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The study of religion and international relations has achieved renewed attention in the last two decades. This study investigates a specific aspect of this field: religious soft power. It focuses on individuals who were affected by religious soft power and develop a typology of courses of action these individuals can take vis-à-vis their home state. I argue that individuals can take three different types of actions: disruptive, reformative, and transnational. Using the cases of the Catholic Church and its followers, ISIS and Sunni believers, and the relations between Israel and the Evangelicals, I assess how these alternative actions are being manifested by different groups of individuals. Lastly, I offer an answer to the question of when individuals would use disruptive action and when will they use reformative one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a new approach to understanding ritual: embodied world construction. Informed by phenomenology and a philosophy of embodiment, this approach argues that rituals can (re)shape the structure of an individual's perceptual world. Ritual participation transforms how the world appears for an individual through the inculcation of new perceptual habits, enabling the perception of objects and properties which could not previously be apprehended. This theory is then applied to two case studies from an existing ethnographic study of North American evangelicalism, indicating how the theory of embodied world construction can shed new light on how individuals are shaped by ritual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes a potential source of immigration policy by comparing attitudes toward Syrian refugees across different religious traditions in the United States. The analysis focuses on the puzzling case of evangelical public opinion, where the views of lay evangelicals showed a contrast with the pro-refugee stance of the church leadership. The current analysis examines the sources of evangelical public opinion by scrutinizing the mediating effects of Muslim stereotypes. The findings from a series of regression analyses using the ANES dataset (2016) suggest that while evangelicals are not distinctive in their opposition to Syrian refugees, they are unique in holding significantly high levels of Muslim stereotypes, which makes them more opposed to allowing refugees from Syria. Additionally, interesting differences in attitudes emerge within the evangelical community, thereby cautioning against generalizing the divide between church leadership and laity. Finally, measures of religiosity demonstrate significant effects on attitudes across religious traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Revival of Evangelicalism: Mission and Piety in the Victorian Church of Scotland" by Andrew Michael Jones explores the recovery of the Church of Scotland after the 'Great Disruption' of 1843. The book argues that Evangelicalism played a crucial role in the Church's revival, alongside factors such as church extension campaigns, liturgical reform, and divisions within other Presbyterian denominations. Jones examines the development of 'established Evangelicalism' between 1843 and the turn of the century, highlighting the contributions of influential ministers and publications affiliated with the Church's Evangelical wing. The book also acknowledges the limitations of Evangelicalism, including its complicity in anti-Catholicism and hindrance of systemic reforms. Overall, the book provides valuable insights into the diversity of opinion within the post-Disruption Church of Scotland and its recovery and revival. [Extracted from the article]

Although underappreciated in his own day, Catholic convert John Henry Newman was remarkably prophetic about the challenges that lay ahead for the Catholic faith. In his 1873 sermon titled, 'The Infidelity of the Future', Newman warned of a time when the Church would face not only the cold indifference of agnosticism but also the targeted hostility of those opposed to both God and religion. Yet Newman was not without hope or wisdom for the future Church. This essay examines Newman's insistence upon the need to cultivate an 'ecclesiastical spirit' and an 'intelligent faith'. It specifically explores how Catholic institutions of higher education can respond to Newman's call and assist in bringing about a renewal in the evangelical mission of the Church, providing a much‐needed alternative to the wisdom of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact conservative criticism has had on companies' behaviour in Brazil. We investigate whether Natura and Boticário − the two largest Brazilian cosmetics companies − have maintained or reversed LGBTQ-oriented marketing and advertising when confronted with criticism from conservative groups. We draw on interviews with stakeholders, company investors and LGBTQ activists, in addition to complaints filed with the Conselho Nacional de Autorregulamentação Publicitária (National Council for Advertising Self-Regulation, CONAR), and companies' documents on finance and social responsibility. Overall, even when faced with a negative backlash from conservative opinion, companies have persisted in their commitment to diversity issues and LGBTQ inclusion in marketing. However, firms have also employed evasive strategies, such as targeted communication and less controversial forms of retail design, signalling compromises with conservative stakeholders and customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do racial group attitudes shape the political preferences of Black and white evangelicals? Scholarship has documented the relationship between religion and race in shaping political behavior and attitudes. However, less is known about how in-group and out-group racial attitudes operate within religious