In a very general sense, Savageries of the Academy Abroad attempts to lay bare the moral insufficiencies of university bureaucracies abroad, which I have come to know personally and then fled in horror. What I've written in this instance can only be called "irresponsible" and "disobedient," but, in my defense, a necessary evil given the bureaucratization of the academy and its innumerable little Eichmanns. Such grievous doubt and skepticism, as Hannah Arendt points out, are "variations of nonviolent action and resistance" under dictatorship. Given the appalling state of higher education at the moment--universities back home not much better--there is no longer a place for "pragmatism" and, least of all, "prudence." My own undeniable fear and loathing of authorities (great and small, western and non-western) goes well beyond the usual lamentation round the office water cooler, but rages against the inhumanity of it all, so that, indeed, all might hear-most especially the "powers that be." People matter less and less, institutions matter more and more. (There was more simple humanity at the German furniture factory where I worked before I entered university, supposing I might fare better among an allegedly better sort.) And so, it is high time that I write something in a revolutionary vein in order to look myself in the mirror. To remain silent any longer would be tantamount to the same intellectual and moral spinelessness that has given us this deeply troubling state of affairs, teachers and students alike the conscious and/or unconscious victims of what is fast becoming, if not already, a gargantuan intellectual fraud. Had I known that the academy abroad was so troubled and, indeed, tantamount to a vow of poverty and obedience, or known that I would be expected to teach a frightening number of courses/students for mere pennies on the dollar, forced to lower my academic standards (or else), I might have taken my father's sage advice and stayed at the cabinet shop where I had a much better chance of making not only a decent living, but an honest one. The wings of feathers and wax that I fashioned for myself, with the academy's help, may have saved me from the monotony of factory life per se, carrying me safely across oceans in both the literal and metaphorical sense. But, I sometimes ask myself if I didn't flee one factory for another. What follows, then, is a dark accounting of my four-year sojourn in Taiwan and a very short stint in Saudi Arabia. Both were very painful and extremely disappointing involvements in their own right. Prospective PhD graduates need to know what they are likely to experience if they should choose to teach in a foreign country and a lack of civility that stretches the limits of credulity.

George Leslie Mackay (1844-1901), the famous Canadian Presbyterian missionary who came to northern Formosa (Taiwan) in 1872 and preached specifically with aborigines in mind, is the subject of an interdisciplinary study by seven independent scholars interested in the nineteenth-century imperial project and Christian mission to China. Importantly, Mackay's mission defies such binary opposites as East and West: the missionary a conduit of an earlier Scottish-Canadian spirituality adapted to Taiwan that allowed converts to appropriate the Presbyterian faith on their own terms; the mission field in which he operated a "biculture" of foreign initiative and aboriginal agency working hand in hand. Mackay's ordination of aboriginal ministers, giving us the Northern Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan (PCT), was a bold departure from the imperial, Anglo-Canadian, Presbyterian norm. So, too, his marriage to a Taiwanese slave-girl, Chhang-mia, and the arranged interracial marriages that he performed between select Chinese ministers and female Taiwanese graduates (which included his two daughters). Mackay's missionary writing and famous autobiography From Far Formosa-a fine specimen of the nineteenth-century heroic memoir genre-is notable for its defense of both gender and racial equality, and despite its unmistakable patriarchal leanings. Mackay's repudiation of Darwinism and belief in an early type of creation science therein also locates the so-called "Barbarian Bible Man" opposite such virulent, racist theorizing as Social Darwinism and Eugenics. He was a dentist not an abortionist. A relative unknown to most Western scholars of religion, Mackay is Taiwan's most famous native son, represented on the national stage in 2008 as a sky god and Taiwanese animistic deity of supernatural power and political influence par excellent. Although a product of the colonial times in which he lived, post-colonial scholars who ignore Mackay, his life and legacy, clearly do so at some peril.

Divine Rite of Kings: Land, Race, Same Sex, and Empire in Mormonism and the Esoteric Tradition is a social-historical-political analysis of the religion of the Latter-day Saints as deeply indebted to a variety of esoteric systems of belief. It argues that the present campaign against gay marriage and other homophobic policies of the "American religion," targeting the LGBTQ community, and, indeed, children of same-sex parents, are connected to erstwhile racial doctrines and practices, which excluded persons from full fellowship on the basis of race alone, Africans the supposed offspring of Cain and Canaan and thus cursed. Narrow heterosexist notions of "sexual purity" merely replaced Anglo-Saxon supremacist notions of "racial purity" in the imperial and the millennial understanding of Mormonism. The new heterosexism, this book suggests, can be viewed as a form of boundary maintenance better suited to an emergent international church and world religion, ironically, which continues to make inroads in parts of Asia, where its social conservatism and, indeed, virulent attacks against the "gay and lesbian lifestyle," continue to attract followers.