front cover of Religion, Order, and Law
Religion, Order, and Law
David Little
University of Chicago Press, 1984
"The issue of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism has been debated endlessly, but few scholars have seriously continued Weber's own research into the Reformation sources of seventeenth-century England. David Little's study was one of the first to do so, and remains an important contribution."—Guenther Roth, University of Washington
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The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne
A. N. Galpern
Harvard University Press, 1976

This study in religious anthropology explores the social history of popular belief. The book begins with an evocation of the river towns, open fields, and vineyards of Champagne. In addition to the historical geography and quantitative material that are hallmarks of the French tradition, the author studies the rich artistic evidence that still graces the provincial churches.

Galpern interprets religious behavior at the beginning of the century as a lingering response to difficulties of the late Middle Ages. The nascent Protestant movement highlights the ways in which many Catholics modified their practices, yet remained orthodox. The book charts the paths of antipathy that converged in civil war, and concludes with a discussion of the late-sixteenth-century atmosphere of revivalism, which mimicked the earlier spiritualclimate.

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Russian Religious Thought
Edited by Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Richard F. Gustafson
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996

As Russia entered the modern age in the nineteenth century, many Russian intellectuals combined the study of European philosophy with a return to their own traditions, culminating in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and in the religious philosophy of their younger contemporary, Vladimir Soloviev. This book explores central issues of modern Russian religious thought by focusing on the work of Soloviev and three religious philosophers who further developed his ideas in the early twentieth century: P. A. Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov, and S. L. Frank. The essays place these thinkers in the contexts of both Western philosophy and Eastern Orthodoxy, presenting a substantially new perspective on Russian religious thought.
    The work of these four philosophers, this volume demonstrates, influenced virtually all aspects of twentieth-century Russian culture, and indeed, many aspects of Soviet culture as well, but also represents a rich philosophical tradition devoted to issues of divinity, community, and humanity that transcend national boundaries and historical eras.
    Included in Russian Religious Thought is an introduction, brief biographical information on Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, and Frank, and an Afterword by scholar James Scanlan, who elaborates on the volume’s aim to provide a thoughtful corrective, both to unexamined assumptions of past scholarship and to nationalist readings currently popular in post-Soviet Russia.
    "Russian religious philosophy, banned under the Soviets, has been marginalized in the Western academy as well. This interdisciplinary volume helps explain why this body of thought has remained for so long at the center of Russian culture."—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

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Religion and Poverty
Pan-African Perspectives
Peter J. Paris, ed.
Duke University Press, 2009
A Ghanaian scholar of religion argues that poverty is a particularly complex subject in traditional African cultures, where holistic worldviews unite life’s material and spiritual dimensions. A South African ethicist examines informal economies in Ghana, Jamaica, Kenya, and South Africa, looking at their ideological roots, social organization, and vulnerability to global capital. African American theologians offer ethnographic accounts of empowering religious rituals performed in churches in the United States, Jamaica, and South Africa. This important collection brings together these and other Pan-African perspectives on religion and poverty in Africa and the African diaspora.

Contributors from Africa and North America explore poverty’s roots and effects, the ways that experiences and understandings of deprivation are shaped by religion, and the capacity and limitations of religion as a means of alleviating poverty. As part of a collaborative project, the contributors visited Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa, as well as Jamaica and the United States. In each location, they met with clergy, scholars, government representatives, and NGO workers, and they examined how religious groups and community organizations address poverty. Their essays complement one another. Some focus on poverty, some on religion, others on their intersection, and still others on social change. A Jamaican scholar of gender studies decries the feminization of poverty, while a Nigerian ethicist and lawyer argues that the protection of human rights must factor into efforts to overcome poverty. A church historian from Togo examines the idea of poverty as a moral virtue and its repercussions in Africa, and a Tanzanian theologian and priest analyzes ujamaa, an African philosophy of community and social change. Taken together, the volume’s essays create a discourse of mutual understanding across linguistic, religious, ethnic, and national boundaries.

Contributors. Elizabeth Amoah, Kossi A. Ayedze, Barbara Bailey, Katie G. Cannon, Noel Erskine, Dwight N. Hopkins, Simeon O. Ilesanmi, Laurenti Magesa, Madipoane Masenya, Takatso A. Mofokeng, Esther M. Mombo, Nyambura J. Njoroge, Jacob Olupona, Peter J. Paris, Anthony B. Pinn, Linda E. Thomas, Lewin L. Williams

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Remaking the Godly Marriage
Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families
Bartkowski, John
Rutgers University Press, 2001

While religious leaders often have enormous influence over their members’ beliefs and how they translate their beliefs into action in everyday life, the individual family remains the place where religious values are practiced through and ultimately transferred to the next generation. As such, the family is an extremely important, though frequently overlooked, topic of study for sociologists of religion.

In Remaking the Godly Marriage, John Bartkowski studies evangelical Protestants and their views on marriage and gender relations and how they are lived within individual families. The author compares elite evangelical prescriptions for godly family living with the day-to-day practices in conservative Protestant households. He asks: How serious are the debates over gender and the family that are manifested within contemporary evangelicalism? What are the values that underlie this debate? Have these internecine disputes been altered by the emergence of new evangelical movements such as biblical feminism and the Promise Keepers? And given the fact that leading evangelicals advance competing visions of godly family life, how do conservative religious spouses make sense of their own family relationships and gender identities?

Through in-depth interviews with evangelical married couples and an exhaustive study of evangelical family advice manuals, Bartkowski explores the disputes and ambivalence concerning traditional gender roles and patriarchal models of family life, which derive from the tension between evangelical Protestantism as a religious subculture and the broader American secular culture in which it is embedded. Bartkowski reveals how evangelical men and women jointly negotiate gender roles within their families and selectively appropriate values of the larger culture even as they attempt to cope with the conflicting messages of their own faith.

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The Roles of Christ's Humanity in Salvation
Insights from Theodore of Mopsuestia
Frederick G. McLeod S.J.
Catholic University of America Press, 2005
This book enables one to judge Theodore's christological statements in the wider context of how he conceives of Christ's roles in salvation.
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A Restless Search
A History of Persian Translations of the Bible
Kenneth J. Thomas
SBL Press, 2015

A literary detective story, a historical survey, and an important contribution to translation studies

This book from Kenneth J. Thomas is both a philological and linguistic analysis of Persian translations and a call for interfaith cooperation. Thomas appraises biblical translation efforts from the fifth to the twenty-first centuries of Persian history when successive translators and groups of translators, sometimes of different faiths, worked to reshape and refine versions of the Bible in the supple Persian language of their times. Restless, impelled, and wide-ranging, this is a story of translations commissioned by shahs, undertaken by Christian and Jewish communities, and produced by teams working outside the country.

Features

  • Demonstration of the effects of the lack of a standard Persian vocabulary for key biblical terms on literary style and word choice
  • Technical analyses and overviews of Persian biblical translations
  • A careful examination of sixteen centuries' worth of Bible translations
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Receiving the Bible in faith
historical and theological exegesis
David M. Williams
Catholic University of America Press, 2004
The book should prove helpful to students as an overview of some of the issues involved, while more advanced readers will appreciate its analysis of recent scholars as well the attempt to integrate and adapt their insights.
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Reading with Feeling
Affect Theory and the Bible
Fiona C. Black
SBL Press, 2019

Essays with a methodological and metacritical focus

The psychological approach known as affect theory focuses on bodily feelings—depression, happiness, disgust, love—and can illuminate both texts and their interpretations. In this collection of essays scholars break new ground in biblical interpretation by deploying a range of affect-theoretical approaches in their interpretations of texts. Contributors direct their attention to the political, social, and cultural formation of emotion and other precognitive forces as a corrective to more traditional historical-critical methods and postmodern approaches. The inclusion of response essays results in a rich transdisciplinary dialog, with, for example, history, classics, and philosophy. Fiona C. Black, Amy C. Cottrill, Rhiannon Graybill, Jennifer L. Koosed, Joseph Marchal, Robert Seesengood, Ken Stone, and Jay Twomey engage a range of texts from biblical, to prayers, to graphic novels. Erin Runions and Stephen D. Moore’s responses push the conversation in new fruitful directions.

Features

  • An overview of the development of affect theory and how it has been used to interpret biblical texts
  • Examples of how to apply affect theory to biblical exegesis
  • Interdisciplinary studies that engage history, literature, classics, animal studies, liturgical studies, philosophy, and sociology
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Reading Biblical Texts Together
Pursuing Minoritized Biblical Criticism
Tat-Siong Benny Liew
SBL Press, 2022

A solid and suggestive foundation for the future of ethnic-racial minority biblical criticism

This volume, edited by Tat-siong Benny Liew and Fernando F. Segovia, expands the work begun in They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (2009) by focusing on specific texts for scholarly engagement and exchange. Essays by scholars of racial/ethnic minoritized criticism of the Bible highlight the various factors and dynamics at play in the formation of power relations within and through four biblical texts: two from the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 21 and 1 Kings 12) and two from the New Testament (John 4 and Revelation 18). Contributors include Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Ronald Charles, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Lynne St. Clair Darden, Steed Vernyl Davidson, Mary F. Foskett, Jione Havea, Tat-siong Benny Liew, Roberto Mata, Henry W. Morisada Rietz, Raj Nadella, Miranda N. Pillay, David Arthur Sánchez, Timothy J. Sandoval, Fernando F. Segovia, Mitzi J. Smith, Angeline M. G. Song, Linzie M. Treadway, Nasili Vaka’uta, Demetrius K. Williams, and Gale A. Yee. Each essay expands our understandings of minoritization from a global perspective.

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Reading the Bible in Ancient Traditions and Modern Editions
Studies in Memory of Peter W. Flint
Andrew B. Perrin
SBL Press, 2017

A collection of essays commemorating the career contributions of Peter W. Flint

An international group of scholars specializing in various disciplines of biblical studies—Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Second Temple Judaism, and Christian origins—present twenty-seven new contributions that commemorate the career of Peter W. Flint (1951–2016). Each essay interacts with and gives fresh insight into a field shaped by Professor Flint’s life work. Part 1 explores the interplay between text-critical methods, the growth and formation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and the making of modern critical editions. Part 2 maps dynamics of scriptural interpretation and reception in ancient Jewish and Christian literatures of the Second Temple period.