populations. Using samples of Black and white evangelicals from the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Studies, we explore the role of racial identity centrality and racial resentment in determining evangelicals' political preferences. While the role of Black and white identity among evangelicals is minimal, we find strong and consistent conservatizing effects for racial resentment. Together these findings suggest that the evangelical racial divide is not driven by Black evangelicals' attachment to their racial identity, but that racial resentment may drive white evangelicals to more conservative political preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relations of the Evangelical movement and Israel have drawn the attention of many scholars of religion, public opinion, and political science in the last two decades. This study examines the influence of Evangelicals on their country's policy toward Israel. I conduct the first quantitative, cross-national research, investigating the links between the size of the Evangelical population of a country and its support for Israel. Analyzing 198 UN General Assembly votes of 18 Latin American countries from 2009 to 2019, my results show that as the Evangelical population in a country grows, so does its support for Israel. Unpredictably, I also find that a state of armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians does not decrease the support for Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contends that Brazil's evangelical Christian networks increasingly function as penal infrastructure. Since the 1990s, the scale and scope of evangelical involvement in the criminal justice system have grown significantly. One clear result is that the capillary relationships that constitute Christian community now mobilise resources to support or even substitute the basic functions of punishment. I draw on fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro to understand this shift and its broader implications for the Brazilian project of incarceration. I also make a general claim for thinking with and through infrastructure as a pathway to understand penal governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Bebbington is respected in the British historical profession, he is revered in the United States, where he is often grouped alongside Mark Noll and George Marsden as a magisterial figure whose sympathetic but rigorous scholarship has brought what was once a niche subject into the mainstream. Similarly important was Bebbington's insistence that Evangelicalism cannot and should not be considered apart from its culture. The approach will be familiar to anyone who has read Bebbington before, and while it showcases his skill in crafting case studies, the cultural backdrop ("enlightenment", "romanticism", "modernism") is often highly impressionistic: a two-dimensional backdrop to the main action. [Extracted from the article]

How does social identity shape Protestant attitudes about guns in the United States? Numerous studies show that religion shapes attitudes about guns, but the role of Protestantism in forming those attitudes is undertheorized and undertested. We draw from the extensive literature on religion-as-identity and the burgeoning literature of gun-ownership-as-identity to test the theory about the role of Protestant religion in cultivating a gun identity. We argue that for many Protestants, gun ownership has taken on the characteristics of a distinctive social identity, but that there are clear differences between different types of Protestants—notably, evangelicals and mainliners—that render the expansive category of "Protestant" largely irrelevant as an explanatory variable. While that finding might seem straightforward to scholars of religion and politics, the broad categorical approach—that is, treating "Protestant" as explanatory—has proven surprisingly durable in studies of gun ownership and attitudes about gun control. The analysis uses a recent Pew survey with batteries of questions about gun identity, gun policy, and religion. While this research note does not fully test why this relationship between Protestantism and gun identity exists, we do show that the relationship not only exists but also affects gun policy attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science, for James Croll, began and ended in metaphysics. Metaphysics, in turn, provided proof of a First and Final Cause of all things. This proof rested on two metaphysical principles: that every event must have a cause, and that the determination of a cause is distinct from its production. This argument emerged from his deeply held religious commitments. As a 17-year-old, he converted to a Calvinist and evangelical form of Christianity. After a period of questioning the Calvinist system, he embraced it again through reading the famous treatise on the will by the New England theologian, Jonathan Edwards. This determinedly metaphysical work, which engaged as much with Enlightenment thought as with Calvinism, defended the view that the will was not a self-determining cause of human action. This 'hard case' provided the basis for a larger claim that every act whatever has a cause, and that the production of an act was different from its determination. In part through reading Edwards, Croll remained a devout and convinced 'moderate' Calvinist for the rest of his life. He also developed a deep love of metaphysics and became convinced that without it, everything, including science, remained confused and in darkness. For Croll, even the most basic science could not be properly conducted without prior metaphysical principles. But this was more than just an argument about the philosophical foundations of scientific inquiry. It was also based on Croll's conviction that the cosmos, earth history and life (including his own) was fully