristian, thus finding themselves at odds with the pervasive racist and segregationist ideologies that dominated the South. This progressive view of race stressed the biblical unity of humanity, encompassing all races and transcending specific ethnic divisions. In All According to God's Plan, Alan Scot Willis explores these beliefs and the chasm ...Read More

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  Crusaders Against Opium: Protestant Missionaries in China, 1874-1917

  Opium addiction in China during the closing decades of the Ch’ing dynasty afflicted all segments of society. From government officials to farmers, the population fell prey to the effects of the drug. Some provinces reported addiction rates as high as eighty percent.

  With the birth of Chinese nationalism, reformers—missionaries who had witnessed the effects of opium on Chinese society, students who had studied abroad and returned to their native land with broader perspectives, families who had lost all through the addiction of a loved one, doctors who had firsthand knowledge that opium use led only to death—cried out against the ...Read More

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  Black Church in the Sixties

  What was the role of the black church in the rise of militancy that marked the sixties? Was it a calming influence that slowed that rise? Or did it contribute a sense of moral purpose and thus help inspire a wider participation in the civil rights movement?

  In Black Church in the Sixties, the Nelsens attack the view that the church tended to inhibit civil rights militancy. The Nelsens reach their conclusions through the examination of thirty data sets derived from published surveys and from their own research conducted in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The data, subjected to Multiple Classification Analysis, ...Read More

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  Thomas Merton: Social Critic

  Thomas Merton: Social Critic organizes and critically analyzes the social thought of the Cistercian monk who has become an internationally known symbol of the spiritual element in man. The author evaluated all of Merton’s writings, published and unpublished, then discussed his interpretations with Merton personally. The result is a perceptive relation of Merton’s social thought to its genesis in his own life experiences and contemplation, a faithful rendering of Merton’s thought on the problems of our time.

  Merton, the author makes clear, called for a spiritual, social, and religious union. It was a poetic and sometimes unimplemented solution to alienation ...Read More