Features

  • Essays that assess the state of the field and reflect on the methods, aims, and best practices for textual criticism and the making of modern critical text editions
  • Demonstrations of how the processes of scriptural composition, transmission, and reception converge and may be studied together for mutual benefit
  • Clarification of the state/forms of scripture in antiquity and how scripture was extended, rewritten, and recontextualized by ancient Jewish and Christian scribes and communities
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Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible
Christiana de Groot
SBL Press, 2007

Women have been thoughtful readers and interpreters of scripture throughout the ages, yet the usual history of biblical interpretation includes few women’s voices. To introduce readers to this untapped source for the history of biblical interpretation, this volume presents forgotten works from the nineteenth century written by women—including Grace Aguilar, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others—from various faith backgrounds, countries, and social classes engaging contemporary biblical scholarship. Due to their exclusion from the academy, women’s interpretive writings addressed primarily a nonscholarly audience and were written in a variety of genres: novels and poetry, catechisms, manuals for Bible study, and commentaries on the books of the Bible. To recover these nineteenth-century women interpreters of the Bible, each essay in this volume locates a female author in her historical, ecclesiastical, and interpretive context, focusing on particular biblical passages to clarify an author’s contributions as well as to explore how her reading of the text was shaped by her experience as a woman.

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Reading Ruth in Asia
Jione Havea
SBL Press, 2015

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Reading Ezra 9-10 Tu'a-wise
Rethinking Biblical Interpretation in Oceania
Nasili Vaka'uta
SBL Press, 2011

An alternative approach to biblical interpretation from a Tongan standpoint

In Reading Ezra 9–10 Tu'a-wise, Nasili Vaka'uta establishes a theoretical framework for reading that is informed by Tongan cultural perspectives—in this case the “eye-/I-s” of a Tongan commoner (tu’a). She applies a methodology for analysis of biblical texts based on the established theoretical framework and tests the methodology on Ezra 9–10. The book emphasizes contextualizing the task of biblical interpretation (using contextual or specifically indigenous categories of analysis) rather than contextualizing the Bible (applying the insights from one’s reading to one’s situation).

Features

  • Oceanic way of reading the Biblical texts
  • Critical engagement with contextual biblical interpretation
  • Practice-based interpretation
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Reading Job with St. Thomas Aquinas
Matthew Levering
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
Reading Job with St. Thomas Aquinas is a scholarly contribution to Thomistic studies, specifically to the study of Aquinas’s biblical exegesis in relation to his philosophy and theology. Each of the thirteen chapters has a different focus, within the shared concentration of the book on Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job. The essays are arranged in three Parts: “Job and Sacra Doctrina”; “Providence and Suffering”; and “Job and the Moral Life”. Boyle’s opening essay argues that Aquinas’s commentary seeks to show what is required in the “Magister” (namely, Job and God) for the effective communication of wisdom. Mansini’s essay argues that by speaking, God reveals the virtue of Job and its value in God’s providence; without the personal revelation or speech of God, Job could not have known the value of his suffering. Vijgen’s essay explores the commentary’s use of Aristotle for reflecting upon divine providence, sorrow and anger, resurrection, and the new heavens and new earth. Levering’s essay explores the commentary’s citations of the Gospel of John and argues that these pertain especially to divine speech and to light/darkness. Bonino’s essay explains why divine incomprehensibility does not mean that Job is wrong to seek to understand God’s ways. Te Velde’s essay explores how Aquinas’s commentary draws upon the reasoning of his Summa contra gentiles with regard to the good order of the universe. Goris’s essay reflects upon how, according to Aquinas’s commentary, sin is and is not related to suffering. Knasas’s essay argues that Aquinas does not hold that the resurrection of the body is a necessary philosophical corollary of the human desire for happiness. Wawrykow’s essay explores merit, in relation to the connection between sin and punishment/affliction as well as to the connection between good actions and flourishing. Spezzano’s essay shows that Job’s hope and filial fear transform his suffering, making him an exemplar of the consolation they provide to the just. Mullady’s essay reflects upon the moral problems and opportunities posed by the passions, along with the ordering of the virtues to the reward of human happiness. Flood’s essay shows how Aquinas defends Job’s possession of the qualities needed for true friendship (including friendship with God), such as patience, delight in the presence of the friend, and compassion. Lastly, Kromholtz’s essay argues that although Aquinas’s Literal Exposition on Job never extensively engages eschatology, Aquinas depends throughout upon the reasonableness of hoping for the resurrection of the body and the final judgment.
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Rhetoric and Scripture
Collected Essays of Thomas H. Olbricht
Thomas H. Olbricht
SBL Press, 2021
This book offers a unique overview of the development of rhetorical criticism both in North America and internationally through the work of pioneering New Testament scholar Thomas H. Olbricht. Lauri Thurén has gathered nineteen of Olbricht's essays as a guidebook to rhetorical criticism for students, clergy, and scholars. The range of essays from throughout Olbricht's career illuminate the history of rhetorical criticism and reflect the different motivations of ancient and contemporary rhetorical approaches. Essays focus on the history of biblical rhetorical analysis, the rhetorical analysis of biblical texts, the characteristics of rhetorical analysis, and types of biblical rhetorical criticism. A foreword by Thurén and a memorial essay by Carl R. Holladay contextualize Olbricht's work. Anyone interested in the rhetorical study of the New Testament will find this volume inspiring and informative.
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Redescribing the Gospel of Mark
Barry S. Crawford
SBL Press, 2017

A collaborative project with a variety of critical essays

This final volume of studies by members of the Society of Biblical Literature’s consultation, and later seminar, on Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins focuses on Mark. As with previous volumes, the provocative proposals on Christian origins offered by Burton L. Mack are tested by applying Jonathan Z. Smith's distinctive social theorizing and comparative method. Essays examine Mark as an author’s writing in a book culture, a writing that responded to situations arising out of the first Roman-Judean war after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. Contributors William E. Arnal, Barry S. Crawford, Burton L. Mack, Christopher R. Matthews, Merrill P. Miller, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Robyn Faith Walsh explore the southern Levant as a plausible provenance of the Gospel of Mark and provide a detailed analysis of the construction of Mark as a narrative composed without access to prior narrative sources about Jesus. A concluding retrospective follows the work of the seminar, its developing discourse and debates, and the continuing work of successor groups in the field.

Features

  • A thorough examination of the relation between structure and event in social and anthropological theory that provides conceptual tools for representing the project of the author of Mark
  • An exploration of the southern Levant as a plausible provenance of the Gospel, a permanent site of successive imperial regimes and culturally related peoples
  • A detailed analysis of the construction of Mark as a narrative composed without access to prior narrative sources about Jesus
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Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas
Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology
Michael Dauphinais
Catholic University of America Press, 2005
This volume fits within the contemporary reappropriation of St. Thomas Aquinas, which emphasizes his use of Scripture and the teachings of the church fathers without neglecting his philosophical insight.
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Resurrection in Paul
Cognition, Metaphor, and Transformation
Frederick S. Tappenden
SBL Press, 2016

Explore the embodied foundations of Paul's resurrection ideals

It is commonly recognized that Paul's resurrection ideals are bodily ideals, though this dictum is usually configured along literal and metaphorical lines. The realism of future resurrected bodies is disconnected from the metaphoricity of bodily transformation in the present. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, this fresh and innovative study addresses this problem. By eschewing the opposition of metaphor and realism, Tappenden explores the concepts and metaphors Paul uses to fashion notions of resurrection, and the uses to which those notions are put. Rather than asserting resurrection as a disembodied, cognicentric proposition, this book illuminates the body's central role in shaping and grounding the apostle's thought and writings.

Features:

  • Close examination of Paul's letters within multiple, interlocking cultural contexts
  • Provides a novel and fresh approach to assessing (in)coherence across the undisputed letters
  • Addresses the materialist nature of early Christian and Judean resurrection ideals without compromising the metaphoricity of those ideals
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The Rhetoric of Abraham's Faith in Romans 4
Andrew Kimseng Tan
SBL Press, 2018

Explore Romans 4 from a sociorhetorical perspective

Andrew Kimseng Tan examines Romans using sociorhetorical interpretation to determine how Paul attempted to alleviate dissension between Judean (or “Jewish”) and non-Judean (or “gentile”) Christians. Through his analysis of Paul’s rhetoric, Tan reveals that Paul used Abraham’s faith in Genesis to demonstrate that the both groups were equally children and heirs of Abraham whose acceptance by God was through the same kind of faith that Abraham possessed, not through the Mosaic law, which Judean Christians claimed gave them a special honored status with God.