determined by a supreme and perfect intellect. This conviction entered into the marrow of Croll's scientific theories and shaped his interpretation of the twists and turns of his own life. In short, to take seriously Croll's own self-understanding, we need to allow him to 'do God'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tipson shows how George Whitefield, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards rejected the moralising approaches of the prior century, prioritising inward baptism as had Perkins and Beza. Chapter iv explains the "conscience religion" of Puritan theologian William Perkins, who warned readers not to trust in their baptism, but rather examine their conscience for evidence of an inward baptism. Beza's prioritisation of inward baptism, Tipson argues, was the theological move that "would eventually make evangelicalism possible" (p. 8). [Extracted from the article]

Cowan's book should be read because it does show that the Religious Right was created by coalitions involving US and Brazilian conservatives; it should also be read because it models a transnational methodology towards which historians must continue to move. Yet, Cowan is correct in pointing out that it is in the years of the Brazilian dictatorship that the power of Brazilian Evangelicals emerged to unprecedented levels - and it did so partially as a result of the pro-dictatorship initiatives of Brazilian Evangelicals and the strengthening of conservative, US-Brazil theopolitical coalitions. For Cowan, the US-supported dictatorship in Brazil (1964-85) and the simultaneous consolidation of Evangelical political organisation in the US provided a crucial immediate context for the development, strengthening and expansion of a transnational religious Right - whose power is felt today in the US, Brazil and beyond. [Extracted from the article]

A significant body of literature argues that American evangelical missionaries working in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century directly contributed to the rise of Armenian nationalism. While acknowledging that missionaries had an effect on Armenian nationalism, this article finds that the impact of missionaries was much more unintended than is commonly assumed and resulted primarily from Armenian reactions to growing missionary influence. Employing new data on the biographies of Armenian nationalist leaders as well as comparative-historical methods, the article offers evidence that missionary influence spurred a backlash among the Armenian community that intensified preexisting local initiatives, increased investment in mass education in the provinces, and modernized its schooling system, all of which popularized and strengthened Armenian nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Missionaries have flocked to the Kyrgyz Republic ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Evangelical-Pentecostal and Tablighi missions have been particularly active on what they conceive of as a fertile post-atheist frontier. But as these missions project their message of truth onto the frontier, the dangers of the frontier may overwhelm them. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork amongst foreign and local Tablighis and evangelical-Pentecostals, this article formulates an analytic of the frontier that highlights the affective and relational characteristics of missionary activities and their effects. This analytic explains why and how missionaries are attracted to the frontier, as well as some of the successes and failures of their expansionist efforts. In doing so, the article reveals the potency of instability, a feature that is particularly evident in missionary work, but also resonates with other frontier situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a contradiction in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica between Bede's own claims and the implications of the list of bishops in the conciliar document produced at the Synod of Hertford, concerning the date of Bisi's consecration. Modern reconstructions of East Anglian episcopal chronology rely on Bede's account. The article opens by considering Bede's concern to identify episcopal consecrators, which led to the contradiction. The implications of the Synod of Hertford are then explored for dating East Anglia's bishops and the consequent impact this has upon interpreting East Anglia's royal chronology and the evangelization of the kingdom. This further exposes Bede's motives for writing his history and how he constructed his narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between religiosity and political attitudes is well established in the United States, particularly around gendered issues like abortion. However, this relationship can be complicated by the highly gendered and racialized nature of social identities. In this paper, we explore how different forms of religiosity (belonging to a denomination, specific religious beliefs, and religious behavior in church and in private) interact with gender to shape Latino abortion preferences. Using two sets of national survey data, we find that Evangelicalism and church attendance are more strongly associated with anti-abortion attitudes among Latino men, while religious beliefs are gender neutral. Our results illustrate the importance of intersectional approaches to studies of social identities and political preferences, as well as the importance of including gender in research on the role of the Evangelical church on immigrant political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, producing extensive debate as to who evangelicals are, what it means to be an evangelical in the United States today, and whether the electoral results are surprising or not. This paper offers empirical clarity to this protracted discussion by asking and answering a series of questions related to Trump's