A half century after its founding in London in 1844, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) became the first NGO to effectively push a modernization agenda around the globe. Soon followed by a sister organization, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), founded in 1855, the Y movement defined its global mission in 1889. Although their agendas have been characterized as predominantly religious, both the YMCA and YWCA were also known for their new vision of a global civil society and became major agents in the worldwide dissemination of modern “Western” bodies of knowledge. The YMCA’s and YWCA’s “secular” social work was partly rooted in the Anglo-American notions of the “social gospel” that became popular during the 1890s. The Christian lay organizations’ vision of a “Protestant Modernity” increasingly globalized their “secular” social work that transformed notions of science, humanitarianism, sports, urban citizenship, agriculture, and gender relations. Spreading Protestant Modernity shows how the YMCA and YWCA became crucial in circulating various forms of knowledge and practices that were related to this vision, and how their work was co-opted by governments and rival NGOs eager to achieve similar ends. The studies assembled in this collection explore the influence of the YMCA’s and YWCA’s work on highly diverse societies in South, Southeast, and East Asia; North America; Africa; and Eastern Europe. Focusing on two of the most prominent representative groups within the Protestant youth, social service, and missionary societies (the so-called “Protestant International”), the book provides new insights into the evolution of global civil society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its multifarious, seemingly secular, legacies for today’s world. Spreading Protestant Modernity offers a compelling read for those interested in global history, the history of colonialism and decolonization, the history of Protestant internationalism, and the trajectories of global civil society. While each study is based on rigorous scholarship, the discussion and analyses are in accessible language that allows everyone from undergraduate students to advanced academics to appreciate the Y movement’s role in social transformations across the world.

This bold and ambitious handbook is the first systematic overview of the history of development ideas, themes, and actors in the twentieth century. Taking stock of the field, the book reflects on blind spots, points out avenues for future research, and brings together a greater plurality of regions, actors, and approaches than other publications on the subject. The book offers a critical reassessment of how historical experiences have shaped contemporary understandings of development, demonstrating that the seemingly self-evident concept of development has been contingent on a combination of material conditions, power structures, and policy choices at different times and in different places. Using a world history approach, the handbook highlights similarities in development challenges across time and space, and it pays attention to the meanings of ideological, cultural, and economic divides in shaping different understandings and practices of development. Taking a thematic approach, the book shows how different actors – governments, non-governmental organizations, individuals, corporations, and international organizations – have responded to concerns regarding the conditions in their own or other societies, such as the provision of education, health, or food; approaches to infrastructure development and industrialization; the adjustment of social conditions; population policies and migration; and the maintenance of stability and security. Bringing together a range of voices from across the globe, this book will be perfect for advanced students and researchers of international development history.

Sayyid Qutb is widely considered the guiding intellectual of radical Islam, with a direct line connecting him to Osama bin Laden. But Qutb has too often been treated maliciously or reductively-"the Philosopher of Islamic Terror," as Paul Berman famously put it in the New York Times Magazine. James Toth offers an even-handed account of Sayyid Qutb and shows him to be a much more complex figure than the many one-dimensional portraits would have us believe. Qutb first gained notice as a novelist, literary critic, and poet but then turned to religious and political criticism aimed at the Egyptian government and Muslims he deemed insufficiently pious. After a two-year sojourn in the U.S., he returned to Egypt even more radicalized and joined the Muslim Brotherhood, eventually taking charge of its propaganda operation. When Brotherhood members were accused of assassinating Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the group was outlawed and Qutb imprisoned. He was executed in 1966, becoming the first martyr to the Islamist cause. Using an analytical approach that investigates without passing judgment, Toth traces the life and thought of Qutb, giving attention not only to his well-known Signposts on the Road, but also to his less-studied works like Social Justice in Islam and his 30-volume Qur'anic commentary, In the Shade of the Qur'an. Toth's aim is to give Qutb's ideas a fair hearing, to measure their impact, and to treat him like other intellectuals who inspire revolutions, however unpopular they may be. In offering a more nuanced account of Qutb, one that moves beyond the cartoonish depictions of him as the evil genius lurking behind today's terrorists, Sayyid Qutb deepens our understanding of a central figure of radical Islam and, indeed, our understanding of radical Islam itself.

This handbook offers a guide to research on religious culture during Europe’s long nineteenth century (1800–1914). Grounded in the latest theoretical approaches and in line with trends that have produced a "religious turn" in the study of modern Europe, the volume assesses the state of the field while making provocative recommendations for its enlargement. Unique and ambitious in its thematic breadth, it addresses the histories of all five of Europe’s main religious traditions – Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism – and brings these histories into comparative analysis. This analysis extends to a wide range of subjects, from popular belief and practice, education and modern knowledge formation, and the arts to the intersections between religion and urbanization, civil society and politics, and missions and imperialism. It also evaluates recent developments in work on religion vis-à-vis both gender and nationalism, while calling attention to newer research that proposes secularism as a form of belief in its own right. Presenting the scholarship of eighteen leaders in their respective fields, the volume explains why religion as a topic of research has moved from the periphery to the center of modern European historiography.