Features

  • A model for the application of sociorhetorical interpretation for analyzing close readings of biblical texts
  • A demonstration of the persuasive power of Romans 4 through the use of sociorhetorical interpretation
  • Exploration of the relationships between important theological topics such as resurrection, the Mosaic law, the Holy Spirit, righteousness, ethical living, and eschatological salvation
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Reading Paul's Letter to the Romans
Jerry L. Sumney
SBL Press, 2012
In this volume, leading scholars in the study of Romans invite students and nonspecialists to engage this text and thus come to a more complete understanding of both the letter and Paul’s theology. The contributors include interpreters with different understandings of Romans so that readers see a range of interpretations of central issues in the study of the text. Each essay includes a short review of different positions on a topic and an argument for the author’s position, set out in clear, nontechnical terms, making the volume an ideal classroom tool. The contributors are A. Andrew Das, James D. G. Dunn, Victor Paul Furnish, Joel B. Green, A. Katherine Grieb, Caroline Johnson Hodge, L. Ann Jervis, E. Elizabeth Johnson, Sylvia C. Keesmaat, Rodrigo J. Morales, Mark D. Nanos, Jerry L. Sumney, and Francis Watson.
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Reading Romans with St. Thomas Aquinas
Matthew Levering
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
This volume fits within the contemporary reappropriation of St. Thomas Aquinas, which emphasizes his use of Scripture and the teachings of the church fathers without neglecting his philosophical insight.
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front cover of Rethinking Paul's Rhetorical Education
Rethinking Paul's Rhetorical Education
Comparative Rhetoric and 2 Corinthians
Ryan S. Schellenberg
SBL Press, 2013
Winner of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies 2015 F. W. Beare Award

Did Paul have formal training in Greco-Roman rhetoric, or did he learn what he knew of persuasion informally, as social practice? Pauline scholars recognize the importance of this question both for determining Paul’s social status and for conceptualizing the nature of his letters, but they have been unable to reach a consensus. Using 2 Corinthians 10–13 as a test case, Ryan Schellenberg undertakes a set of comparisons with non-Western speakers—most compellingly, the Seneca orator Red Jacket—to demonstrate that the rhetorical strategies Paul employs in this text are also attested in speakers known to have had no formal training in Greco-Roman rhetoric. Since there are no specific indicators of formal training in the way Paul uses these strategies, their appearance in his letters does not constitute evidence that Paul received formal rhetorical education.

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Reading the Epistle to the Hebrews
Eric F. Mason
SBL Press, 2011
This volume, designed for classroom use, reflects contemporary trends in the study of an important and complex biblical text. Essays address major interpretive issues and emphasize the importance of interpreting Hebrews in light of its ancient Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman contexts.
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Reading the Epistle of James
A Resource for Students
Eric F. Mason
SBL Press, 2019

Foundational essays for students of New Testament epistles

This accessible introduction to contemporary scholarship on the Epistle of James begins with chapters that consider possible sources and backgrounds used by the author of James, the genre and literary structure of the book, and its major theological themes. Building on this foundation, subsequent chapters examine James through social-scientific readings, perspectives of Latin American immigrants and the marginalized, and major recent developments in textual criticism. The final chapters in the volume address the relationship between the epistle and the historical James, reception of the epistle in the early church, and major Catholic and Protestant interpretations of the book in the Reformation era. The contributions in this volume distill a range of important issues for readers undertaking a serious study of this letter for the first time.

Features

  • An introduction to contemporary scholarship on this important but often-overlooked text
  • Clear explanations of all technical terms and themes
  • In-depth discussions of the importance of Jewish Scripture and interpretative traditions, Greco-Roman philosophy and Jewish wisdom motifs, and biblical perspectives on justice, wealth, and poverty
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Reading 1-2 Peter and Jude
A Resource for Students
Eric F. Mason
SBL Press, 2014

An essential textbook on 1–2 Peter and Jude for readers of all levels

Scholars engage the best contemporary work on 1–2 Peter and Jude in this student-oriented book. The first four chapters in this collection—on authorship and pseudonymity, literary relationships among the three books, epistolary rhetoric, and apocalyptic elements—consider important, foundational issues related to all three epistles. These essays lay the groundwork for more focused chapters that examine theology and theory in 1 Peter as well a stylistic, theological, and thematic overlap in Jude and 2 Peter.

Features:

  • A range of theological, literary, and theoretical approaches
  • Definitions for specialized terminology
  • Historical and cultural background information
  • Explanations of methodologies
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Reading the Book of Revelation
A Resource for Students
David L. Barr
SBL Press, 2003
The Apocalypse lends itself to multivalent readings, and this volume fills a gap for students and scholars by discussing how different methods apply to readings. Using historical, literary, and social analysis in combination with strategies such as social-conflict theory, philosophy, women’s studies, ethics, history of religions, postcolonial studies, and popular culture, the essays in this volume focus on specific texts and show not only how each helps interpret the text but also how diverse methods produce divergent readings of a text. Developed as a classroom resource for undergraduates, this work will also prove useful to graduate students, religious leaders, and others who wish to explore how methods shape our understandings of various texts, including Revelation.
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The Regensburg Lecture
James V. Schall, S.J.
St. Augustine's Press, 2007

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Roots of Fundamentalism
British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930
Ernest R. Sandeen
University of Chicago Press, 1970
Ernest Sandeen’s Roots of Fundamentalism remains a landmark work in the history of religion. A National Book Award finalist, it was the first full-length study to present an intellectual historical critique of the Fundamentalist movement in America. Sandeen argues that our understanding of this movement has been grievously distorted by the Fundamentalist-Modernist debate of the 1920s, as symbolized by William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial. Rather than viewing Fundamentalism as a chiefly sociological phenomenon of the 1920s, Sandeen argues from a transatlantic perspective that the Fundamentalist movement “was a self-conscious, structured, long-lived dynamic entity” that had its origins in Anglo-American millenarian thought and movements of the nineteenth century.
         
"All historians need to face the issues [this book] raises. Serious theological discussion of Fundamentalism tends to be neglected because it is intellectually unfashionable: Mr. Sandeen shows that for the historian such neglect is a luxury he cannot afford.”—David M. Thompson, English Historical Review
 
“Sandeen’s ‘new approach to Fundamentalism’ eschews the common tendency to see the movement as parochially American, rurally based, and essentially a phenomenon of the twenties. . . . It is a highly valuable addition to American and—more singularly—to comparative theological history.”—William R. Hutchinson, Journal of American History 
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A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology
Religion and Justice
Edited by María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez
University of Texas Press, 2002

Speaking for the growing community of Latina feminist theologians, the editors of this volume write, "With the emergence and growth of the feminist theologies of liberation, we no longer wait for others to define or validate our experience of life and faith.... We want to express in our own words our plural ways of experiencing God and our plural ways of living our faith. And these ways have a liberative tone."

With twelve original essays by emerging and established Latina feminist theologians, this first-of-its-kind volume adds the perspectives, realities, struggles, and spiritualities of U.S. Latinas to the larger feminist theological discourse. The editors have gathered writings from both Roman Catholics and Protestants and from various Latino/a communities. The writers address a wide array of theological concerns: popular religion, denominational presence and attraction, methodology, lived experience, analysis of nationhood, and interpretations of life lived on a border that is not only geographic but also racial, gendered, linguistic, and religious.

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The Royal Remains
The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty
Eric L. Santner
University of Chicago Press, 2011

"The king is dead. Long live the king!" In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign—and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In The Royal Remains, Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location—the life of the people—where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh.
 
Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious—which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways—are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal,and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, The Royal Remains locates much of modernity—from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments—in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship.
 
This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.

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The Reason of Following
Christology and the Ecstatic I
Robert P. Scharlemann
University of Chicago Press, 1991
In the Reason of Following noted scholar Robert P. Scharlemann takes Christology in a radically new direction, suggesting that Christology itself represents a form of reason and an understanding of selfhood. For the first time, Scharlemann establishes a logical place for Christology in philosophical theology.

Scharlemann presents a christological phenomenology of the self, tracing the connections between the "I am" of the God who spoke to Moses, the "I am" of Christ, and the "I am" of autonomous self-identification. How, he asks, can the self that spontaneously responds to Jesus' "Follow me!" be compared with the everyday, autonomous self? What is the nature of "following" on the part of those who answer the summons of one whose name is "I am"? Pursuing these questions, Scharlemann develops a christological phenomenology of the self—an account in which following means not the expression of the self in action or reflection but rather self-discovery in another person.

With a deep sense of both culture and philosophy, Scharlemann distinguishes the forms of reason involved in "following" from those in ethics, aesthetics, and other modes of religious philosophic thought. His penetrating readings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German theological and philosophical traditions provide an introduction to lesser-known thinkers such as Hermann and Picht as well as a profound critique of major figures such as Descartes, Heidegger, Fichte, and Kant.

Finally Scharlemann outlines a program for a more systematic and rounded presentation of what Christian doctrine might mean in the contemporary world. His work will be of interest to students of theology and philosophy alike.
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Reenvisioning Sexual Ethics
A Feminist Christian Account
Georgetown University Press, 2023

A profound feminist Christian reframing of sexuality examines contemporary social practices and ethical sex

From the sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church to the US Supreme Court decision outlawing state-level bans on same-sex marriage, it has become clear that Catholics and other Christians cannot afford to downplay sex or rely on outdated normative understandings of its moral contours. Feminist theological approaches offer a way forward by considering not just what we should do in sexual spheres but also what sort of sexual people we should aspire to be.

In Reenvisioning Sexual Ethics, author Karen Peterson-Iyer adopts a feminist Christian anthropological framework to connect robust theological and ethical analysis to practical sexual issues, particularly those confronting college-aged and younger adults today. The book examines four divergent yet overlapping contemporary social practices and phenomena wherein sex plays a central role: “hookup” culture; “sexting”; sex work; and sex trafficking. Through these case studies, Peterson-Iyer shows that ethical sex is best demarcated not as a matter of chastity on the one hand and purely free consent on the other, but rather as ideally expressing the fullness of human agency, communicating the joy of shared pleasure, and conferring a deep sense of possibility and wholeness upon all participants.

This feminist Christian framework will help facilitate frank and profound discussions of sex, enabling young adults to define themselves and others not by hypersexualized and gendered social norms or attitudes but by their fundamental status as dignified and beloved by God.

