Sherwood Eddy  George Sherwood Eddy (1871–1963) was a leading American Protestant missionary, administrator and educator. He was a prolific author and indefatigable traveler. His main achievement was to link and finance networks of intellectuals across the globe, especially Christian leaders in Asia and the Middle East. He enabled missionaries to better understand and even think like the people they were serving. His long-term impact on the Protestant communities in the United States, and in the Third World, was long lasting. From the 1930s onwards, he became a Christian socialist. George Sherwood Eddy was born on January 19, 1871 to George Alfred Eddy and Margaret Louise Norton at Leavenworth, Kansas. His father George Eddy was a leading businessman and civic leader; he and his wife Margaret were of Yankee stock, The son attended Phillips Andover Academy, and graduated Yale College in engineering in 1891. Eddy married Alice Maud Harriet Arden (1873–1945) on November 10, 1898. They were the parents of two children, Margaret and Arden. After his first wife's death, he married Catherine Louise Gates in 1946. Eddy had had a religious experience in 1889 at the Northfield conference. Therefore, after completing his engineering training he attended Union Theological Seminary (1891-1893) in New York. He also enlisted in the Student Volunteer Movement, which sought to "evangelize the world in this generation" and worked on the staff of a local Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). In 1893-1894 he served as a traveling secretary for the Student Volunteer Movement in the United States. Eddy's father died in 1894, leaving him an inheritance that made him financially independent and enabled him to work for the causes he believed in without concern for finances. He then attended Princeton Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1896. In spite of his theology studies he always kept to his line to serve as a committed layman and a missionary. Eddy was one of the first of sixteen thousand student volunteers who emerged from the leading universities of the U.S. and Europe to serve as Christian missionaries across the world. In 1896, he went to India and worked at the YMCA-organized Indian Student Volunteer Movement. He served as its secretary for the next 15 years. Working among the poor and outcasts of India he mastered the Tamil language and served as a traveling evangelist among the students and masses of southern India beginning in Palamcottah.