Failed or weak states, miscarried democratizations, and economic underdevelopment characterize a large part of the world we live in. Much work has been done on these subjects over the latest decades but most of this research ignores the deep historical processes that produced the modern state, modern democracy and the modern market economy in the first place. This book elucidates the roots of these developments. The book discusses why China was surpassed by Europeans in spite of its early development of advanced economic markets and a meritocratic state. It also hones in on the relationship between geopolitical pressure and state formation and on the European conditions that – from the Middle Ages onwards – facilitated the development of the modern state, modern democracy, and the modern market economy. Finally, the book discusses why some countries have been able to follow the European lead in the latest generations whereas other countries have not. State Formation, Regime Change and Economic Development will be of key interest to students and researchers within political science and history as well as to Comparative Politics, Political Economy and the Politics of Developing Areas.

Adam Seligman, one of our most important social thinkers, continues the incisive critique of modernity he began in his previously acclaimed The Idea of Civil Society and The Problem of Trust. In this provocative new work of social philosophy, Seligman evaluates modernity's wager, namely, the gambit to liberate the modern individual from external social and religious norms by supplanting them with the rational self as its own moral authority. Yet far from ensuring the freedom of the individual, Seligman argues, "the fundamentalist doctrine of enlightened reason has called into being its own nemesis" in the forms of ethnic, racial, and identity politics. Seligman counters that the modern human must recover a notion of authority that is essentially transcendent, but which extends tolerance to those of other--or no--faiths. Through its denial of an authority rooted in an experience of transcendence, modernity fails to account for individual and collective moral action. First, deprived of a sacred source of the self, depictions of moral action are reduced to motives of self interest. Second, dismissing the sacred leaves the resurgence of religious movements unexplained. In this rigorous and imaginative study, Seligman seeks to discover a durable source of moral authority in a liberalized world. His study of shame, pride, collective guilt, and collective responsibility demonstrates the mutual relationship between individual responsibility and communal authority. Furthermore, Seligman restores the indispensable role of religious traditions--as well as the features of those traditions that enhance, rather than denigrate, tolerance. Sociologists, political theorists, moral philosophers, and intellectual historians will find Seligman's thesis enlightening, as will anyone concerned with the ethical and religious foundations of a tolerant society.

This textbook offers a fresh approach to modern theology by approaching the field thematically, covering classic topics in Christian theology over the last two hundred years. The editors, leading authorities on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theology, have assembled a respected team of international scholars to offer substantive treatment of important doctrines and key debates in modern theology. Contributors include Kevin Vanhoozer, John Webster, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, and Michael Horton. The volume enables readers to trace how key doctrinal questions were discussed, where the main debates lie, and how ideas developed. Topics covered include the Trinity, divine attributes, creation, the atonement, ethics, practical theology, and ecclesiology.

In Mission Manifest, Matthew Shannon argues that American evangelicals were central to American-Iranian relations during the decades leading up to the 1979 revolution. These Presbyterian missionaries and other Americans with ideals worked with US government officials, nongovernmental organizations, and their Iranian counterparts as cultural and political brokers—the living sinews of a binational relationship during the Second World War and early Cold War. As US global hegemony peaked between the 1940s and the 1960s, the religious authority of the Presbyterian Mission merged with the material power of the American state to infuse US foreign relations with the messianic ideals of Christian evangelicalism. In Tehran, the missions of American evangelicals became manifest in the realms of religion, development programs, international education, and cultural associations. Americans who lived in Iran also returned to the United States to inform the growth of the national security state, higher education, and evangelical culture. The literal and figurative missions of American evangelicals in late Pahlavi Iran had consequences for the binational relationship, the global evangelical movement, and individual Americans and Iranians. Mission Manifest offers a history of living, breathing people who shared personal, professional, and political aims in Iran at the height of American global power.

The essays gathered in this volume are devoted to different aspects of the reception of Humanism and the Renaissance in Slavic countries. They mark the beginning of a dialogue among scholars of different Slavic languages and literatures, in search of the ways in which the entire Slavic world – albeit to varying degrees – has participated from the very beginning in European cultural transformations, and not simply by sharing some characteristics of the new currents, but by building a new identity in harmony with the changes of the time. By overcoming the dominant paradigm, which sees all cultural manifestations as part of a separate ‘national’ linguistic, literary and artistic canon, this volume is intended to be the first step in outlining some ideas and suggestions in view of the creation, in the future, of an atlas that maps the relevance of Humanism and the Renaissance in the Slavic world.

Decolonising the Study of Religion analyses historical and contemporary discussions in the study of religion and Buddhism and critically investigates representations, possibilities, and challenges of a decolonial approach, addressing the important question: who owns Buddhism? The monograph offers a case-based perspective with which to examine the general study of religion, where new challenges require reflection and prospects for new directions. It focuses on Buddhism, one religion which has been studied in the West for centuries. Building on postcolonial theories and supplemented with a critical analysis of identity and postsecular engagement, the book offers new possibilities and challenges to the study of religion. It critically investigates decolonisation in the study of religion, subscribing to a third way between ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ positions. Analysing the postcolonial and decolonial critique of the study of religion, with a particular focus on Buddhist studies in the West and in Japan, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Religious Studies, Buddhism, Japanese religions, anthropology, Asian Studies and those interested in religion and decolonisation.