Earl Herbert Cressy 葛德基 (1883 - 1979)
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Earl Herbert Cressy (葛德基 1883 - 1979) was a Baptist missionary who helped author several studies of Chinese religion for the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry of the early 1930s.
Cressy was born in Lacon, IL on June 15, 1883. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1907, and Rochester Theological Seminary in 1910. That same year he traveled to Hànyáng 漢陽 to work as a missionary under the auspices of the American Board of Foreign Missions. He worked with the Central China Famine Relief Committee in 1912 to solicit direct support for the needy, and from 1916 lived in Hángzhōu 杭州, where he was principal of Wayland Academy. In 1925 he was the executive secretary of the Council of Christian Colleges in China, and associate general secretary of the National Christian Council of China. He married Margaret Millie in 1927, and ultimately left China in 1946. He later taught at the Kennedy School of Missions at Hartford, and was director of the Urban Church Research Center for Asia in Claremont, CA in the 1960s. He passed away in 1979.
Cressy authored several books, including China Marches Toward the Cross (1938), Daughters of Changing Japan (1955) and Understanding China (1957).
In the early 1930s Cressy was the lead researcher in a team sponsored by the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry that gathered data on Chinese religious institutions in Wǔchāng, Hànkǒu, and Hángzhōu. Some of their data was based on official figures, but much of it was gathered by Chinese researchers who visited the temples and monasteries. The data collected was the basis of the chapter "A Study in Indigenous Religions", published in Volume V, Part Two of the Supplementary Series to the LFMI Fact-Finder's Reports. Manuscript versions of the data are currently held in the Missionary Research Library collection at Burke Library, part of the Columbia University Libraries in New York City.