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Restoring the Healer
Spiritual Self-Care for Health Care Professionals
William Dorman
Templeton Press, 2015
Burn out. Two words that haunt those in high stress jobs, especially in the medical profession. Long hours and the literal life-and-death nature of the field creates expectations to not only be on call at all hours, but to be at one’s best, even at 3:00 AM after a twenty-hour shift. So much energy is devoted to the care of others that self-care is forgotten.
Yet, more are noticing and research confirms that self-care is needed, not only for personal sanity but also for quality of work. Unwell medical professionals are not the best at treating others. And this self-care includes not just rest, food, and water, but a deeper care, one that tends the spiritual side as well.
To both the spiritually active and the spiritually resistant, hospital chaplain William Dorman offers a guide to understand a more comprehensive, full-bodied self-care. Each chapter begins with case studies, concrete experiences that help unpack abstract concepts which bring much needed peace to stressed individuals. Dorman also structures each chapter to end with prayers and action steps, which offer more concrete ways to care for the self.
From working as a hospital chaplain for over 18 years, and serving as the director of chaplaincy services for the largest integrated health care system in New Mexico, Rev. Dorman recognizes the stresses that come to those who have made it their profession to heal others. Healers need healing too—and this guide is the first step.
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Race and the Power of Sermons on American Politics
R. Khari Brown, Ronald E. Brown, and James S. Jackson
University of Michigan Press, 2021

This book examines the intersection of race, political sermons, and social justice. Religious leaders and congregants who discuss and encourage others to do social justice embrace a form of civil religion that falls close to the covenantal wing of American civil religious thought. Clergy and members who share this theological outlook frame the nation as being exceptional in God’s sight. They also emphasize that the nation’s special relationship with the Creator is contingent on the nation working toward providing opportunities for socioeconomic well-being, freedom, and creative pursuits. God’s covenant, thus, requires inclusion of people who may have different life experiences but who, nonetheless, are equally valued by God and worthy of dignity. Adherents to such a civil religious worldview would believe it right to care for and be in solidarity with the poor and powerless, even if they are undocumented immigrants, people living in non-democratic and non-capitalist nations, or members of racial or cultural out-groups. Relying on 44 national and regional surveys conducted between 1941 and 2019, Race and the Power of Sermons on American Politics explores how racial experiences impact the degree to which religion informs social justice attitudes and political behavior. This is the most comprehensive set of analyses of publicly available survey data on this topic.

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Revolution as Reformation
Protestant Faith in the Age of Revolutions, 1688–1832
Edited by Peter C. Messer and William Harrison Taylor
University of Alabama Press, 2021
Essays that explore how Protestants responded to the opportunities and perils of revolution in the transatlantic age
 
Revolution as Reformation: Protestant Faith in the Age of Revolutions, 1688–1832 highlights the role that Protestantism played in shaping both individual and collective responses to revolution. These essays explore the various ways that the Protestant tradition, rooted in a perpetual process of recalibration and reformulation, provided the lens through which Protestants experienced and understood social and political change in the Age of Revolutions. In particular, they call attention to how Protestants used those changes to continue or accelerate the Protestant imperative of refining their faith toward an improved vision of reformed religion.
 
The editors and contributors define faith broadly: they incorporate individuals as well as specific sects and denominations, and as much of “life experience” as possible, not just life within a given church. In this way, the volume reveals how believers combined the practical demands of secular society with their personal faith and how, in turn, their attempts to reform religion shaped secular society.
 
The wide-ranging essays highlight the exchange of Protestant thinkers, traditions, and ideas across the Atlantic during this period. These perspectives reveal similarities between revolutionary movements across and around the Atlantic. The essays also emphasize the foundational role that religion played in people’s attempts to make sense of their world, and the importance they placed on harmonizing their ideas about religion and politics. These efforts produced novel theories of government, encouraged both revolution and counterrevolution, and refined both personal and collective understandings of faith and its relationship to society.
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Reformation of the Senses
The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany
Jacob M. Baum
University of Illinois Press, 2018
We see the Protestant Reformation as the dawn of an austere, intellectual Christianity that uprooted a ritualized religion steeped in stimulating the senses--and by extension the faith--of its flock. Historians continue to use the idea as a potent framing device in presenting not just the history of Christianity but the origins of European modernity. Jacob M. Baum plumbs a wealth of primary source material from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to offer the first systematic study of the senses within the religious landscape of the German Reformation. Concentrating on urban Protestants, Baum details the engagement of Lutheran and Calvinist thought with traditional ritual practices. His surprising discovery: Reformation-era Germans echoed and even amplified medieval sensory practices. Yet Protestant intellectuals simultaneously cultivated the idea that the senses had no place in true religion. Exploring this paradox, Baum illuminates the sensory experience of religion and daily life at a crucial historical crossroads. Provocative and rich in new research, Reformation of the Senses reevaluates one of modern Christianity's most enduring myths.
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The Ransom of the Soul
Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity
Peter Brown
Harvard University Press, 2015

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
A Tablet Book of the Year

Marking a departure in our understanding of Christian views of the afterlife from 250 to 650 CE, The Ransom of the Soul explores a revolutionary shift in thinking about the fate of the soul that occurred around the time of Rome’s fall. Peter Brown describes how this shift transformed the Church’s institutional relationship to money and set the stage for its domination of medieval society in the West.

“[An] extraordinary new book…Prodigiously original—an astonishing performance for a historian who has already been so prolific and influential…Peter Brown’s subtle and incisive tracking of the role of money in Christian attitudes toward the afterlife not only breaks down traditional geographical and chronological boundaries across more than four centuries. It provides wholly new perspectives on Christianity itself, its evolution, and, above all, its discontinuities. It demonstrates why the Middle Ages, when they finally arrived, were so very different from late antiquity.”
—G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books

“Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century…Brown shows brilliantly in this book how the future life of Christians beyond the grave was influenced in particular by money.
—A. N. Wilson, The Spectator

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Redeem the Time
The Puritan Sabbath in Early America
Winton U. Solberg
Harvard University Press, 1977

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Reassessing Reform
Christopher M. Bellitto
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
Now, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversaries of the publication of The Idea of Reform and the Second Vatican Council, Reassessing Reform explores and critiques the enduring significance of Ladner's study, surveying new avenues and insights of more recent reform scholarship, especially concerning the long Middle Ages.
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Religion and Social Justice For Immigrants
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Religion has jumped into the sphere of global and domestic politics in ways that few would have imagined a century ago. Some expected that religion would die as modernity flourished.  Instead, it now stares at us almost daily from the front pages of newspapers and television broadcasts. Although it is usually stories about the Christian Right or conservative Islam that grab headlines, there are many religious activists of other political persuasions that are working quietly for social justice. This book examines how religious immigrants and religious activists are working for equitable treatment for immigrants in the United States.

The essays in this book analyze the different ways in which organized religion provides immigrants with an arena for mobilization, civic participation, and solidarity. Contributors explore topics including how non-Western religious groups such as the Vietnamese Caodai are striving for community recognition and addressing problems such as racism, economic issues, and the politics of diaspora; how interfaith groups organize religious people into immigrant civil rights activists at the U.S.–Mexican border; and how Catholic groups advocate governmental legislation and policies on behalf of refugees.

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Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa
Felicitas Becker
Ohio University Press, 2018

In recent years, anthropologists, historians, and others have been drawn to study the profuse and creative usages of digital media by religious movements. At the same time, scholars of Christian Africa have long been concerned with the history of textual culture, the politics of Bible translation, and the status of the vernacular in Christianity. Students of Islam in Africa have similarly examined politics of knowledge, the transmission of learning in written form, and the influence of new media. Until now, however, these arenas—Christianity and Islam, digital media and “old” media—have been studied separately.

Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa is one of the first volumes to put new media and old media into significant conversation with one another, and also offers a rare comparison between Christianity and Islam in Africa. The contributors find many previously unacknowledged correspondences among different media and between the two faiths. In the process they challenge the technological determinism—the notion that certain types of media generate particular forms of religious expression—that haunts many studies. In evaluating how media usage and religious commitment intersect in the social, cultural, and political landscapes of modern Africa, this collection will contribute to the development of new paradigms for media and religious studies.

Contributors: Heike Behrend, Andre Chappatte, Maria Frahm-Arp, David Gordon, Liz Gunner, Bruce S. Hall, Sean Hanretta, Jorg Haustein, Katrien Pype, and Asonzeh Ukah.

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Revival and Awakening
American Evangelical Missionaries in Iran and the Origins of Assyrian Nationalism
Adam H. Becker
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Most Americans have little understanding of the relationship between religion and nationalism in the Middle East. They assume that the two are rooted fundamentally in regional history, not in the history of contact with the broader world. However, as Adam H. Becker shows in this book, Americans—through their missionaries—had a strong hand in the development of a national and modern religious identity among one of the Middle East's most intriguing (and little-known) groups: the modern Assyrians. Detailing the history of the Assyrian Christian minority and the powerful influence American missionaries had on them, he unveils the underlying connection between modern global contact and the retrieval of an ancient identity.         

American evangelicals arrived in Iran in the 1830s. Becker examines how these missionaries, working with the “Nestorian” Church of the East—an Aramaic-speaking Christian community in the borderlands between Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire—catalyzed, over the span of sixty years, a new national identity. Instructed at missionary schools in both Protestant piety and Western science, this indigenous group eventually used its newfound scriptural and archaeological knowledge to link itself to the history of the ancient Assyrians, which in time led to demands for national autonomy. Exploring the unintended results of this American attempt to reform the Orient, Becker paints a larger picture of religion, nationalism, and ethnic identity in the modern era. 
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The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking During the Eighteenth Century
Eric Widmer
Harvard University Press, 1976

This book is the first analytical treatment in any language of the “most durable ‘sino–foreign’ institution in modern Chinese history.” It traces the beginnings of a Russian-Orthodox presence in Peking several decades back before the commonly held date of its origin. It also shows how the news of the plight of prisoners from the Russian fortress of Albazin (taken by the Ch’ing in 1685) was transmitted back to Russia, and how the indecisiveness of the official Russian response colored the entire subsequent history of the mission. The chapters on the Orthodox missionary life in Peking and on the institutions of the mission provide us with new insight into life in the Ch’ing capital.

The tentative beginnings of Russian scholarly and scientific interest in Chinese matters, an outgrowth of the missionary presence in Peking, are also discussed. The book tackles an especially difficult case, for by ordinary standards the Russian ecclesiastical mission was a failure, not a success. The monks and students were an unruly lot, the mission itself never functioned as a full diplomatic institution, and the Chinese frequently treated the missionaries with neglect or disdain.

