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"Yet there is growing concern about the direction globalization is currently taking. Its advantages are too distant for too many, while its risks are all too real. Its volatility threatens both rich and poor. Immense riches are being generated. But fundamental problems of poverty, exclusion and inequality persist. Corruption is widespread. Open societies are threatened by global terrorism, and the future of open markets is increasingly in question. Global governance is in crisis. We are at a critical juncture, and we need to urgently rethink our current policies and institutions." (page 3)

Summary statement from the final report of The World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization, entitled "A fair globalization: Creating opportunities for all." The report was issued on 24 February 2004, and the full text may be found on the International Labor Organization website (Link).

The stacks of the Yale Divinity School Library contain an impressive number of single volume histories of Christianity, and out of curiosity one day I pulled down a half dozen of them to see how much space they gave to the history of Christianity in Thailand. Not much, as it turned out. Of the six, four did not have index entries for Thailand, Siam, or even Southeast Asia. Of the remaining two, each containing over 600 pages, Thailand rated one full sentence in one and a single phrase in the other. In both cases, the single fact given is that Christianity has had little numerical impact on Thailand.

One of the two books that does at least mention Thailand is David L. Edward's Christianity: The First Two Thousand Years (Orbis, 1997), a tome of 630 pages that contains about 300,000 words of text. The author gives Thailand exactly 8 words of its own (my calculator makes that 2.6666667E-5 percent, a figure I admit I don't understand). I should note that except for Viet Nam none of the countries of mainland Southeast Asia do much better, not even Burma (see page 568).

The study of Thai church history is a small field, microscopic actually when viewed from the perspective of the history of Christianity from its beginnings down to the present. What is endlessly fascinating to me, however, is that from the "inside" the field seems huge. Even Protestant history in Thailand has more to it than any one or two scholars can possibly encompass; and, of course, the issues involved in the study of Thai church history are as broad in many ways as the global church itself. The statistics presented here, thus, actually tell us more about the incomprehensible immensity of church history itself than about the smallness of church history in Thailand.

In August 1852, Brigham Young, President of the Church of Latter-day Saints (LDS) called a missionary conference to promote Mormon foreign missions. That conference selected four individuals to establish a mission in Siam, and in late

October of that year these four men became part of a wagon train composed of 38 Mormon missionaries who were going from Utah to Asia by way of California. In January 1853, they sailed from San Francisco with ten other Mormon missionaries who were bound for India, and they finally arrived in Calcutta in April 1853. They soon found that it was all but impossible to travel from India to Siam, and two of the four went to Sri Lanka, hoping to find their way to Siam from there, but they failed and finally gave up. The other two went to Rangoon, but they also found it was incredibly difficult to travel on to Siam ; and one of these two also gave up. Elam Luddington, however, persevered in his goal of establishing a Mormon mission in Siam, eventually found his way to Singapore, and on 6 April 1854 finally reached Bangkok.

Things did not go well for Luddington in spite of the fact that he arrived in Bangkok at an auspicious time, early in the reign of King Mongkut, a modernizing monarch who was generally friendly towards foreign missionaries. The European community rejected him, the local population was not interested in his message, learning Siamese turned out to be difficult, and he reported that he was stoned twice. At one point, he wrote to the Mormons in England that he was living in the midst of "wild savages" and "wild beasts." His difficulties in Bangkok were compounded by the fact that the Mormon missionaries received little in the way of financial resources or institutional support from Utah. On 12 August 1854, Luddington left Bangkok and after a difficult passage arrived back in Utah in 1855. The LDS did not return to Thailand until the early 1960s, many years after it had ceased to be Siam.

Luddington's claim that he was stoned twice is extremely dubious, at best. As far as I know, stoning has not been practiced in Thailand, and it is difficult to believe that a Westerner would have been stoned in Mongkut's Bangkok. It is far more likely that Bangkok proved to be too difficult for Luddington and his references to savages, wild beasts, and tales of stonings served to justify going home. Even so, Elam Luddington has the distinction of numbering among the earliest generation of Western missionaries to Siam, if only briefly.

Source: Britsch, R. Lanier. From the East: The History of the Latter-Day Saints in Asia, 1851-1996. Salt Lake City, Utah : Deseret Book Company, 1998, pages 14-33.

Note: I have added an entry on the "Latter-day Saints in Thailand" to the website Dictionary, based on this same source.

Readers will remember that HeRB 8 contains an article on the life of Sarah Blachly Bradley before she married Dr. Dan Beach Bradley. That article was based on research that I did at Berea College and Yale University during the summer of 2003, research that left a good deal of information yet to be found. In particular, I was not able to trace the Blachly family back beyond their residence in Trumbull County, Ohio, in the early 1800s. Having run out of time in the U.S., I had to let matters stand.

And stand they did until earlier this year when I received an email from Donna Bell, a descendant of the Blachly family who informed me about a book entitled Blatchley Physicians and Pioneers: A Family History of Descendants of Thomas Blatchley 1635-1929, written by Shirley Hathaway Stebbings (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1983). This past summer I was able to get a copy through the Yale Divinity School library, and while it turned out that the book is a family history of a collateral

According to a footnote, Sarah's father, Miller Blachly II was a physician who was born in 1773 in New Jersey and her mother was Phoebe Bell, born in 1774. They were married in 1794 and eventually moved to Mercer County, Pennsylvania and from there to Weathersfield, Ohio, in about 1803 (page 130). Without going into all of the details, three things stand out from the book itself. First, Sarah's family came from New England stock. The progenitor of the American Blachlys was Thomas Blachley (also spelled Blacksley), who emigrated from England and arrived in Boston in 1635. Second, Sarah's line of ancestors, from that time on, showed a real wanderlust, moving time and again south and west, always towards the open frontier. Blachlys lived in Connecticut, on Long Island, in New Jersey, and in Pennsylvania before members of the family finally reached Ohio at the turn of the nineteenth century. The chapters in this book, one for each generation, are headed "The First Migration," "The Second Migration," and so on. Sarah's father, Miller II, was part of the fifth migration, making Sarah herself a sixth generation member of the wandering Blachly clan. Third, as the title of the book suggests, many of the Blachlys were doctors, including Sarah's father and two of her brothers.

There is still another source I am aware of that may add further details to Sarah's life for another note—in, perhaps, about HeRB 15!