Love, sex, and marriage in the global mission of Walter and Ingrid Trobisch

In 1962 Walter Trobisch, a Lutheran missionary in Cameroon, published a book about love, sex, and marriage. By 1974 the book had been translated into seventy languages. One million copies were in circulation, and Walter had received 10,000 letters from young people around the world asking for sexual advice. The book, J'ai Aimé Une Fille, launched Walter and his wife Ingrid into a global marriage counseling ministry. Through books, seminars, and personal correspondence the Trobisches advocated western, Christian sexual ethics like premarital chastity, spouse self-selection, monogamy, and the intimacy and spiritual equality of husband and wife. This dissertation analyzes the economic, political, and religious conditions that facilitated the global flow of the Trobisches' message. Global gender relations during this period were in flux, due to the influence of colonial encounters, industrialization, urbanization, and new forms of education. Cultural chasms often developed between the young, who were open to new family structures and sexual norms, and the old, who insisted on preserving traditions like the bride-price and arranged marriage. While the Trobisches held paternalistic attitudes common among western missionaries of their generation, their vision of sexual ethics aimed to provide young people around the world with tools to navigate changing sexual norms of the mid-twentieth century. In the 1960s, the Trobisches helped to popularize and shape an African marriage guidance movement. However, with the awareness in the 1970s of the church's complicity in colonialism, the Trobisches' leadership in African marriage guidance became increasing problematic. As they lost influence in Africa, they shifted their focus to the United States, where their vision of sexual ethics resonated with evangelicals who were trying to distinguish their views of sexuality from those of the surrounding culture. Although the Trobisches conceived of their work as a way to introduce non-Christians to the faith, the people most affected by their work were those who already considered themselves Christian. Through historical analysis of books, correspondence, diaries, articles, and conference proceedings, this dissertation argues that the Trobisches played a significant role in shaping a transcultural conversation about the meaning of Christian marriage during the mid-twentieth century

Four Failures of Deliberating Groups

Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have. There are four such failures. (1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of group members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation. (2) Groups may fall victim to cascade effects, as the judgments of initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Nondisclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades. (3) As a result of group polarization, groups often end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect. (4) In deliberating groups, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that groups do not learn what their members know. All four errors can be explained by reference to informational signals, reputational pressure, or both. A disturbing result is that many deliberating groups do not improve on, and sometimes do worse than, the predeliberation judgments of their average or median member

The Legacy of Irma Highbaugh

Irma Highbaugh (1891–1973), an American Methodist missionary, used her thirty years of experience in China’s Christian home movement to help Christians throughout Asia develop Christian home literature and train leaders in marriage and family counseling. Her publications and presence at international missionary conferences stoked interest in Christian home missiology, and she put her stamp on that missiology. She was notable for believing that both men and women should be involved with Christian home work and for insisting that significant funds and professionally trained personnel should be dedicated to this ministry. </jats:p

Christian Women and the Development of Nascent Feminist Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century China

In 2010, Padma Anagol argued that the first modern feminists in India were Christian women, women such as Laxmibai Tilak and Pandita Ramabai. Using Anagol&rsquo;s definition of feminism as &ldquo;a theory and practice which presented a challenge to the subordination of women in society and attempted to redress the balance of power between the sexes,&rdquo; this article shows how feminist consciousness was cultivated in Christian schools, churches, hospitals, and organizations in late-nineteenth-century China. Kwok Pui Lan pointed out in 1992 that Christians were the first women in China to band together to fight women&rsquo;s oppression; however, like so many of the claims made about women in global Christianity, this one has not yet been fully appreciated by historians and missiologists. I show how mission schools gave girls access to new models of personhood and womanhood. Likewise, Christian scriptures, churches, and voluntary societies such as the WCTU and YWCA provided space to reflect on gender identity and activism. Through all these avenues, a modest version of Christian feminism was cultivated in China decades before the secular women&rsquo;s movement began in 1900

Revolutionary Christian Attitudes toward Women and Family in Late Qing and Republican-Era China

Abstract In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Chinese Christian familial ideals were traditional and revolutionary at the same time. They were traditional in wanting to preserve some role for parents in forming the marriages of their children and in seeing wives as primarily responsible for the care of children. But Christians were revolutionary in encouraging women to develop their personalities and work outside the home. They advocated women’s education and associated education with women’s empowerment and independence. Christians taught that marriage should be based on love and that daughters were just as important as sons, even if they chose to be single. Singleness, spouse self-selection, prioritizing the husband-wife relationship over the parent-child relationship, and pursuing a companionate model of marriage were all ways that Christians helped revolutionize familial ideals in China.</jats:p

Christian Women and the Development of Nascent Feminist Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century China

In 2010, Padma Anagol argued that the first modern feminists in India were Christian women, women such as Laxmibai Tilak and Pandita Ramabai. Using Anagol’s definition of feminism as “a theory and practice which presented a challenge to the subordination of women in society and attempted to redress the balance of power between the sexes,” this article shows how feminist consciousness was cultivated in Christian schools, churches, hospitals, and organizations in late-nineteenth-century China. Kwok Pui Lan pointed out in 1992 that Christians were the first women in China to band together to fight women’s oppression; however, like so many of the claims made about women in global Christianity, this one has not yet been fully appreciated by historians and missiologists. I show how mission schools gave girls access to new models of personhood and womanhood. Likewise, Christian scriptures, churches, and voluntary societies such as the WCTU and YWCA provided space to reflect on gender identity and activism. Through all these avenues, a modest version of Christian feminism was cultivated in China decades before the secular women’s movement began in 1900.</jats:p