Yet, as the author demonstrates, even this apparent failure had a purpose. The mission served to maintain a minimal contact between the two empires throughout a long period of conflicting ambitions and actions in the Inner Asian theater.

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Religious Entanglements
Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga
David Maxwell
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Under the leadership of William F. P. Burton and James Salter, the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) grew from a simple faith movement founded in 1915 into one of the most successful classical Pentecostal missions in Africa, today boasting more than one million members in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Drawing on artifacts, images, documents, and interviews, David Maxwell examines the roles of missionaries and their African collaborators—the Luba-speaking peoples of southeast Katanga—in producing knowledge about Africa.
 
Through the careful reconstruction of knowledge pathways, Maxwell brings into focus the role of Africans in shaping texts, collections, and images as well as in challenging and adapting Western-imported presuppositions and prejudices. Ultimately, Maxwell illustrates the mutually constitutive nature of discourses of identity in colonial Africa and reveals not only how the Luba shaped missionary research but also how these coproducers of knowledge constructed and critiqued custom and convened new ethnic communities.

Making a significant intervention in the study of both the history of African Christianity and the cultural transformations effected by missionary encounters across the globe, Religious Entanglements excavates the subculture of African Pentecostalism, revealing its potentiality for radical sociocultural change.
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Revivals, Awakening and Reform
William G. McLoughlin
University of Chicago Press, 1980
In Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, McLoughlin draws on psychohistory, sociology, and anthropology to examine the relationship between America's five great religious awakenings and their influence on five great movements for social reform in the United States. He finds that awakenings (and the revivals that are part of them) are periods of revitalization born in times of cultural stress and eventuating in drastic social reform. Awakenings are thus the means by which a people or nation creates and sustains its identity in a changing world.

"This book is sensitive, thought-provoking and stimulating. It is 'must' reading for those interested in awakenings, and even though some may not revise their views as a result of McLoughlin's suggestive outline, none can remain unmoved by the insights he has provided on the subject."—Christian Century

"This is one of the best books I have read all year. Professor McLoughlin has again given us a profound analysis of our culture in the midst of revivalistic trends."—Review and Expositor
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Revivalism and Cultural Change
Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States
George M. Thomas
University of Chicago Press, 1989
The history of Christianity in America has been marked by recurring periods of religious revivals or awakenings. In this book, George M. Thomas addresses the economic and political context of evangelical revivalism and its historical linkages with economic expansion and Republicanism in the nineteenth century. Thomas argues that large-scale change results in social movements that articulate new organizations and definitions of individual, society, authority, and cosmos. Drawing on religious newspapers, party policies and agendas, and quantitative analyses of voting patterns and census data, he claims that revivalism in this period framed the rules and identities of the expanding market economy and the national policy.

"Subtle and complex. . . . Fascinating."—Randolph Roth, Pennsylvania History

"[Revivalism and Cultural Change] should be read with interest by those interested in religious movements as well as the connections among religion, economics, and politics."—Charles L. Harper, Contemporary Sociology

"Readers old and new stand to gain much from Thomas's sophisticated study of the macrosociology of religion in the United States during the nineteenth century. . . . He has given the sociology of religion its best quantitative study of revivalism since the close of the 1970s."—Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion
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Rebecca's Revival
Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World
Jon F. Sensbach
Harvard University Press, 2005

Rebecca's Revival is the remarkable story of a Caribbean woman--a slave turned evangelist--who helped inspire the rise of black Christianity in the Atlantic world. All but unknown today, Rebecca Protten left an enduring influence on African-American religion and society. Born in 1718, Protten had a childhood conversion experience, gained her freedom from bondage, and joined a group of German proselytizers from the Moravian Church. She embarked on an itinerant mission, preaching to hundreds of the enslaved Africans of St. Thomas, a Danish sugar colony in the West Indies. Laboring in obscurity and weathering persecution from hostile planters, Protten and other black preachers created the earliest African Protestant congregation in the Americas.

Protten's eventful life--the recruiting of converts, an interracial marriage, a trial on charges of blasphemy and inciting of slaves, travels to Germany and West Africa--placed her on the cusp of an emerging international Afro-Atlantic evangelicalism. Her career provides a unique lens on this prophetic movement that would soon sweep through the slave quarters of the Caribbean and North America, radically transforming African-American culture.

Jon Sensbach has pieced together this forgotten life of a black visionary from German, Danish, and Dutch records, including letters in Protten's own hand, to create an astounding tale of one woman's freedom amidst the slave trade. Protten's life, with its evangelical efforts on three continents, reveals the dynamic relations of the Atlantic world and affords great insight into the ways black Christianity developed in the New World.

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Reading in the Wilderness
Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England
Jessica Brantley
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England.

Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript’s texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk’s cell and also outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.
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Robert H. Gardiner and the Reunification of Worldwide Christianity in the Progressive Era
John F. Woolverton
University of Missouri Press, 2005
In his time, Robert Hallowell Gardiner III (1855–1924) was the heart and soul of the Progressive Era’s movement to establish cooperation among all Christian churches. Gardiner’s legacy today is the World Council of Churches. From his home on the Kennebec River and from the Maine town that bears his family’s name, Gardiner carried on an extensive letter-writing campaign on behalf of the reunion of worldwide Christianity. John F. Woolverton incorporates Gardiner’s eleven thousand letters, as well as his published speeches and articles and family records, to present the first biography of a man who was a seminal figure in the early twentieth-century Christian ecumenical movement.
Gardiner was remarkable in that, as a layperson in the traditionally clergy-dominated, hierarchical Episcopal Church, he was able to bring along his own often reluctant denomination, as well as the Eastern and Russian Orthodox churches, major American and European Protestant bodies, and for a time the Roman Catholic Church itself. In addition, in the 1890s Gardiner was a leader in Boston’s famous Social Gospel, moving on to the Young Manhood Movement of the 1910s. He was an outspoken advocate for giving women a voice and vote in the church, as well as a leader in the major 1916 revision of Christian education in his denomination.
In his study, Woolverton analyzes Gardiner’s commitment as an internationalist to multilateral peace efforts on the threshold of World War I. He also discusses Gardiner’s relationships with well-known figures from that era: U.S. Senator George Wharton Pepper, Francis Stetson, John R. Mott, Newman Smyth, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, John J. Wynne, Cardinal James Gibbons, Episcopal Bishop Charles Henry Brent, and Vida D. Scudder.
Woolverton shows how, despite the ravages of war, Gardiner was able to build a vast network of cooperating political and religious leaders. American historians of the Progressive Era, church historians, and theological students will welcome this valuable addition to the historical literature on the social gospel.
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Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime
Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou, Editors
University of Minnesota Press, 1978

Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime was first published in 1978. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In this book, which is especially suitable for course use, eleven scholars examine one of the most important institutions of imperial Russia, the Orthodox church in the two centuries before the Russian revolution. The material is arranged in two sections, the first devoted to Orthodoxy's role in Russian social and cultural life and the second dealing with the church's relationship to the tsarist regime.

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Russia's Social Gospel
The Orthodox Pastoral Movement in Famine, War, and Revolution
Daniel Scarborough
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
The late Russian Empire experienced rapid economic change, social dislocation, and multiple humanitarian crises, enduring two wars, two famines, and three revolutions. A “pastoral activism” took hold as parish clergymen led and organized the response of Russia’s Orthodox Christians to these traumatic events. In Russia’s Social Gospel, Daniel Scarborough considers the roles played by pastors in the closing decades of the failing tsarist empire and the explosive 1917 revolutions.
 
This volume draws upon extensive archival research to examine the effects of the pastoral movement on Russian society and the Orthodox Church. Scarborough argues that the social work of parish clergymen shifted the focus of Orthodox practice in Russia toward cooperative social activism as a devotional activity. He furthers our understanding of Russian Orthodoxy by illuminating the difficult position of parish priests, who were charged with both spiritual and secular responsibilities but were supported by neither church nor state. His nuanced look at the pastorate shows how social and historical traumas shifted perceptions of what being religious meant, in turn affecting how the Orthodox Church organized itself, and contributed to Russia’s modernization.
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The Russian Levites
Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century
Gregory L. Freeze
Harvard University Press, 1977

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The Revelation of Your Words
The New Evangelization and the Role of the Seminary Professor of Sacred Scripture
Kevin Zilverberg
Saint Paul Seminary Press, 2021
The Revelation of Your Words, a collection of essays, treats the role of the seminary professor of sacred Scripture within the context of the New Evangelization. Some of the essays concern principally the imparting of knowledge and best practices to accomplish this; others concern the fostering of delight in the sacred page and spiritual encounter with God. Although these essays are Catholic, written within a Catholic theological framework and with Catholic seminaries in mind, many of their conclusions can be applied to non-Catholic environments. This book provides insights that, even beyond the seminary, will benefit teachers of the Bible, regardless of their denomination and level of instruction. Readers will encounter the following authors and topics. Peter S. Williamson writes on the implications of the New Evangelization for priestly ministry and for teaching Scripture. Steven C. Smith makes a contribution concerning the role of the seminary professor of sacred Scripture in forming priests. Michael Magee treats the relevance of Johannine irony to the New Evangelization. Stephen Ryan’s chapter takes up the topic of Old Testament Wisdom literature and formation for a New Evangelization. Juana L. Manzo seeks a path to integrate modern and ancient interpretations into the seminary classroom. Kelly Anderson takes up the father of Proverbs 1–9 as a model of spiritual fatherhood for seminary professors. Scott Carl proposes a spiritual reading of sacred Scripture in the twenty-first century. Michael Magee, in his second contribution, writes on the joy of discovery in the Fourth Gospel. James Keating reflects upon the exegete as seminary formator. Finally, André Villeneuve advocates for the teaching of Biblical Hebrew in Catholic seminaries and academic institutions.
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Roman Catholicism after Vatican II
Robert A. Burns, OP
Georgetown University Press, 2001

The second Vatican Council, which concluded in December 1965, inaugurated a reformation process in the Catholic Church that continues to this day. Grounding his discussion in the documents that came out of Vatican II, Robert Burns addresses four critical questions that face the Church largely as an outcome of this first truly global Church council.