victory in general and his support from white evangelicals in particular. In doing so, the analyses show that the term "evangelical" has not become a synonym for conservative politics and that white evangelical support for Trump would be higher if public opinion scholars used a belief-centered definition of evangelicalism rather than relying on the more common classification strategies based on self-identification or religious denomination. These findings go against claims that nominal evangelicals, those who call themselves evangelicals but are not religious, make up the core of Trump's support base. Moreover, strong electoral support among devout evangelicals is not unique to the 2016 election but rather is part of a broader trend of evangelical electoral behavior, even when faced with non-traditional Republican candidates. Finally, the paper explores why white evangelicals might support a candidate like Trump. The paper presents evidence that negative partisanship helps explain why devout evangelicals—despite Trump's background and behaviors being cause for concern—coalesced around his presidential bid. Together, the findings from this paper help make sense of both the 2016 presidential election and evangelical public opinion, both separately and together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that Barth's christological ecclesiology is worthy of consideration as a resource to fund a more robust and distinctly theological evangelical free church ecclesiology. Specifically, Barth's articulation of the church as witness, combined with his emphases on the gathering, upbuilding and sending of the church, all resonate with a distinctly free church vantage point. Additionally, I argue that Barth's theological interpretation of Matthew 18:20 (a verse of great significance for the free church tradition) further reveals his compatibility with free church ecclesiology. I conclude that while the traditional problems associated with evangelical reception of Barth need to be addressed and his doctrine of the church as grounded in Christ (and thus election) critically assessed, Barth does end up offering a resource that can inform the development of a theologically robust evangelical free church ecclesiology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cathedrals are usually thought to have had little role in the English Reformation and the reasons for their very survival in the new Church of England have been questioned. Instead of being an irrelevant and closed-off institution, Durham Cathedral was intellectually close to its Reformation-era bishop, the conservative Cuthbert Tunstall, and was involved in diocesan matters throughout his episcopate. Tunstall's evangelical successors also appreciated its potential for reform and the need to use its staff and resources. Cathedrals thus could be a tool to be used in the reformation of the diocese on both sides of the emerging confessional divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the impact of the diversity of evangelical denominations at the municipal level on the proportion of votes obtained by those members of Congress belonging to this demographic group. To reach this goal, we employ demographic and electoral data, as well as the composition of the evangelical caucus in the 2014 elections to Congress. We compare the effect of confessional diversity in the municipalities between two groups of elected representatives: evangelicals and nonevangelicals. We found that the higher the number of evangelical churches in the municipality, the more significant the proportion of votes obtained by the evangelical deputies. Controlling the effect of confessional diversity on electoral performance by other members of Congress also enabled us to confirm that the observed effect was exclusive to evangelical deputies and not replicated in other representatives. The results provide consistent empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis that there is complementarity between religious denominations about voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have shown that religious activity can prepare individuals for civic activity by endowing them with the skills and motivation to engage in politics. Others, however, assert that religious dogmatism may lead to disengagement with the secular world and politics more generally. These two perspectives have resulted in contradictory findings on a key aspect of civic ability: political knowledge. I argue that while religiosity may indeed increase individuals' engagement in a wide array of political activities, including some aspects of political knowledge, religious commitment decreases the ability to acquire accurate information about certain types of political facts. This argument is tested with a number of national surveys, and I find that while religion has a mixed effect on knowledge of general political structures and actors, it increases the perception of media hostility, which leads to lower levels of political knowledge about policy-specific surveillance information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agrarian populist movement of the late nineteenth century remains among the largest social movement and third-party revolts in American history. It embodied a full-scale critique and mobilization against the inequities of the Gilded Age, and its influence stretched well into the Progressive and New Deal eras. While most accounts of the movement and party's emergence and rapid demise have centered on economic conditions and interests, we link movement and third-party emergence and failure to the institutional arena second only to partisan politics in its impact on southern society at large, namely organized religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism. This article offers the first systematic analysis of the extent to which organized religion