Kenneth Scott Latourette Biography Quotes 22 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Kenneth Scott Latourette was born in 1884 in Oregon City, Oregon, and grew up in a milieu shaped by Baptist piety, civic-mindedness, and the expanding horizons of the American West. He displayed early aptitude for history and languages and pursued studies at a Baptist college in Oregon before going on to graduate work at Yale University. At Yale he gravitated toward the intersection of history, religion, and the emerging field once called Oriental studies, preparing himself to interpret Asia to Western audiences and Christianity to a global public. The combination would define his life's work.

China and the Call to Scholarship
As a young man, Latourette planned to serve long-term in China. He spent time there in the 1910s teaching and studying, an immersion that shaped his vocation even as illness curtailed the missionary service he had intended. The encounter left a permanent mark: he learned to frame Christianity not as a European story but as a world movement in which Asian, African, and Latin American peoples exercised agency. He returned to the United States persuaded that his calling lay in scholarship, the training of students, and the interpretation of Christian missions and East Asia for church and public audiences.

Yale Years and Intellectual Community
After early appointments at colleges in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest, Latourette joined Yale, where he taught for decades as professor of missions and Oriental history, eventually holding one of the university's most distinguished chairs. Yale Divinity School and the wider university provided a collegial setting in which he worked alongside prominent figures. Church historian Roland H. Bainton, ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr, and, in Latourette's early years there, the venerable Williston Walker formed part of the intellectual community around him. The interchange among historians, theologians, linguists, and social scientists at Yale encouraged his capacious global vision.

Major Works and Themes
Latourette rose to international prominence through a series of voluminous, meticulously documented books. His seven-volume A History of the Expansion of Christianity surveyed the spread of the faith from its beginnings to the modern era, treating evangelization, translation, institutions, and indigenous reception with an eye to both continuity and change. Earlier, in A History of Christian Missions in China, he provided a foundational synthesis on the subject, and in The Chinese: Their History and Culture he offered a broad account of China for Western readers. Later, in the multi-volume Christianity in a Revolutionary Age, he analyzed how the churches and Christian thought navigated social upheavals from the nineteenth into the twentieth century.

Across these works he insisted that Christian history was not a story of the West alone. He foregrounded networks of exchange, the roles of local converts and leaders, the importance of vernacular Scripture and education, and the complex entanglements of missions with empire, commerce, and nationalism. He combined narrative sweep with statistical tables, bibliographic guides, and careful attention to sources in multiple languages. The sheer scale of his synthesis made his books standard references for generations.

Leadership in Associations and the Ecumenical Movement
Latourette was also a builder of institutions. Within the guild, he served in leadership roles in the American Historical Association and the American Society of Church History, helping to elevate the study of religion within broader historical discourse. Beyond the academy, he was deeply engaged with the missionary and ecumenical movements. He participated in and advised gatherings of the International Missionary Council and related bodies during decades when the world missionary enterprise was rethinking its purpose and structures. In those circles he interacted with or worked alongside prominent figures such as the global mission leader John R. Mott, the Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, and W. A. Visser 't Hooft, who would become the first general secretary of the World Council of Churches. His historical perspective lent depth to practical debates about partnership, indigenization, and the future of international Christian cooperation.

Public Voice on Asia and Religion
Latourette became a widely consulted interpreter of Asia for American audiences, especially during the turbulent years of war and revolution in the mid-twentieth century. He wrote essays and delivered lectures seeking to explain Chinese history, Confucian and Buddhist traditions, and the dynamics of nationalism to church leaders, journalists, and policymakers. Without claiming the last word, he argued that careful historical understanding was indispensable to sound judgment. His works stood alongside those of other leading American interpreters of China, and his scholarly caution counterbalanced more polemical voices in the public square.

Character, Faith, and Personal Life
A committed Baptist layman, Latourette practiced the ecumenical charity he studied. Colleagues remembered his exacting work habits, quiet humor, and generosity as a mentor. He prized precision and breadth: his footnotes were as notable as his narratives. The home he kept in New Haven served as a welcoming place for students, missionaries on furlough, and visiting scholars. He married and sustained a family life that was woven into the rhythms of university and church, though he kept the focus of public attention firmly on his scholarship and on the causes he served.

Later Years and Legacy
Latourette continued to publish into his later years, updating editions, revising bibliographies, and producing essays that reflected both hope and realism about Christianity's prospects in a decolonizing world. He died in 1968, closing a career that had spanned more than half a century. His papers, lectures, and correspondence remain a rich archive for historians of missions, global Christianity, and Sino-Western relations. Subsequent generations have debated aspects of his framework, especially in light of postcolonial critiques, yet they continue to rely on his compendious research and global lens. The colleagues who surrounded him at Yale and in the ecumenical movement, and the countless students who learned from his courses and books, helped transmit his central conviction: that the history of Christianity, like the history of the world, must be written as a connected, genuinely global story.

Our collection contains 22 quotes who is written by Kenneth, under the main topics: Truth - Free Will & Fate - Faith - Knowledge - Bible.