Institutional Genesis

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-123
Author(s):  
Anilkumar Belvadi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
School Attendance ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Formal Organization ◽  
Statistical Review ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Government Grants ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Set Up

Chapter 4 traces the logic American missionaries employed in advocating Sunday schools as a suitable answer to their problem of finding audiences for their message. Bazaar-preaching did not produce many converts. Missionaries tried to expand the notion of itinerant preaching: rather than merely present Christianity as a personal path to a secure afterlife, they attempted holding out prospects for a better standard of living for all in this world if they accepted Christianity. The responses usually were those of admiration for the material facts they presented about “Christian countries,” but accompanied by an assertive rejection of any notion of Christian causality. The recalcitrance of their ill-educated adult interlocutors frustrated missionaries and their attention thence turned to children. However, thanks to the availability of government grants-in-aid after 1854, there was increased competition in education from non-Christian groups wanting to set up government-approved secular schools. It was in this context that missionaries felt that Sunday schools, being independent of government funds, could teach Christian doctrine without fear of interference. Further, they expected thousands of non-Christians, eager for any education in English, to attend Sunday Schools, disregarding the evangelical intent of the schools’ sponsors. The India Sunday School Union was formed in 1876 following extensive pan-denominational missionary discussions on the need for a formal organization patterned after “modern” Western bureaucracies, educational systems, armies, and so forth. The chapter details the methods, including the use of advertising, small bribes, and favor-seeking with influential, Christian-minded colonial officials, by which missionaries assembled students. The chapter ends with a statistical review of Sunday school attendance in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

Ghazals, Bhajans and Hymns: Hindustani Christian Music in Nineteenth-Century North India

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-165
Author(s):  
Alan M. Guenther
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
North India ◽  
Emerging Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Christian Music ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Indigenous Music ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Muslim Culture

When American missionaries from the Methodist Episcopal Church arrived in India in the middle of the nineteenth century, they very soon published hymn-books to aid the Christian church in worship. But these publications were not solely the product of American Methodists nor simply the collection of foreign songs and music translated into Urdu. Rather, successive editions demonstrate the increasing participation of both foreigners and Indians, of missionaries from various denominations, of both men and women, and of even those not yet baptised as Christians. The tunes and poetry included were in both European and Indian forms. This hybrid nature is particularly apparent by the end of the century when the Methodist press published a hymn-book containing ghazals and bhajans in addition to hymns and Sunday school songs. The inclusion of a separate section of ghazals was evidence of the influence of the Muslim culture on the worship of Christians in North India. This mixing of cultures was an essential characteristic of the hymnody produced by the emerging church in the region and was used in both evangelism and worship. Indian and foreign evangelists relied on indigenous music to draw hearers and to communicate the Christian gospel.

Missionary Calculus

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anilkumar Belvadi
Keyword(s):  
Learning Environment ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Educational History ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
East Indian ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
First Time ◽  
School Curricula

Missionary Calculus tells the story for the first time of the making of the Sunday school in Victorian India (1858–1901), focusing on American missionaries, its most active promoters. Unlike other mission histories, this book studies the means missionaries adopted in building this institution rather than on their evangelical ends. Based on extensive archival research, it addresses the question: How did the process of building institutions affect the Christian values to establish which they were built? The book provides a richly detailed account of Indian colonial educational history, discussing the Christian pedagogical encounter with a non-Christian learning environment. It tells of lavish missionary lifestyles in a land frequently stricken by famine, and of missionary solidarity with British colonial authorities, accompanied though by Christian caritative commitment for the plight of the colonized. Missionaries resolved these contradictions by telling their audiences that becoming Christian would lead them to prosperity, while telling themselves that they needed to work out a plan for civilizational correction. Sunday schools began to be seen as at once the instrument of evangelization as of reschooling India. American missionaries brought with them Sunday school curricula and organizational methods from back home, and tried to customize them to Indian conditions. But this meant having to compromise with hiring heathen teachers, allowing heathen students to wear their caste-marks, commissioning a heathen-style hymnody, and paying money to key people to fill the classrooms with heathens. Could such a hybrid institution be Christian? And whom could it serve? Here is an East Indian tale.

