Research
Nothing but Christ: Rufus Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions (from Oxford University Press)
Rufus Anderson was the leading ideologist in the nineteenth-century American Protestant missionary movement. As Senior Secretary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Anderson articulated a set of policies which came to be known as the Three Self program, emphasizing the development of native churches that would be self-governing, self-supporting, and self-propagating. Although intended to free native churches from dependence on the American Board, Anderson's initiatives most immediately served to impose austerity on mission churches by maintaining a clear status distinction between the American missionaries and native ministers. To that end, Anderson further developed educational policies designed to ensure that mission-educated natives would be dependent on the mission for their livelihood.
Current projects:
Emma Rauschenbusch Clough. I have been writing recently about two books by the sister of the famed Social Gospel theologian, Walter Rauschenbusch. Her interest was the foreign mission field in India where she served briefly and to which she later returned as the wife of John E. Clough, leader of a mass conversion movement of Untouchables. Her accounts of the conversion movement were pioneering efforts to recognize and appreciate the role of indigenous agency in missions.
The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher. Beecher's autobiography has long served as one of the central primary sources for the history of the Second Great Awakening, although recent historians have challenged its depiction of the rise of evangelicalism and Beecher's representativeness among revivalists of the era. I reread the Autobiography as a work of historical interpretation by the Beecher children, particularly his son Charles, which wrestles with many of the same issues that concern historians in recent years.