Over the past seventy years, World Vision has grown from a small missionary agency to the largest Christian humanitarian organization in the world, with 40,000 employees, offices in nearly one hundred countries, and an annual budget of over $2 billion. While founder Bob Pierce was an evangelist with street smarts, the most recent World Vision U.S. presidents move with ease between megachurches, the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, and the corridors of Capitol Hill. Though the organization has remained decidedly Christian, it has earned the reputation as an elite international nongovernmental organization managed efficiently by professional experts fluent in the language of both marketing and development. God's Internationalists is the first comprehensive study of World Vision—or any such religious humanitarian agency. In chronicling the organization's transformation from 1950 to the present, David P. King approaches World Vision as a lens through which to explore shifts within post-World War II American evangelicalism as well as the complexities of faith-based humanitarianism. Chronicling the evolution of World Vision's practices, theology, rhetoric, and organizational structure, King demonstrates how the organization rearticulated and retained its Christian identity even as it expanded beyond a narrow American evangelical subculture. King's pairing of American evangelicals' interactions abroad with their own evolving identity at home reframes the traditional narrative of modern American evangelicalism while also providing the historical context for the current explosion of evangelical interest in global social engagement. By examining these patterns of change, God's Internationalists offers a distinctive angle on the history of religious humanitarianism.

For God and Globe recovers the history of an important yet largely forgotten intellectual movement in interwar America. Michael G. Thompson explores the way radical-left and ecumenical Protestant internationalists articulated new understandings of the ethics of international relations between the 1920s and the 1940s. Missionary leaders such as Sherwood Eddy and journalists such as Kirby Page, as well as realist theologians including Reinhold Niebuhr, developed new kinds of religious enterprises devoted to producing knowledge on international relations for public consumption. For God and Globe centers on the excavation of two such efforts—the leading left-wing Protestant interwar periodical, The World Tomorrow, and the landmark Oxford 1937 ecumenical world conference. Thompson charts the simultaneous peak and decline of the movement in John Foster Dulles's ambitious efforts to link Christian internationalism to the cause of international organization after World War II.Concerned with far more than foreign policy, Christian internationalists developed critiques of racism, imperialism, and nationalism in world affairs. They rejected exceptionalist frameworks and eschewed the dominant "Christian nation" imaginary as a lens through which to view U.S. foreign relations. In the intellectual history of religion and American foreign relations, Protestantism most commonly appears as an ideological ancillary to expansionism and nationalism. For God and Globe challenges this account by recovering a movement that held Christian universalism to be a check against nationalism rather than a boon to it.

“An original book…about individuals who used ideas to change the world” (The New Yorker)—the fascinating exploration into the creation and history of the Paris Peace Pact, an often overlooked but transformative treaty that laid the foundation for the international system we live under today. In 1928, the leaders of the world assembled in Paris to outlaw war. Within the year, the treaty signed that day, known as the Peace Pact, had been ratified by nearly every state in the world. War, for the first time in history, had become illegal. But within a decade of its signing, each state that had gathered in Paris to renounce war was at war. And in the century that followed, the Peace Pact was dismissed as an act of folly and an unmistakable failure. This book argues that the Peace Pact ushered in a sustained march toward peace that lasts to this day. A “thought-provoking and comprehensively researched book” (The Wall Street Journal), The Internationalists tells the story of the Peace Pact through a fascinating and diverse array of lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals. It reveals the centuries-long struggle of ideas over the role of war in a just world order. It details the brutal world of conflict the Peace Pact helped extinguish, and the subsequent era where tariffs and sanctions take the place of tanks and gunships. The Internationalists is “indispensable” (The Washington Post). Accessible and gripping, this book will change the way we view the history of the twentieth century—and how we must work together to protect the global order the internationalists fought to make possible. “A fascinating and challenging book, which raises gravely important issues for the present…Given the state of the world, The Internationalists has come along at the right moment” (The Financial Times).

A robust historical case study that demonstrates how village development became central to the rhetoric and practice of statecraft in rural Ghana. Combining oral histories with decades of archival material, Village Work formulates a sweeping history of twentieth-century statecraft that centers on the daily work of rural people, local officials, and family networks, rather than on the national governments and large-scale plans that often dominate development stories. Wiemers shows that developmentalism was not simply created by governments and imposed on the governed; instead, it was jointly constructed through interactions between them. The book contributes to the historiographies of development and statecraft in Africa and the Global South by emphasizing the piecemeal, contingent, and largely improvised ways both development and the state are comprised and experienced providing new entry points into longstanding discussions about developmental power and discourse unsettling common ideas about how and by whom states are made exposing the importance of unpaid labor in mediating relationships between governments and the governed showing how state engagement could both exacerbate and disrupt inequities Despite massive changes in twentieth-century political structures—the imposition and destruction of colonial rule, nationalist plans for pan-African solidarity and modernization, multiple military coups, and the rise of neoliberal austerity policies—unremunerated labor and demonstrations of local leadership have remained central tools by which rural Ghanaians have interacted with the state. Grounding its analysis of statecraft in decades of daily negotiations over budgets and bureaucracy, the book tells the stories of developers who decided how and where projects would be sited, of constituents who performed labor, and of a chief and his large cadre of educated children who met and shaped demands for local leaders. For a variety of actors, invoking “the village” became a convenient way to allocate or attract limited resources, to highlight or downplay struggles over power, and to forge national and international networks.

Given unprecedented insider access, author Allen D. Hertzke charts the rise of the new faith-based movement for global human rights and tells the compelling story of the personalities and forces, clashes and compromises, strategies and protests that shape it. In doing so, Hertzke shows that by raising issues_such as global religious persecution, Sudanese atrocities, North Korean gulags, and sex trafficking_the movement is impacting foreign policy around the world.

Award of Merit, 2019 Christianity Today Book Awards (History/Biography) More than forty years ago, conservative Christianity emerged as a major force in American political life. Since then the movement has been analyzed and over-analyzed, declared triumphant and, more than once, given up for dead. But because outside observers have maintained a near-relentless focus on domestic politics, the most transformative development over the last several decades--the explosive growth of Christianity in the global south--has gone unrecognized by the wider public, even as it has transformed evangelical life, both in the US and abroad. The Kingdom of God Has No Borders offers a daring new perspective on conservative Christianity by shifting the lens to focus on the world outside US borders. Melani McAlister offers a sweeping narrative of the last fifty years of evangelical history, weaving a fascinating tale that upends much of what we know--or think we know--about American evangelicals. She takes us to the Congo in the 1960s, where Christians were enmeshed in a complicated interplay of missionary zeal, Cold War politics, racial hierarchy, and anti-colonial struggle. She shows us how evangelical efforts to convert non-Christians have placed them in direct conflict with Islam at flash points across the globe. And she examines how Christian leaders have fought to stem the tide of HIV/AIDS in Africa while at the same time supporting harsh repression of LGBTQ communities. Through these and other stories, McAlister focuses on the many ways in which looking at evangelicals abroad complicates conventional ideas about evangelicalism. We can't truly understand how conservative Christians see themselves and their place in the world unless we look beyond our shores.