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Child sponsorship emerged from nineteenth-century Protestant missions to become one of today's most profitable private fundraising tools in organizations including World Vision, Compassion International, and ChildFund. Investigating two centuries of sponsorship and its related practices in American living rooms, churches, and shopping malls, this book reveals the myriad ways that Christians who don't travel outside of the United States cultivate global sensibilities. The book traces the movement of money, letters, and images, along with a wide array of sponsorship's lesser-known embodied and aesthetic techniques, such as playacting, hymn singing, eating, and fasting. It shows how, through this process, U.S. Christians attempt to hone globalism of a particular sort by oscillating between the sensory experiences of a God's eye view and the intimacy of human relatedness. These global aspirations are buoyed by grand hopes and subject to intractable limitations, since they so often rely on the inequities they claim to redress. Based on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, the book explores how U.S. Christians imagine and experience the world without ever leaving home.

Urbanization is rapidly overtaking China and India, the two most populous countries in the world. One-sixth of humanity now lives in either a Chinese or Indian city. This transformation has unleashed enormous pressures on land use, housing, and the environment. Despite the stakes, the workings of urban governance in China and India remain obscure and poorly understood. This book explores how China and India govern their cities and how their different styles of governance produce inequality and exclusion. Drawing upon historical comparative analyses and extensive fieldwork (in Beijing, Guangzhou, Wukan, Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata), the book investigates the ways that Chinese and Indian cities manage land acquisition, slum clearance, and air pollution. It discovers that the two countries address these issues through radically different approaches. In China, urban governance centers on territorial institutions, such as hukou and the cadre evaluation system. In India, urban governance centers on associational politics, encompassing contingent alliances formed among state actors, the private sector, and civil society groups. The book traces the origins of territorial and associational forms of governance to late imperial China and precolonial India. It then shows how these forms have evolved to shape urban growth and residents' struggles today. As the number of urban residents in China and India reaches beyond a billion, this book makes clear that the development of cities in these two nations will have profound consequences well beyond their borders.

Religion is commonly viewed as something that people practice, whether in the presence of others or alone. But what do we mean exactly by “practice”? What approaches help to answer this question? This book delves into the central concepts, arguments, and tools used to understand religion today. Throughout the past few decades, the study of religion has shifted away from essentialist arguments that grandly purport to explain what religion is and why it exists. Instead, using methods from anthropology, psychology, religious studies, and sociology, scholars now focus on what people do and say: their daily religious habits, routines, improvisations, and adaptations. The book shows how four intersecting areas of inquiry—situations, intentions, feelings, and bodies—shed important light on religious practice, and it explores such topics as the role of religious experiences in sacred spaces, gendered social relationships, educational settings, the arts, meditation, and ritual. The book provides insights into the diverse ways that religion manifests in ordinary life.