George Liele: Liberated slave and African American Baptist Missionary to Jamaica

Liele introduced Baptist witness to Jamaica and served as pastor and educator of churches in Kingston and Spanish town cities there. Further, Liele was responsible for the conversion and baptism of another African American, Moses Baker, who migrated to Jamaica in 1783 and was a leader in establishing Baptist churches in western parishes in Jamaica. Beyond his work in Jamaica, Liele’s ministry reached as far afield as Nova Scotia, Canada, and Sierra Leone, Africa, through the influence of his protege, David George, who was first known as David, until he changed his name to “David George” in honor of his friend and mentor George Liele.

Linguistic nationalism in early-colonial Assam: The American Baptist Mission and Orunodoi

This paper will attempt to map the emergence of linguistic nationalism as a direct offshoot of the language debate in early-colonial Assam. In 1836, Bengali was made the language of courts and schools in Assam. Ten years later, the Baptist Mission at Sadiya started publishing a monthly magazine called Orunodoi. Orunodoi gradually became a critical instrument in the effort to reinstate Assamese as the language of the province’s courts and schools. How did the emergent public sphere react to the debate on language? What was the power dynamic between an emergent native intelligentsia, the Baptist Mission and the colonial state in early-colonial Assam? What are the factors that prevented Assamese from being reinstated as the language of courts and schools in Assam until 1873? Was the debate on language merely about imposition of a ‘foreign’ language, or was the discourse more fluid with concerns like language standardisation operating as undercurrents? Can the language debate in early-colonial Assam be isolated as the first assertion of a sub-national identity based upon cultural and linguistic ‘uniqueness’? Through an analysis of some articles published in Orunodoi, read along with private letters and official correspondences of the American Baptist Mission in Assam, this paper will attempt to address some of these questions and recover the context of the debate around language in nineteenth-century Assam.

“All the Baptists on the Continent”

Oliver Hart longed to see one more revival in his final years, but he died in 1795, just before the Second Great Awakening. The Baptist movement in America had been dramatically transformed during his lifetime, both in numbers and in cultural respectability. Twenty years after Hart’s death, “all the Baptists on the continent” would unite to support the foreign missionaries Ann and Adoniram Judson, thus birthing the first nationwide Baptist denomination and fulfilling a long-held desire of Hart’s. Fittingly, it was Hart’s successor at Charleston, Richard Furman, who would serve as the new denomination’s first president. Furman would also build on Hart’s lifework by overseeing the expansion of Baptist institutional life in the South during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Ultimately Hart’s dream of a united Baptist America was shattered over the issue of slavery, with the South’s Baptists clinging to his earlier position on slavery, and Northern Baptists following his later position. This chapter closes with a reflection on Hart’s enduring legacy as an early American Baptist and evangelical leader.

The Rise and Development of Lexicography & Dictionary Craft in Tiechiu-Swatow Dialect during Late Qing Dynasty

In the first half of the 19th century, the Christian churches of Britain and America successively sent missionaries to the southeast Asia. American Baptist missionaries William Dean and Josiah Goddard, who preached in Bangkok, published First Lessons in the Tiechiw Dialect 1841 and A Chinese and English Vocabulary in the Tiechiu Dialect in 1847. They started the activities of missionaries and foreigners in China to compile dictionaries of Tiechiw-Swatow dialects. After the second Opium War, missionaries went deep into the hinterland of China, and the activities of compiling dictionaries of Chinese dialects became more active. The compilation techniques such as content design, Roman pronunciation scheme and tone annotation, and Chinese-English comparison, became more perfect. From the 1870s to 1911, foreign missionaries in Tiechiw-Swatow area compiled and published nine dictionaries. The purpose of this paper is to sort out the compilation process of Tiechiw-Swatow dialect dictionaries in the late Qing dynasty and the recognition of the regularity of compilation techniques, so as to provide reference for the study of compilation techniques of Tiechiw-Swatow dialect dictionaries and the dissemination of Tiechiw-Swatow regional culture in the English world.