in the South channeled the mobilization of agrarian populism. The results both support and contradict the argument that agrarian populism was rooted in organized southern religion by suggesting that evangelical Protestantism channeled the mobilization of the Farmers' Alliance movement but not the People's Party. While white southern evangelical religion served as a potent cultural resource and mobilizing structure for the movement, the move to partisan politics helped create a disjuncture between movement and party from which Populism never recovered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the evangelical framework for business ethics is important, since business evangelicals are well positioned to exercise considerable future influence. This article develops the context for understanding evangelical business ethics by examining their history, theology and culture. It then relates the findings to evangelical foundations for business ethics. The thesis is that business ethics, as practiced by those in the evangelical community, has developed inductively from a base of applied experience. As a result, emphases on piety, witnessing, tithing, and neighborliness, important foundations in the evangelical model for business ethics, have resulted in a multitude of applied ethical strategies. This operative ethics model is then evaluated, particularly in regarding to its limited focus on the fundamental purposes and structures of business. The article concludes with several recommended sources which can enrich the evangelical tradition of business ethics, suggesting many resources from the Reformed Christian tradition as well as other ideas from contemporary Protestant and Catholic thinkers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outnumbered at the middle of the nineteenth century by Baptists and Methodists, although still ranking third in size among Protestant denominations, Presbyterians of several kinds constituted about 3 per cent of the country's population. Unhappily, some Presbyterians began to argue that the denomination could permit its ministers to endorse a selective version of Westminster and/or understand the Bible as historically inflected. 978 0 8028 7340 8 The denomination in the United States that goes by the name of Presbyterianism is a legacy of the Reformed tradition. [Extracted from the article]

Evangelical rap may sound like an oxymoron, but it was one of the most important trends in evangelical America as the Christian right rose to new levels of power in the 1990s. The trio DC Talk sold millions of album and dominated the Christian charts from the early 1990s and into the early 2000s. This was more than pure entertainment. Popular culture, and especially popular culture targeted at teens, is an important venue for disseminating values and sustaining religious identities. The artists promoted by the Christian music industry have to reflect the ideas and values that parents and central evangelical institutions wish to teach their children. In the 1990s, racial reconciliation was one of the most important issues to evangelical America and DC Talk were poster boys for a multiracial and multicultural America. Therefore this article takes DC Talk as a starting point to discuss evangelical engagement with race issues in the 1990s. DC Talk wrapped up evangelical individualism and color-blind conservatism in hip-hop garb, trying to reinvent a group with a checkered past when it comes to race relations as the hope of a racially harmonious America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is American Evangelicalism a politically progressive tradition? For contemporary observers who are familiar with American Evangelicalism only in its modern, politically conservative guise, the idea that many American Evangelicals have traditionally been on the left end of the political spectrum might come as a surprise. Yet, according to Randall Balmer's Evangelicalism in America and Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals, both of which offer two-hundred-year surveys of Evangelical political activism in the United States, the Christian Right is an aberration in American Evangelicalism and not representative of the tradition's political orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Evangelicals are generally considered culturally conservative regarding issues like abortion or homosexuality and sometimes also economically conservative regarding issues like tax reduction. But does this image also apply to Dutch evangelicals who live in a secular environment in which they constitute only a tiny fraction of the number of church members? This article explores the political attitudes of Dutch evangelicals with the help of two research questions: (1) Do Dutch evangelicals hold more conservative political attitudes on economic and cultural issues than Catholics, mainline Protestants and non-church members? and (2) Which decisive factors determine the supposed conservatism among Dutch evangelicals as compared to Catholics, mainline Protestants and non-church members? Analyses of survey data show that Dutch evangelicals are indeed culturally conservative, but more liberal in economic matters. In addition, results also show that their cultural conservatism is related to their religious convictions, while their economic attitudes are unrelated to religion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In his I Remarks on the Life and Character of John Wesley i , Knox regarded Wesley as "A Church-of-England man of the highest tone", by which he meant a Platonist High Churchman, even though he deplored the tendency of Wesley's followers towards separation. Chapter 3 explores the relationship with John Wesley, who McCready sees as the key influence on Knox's High Churchmanship. Moving from the ancient world into Knox's own times, Chapter 5 explores the relationship to the Enlightenment and Romanticism which was manifest most strongly in Knox's spirit of tolerance as well as in the importance of experience. