Christian globalism at home : child sponsorship in the United States

Author / Creator

Kaell, Hillary, author

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Summary

"Keynote This book explores the deep history and contemporary workings of the popular U.S. Christian practice of "sponsoring" a child abroad. Capsule This book explores the deep history and contemp...

"Keynote This book explores the deep history and contemporary workings of the popular U.S. Christian practice of "sponsoring" a child abroad. Capsule This book explores the deep history and contemporary workings of the popular U.S. Christian practice of "sponsoring" a child abroad. These programs are among the most profitable private Christian fundraising tools today, raising billions of dollars annually. (Most of us have seen the television commercials produced by these organizations, including World Vision, Compassion International, and ChildFund, which attract new sponsors with images of wide-eyed and distressed orphans and with sentimental appeals to individual conscience.) The sponsoring organizations request yearly or monthly financial contributions from individual donors for ongoing support of a specific child abroad. The sponsorship arrangement typically comes with some promise of communication between the sponsor/donor and the child recipient. Tracing child sponsorship back to American Protestant missions in the early nineteenth century, Kaell recounts its spread to Christian NGOs in the mid-twentieth century, and, in light of this history, explores the ideological and ethical stakes of this form of Christian globalism. Kaell shows how, in spite of child sponsorship's seemingly altruistic aims and global nature, the practice in fact reproduces the inequities that it claims to be redressing, allowing for Christian donors to feel that they are "making a difference" while reinforcing the global status quo. Her book, based on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork at sponsorship organizations, also reveals an important and understudied way that U.S. Christians imagine and experience global connections. Biography Internal Use Only Hillary Kaell is associate professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage (NYU Press, 2014), and the editor of Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec (McGill-Queens, 2017). Audience This is a book for scholars and students in American religious history and historians of modern Christianity more broadly - particularly scholars interested in how Christians imagine the global, now and in the past. The book will also find readers among anthropologists and sociologists of religion and among scholars in American Studies. Rationale This is the sort of broad interdisciplinary scholarly book that fits with our lists in the humanities (religious studies, history of religion) and in the social sciences (anthropology). It will complement such books as Ian Tyrrell's Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire (2010) and David Hollinger's Protestants Abroad (2017). In its depiction of how religious abstractions become real through everyday material practices it will complement Robert Orsi's Princeton book Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (2006). It will also be a valuable contribution to our list in American religion and religious history, which Eric and I are working to bolster. Other Relevant Info A manuscript (of approx 115,000 words, iwith perhaps 20 b & w images) will be complete and ready for peer review by this fall. I wish to persuade the author to send the manuscript to me for peer review on an exclusive basis. (An advance contract is neither needed or desired as we are so close to completion of the full manuscript.)"--Provided by publisher.

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