Yi was baptized in 1896, and worked with Swallen to establish a church in Wonsan. Yi’s dream and his conversion from bully to evangelist led some to nickname him “the Apostle Paul of Korea.” Yi helped to spread the gospel in Wonsan and surrounding region by distributing Bibles and gospel literature (as a colporteur or, in Korean, gwonseo). By answering questions, gathering interested people and establishing contacts, gwonseos played an important role in the institution of the Korean church.

Gi Pung Yi – First Korean Martyr
He was the first Korean Protestant missionary and the first Korean martyr, often remembered as the father of the Korean Protestant church. It all began through a rock and a bout of hot temper.
A Paul-like Conversion
Gi Pung Yi was only sixteen in 1885, when the American missionary Samuel A. Moffet arrived in Pyeongyang (today in North Korea). Yi distrusted foreigners. Why did this American come to Pyeongyang?, he wondered. Used to dealing with problems through violence, he gathered some friends and went to Moffet’s house, where they kicked the gate and threw rocks. The rocks broke a window and dislodged some roof tiles, but the Moffet family stayed inside.
One month later, Yi spotted Moffet at a street market, speaking in broken Korean while holding a track. Seeing his chance of protesting this foreigner’s intrusion, Yi picked up a rock and threw it, hitting Moffet in the chin. Losing his balance, Moffet fell on the ground, bleeding. No one came to his help. Yi left the scene.
Fast-forward ten years, when Yi met another missionary, this time in Wonsan, where he had looked for refuge during the Sino-Japanese war. By then, he was a young man trying to make ends meet by painting pipes and selling them on the street.
To Yi, the missionary, William L. Swallen, looked enough like Moffet to bring back a painful memory. For years, Yi’s conscience had been bothering him and Moffet had appeared in many of his dreams.
A missionary spoke to Yi about Jesus, who didn’t pay much attention. He just wondered who was this Jesus that people considered so important. That night, however, he had a dream where Jesus told him to stop persecuting him. Frightened, the next morning he ran to the house of the missionary who had talked to him.
After hearing Yi’s confession, the missionary took him to Swallen’s house, where Yi, crying profusely, continued to unburden his heart. Swallen prayed for him, and continued to teach him about Christ. Yi was baptized in 1896, and worked with Swallen to establish a church in Wonsan. Yi’s dream and his conversion from bully to evangelist led some to nickname him “the Apostle Paul of Korea.”
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In the war of the mind, students need to master the tools of grammar, logic, and rhetoric that have been painstakingly developed since antiquity. They need the intellectual courage developed through real engagement with minds better than their own. 

In a time when crime and inflation are rising together, when independent nations are threatened by massive powers eager to consume them, and when dispassionate public discourse seems impossible, it’s bracing to remember the fairness and generosity that make justice and good judgment possible.
In the last few months, two friends have highly recommended a book by Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Amazon lies in wait for readers like me, of course, so I now have it in hand. Trueman begins by asking how this sentence—“I am a woman trapped in a man’s body”—could make sense in the contemporary world and even elicit sympathy from ordinary people, whereas a generation or two ago it would have been met with pure incredulity. Trueman’s account takes him back into the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then through Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and others of contemporary importance, such as Judith Butler. I am still in the early chapters, but I can already add my recommendation.
His arguments aside, what strikes me with unusual force is Trueman’s articulation of his approach, because it goes to the heart of an institution like Wyoming Catholic College. In his introduction to the book, Trueman explains what he does as a historian of ideas: “it seems to me that giving an accurate account of one’s opponents’ views, however obnoxious one may consider them to be, is vital, and never more so than our in our age of cheap Twitter insults and casual slanders. There’s nothing to be gained from refuting a straw man.” Perhaps it’s the almost universal absence of this attitude in the public sphere that makes Trueman’s fairness seem startling. After listing thinkers and movements inimical to his own position, he says that he has tried to be “as careful and dispassionate as possible. Some readers might find this odd, given my personal dissent from much of what they each represent. But truthfulness is not optional. My hope is that I have represented the views of these groups and individuals in such a manner that, were they to read this book, they might demur to my conclusions but at least recognize themselves in my account of their thought.” [my emphasis]
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Written by Christos A. Makridis |
Tuesday, October 11, 2022
A mountain of empirical research demonstrates that religious attendance and participation benefits health and well-being. My research offers evidence that Covid restrictions on religious communities have had adverse effects.

My newly published research in the European Economic Review finds that the introduction of Covid-related restrictions on houses of worship led to a substantial decline in subjective well-being and an increase in social isolation among religious adherents relative to non-religious people.
Using a sample of 50,000 Americans surveyed between 2020 and 2021, I find that the adoption of these restrictions reduced current life satisfaction and made it more probable that religious people would isolate themselves. These effects remained after controlling for demographics, income, political affiliation, industry, and occupation—and they wiped away nearly half of the life-satisfaction advantage that religious people generally enjoy over the non-religious. Limits on exactly how many people can gather were associated with more harm than were percentage caps on occupancy.
Further, my research finds no public-health benefits to these restrictions—they did not limit the spread of Covid infections or deaths, on average. This finding joins a large body of empirical literature identifying adverse economic effects, no public-health benefits, and dreadful benefit–cost ratios for Covid restrictions. Some evidence showed an association between the restrictions and a reduction in Covid in the early months of the pandemic, but as sample sizes grew, these benefits disappeared.
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