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the crucial role that print media played in the global expansion of American evangelicalism during the late 1890s: a moment when the United States was exercising new forms of military, economic, and cultural power to extend its influence in world affairs. Analyzing the strategies that publicists employed to make the popular press an effective medium of spreading American evangelicalism sheds light on the theological and social factors that influenced – and circumscribed – the ways in which evangelicals imagined, fostered, and undermined the creation of a global Christian community in this increasingly imperial era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in 1974 was the largest global gathering of evangelical Christians in the latter half of the twentieth century. Lausanne was significant, in part because of the struggle between two sets of evangelical leaders: those, led by the US, who wanted to retain a focus on “evangelism,” and the young radicals, led by Latin Americans, who demanded a broader attention to “social concern.” This essay traces the impact of the liberalizing faction, while also following the “evangelism-first” movement and its role in the rise of the religious right in the US in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, American evangelicals broadened their global outlook and operations, becoming the largest private radio broadcasters in the world. As they expanded overseas after World War II, American evangelicals encountered a world in crisis due to the Cold War, population growth, and processes of decolonization, affecting Western missions. Evangelical broadcasting advocates promoted mass media as a means to address the shifting demographic, political, and religious balance between the global North and South. Global radio broadcasting demonstrated a dynamic tension within American evangelicalism between innovative and conservative impulses, which was particularly evident in the area of reception. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This introduction embeds the Exploring the Global History of American Evangelicalism special issue into current historiographical debates in the field of US evangelicalism and globalization. It lays out the methodological framework and thematic scope of the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The resurgence of American evangelicalism since the 1940s unfolded in conjunction with efforts by policymakers to instrumentalize religion for the assertion of empire. Missions and foreign aid are two key areas where these dynamics intersected. They show that evangelicals were both at home in the “American century” and deeply critical of global power. Rather than being a weakness, however, these tensions enabled the movement to become a crucial arbiter at a time when the country's new role was not yet firmly legitimized at home. In particular, evangelicalism helped reconcile isolationist, antistatist, and antimilitarist sentiments with hegemonic aspirations, the national security state, and the military–industrial complex. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article, which emphasizes the importance of transnational history, tracks the influence of E. Stanley Jones, a missionary to India in the early twentieth century, on evangelicals in the United States. It contends that global encounters pushed Jones to hold integrated ashrams, conduct evangelistic crusades, and participate in the Congress on Racial Equality. During his time abroad, he discovered that racial segregation at home hurt the causes of missions and democracy abroad. Using this Cold War logic, Jones in turn provoked American evangelicals to consider more fully questions of racial inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

After World War II, American evangelicals realized that the European religious landscape had been seriously damaged, causing them to begin to include Europe in their mission programs. Their initiatives reversed the established direction of things, changing the pattern of who sent and who received missionary support. The religious aid flowing from the US fell almost entirely within the masculine framing of the American state, which had so recently exerted its influence in Europe in the military, economic, and cultural spheres. This essay explains how, as a result of practical experience and general social change, gender relations in American missions came to embrace greater inclusivity. European evangelicals, in turn, were both empowered by working with the American missionaries and impacted by the American debate over the separation of male and female roles in the mission field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the ancient Nahua concept of “father,” employing early Colonial sources written in both Nahuatl and Spanish. A careful contextual analysis of the occurrences of various Nahuatl terms for “father” or “parent” leads to the conclusion that the principal criterion for creating their metaphorical extensions differed considerably from parallel Spanish criterion. While the latter referred to the power relationship (“father” is the one who governs), the former was based on the concept of exchange (“father” is the one who gives). This principle has implications for studying many aspects of Nahua culture in which the terms for “father” appear: gender and social roles, political hierarchy, pre-Hispanic religion, or evangelization. The difference in the construction of such basic concepts in Nahuatl and Spanish leads to methodological considerations about studying sources that have arisen from the context of cultural contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]