We Americans believe that there is basically one rational way to live: ours. There is one legitimate path of development, which leads toward democracy, transparency, and a competitive market system. Our dealings with the rest of the world are based on this assumption. We reinforce the point by dispatching economists, foreign aid workers, and religious missionaries to teach the world how to live...

Herman Melville’s final novel The Confidence-Man destabilizes conventional Western models of ethical behavior, particularly Kantian notions of moral agency, by exposing and challenging their basis in rationality and a progressivist model of history. The Confidence-Man shows rationality to be nothing more than one way, among many other possible ways, that human beings attempt to fix the world in...

This sensational headline turned out to reveal little more than that a few American Presbyterian missionaries had provided ome women in nazonia with contraceptive devices. The resultant scandal was totally disproportionate to the importance of the events. Throughout the country the topic was widely discussed while the arguments employed were frequently heated, and at times irrational to the poi...

This case study of the medical and missionary career of Robert Grierson (1868-1965) with the Canadian Presbyterian mission to Northern Korea from 1898 to 1913 examines the practical context and implications of changing mission ideology in the early-twentieth century for medically trained missionaries. Historians such as William Hutchison and Robert Wright have argued that, in the early-twentiet...

We analyzed characteristics of humanitarian service workers (HSWs) seen pre-travel at Global TravEpiNet (GTEN) practices during 2009-2011. Of 23,264 travelers, 3,663 (16%) travelers were classified as HSWs. Among HSWs, 1,269 (35%) travelers were medical workers, 1,298 (35%) travelers were non-medical service workers, and 990 (27%) travelers were missionaries. Median age was 29 years, and 63% of...

The Syrian Medical Aid Association (SMAA), created by British philanthropists and medical men in the 1840s, represents one of the earliest attempts by a secular organization to transmit Western medicine to a part of the world deemed to be in need of assistance. Its founders, convinced of the need for well-trained physicians, drugs, and equipment in Syria and hopeful that the introduction of sci...

Abstract Do Protestant missionaries affect community cohesion? This study puts forth two mechanisms that link to trusting, cooperative life: pro-social preferences and social networks. On the one hand, espouse charity, they establish regular venues of interaction. other propagate an individualist faith, provide identity along which communities may separate. The effect on cohesion is thus unclea...