Time, (Com)passion, and Ethical Self‐formation in Evangelical Humanitarianism

Abstract

This article examines narratives, images, and stories that give insight to everyday experimentation and ethical self‐formation. I use the case of World Vision and its early leaders to unpack genealogies of American evangelical humanitarianism. Rather than seeking to identify American evangelicalism’s normative ethical stance, I aim to expand the discussion in anthropology of ethics on ethical self‐formation through examining the tensions, reflections, and processes of becoming among evangelical humanitarians. In doing so, I examine two focal areas of ethical self‐formation among early World Vision leaders. The first is oscillation between and mixing of passion and compassion frameworks in the American evangelical imagination. Second, I identify a range of temporal frames that evangelicals draw on to make sense of and formulate ethical responses to human needs encountered abroad.

Missionary, citizen, and consumer: Evangelical American child sponsorship and humanitarian marketing in the 1950s and 1960s

“…In humanitarian moral economies, values and affects circulate, gifts and objects are linked with values and affect, and givers and receivers appropriate and interpret gifting relationships according to their own social worlds and motivations (e.g., Henquinet, 2013Henquinet, , 2020Sliwinski, 2018). In this study of child sponsorship, donors gave monthly payments to help a child whom they encountered through World Vision marketing.…”