To Henry Luce, 10 March 1930

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide original possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development. This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.

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The hiatus of history

American Tianxia ◽

10.1332/policypress/9781447336808.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Salvatore Babones

Keyword(s):

Historical Analysis ◽

World System ◽

Low Fertility ◽

Homogeneous State ◽

Anglo Saxon ◽

Interstate Relations ◽

End Of History ◽

American Century ◽

The End Of History ◽

Henry Luce

When Henry Luce famously called the twentieth century the "American Century," he strongly implied that it was the "first" American century (i.e., not the only one). Subsequent commentators have misunderstood Luce because they have failed to identify the relevant "width of a time point" for world-historical analysis. World-historical trends unfold over centuries, not decades. Demographic change is also slow but sure. China's low fertility rate means that China's population will soon by declining. By 2100 China may have roughly the same population as the Anglo-Saxon core of the American Tianxia. Francis Fukuyama's famous "end of history" is thus much more stable than he has subsequently maintained. The American Tianxia is the universal homogeneous state that Fukuyama once claimed was to be found at the end of history. The Pax Americana of the American Tianxia is very stable because it is based on personal incentives, not interstate relations. It constitutes a new, postmodern world-system, the millennial world-system, that is likely to last for several centuries.

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The Predicament of National Character

10.1093/oso/9780190209209.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

George Blaustein

Keyword(s):

Intellectual History ◽

The United States ◽

Second World War ◽

National Character ◽

Lonely Crowd ◽

American Military ◽

American Character ◽

History Of ◽

Henry Luce ◽

Second World

“National character” has a curious history in the twentieth century. Margaret Mead wrote the first anthropological account of the United States in 1942, but the history of national character as a concept runs through social psychology and anthropology between the wars, the cultivation of “morale” during the Second World War, and the deployment of social science in postwar American military occupations. That history is the subject of this chapter: what “American character” revealed and obscured, both nationally and internationally. Mead was the Henry Luce of anthropology: her life and writings offer a miniature of the science of characterology in the American Century. The chapter begins as an institutional and intellectual history, but concludes with new readings of three postwar texts. Characterology was indeed a science, of a kind, but it was also an art. Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a remote ethnography of Japan, is a parable of American power and its limits. Mead’s New Lives for Old, recounting her return to New Guinea in 1953, becomes a sermon about a Polynesian city upon a hill. David Riesman’s classic of sociology, The Lonely Crowd, closes one frontier of national character but opens another. To consider national character as narrative and ideology illuminates American character’s imprint on the world.

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The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century

The SHAFR Guide Online ◽

10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim120040108 ◽

2017 ◽

Keyword(s):

American Century ◽

Henry Luce

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'Glocalization' as a Key to the Interplay between Christianity and Asian Cultures: The Vision of Francis Wei in Early Twentieth Century China

International Journal of Public Theology ◽

10.1163/156973207x194510 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 101-111 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Peter Tze Ming Ng

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Chinese Culture ◽

Human Beings ◽

Early Twentieth Century ◽

World Christianity ◽

Henry Luce ◽

The Way

AbstractThis article aims to apply the concept of 'glocalization' to the study of theology and culture. China is chosen as a case study, with particular focus on a Chinese theologians discussion of the interplay between Christianity and Chinese Culture in the early twentieth century China. Francis Wei was the first Chinese President of Huazhong University in Wuhan, 1929–1952, and he was appointed as the first Henry Luce Visiting Professor of World Christianity in 1945–46. Wei's conviction was that Christianity and Chinese culture could be complementary. He held that China needed Christianity for a better understanding of God's nature and the way human beings could communicate with God, while maintaining that Christianity needed China to move beyond western denominationalism. Moreover, Christianity could not become a universal religion without including China. This article argues that Wei's work is relevant to the contemporary discussion about interaction between globalization and localization, known as 'glocalization'.

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