Relationships Human and Divine: Retribution and Repentance in Children’s Lives, 1740–1870

2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 253-265
Author(s):  
Mary Clare Martin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Divine Retribution

The place of repentance and retribution in children’s lives between 1740 and 1870 has not been viewed positively. E. P. Thompson famously claimed that ‘the child’ in Methodist Sunday schools and in pious homes, from about 1780, was subjected to ‘the worst kind of emotional bullying to confess his sins and come to a sense of salvation’. In the 1840s children in the mines allegedly reported that they had been taught at Sunday school that hell was a place full of fire and brimstone. Nor have such assertions been made only about working-class children. Lawrence Stone, James Walvin, Walter Houghton and others claimed that the young of the middle and upper classes were intimidated by stories such as Mrs Sherwood’s The Fairchild Family, and other Evangelical tracts threatening hell and retribution and urging immediate repentance. In 1995, Hugh Cunningham still followed Stone’s chronology in suggesting that the early nineteenth century was a period of ‘reaction’ in religious terms for children.

scholarly journals “Take this Normal Class Idea and Carry it throughout the Land”: Sunday School Teacher Training in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Kmiec
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
School Teacher ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
School Community ◽  
Formal Training ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Normal Schools ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Normal Class

AbstractBy 1874, the interdenominational Protestant Sunday school community in Ontario was wellestablished, with over 4,000 schools and 34,000 teachers connected through the SabbathSchool Association of Canada. From private prayer to centralized normal schools with qualifyingexaminations, various approaches to teacher education were debated and practiced withinthe Sunday school community. This paper traces the increasingly formal training that Sundayschool teachers underwent over the last half of the nineteenth century. This analysis highlightshow Sunday schools across Ontario continued to be directed by their workers at the locallevel, even as there was increasing centralization and standardization over the last half of thenineteenth century. It also suggests that the adult education provided within this communityextended well beyond the Sunday school classroom.RésuméEn 1874, le réseau des écoles du dimanche interconfessionnelles protestantes étaient bien établiesen Ontario avec plus de 4 000 écoles et 34 000 enseignants réunis au sein de la SabbathSchool Association of Canada. De la prière en privé aux examens de qualification des écolesnormales centralisées, diverses approches de formation en enseignement étaient discutées etmises en pratique dans la communauté des écoles du dimanche. Cet article retrace la formationde plus en plus standardisée dispensée aux enseignants des écoles du dimanche durant la secondemoitié du 19e siècle. Notre analyse souligne que les écoles du dimanche étaient toujoursdirigées par des travailleurs locaux, malgré les processus de standardisation et de centralisationdurant cette période. Nous affirmons également que l’éducation aux adultes dispensée danscette communauté continuait bien au-delà de la salle de classe de l’école du dimanche

Chinese and American Collaborations through Educational Exchange during the Era of Exclusion, 1872–1955

2012 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Education ◽  
Foreign Students ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Systems ◽  
Higher Education Administrators ◽  
Overlapping Communities ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Education Administrators

Overlapping communities of American missionaries and higher education administrators and faculty laid the foundations for international education in the United States during the first half-century of that movement’s existence. Their interests and activities in China, in conjunction with Chinese efforts to develop modern educational systems in the early twentieth century, meant that Chinese students featured prominently among foreign students in the United States. Through the education and career of Meng Zhi, an American-educated convert to Christianity, staunch patriot, and long-term director of the China Institute in America, this article examines the transition of international education programs from U.S.-dominated efforts to extend influence overseas to initiatives intended to advance Chinese nationalist projects for modernization.

Hebrew School in Nineteenth-Century Bombay: Protestant Missionaries, Cochin Jews, and the Hebraization of India's Bene Israel Community

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1764-1808 ◽  
Author(s):  
MITCH NUMARK
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Language Instruction ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Hebrew School ◽  
Hebrew Language ◽  
Bene Israel ◽  
Jewish Liturgy