First, Burns presents an overview of the evolving Roman Catholic understanding of Jesus Christ. He follows with an analysis of authority within the Church, a matter of some contention in today's democratic societies, and a discussion of Catholicism as a global church incorporating people and practices from many cultures. Finally, Burns examines the validity of other religions in relation to the Christian claim that salvation through Jesus is unique and final.

A readable introduction for all Catholics interested in learning more about their church, the book includes features such as chapter summaries and study questions that also make it an ideal textbook for undergraduates or parish study.

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Reviving the Eternal City
Rome and the Papal Court, 1420-1447
Elizabeth McCahill
Harvard University Press, 2013

In 1420, after more than one hundred years of the Avignon Exile and the Western Schism, the papal court returned to Rome, which had become depopulated, dangerous, and impoverished in the papacy's absence. Reviving the Eternal City examines the culture of Rome and the papal court during the first half of the fifteenth century, a crucial transitional period before the city's rebirth. As Elizabeth McCahill explains, during these decades Rome and the Curia were caught between conflicting realities--between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between conciliarism and papalism, between an image of Rome as a restored republic and a dream of the city as a papal capital.

Through the testimony of humanists' rhetorical texts and surviving archival materials, McCahill reconstructs the niche that scholars carved for themselves as they penned vivid descriptions of Rome and offered remedies for contemporary social, economic, religious, and political problems. In addition to analyzing the humanists' intellectual and professional program, McCahill investigates the different agendas that popes Martin V (1417-1431) and Eugenius IV (1431-1447) and their cardinals had for the post-Schism pontificate. Reviving the Eternal City illuminates an urban environment in transition and explores the ways in which curialists collaborated and competed to develop Rome's ancient legacy into a potent cultural myth.

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Reject Aeneas, Accept Pius
Selected Letters of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II)
Thomas M. Pius II
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1405-1464, elected Pope Pius II in 1458) was an important and enigmatic figure of the Renaissance as well as one of the most prolific writers and gifted stylists ever to occupy the papacy
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A Reason Open to God
Pope Benedict XVI Brown
Catholic University of America Press, 2013
With clarity and wisdom, Pope Benedict XVI sets out his vision for Catholic higher education in this first and only collection of his major addresses on the topic. What is the mission and identity of a Catholic university? What are the responsibilities of administrators, teachers, and students in Catholic institutes of higher learning? Where does the central theme of "love of God and others" fit into academia?
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Remapping the History of Catholicism in the United States
David J. Endres
Catholic University of America Press, 2017
For more than thirty years, the U.S. Catholic Historian has mapped the diverse terrain of American Catholicism. This collection of recent essays tells the story of Catholics previously underappreciated by historians: women, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and those on the frontier and borderlands.

Timothy Matovina’s opening essay sets the theme for the volume, encouraging a remapping of U.S. Catholic history to more widely encompass its various localities and peoples, especially the significance of non-European ethnic groups and the role of Catholics in the American Southwest. Jeanne Petit explores Catholic womanhood’s strength and organizational zeal in the post-World War I era, noting the obstacles and successes of women’s attempts to be recognized fully as American citizens and members of the Church. Anne Klejment weaves together the lives of Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez to illustrate their use of nonviolence and “weapons of the spirit” to respond to societal injustice. Amanda Bresie provides a window into the life of Mother Katharine Drexel, noting the generosity of the millionaire heiress, but also her meticulous record keeping and close supervision of her funding of educational and evangelization e­orts among Native and African Americans. Kristine Ashton Gunnell analyzes the ways in which the Daughters of Charity crossed cultural boundaries to off­er charitable assistance to Mexican and Japanese communities in Los Angeles. Matthew Cressler explores the intersection of Black Power and distinctive African American-inspired liturgies, arguing that the liturgy became a site of struggle as black self-determination and nationalism impacted worship and black Catholic identity. Finally, Joseph Chinnici off­ers an important essay on re-envisioning post-conciliar U.S. Catholicism in its global context, off­ering a new approach to how we consider the American Catholic narrative and write its history.

Together these path-breaking studies serve as a model for historians seeking to engage in the cartographic task of remapping the U.S. Catholic experience.
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The Road to Renewal
Victor Joseph Reed and Oklahoma Catholicism, 1905–1971
Jeremy BONNER
Catholic University of America Press, 2008
The Road to Renewal offers an important contribution to the study of Catholicism in the 1960s. Grounded in thorough archival research, the book breaks new ground in its examination of the implementation of Vatican II at the diocesan level.
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The Rise of Newport’s Catholics
From Colonial Outcasts to Gilded Age Leaders
John F. Quinn
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

Nineteenth-century New England was a hostile place for Catholics. In Massachusetts a mob torched a convent; in Maine a priest was tarred and feathered; and Rhode Island elected an anti-Catholic Know Nothing governor. “No Irish Need Apply” signs were common.

Newport was different. It was a religiously diverse and tolerant city that welcomed Catholic French troops during the American Revolution. Later, as it became the favored summer retreat for America’s Protestant social elite, Irish Catholics arrived to work in construction jobs, the tourist economy, and the grand Gilded Age cottages. By the end of the century, Newport’s Catholic community was flourishing. Moneyed Catholics acquired their own mansions, an Irish Catholic was mayor, and prominent Protestants were helping Catholic neighbors establish new schools and churches. In this deeply researched study, John F. Quinn delves into this rich Catholic history to discover why nineteenth-century Newport was particularly religiously tolerant and accepting.

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Reverse Mission
Transnational Religious Communities and the Making of US Foreign Policy
Timothy A. Byrnes
Georgetown University Press, 2011

Many Catholic priests, nuns, and brothers in the United States take a strong interest in US policies that affect their "brothers and sisters" abroad. In fact, when the policies of their native government pose significant dangers to their people internationally, these US citizens engage actively in a variety of political processes in order to protect and advance the interests of the transnational religious communities to which they belong. In this provocative examination of the place of religion in world politics, Timothy A. Byrnes focuses on three Catholic communities—Jesuit, Maryknoll, and Benedictine—and how they seek to shape US policy in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Based on years of fieldwork and on-the-ground interviews, Reverse Mission details the transnational bonds that drive the political activities of these Catholic orders.

This fascinating book reveals how the men and women of these orders became politically active in complex and sometimes controversial causes and how, ultimately, they exert a unique influence on foreign policy that is derived from their communal loyalties rather than any ethnic or national origin.

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Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism
Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934
Edward Wright-Rios
Duke University Press, 2009
In Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, Edward Wright-Rios investigates how Catholicism was lived and experienced in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca, a region known for its distinct indigenous cultures and vibrant religious life, during the turbulent period of modernization in Mexico that extended from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Wright-Rios centers his analysis on three “visions” of Catholicism: an enterprising archbishop’s ambitious religious reform project, an elderly indigenous woman’s remarkable career as a seer and faith healer, and an apparition movement that coalesced around a visionary Indian girl. Deftly integrating documentary evidence with oral histories, Wright-Rios provides a rich, textured portrait of Catholicism during the decades leading up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and throughout the tempestuous 1920s.

Wright-Rios demonstrates that pastors, peasants, and laywomen sought to enliven and shape popular religion in Oaxaca. The clergy tried to adapt the Vatican’s blueprint for Catholic revival to Oaxaca through institutional reforms and attempts to alter the nature and feel of lay religious practice in what amounted to a religious modernization program. Yet some devout women had their own plans. They proclaimed their personal experiences of miraculous revelation, pressured priests to recognize those experiences, marshaled their supporters, and even created new local institutions to advance their causes and sustain the new practices they created. By describing female-led visionary movements and the ideas, traditions, and startling innovations that emerged from Oaxaca’s indigenous laity, Wright-Rios adds a rarely documented perspective to Mexican cultural history. He reveals a remarkable dynamic of interaction and negotiation in which priests and parishioners as well as prelates and local seers sometimes clashed and sometimes cooperated but remained engaged with one another in the process of making their faith meaningful in tumultuous times.

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Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter
The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914–1939
Neal Pease
Ohio University Press, 2009

When an independent Poland reappeared on the map of Europe after World War I, it was widely regarded as the most Catholic country on the continent, as “Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter.” All the same, the relations of the Second Polish Republic with the Church—both its representatives inside the country and the Holy See itself—proved far more difficult than expected.

Based on original research in the libraries and depositories of four countries, including recently opened collections in the Vatican Secret Archives, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter: The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914–1939 presents the first scholarly history of the close but complex political relationship of Poland with the Catholic Church during the interwar period. Neal Pease addresses, for example, the centrality of Poland in the Vatican’s plans to convert the Soviet Union to Catholicism and the curious reluctance of each successive Polish government to play the role assigned to it. He also reveals the complicated story of the relations of Polish Catholicism with Jews, Freemasons, and other minorities within the country and what the response of Pope Pius XII to the Nazi German invasion of Poland in 1939 can tell us about his controversial policies during World War II.

Both authoritative and lively, Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter shows that the tensions generated by the interplay of church and state in Polish public life exerted great influence not only on the history of Poland but also on the wider Catholic world in the era between the wars.

