Expeditions into ‘Central Man’: Imperial Romance, Tropical Medicine, and Heroic Masculinity

In this chapter, Taylor-Pirie considers how parasitology became rhetorically and materially entangled in the imperial imagination with travelogues, anthropological treatise, imperial romance fiction, and missionary biography. These modes jointly constructed the colonial encounter as a feat of manly endurance, using the linguistic enjoinment of medicine and exploration to frame parasitologists as modern heroes. Examining the influence of Thomas Carlyle’s conceptualisation of the heroic in history and imperial cartography as a strategy of representation, she demonstrates how tropical illness became a subject associated with pioneers, poets, and prophets, mapped onto the larger field of empire by the adventure mode. Through close readings of Henry Seton Merriman’s With Edged Tools (1894), John Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude (1909), and Joseph Hocking’s The Dust of Life (1915), she demonstrates the utility of forms like the ‘soldier hero’ and ‘imperial hunter’ in elaborating masculine citizenship in the context of tropical illness and ‘muscular Christianity’.

Moral Education about Sex in the YMCA and Military

After ASHA’s incorporation in 1914, it turned its attention to programs to carry out its vision. Chapter 2 examines the emergence of the Young Men’s Christian Association and chaplains as ASHA’s partners in providing sex education to young men within colleges, YMCAs, and the military. This chapter demonstrates how Christian sex educators used the framework of moral education to justify national sex education programs and to bridge religious and scientific interests. Their positioning of sex education as an integral part of moral education was further influenced by two trends within Protestantism: the social gospel and muscular Christianity. Through these interactions, sex education became a liberal Protestant version of muscular Christianity that sought to reform society. For sex educators within the YMCA and chaplaincy, restoration of moral and social order required instruction that could channel uncontrolled male sexual energy into recreational activities, service to the country, and monogamous, heterosexual marriages.

Manhood and Mary Baker Eddy: Muscular Christianity and Christian Science

On first examination, “muscular Christianity”—with its emphasis on manly vigor and physical strength—positions itself well afield of Christian Science teachings on the non-physical basis of existence, as propounded by founder Mary Baker Eddy. Nonetheless, both movements arose in the nineteenth century with a deep commitment to revitalizing Christianity and its practical value in an increasingly scientific and secular age, especially regarding bodily well-being. Both Eddy and advocates of muscular Christianity defended their respective systems on scientific and religious grounds, focusing on questions of health. At a time when the Young Men's Christian Association was a leading exponent of muscular Christianity, Eddy saw fit to give it significant philanthropic support. While her gift reflected civic goodwill as opposed to a close relationship with the Association, I argue that it was not anomalous to Eddy's overall values and vision for Christian Science. Like muscular Christians, Eddy was calling for a progressive Christianity that met the criteria of a pragmatic age. In giving attention to issues around manhood, Eddy was signaling the necessity as well as potentiality of Christian spirituality to be a source of health and empowerment for modern man.

A Man Is Only as Good as His Words!?

This article provides a discussion of various types of thinking and reading Jesus’ gender exemplified by four thematic foci on church history and recent discourses on Christian religiosity within society (Muscular Christianity, Bridal Mysticism, Passion Piety, religious art/ art using religious topoi). In particular, this article applies a queer and intersectional reading on the topic of Jesus’ gender by toying with heteronormative stereotypes of a strictly gender-binary line of thought.

A Different Passage to India

Ashis Nandy, an Indian psychologist and cultural critic of the post-1945 era, has spent his career largely re-imagining “Indic civilization” as a Gandhi-inspired rejection of Western civilization and especially Western modernity. Very much like Brunner in his rewriting of German civilization, Nandy returns us to pre-nation-state Indian literary and religious texts, the interpretation of which he reconstructs in order to rescue the texts from modern revisionism that has been shaped by the “muscular Christianity” of the Raj. Further, Nandy understands Indic culture, reaching from Afghanistan to Vietnam, as a diversified yet unified entity, comprising a host of territories within one, supra-national civilization. In this sense, Nandy’s work echoes that of Brunner on the authentic, pre-nation-state German Reich, complete with its array of Volksgemeinschaften. But Nandy’s thinking is also reflected in the modern Hindutva movement of present-day India.

The Americanization of Kurt Hahn’s Values: Commentary on “Outward Bound and Civic Minded”

This commentary discusses a 2019 JOREL article by Cheryl Bolick and Ryan Nilsen that reported on a study of the way Outward Bound participants came to define public service after their courses. The present essay elaborates on the “pluralistic” view of service, which they found to be prevalent. This view can be contrasted with Outward Bound founder Kurt Hahn’s “traditionalistic” view based in muscular Christianity. The commentary here argues that the pluralistic view is an artifact of Outward Bound USA’s affiliation with the human potential movement in the 1970s and is aligned with the civic tradition known as expressive individualism.