AbstractThis paper is a study of cultural interaction and diffusion in colonial Bombay. Focusing on Hebrew language instruction, it examines the encounter between India's little-known Bene Israel Jewish community and Protestant missionaries. Whilst eighteenth and nineteenth-century Cochin Jews were responsible for teaching the Bene Israel Jewish liturgy and forms of worship, the Bene Israel acquired Hebrew and Biblical knowledge primarily from nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Bene Israel community was a Konkan jati with limited knowledge of Judaism. However, by the end of the century the community had become an Indian-Jewish community roughly analogous to other Jewish communities. This paper explores how this transformation occurred, detailing the content, motivation, and means by which British and American missionaries and, to a lesser extent, Cochin Jews instructed the Bene Israel in Jewish knowledge. Through a critical examination of neglected English and Marathi sources, it reconstructs the Bene Israel perspective in these encounters and their attitude towards the Christian missionaries who laboured amongst them. It demonstrates that the Bene Israel were active participants and selective consumers in their interaction with the missionaries, taking what they wanted most from the encounter: knowledge of the Old Testament and the Hebrew language. Ultimately, the instruction the Bene Israel received from Protestant missionaries did not convert them to Christianity but strengthened and transformed their Judaism.

Showcasing Science

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Museum ◽  
Scientific Instrument ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Role ◽  
Electrostatic Generator ◽  
History Of ◽  
World Class ◽  
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz ◽  
Set Up

Teylers Museum was founded in 1784 and soon thereafter became one of the most important centres of Dutch science. The Museum’s first director, Martinus van Marum, famously had the world’s largest electrostatic generator built and set up in Haarlem. This subsequently became the most prominent item in the Museum’s world-class, publicly accessible, and constantly growing collections. These comprised scientific instruments, mineralogical and palaeontological specimens, prints, drawings, paintings, and coins. Van Marum’s successors continued to uphold the institution’s prestige and use the collections for research purposes, while it was increasingly perceived as an art museum by the public. In the early twentieth century, the Nobel Prize laureate Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was appointed head of the scientific instrument collection and conducted experiments on the Museum’s premises. Showcasing Science: A History of Teylers Museum in the Nineteenth Century charts the history of Teylers Museum from its inception until Lorentz’ tenure. From the vantage point of the Museum’s scientific instrument collection, this book gives an analysis of the changing public role of Teylers Museum over the course of the nineteenth century.

‘Missionary Regiments for Immanuel’s Service’: Juvenile Missionary Organization in English Sunday Schools, 1841-1865

1994 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 391-403
Author(s):  
Brian Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Sunday School ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Missionary Work ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
The Church ◽  
School Movement

Juvenile associations in aid of foreign missions made their appearance both in the Church of England and in the Nonconformist churches in the wake of the successful campaign in 1813 to modify the East India Company charter in order to open British India to evangelical missionary work. The fervour which the campaign engendered led to the formation of numerous local associations in support of the missionary societies. In some cases these associations had juvenile branches attached. However, until the 1840s children’s activity in aid of foreign missions was relatively sporadic. Children’s missionary literature was almost non-existent. Such children’s missionary activity as did take place was confined largely to the children of church and chapel congregations; before the 1840s there was little perception of the vast potential for missionary purposes of the Sunday-school movement.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Deanna Ferree Womack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
World Christianity

This book picks up where most books on the American Syria Mission have left off-in 1860, when civil war threw the Syrian Protestant community and the wider Ottoman Syrian society into chaos. This opening chapter introduces the diverse characters who sought to rebuild Syrian society and became enmeshed or entangled in one another’s history during the Arab renaissance (Nahda) that picked up steam in the late nineteenth century: American missionaries, Ottoman administrators, Syrian Protestants, and others from Syria’s Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and Druze sects. It proposes setting the dominant Western male missionary narrative alongside the overlooked stories of Ottoman residents-especially women-and it locates this exploration of Syrian Protestant history within the field of World Christianity.

The Claims of Kinship: Humanitarian Ideals at the Century’s End

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Organization ◽  
Green Movement ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This Chapter examines the self-styled late nineteenth-century humanitarians and their formal organization, ‘The Humanitarian League’. It stresses the visionary zeal of the movement, and examines the wide range of topics discussed in the League’s two main journals, such as vegetarianism and vivisection, pointing up the tensions and paradoxes in humanitarian thinking at the time. It concludes by noting the holistic nature of the humanitarian vision and its echoes in later phenomena such as eco-criticism and the green movement.

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