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This chapter addresses two arguments on the basic differences between “secular” and “religious” organizations. It first studies the creation of the layered and complicated meanings of the sacred in the life of modern humanitarian organizations. It then studies two religious and two secular organizations and how they express and give meaning to the sacred. The chapter also discusses the consequences of the creation of the sacred, which is common to both secular and religious organizations, and shows how these organizations connect with the “profane” and with the world.

This chapter analyzes how foreigners have dealt with the Myanmar problem by examining the policies adopted by outsiders over the past quarter-century. The first section provides an overview of the global debate about Myanmar. The second looks at engagement strategies associated mainly with Asian states and a range of humanitarian organizations. The third evaluates the efforts of western states and activist groups to sanction and isolate Myanmar. The final section analyzes the degree of political leverage foreigners have been able to exercise over the dominant military machine and looks for pointers to future involvement. It is argued that external actors have generally fallen far short of their major objectives in shaping Myanmar's politics. The result is that today global policy responses are fiercely contested not only among outsiders, but also among people living and working inside the country.

This chapter examines the relations between Poland and the United States, focusing on the period between September 1982 and January 1985. More specifically, it considers how decisions to lift individual U.S. sanctions were used to push for gradual reforms as part of what was known as the “step-by-step” policy. In one particular instance, sanctions were exchanged for political prisoners. This chapter also looks at the continuing work by humanitarian organizations, as well as the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, which significantly increased resources provided by the United States in support of opposition underground in Poland. Finally, it discusses the role of Radio Free Europe and the Catholic Church within Poland, together with the efforts of the Polish United Worker's Party (PZPR) to liberalize and reform the system.

This chapter examines the role of social service agencies, independent adoption organizations, humanitarian organizations, and individuals in facilitating Asian international adoption in the United States. The labor of many different agencies and organizations, it argues, has transformed the United States into an international adoption nation. It also highlights the efforts of charismatic individuals who popularized international and transracial adoption in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, including Harry and Bertha Holt, Nobel Prize-winning writer Pearl S. Buck, and screen siren Jane Russell. In addition, it considers Asian international adoption in the historical context of US immigration and how it created a vision of the world in which national, cultural, and political borders could and should be crossed. In particular, it looks at the work of World Vision, a Portland, Oregon-based organization founded by Christian minister Bob Pierce to facilitate international adoption from Asia. Finally, the chapter assesses the legacy of independent adoption programs in America.

The Conclusion considers the distance between Bonhoeffer’s politics and ours. Our own thinking about political resistance in the West tends to begin with the idea of inviolable human rights, the protection of which is a chief duty of the state. If the state allows those rights to be violated or violates them itself, individual citizens ought to resist, and the church should lend its moral authority. As this book has shown, Bonhoeffer’s vision of resistance differs from ours in several important ways. His political thinking privileges not rights but the state’s mandate for preservation. And for him it is not the chief task of the church but rather humanitarian organizations to speak out against the state on moral grounds. This latter, consistently articulated distinction between humanitarian organizations and the church as the gospel community frequently sets Bonhoeffer’s politics at some distance from ours.