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In a fourth- or fifth-century narrative known as the Acts of Thomas and his Wonderworking Skin , Jesus sells the apostle Thomas as a slave to the governor of India. When the governor's wife converts to Christianity, dumps all her earthly riches outside her front door, and turns celibate, the governor has the apostle tortured and his skin flayed off, but Thomas survives, and uses his peeled-off skin to raise the dead. This paper uses Kathryn Tanner's concept of culture to compare the ideals advocated by this story – servitude to Christ, voluntary poverty, sexual abstinence, readiness to suffer, and zeal for evangelization – to ideals expressed in first-century Christian literature. The subculture expressed by the narrative is found to consist entirely of ideals also expressed in the New Testament, which are updated, recontextualized, and radicalized in order to reach an audience of fourth- or fifth-century Christians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we try to raise caution against the consequences of the overwhelming drive for microfinance institutions to become financially self-sustainable-more often than not pushed into this by international organizations. Such a push can have severe consequences, ranging from mission drift to questionable practices employed by institutions. Focusing on India, we discuss the extent to which donors influence the microfinance sector and identify the role that international organizations play in pushing microfinance institutions away from their primary objective of delivering financial services to the poor. Revisiting the microfinance crisis which erupted in India in March 2006, this case study reveals a fundamental problem: the zeal of private and public actors, driven by motives that are hard to relate to the fight against poverty, a new commercial niche for the former and a collection of vote banks for the latter. Understanding the origin, the driving forces, and the extent of this problem may not only help us work out an improved governance process, but may also help us evaluate the reach and limits of microfinance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]