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Renewing Our Hope
Essays for the New Evangelization
Robert Barron
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
In a time of discouragement, how can the Church renew itself and its outreach to all people? Bishop Robert Barron, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, insists that a "dumbed down" Catholicism cannot succeed in today's highly educated society--instead, the Church needs to draw upon its great theological heritage in order to renew its hope in Christ. With Renewing Our Hope: Essays for the New Evangelization, Bishop Barron traces this renewal through four stages. "Renewing Our Mission" lays out the challenges that call for Catholics to become more aware of their own intellectual resources in encountering the "Nones." "Renewing Our Minds" showcases the importance of theological reflection as a font of wisdom and sanity in the Church, touching on Thomas Aquinas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the recently canonized John Henry Newman, and Pope Francis. In "Renewing the Church," he proceeds to look at how Scripture, the family, the seminary, and Catholic college graduates can each contribute to this renewal. Finally, in "Renewing Our Culture," he returns to the judgments Catholics must make in assessing contemporary culture, specifically, family life, liberalism, relativism, and (surprisingly) the beauty of cinema. Bishop Barron, known as the host of the Catholicism PBS video series, was previously rector and professor of systematic theology at Mundelein Seminary outside Chicago, Illinois. He demonstrates again in Renewing Our Hope his ability to make the fruits of his wide reading accessible to a broad audience, while still giving his academic colleagues much to consider.
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Revelations of Humanity
Anthropological Dimensions of Theological Controversies
Richard Schenk, OP
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
Revelations of Humanity brings together essays into the history and actuality of how our searches for God and for our own humanity are interwoven. They argue that the revelation of God is possible only when accompanied by a revelation of what it means to be a human being. Revelation implies that the truth is not fully evident in either case. This quest is aided in many of the essays by a recollection of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. As opposed to simple memory, recollection implies that memory has been lost or become clouded, here by the misrepresentation of Thomas’ view of humanity’s relation to God as harmonistic, at best semi-Pelagian, often even naturalistic. This difficult recovery is made possible by historical research that alone can escape the easy systematic alienation that supporters and critics of Thomas have often brought to their interpretation of his works. Thomas’s sense of a real but finite capacity of human beings for God, his grace and revelation, anticipates in more ways than is commonly known much of contemporary suspicion about human capacities, but in ways that are open to God. That programmatic insight into the historical Thomas, keenly aware of human entanglements, limits and hopes, offers on many contemporary issues a ressourcement of systematic thought. Revelations of Humanity revolves around three clusters of issues. The first asks about the reality and limits of the human capacity for truth: in metaphysical, moral and political matters and in relation to the disputed issues of analogous reason and faith. The second cluster is structured around the four involvements that the Second Vatican Council identified as the human face of genuine Christian existence: participation in the legitimate joys, hopes, sorrows and fears of the contemporary world. These are refracted in the broken light of the human proprium of risibility, the abiding uncertainty addressed by hope, the disputed question of a suffering God and the recollection of Christ’s anxiety in the face of death. The final cluster brings together anthropological dimensions of current ecumenical and interreligious disputes: the need to complement affirmation with admonition in ecumenical conversation, exemplified by the ambivalence towards sacrifice in a genuinely Catholic theology and the need to avoid the excesses of univocity, equivocity or an all too facile analogy in the determination of interreligious relationalities.
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Respectably Catholic and Scientific
Evolution and Birth Control Between the World Wars
Alexander Pavuk
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
Respectfully Catholic and Scientific traces the unexpected manner in which several influential liberal-progressive Catholics tried to shape how evolution and birth control were framed and debated in the public square in the era between the World Wars-- and the unintended consequences of their efforts. A small but influential cadre of Catholic priests professionally trained in social sciences, Frs. John Montgomery Cooper, John A. Ryan, and John A. O’Brien, gained a hearing from mainline public intellectuals largely by engaging in dialogue on these topics using the lingua franca of the age, science, to the near exclusion of religious argumentation. The Catholics’ approach was more than just tactical. It also derived from the subtle influence of Catholic theological Modernism, with its strong enthusiasm for science, and from an inclination toward scientism inherited from the Progressive Era’s social science milieu. All three shared a fervent desire to translate the Catholic ethos, as they understood it, into the vocabulary of the modern age while circumventing anti-Catholic attitudes in the process. However, their method resulted in a series of unintended consequences whereby their arguments were not infrequently co-opted and used against both them and the institutional church they served. Alexander Pavuk considers the complex role of both liberal religious figures and scientific elites in evolution and birth control discourse, and how each contributed in unexpected ways to the reconstruction of those topics in public culture. The reconstruction saw the topics themselves shift from matters considered largely within moral frameworks into bodies of kno
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Religious Freedom after the Sexual Revolution
A Catholic Guide
Helen Alvare
Catholic University of America Press, 2022
Laws mandating cooperation with the state’s new sexual orthodoxy are among the leading contemporary threats to the religious freedom of Catholic institutions in the United States. These demand that Catholic schools, health-care providers, or social services cooperate with contraception, cohabitation, abortion, same-sex marriage, or transgender identity and surgeries. But Catholic institutions’ responses seem thin and uninspiring to many. They are criticized as legalistic, authoritarian, bureaucratic, retrograde and hurtful to women and to persons who identify as LGBTQ. They are even called “un-Christian.” They invite disrespect both for Catholic sexual responsibility norms and for religious freedom generally, not only among lawmakers and judges, but also in the court of public opinion, which includes skeptical Catholics. The U.S. Constitution protects Catholic institutions’ “autonomy” – their authority over faith and doctrine, internal operations, and the personnel involved in personifying and transmitting the faith. Other constitutional and statutory provisions also safeguard religious freedom, if not always perfectly. Catholic institutions could take far better advantage of all of these existing protections if they communicated, first, how they differ from secular institutions: how their missions emerge from their faith in Jesus Christ, and their efforts both to make his presence felt in the world today, and to display the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God. Second, they need to draw out the link between their teachings on sexual responsibility and love of God and neighbor. Drawing upon Scripture, tradition, history, theology and empirical evidence, Helen Alvaré frames a more complete, inspiring and appealing response to current laws’ attempts to impose a new sexual orthodoxy upon Catholic institutions. It clarifies the “ecclesial” nature of Catholic schools, hospitals and social services. It summarizes the empirical evidence supporting the link between personnel decisions and mission, and between Catholic sexual responsibility norms and human flourishing. It grounds Catholic sexual responsibility teachings in the same love of God and neighbor that animate the existence, operations, and services of Catholic institutions.
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Religious Crisis and Civic Transformation
How Conflicts over Gender and Sexuality Changed the West German Catholic Church
Kimba Allie Tichenor
Brandeis University Press, 2016
This book offers a fresh interpretation of the connection between the West German Catholic Church and post-1950s political debates on women’s reproductive rights and the protection of life in West Germany. According to Tichenor, Catholic women in West Germany, influenced by the culture of consumption, the sexual revolution, Vatican II reforms, and feminism, sought to renegotiate their relationship with the Church. They demanded a more active role in Church ministries and challenged the Church’s hierarchical and gendered view of marriage and condemnation of artificial contraception. When the Church refused to compromise, women left en masse. In response, the Church slowly stitched together a new identity for a postsecular age, employing an elaborate nuptial symbolism to justify its stance on celibacy, women’s ordination, artificial contraception, abortion, and reproductive technologies. Additionally, the Church returned to a radical interventionist agenda that embraced issue-specific alliances with political parties other than the Christian parties. In her conclusion, Tichenor notes more recent setbacks to the German Catholic Church, including disappointment with the reactionary German Pope Benedict XVI and his failure in 2010 to address over 250 allegations of sexual abuse at twenty-two of Germany’s twenty-seven dioceses. How the Church will renew itself in the twenty-first century remains unclear. This closely observed case study, which bridges religious, political, legal, and women’s history, will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century European religious history, modern Germany, and the intersection of Catholic Church practice and women’s issues.
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Recovering Origins
A Unique Healing Program for Adult Children of Divorce
Margaret Harper McCarthy
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
Recovering Origins is a healing program offered to adult children of divorced parents who now, with a certain distance from the practical difficulties that burden younger children, wrestle with the core problem at the heart of those difficulties. Having lost the community that brought them into the world, they have suffered a “primal loss.” Children are the literal embodiment of that community. When it is voluntarily dismantled, and worse–wished never to have been–the effect is not negligible. Children of divorce, by their own description, are now “pulled apart” as if “between two worlds.” They are “torn asunder.” Paradoxically the idea for Recovering Origins was occasioned by this straight talk about divorce. For, by going to the depths of the loss of one’s primal community one can be opened up to the Community that stands at the root of it. “Deep calls unto deep,” as the Psalmist says. In short, Recovering Origins invites participants to move through the broken image of love that they see in their parents, to the loving Origin which is more fundamental than any human reflection of it, broken or not. Recovering Origins begins with an invitation to look honestly at the actual experience of divorce, beyond all the “happy talk” about the “good divorce.” Participants are then invited to follow the path of the Lord’s Prayer, to recover what is at once challenging and precious to those whose very identities are on uncertain ground: the memory of God the Father, the goodness of their lives, and the real possibility of a good future. In this way, the program offers adult children of divorce a path to healing in the deepest sense. Recovering Origins offers an occasion to encounter the Christian Faith more deeply, especially where it bears on fundamental question faced by children of divorce in a particularly dramatic way. Recovering Origins addresses adult children of divorce, then, not only as individuals in need of pastoral care, but as potential witnesses to something they can, perhaps, see more clearly: the goodness and fidelity of the One on whom their lives ultimately depend and the possibility (and need) that that be reflected in an irrevocable and fruitful love between the creatures made in his image.
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Revisiting the Idea of Vocation
Theological Explorations
John C. Haughey, S.J.
Catholic University of America Press, 2004
Until recently theologians have been in a deep slumber about the subject of vocations. This volume represents one of the first awakenings in the theological community to this subject. The ten contributors, all theologians at Loyola University Chicago, present original essays that explore vocations, or callings.
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The Rule of Saint Benedict
Benedict of Nursia
Harvard University Press, 2011

One of the most influential texts in the Middle Ages, The Rule of Saint Benedict offers guidance about both the spiritual and organizational dimensions, from the loftiest to the lowliest, of monastic life. This new Latin-English edition has features of interest for first-time readers of the Rule as well as for scholars of medieval history and language.

The Latin text is a transcription of manuscript 914 of the Abbey of St. Gall (Switzerland), an early ninth-century copy regarded as the version that most closely reproduces Benedict's style. The saint’s idiom was informal, sometimes conversational, and heavily influenced by the spoken Latin of the sixth century CE. In the Rule his voice and thought processes come through in all their strength and humanity. Readers will find background to the monastic life in the notes. This volume also includes texts and translations of two letters that explain the origins of the St. Gall version as well as an index to all the translated materials.

