Our World Tomorrow

The World Tomorrow

He's Been a Cloud over Me All My Life with Love, Love, and More Love

God's a cloud that's truly needed over all lives, for God is life do I say out loud to all the world, such a crowd. A crowd that truly needs to hear, believe, and accept these words very, very proud. So to Jesus Christ, God the Son and Savior of the world, do I proudly also say out loud. To be comforted, yes, saved with love by God the Holy Ghost makes me even prouder to say. Yes, proudly do I say to the whole world as if I were the world do I say loudly. Yes, loudly I say with truth, as if hurled over the rooftop do I proudly say. I thank you, God, my Father; I thank you, God, my Brother; and I thank you, God, my rock. Yes, I thank you, I thank you, truly do I thank you with love, love, and more love. I thank you for being a cloud of protection over me all my life!

For God and Globe

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.