Chemists Who Work in Industry

Dr. Dorothy J. Phillips (Fig. 2.1) is a retired industrial chemist and a member of the Board of Directors of the ACS. Dorothy Jean Wingfield was born in Nashville, Tennessee on July 27, 1945, the third of eight children, five girls and three boys. She was the second girl and is very close to her older sister. Dorothy grew up in a multi- generational home as both her grandmothers often lived with them. Her father, Reverend Robert Cam Wingfield Sr., born in 1905, was a porter at the Greyhound Bus station and went to school in the evenings after he was called to the ministry. He was very active in his church as the superintendent of the Sunday school; he became a pastor after receiving an associate’s degree in theology and pastoral studies from the American Baptist Theological Seminary. Her mother, Rebecca Cooper Wingfield, occasionally did domestic work. On these occasions, Dorothy’s maternal grandmother would take care of the children. Dorothy’s mother was also very active in civic and school activities, attending the local meetings and conferences of the segregated Parent Teachers Association (PTA) called the Negro Parent Teachers Association or Colored PTA. For that reason, she was frequently at the schools to talk with her children’s teachers. She also worked on a social issue with the city to move people out of the dilapidated slum housing near the Capitol. The town built government subsidized housing to relocate people from homes which did not have indoor toilets and electricity. She was also active in her Baptist church as a Mother, or Deaconess, counseling young women, especially about her role as the minister’s wife. When Dorothy went to school in 1951, Nashville schools were segregated and African American children went to the schools in their neighborhoods. But Dorothy’s elementary, junior high, and high schools were segregated even though the family lived in a predominately white neighborhood. This was because around 1956, and after Rosa Park’s bus boycott in Montgomery, AL, her father, like other ministers, became more active in civil rights and one of his actions was to move to a predominately white neighborhood.

Southern Catholics and Desegregation in Denominational Perspective, 1945–1971

The chapter compares the response of the Catholic Church in the South to desegregation with that of the region’s larger white denominations: the Southern Baptist Convention, the Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. It also makes comparisons with Catholics outside the South and with southern Jews, a minority, like Catholics, subject to suspicion and even hostility from the Protestant majority, and with the Northern (later American) Baptist Convention and the Disciples of Christ, both of which had a substantial African American membership. The comparison suggests that white lay sensibilities, more than polity or theology, influenced the implementation of desegregation in the South by the major white religious bodies. Like the major white Protestant denominations, Catholic prelates and clergy took a more progressive approach to desegregation in the peripheral than the Deep South.

Family Planning Is a Christian Duty

Throughout the 1960s, the Protestant mainline developed a theology of “responsible parenthood,” grounded in scripture and Christian thought that turned the use of contraception within marriage into a site of Christian moral agency. Responsible parenthood language offered religious responses to scientific advances and scientifically articulated social problems like population explosion. Protestant clergy, nationally and locally, deployed it to encourage birth control among married couples. These leaders were often members of what is called “mainline” Protestantism, encompassing such moderate, non-evangelical denominations such as the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the American Baptist Church, and the Episcopal Church. They eschewed fundamentalism and valued ecumenical cooperation, particularly among liberal white Protestants, building alliances through groups such as the National Council of Churches (NCC). While the number of mainline Protestants has declined since the middle of the twentieth century, in the 1960s mainline Protestants constituted a prominent voice in public conversations. Their influence was so great that much of what historians tend to see as secular was actually deeply inflected with liberal Protestant values.

The Remaking of Custom in the Naga Hills

The British search for the custom within tribes to reproduce their knowledge which could be used for the imperial expansion in the Naga Hills of North East India. Nagas practiced oral tradition, therefore the colonial court judgment was based on how it understood what the litigants testified orally in the court without any prior documented directives. This way customary tradition of the people was interpreted back to the people according to how the court identified and understood what was customary. This strategically established symbolic authority, namely, favouring of ‘custom’ in the dispensation of justice. In addition to the British expansionist mission, there was also a very strong contender in the form of American Baptist Missionaries in the Naga Hills. Village life underwent a huge change as the Missionaries introduced the system of separating the village communities into the ancient ones and the converts khels (colony/block), which further altered the space for the operation of custom. In the process, the significant differences lasted as long as the imperial rule in the Naga Hills as is evident from many cases that read ancients/heathens v Christians lodged in the colonial courts in the Naga Hills.