Billy Graham in 1966. (Photo by Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection, Library of Congress)
Most of the notices and obituaries of Billy Graham, who died on 21 February 2018, have focused on his significance for Christianity in the United States. Dubbed ‘America’s pastor’ by President George H. W. Bush in 2007, Graham seemed to be the quintessential American preacher – handsome, dapper, eloquent, uncompromising in his presentation of the gospel, and apparently quite untroubled by modern questions about the reliability of the Bible. He was on first-name terms with a string of American presidents from Eisenhower to Obama. He was also a typical product of the Bible belt in the American south. At first he accepted racial segregation, even in Christian meetings, as a fact of life and his relationship with the civil rights movement – notably with Martin Luther King – was at times a fractious one. Continue reading
I was invited to respond to Professor Kwok Pui-lan’s paper, and share about being a woman in the Zomi church. Professor Kwok highlighted the somewhat contradictory nature of freedom that many missionary women experienced. She noted that although mission work allowed women to have a profession, they were still nonetheless working within the confines of set gender roles and Victorian notions of domesticity. Their work was ‘woman’s work’, and they received low wages if any. For me, as a Zomi woman, her remarks reminded me of the current situation of many women in my community.