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Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain
Charles W. Polzer
University of Arizona Press, 1976
An exceptionally valuable research tool for scholars. The noted Jesuit historian has translated the rules and precepts that governed the mission expansion in the 1600s and 1700s in northwestern Mexico, and has added authoritative commentary to make this work literally a "manual on the missions."
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Roads to Rome
A Guide to Notable Converts from Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to the
John Beaumont
St. Augustine's Press, 2010

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Reclaiming Catherine of Siena
Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others
Jane Tylus
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) wrote almost four hundred epistles in her lifetime, effectively insinuating herself into the literary, political, and theological debates of her day. At the same time, as the daughter of a Sienese dyer, Catherine had no formal education, and her accomplishments were considered miracles rather than the work of her own hand. As a result, she has been largely excluded from accounts of the development of European humanism and the language and literature of Italy. Reclaiming Catherine ofSiena makes the case for considering Catherine alongside literary giants such as Dante and Petrarch, as it underscores Catherine's commitment to using the vernacular to manifest Christ's message—and her own.
Jane Tylus charts here the contested struggles of scholars over the centuries to situate Catherine in the history of Italian culture in early modernity. But she mainly focuses on Catherine’s works, calling attention to the interplay between orality and textuality in the letters and demonstrating why it was so important for Catherine to envision herself as a writer. Tylus argues for a reevalution of Catherine as not just a medieval saint, but one of the major figures at the birth of the Italian literary canon.
 
 
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Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History
Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034
Richard Landes
Harvard University Press, 1995

This unusual biographical work traces the life and career of Ademar of Chabannes, a monk, historian, liturgist, and hagiographer who lived at the turn of the first Christian millennium. Thanks to the unique collection of over one thousand folios of autograph manuscript that Ademar left behind, Richard Landes has been able to reconstruct in great detail the development of Ademar's career and the events of his day, and to suggest several major revisions in the general picture held by current medieval historiography.

Above all, the author's research confirms and elaborates the realization (first articulated over sixty years ago by the historian Louis Saltet) that in 1029 Ademar suffered a humiliating defeat at the height of his career and spent his final five years feverishly producing a dossier of forgeries and fictions about his own contemporaries that has few parallels in the annals on medieval forgery. Not only did that dossier of forgeries succeed in misleading historians from the twelfth century right up to the twentieth, but few historians have been willing to explore the implications of so striking a revision in Ademar's biography. Richard Landes is the first to systematically examine the evidence and the implications for our understanding of the period, and he offers an explanation of how these remarkable developments might have occurred.

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Robert of Arbrissel
Sex, Sin, and Salvation in the Middle Ages
Jacques Dalarun
Catholic University of America Press, 2006
This book tells the fascinating story of Robert of Arbrissel (ca. 1045-1116). Robert was a parish priest, longtime student, reformer, hermit, wandering preacher, and, most famously, founder of the abbey of Fontevraud
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Robert of Arbrissel
A Medieval Religious Life
Bruce L. Venarde
Catholic University of America Press, 2003

front cover of A Rule for Children and Other Writings
A Rule for Children and Other Writings
Jacqueline Pascal
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Jacqueline Pascal (1625-1661) was the sister of Blaise Pascal and a nun at the Jansenist Port-Royal convent in France. She was also a prolific writer who argued for the spiritual rights of women and the right of conscientious objection to royal, ecclesiastic, and family authority.

This book presents selections from the whole of Pascal's career as a writer, including her witty adolescent poetry and her pioneering treatise on the education of women, A Rule for Children, which drew on her experiences as schoolmistress at Port-Royal. Readers will also find Pascal's devotional treatise, which matched each moment in Christ's Passion with a corresponding virtue that his female disciples should cultivate; a transcript of her interrogation by church authorities, in which she defended the controversial theological doctrines taught at Port-Royal; a biographical sketch of her abbess, which presented Pascal's conception of the ideal nun; and a selection of letters offering spirited defenses of Pascal's right to practice her vocation, regardless of patriarchal objections.
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Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America
David Stoll
Temple University Press, 1993
William J. Goode Book Award, American Sociological Association Family Section, 2000 "Path-breaking, brilliant, and a pleasure to read. The idea that women will be either career or home oriented is one that is long overdue for re-examination." --Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University In American culture, the image of balancing work and family life is most often represented in the glossy shot of the executive-track woman balancing cell-phone, laptop, and baby. In Weaving Work and Motherhood, Anita Ilta Garey focuses not on the corporate executives so frequently represented in American ads and magazines but, rather, on the women in jobs that typify the vast majority of women's employment in the United States. A sociologist, work, and family expert, Garey situates her research in the health service industry. Interviewing a racially and ethnically diverse group of women hospital workers--clerical workers, janitorial workers, nurses, and nurse's aids--Garey analyzes what it means to be at once a mother who is employed and a worker with children. Within the limits of the resources available to them, women integrate their identities as workers and their identities as mothers by valuing their relation to work while simultaneously preserving cultural norms about what it means to be a good mother. Some of these women work non-day shifts in order to have the right blocks of time at home, including, for example, a registered nurse who explains how working the night shift enables her to see her children off to school, greet them when they return, and attend school events in the way she feels "good mothers" should - even if she finds little time for sleep. Moving beyond studies of women, work, and family in terms of structural incompatibilities, Garey challenges images of the exclusively "work-oriented" or exclusively "family-oriented" mother. As women talk about their lives, Garey focuses on the meanings of motherhood and of work that underlie their strategies for integrating employment and motherhood. She replaces notions of how women "balance" work and family with a better understanding of how women integrate, negotiate, and weave together their identities as both workers and mothers. Breaking new ground in the study of work and family, Weaving Work and Motherhood offers new insights for those interested in sociology, gender and women's studies, social policy, child care, social welfare, and health care. "Anita Ilta Garey carves out new terrain by unifying the study of work and family in women's lives. Rich in detail about working mothers' experiences, this book inaugurates a powerful framework for future research in family studies." --Maxine Baca Zinn, co-editor of Women of Color in U.S. Society (Temple) "A perceptive account, especially good at making visible the work activities and commitments of women in female-dominated and part-time positions." --Marjorie DeVault, author of Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work "This gem of a study points out the kinds of social solutions that are needed to address how to integrate daily family life with labor force participation. Using a hospital to find respondents who are employed in typically female-dominated occupations, Garey conducted in-depth interviews with women that have children about their individual work and family strategies. She dispels the myth that women choose between employment and family." --Rosanna Hertz, author of More Equal Than Others: Women and Men in Dual-Career Marriages
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The Reverend Jacob Bailey, Maine Loyalist
For God, King, Country, and for Self
James S. Leamon
University of Massachusetts Press, 2012
This book tells the story of the Reverend Jacob Bailey, a missionary preacher for the Church of England in the frontier town of Pownalborough (now Dresden), Maine, who refused to renounce allegiance to King George III during the American War of Independence. Relying largely on Bailey's unpublished journals and voluminous correspondence, James S. Leamon traces Bailey's evolution from his rustic background through his Harvard education and subsequent career as a teacher, Congregational minister, and missionary preacher for the Church of England. Along the way, Bailey absorbed many of the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, but also the more traditional conviction that family, society, religion, and politics, like creation itself, should be orderly and hierarchal. Such beliefs led Bailey to oppose the Revolution as unnatural, immoral, and doomed to fail.

Reverend Bailey's persistence in praying for the king and his refusal to publicize the Declaration of Independence from his Pownalborough pulpit aroused hostilities that drove him and his family to the safety of Nova Scotia. There, in exile, Bailey devoted himself to assisting fellow refugees while defending himself from others. During this time, he wrote almost obsessively: poems, dramas, novels, histories. Though few were ever completed, and even fewer published, in one way or another most of his writings depicted the trauma he underwent as a loyalist.

Leamon's study of the Reverend Jacob Bailey depicts the complex nature and burdens of one person's loyalism while revealing much about eighteenth-century American life and culture.
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Revival and Reconciliation
The Anglican Church and the Politics of Rwanda
Phillip A. Cantrell II
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
When Europe began colonizing Rwanda in the late nineteenth century, the Anglican Church played a significant and long-lasting role in controlling the colony through the Ruanda Mission. This informative volume shows how the church repeatedly aligned with the regime in power and failed to take account of its own history in fomenting ethnic tensions prior to the 1994 genocide. In recent years, the media has depicted Rwanda as a model of unity, development, and recovery, yet Phillip A. Cantrell II argues that not all is as it seems, as he takes a critical look at the church's complicity with authoritarian rule—from the Tutsi monarchy to the Rwandan Patriotic Front.

Drawing from new archival materials as well as on-the-ground field research, Revival and Reconciliation is a Rwanda-centered account of the country's ecclesiastical and national historiography. Cantrell calls attention to the harms the postgenocide church risks doing should it continue to support false narratives about Rwanda's colonial and postcolonial past—with dangerous consequences for the future.
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Righteous Discontent
The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Harvard University Press, 1993

What Du Bois noted has gone largely unstudied until now. In this book, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gives us our first full account of the crucial role of black women in making the church a powerful institution for social and political change in the black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the black church served as the most effective vehicle by which men and women alike, pushed down by racism and poverty, regrouped and rallied against emotional and physical defeat. Focusing on the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious movement among black Americans, Higginbotham shows us how women were largely responsible for making the church a force for self-help in the black community. In her account, we see how the efforts of women enabled the church to build schools, provide food and clothing to the poor, and offer a host of social welfare services. And we observe the challenges of black women to patriarchal theology. Class, race, and gender dynamics continually interact in Higginbotham’s nuanced history. She depicts the cooperation, tension, and negotiation that characterized the relationship between men and women church leaders as well as the interaction of southern black and northern white women’s groups.

Higginbotham’s history is at once tough-minded and engaging. It portrays the lives of individuals within this movement as lucidly as it delineates feminist thinking and racial politics. She addresses the role of black Baptist women in contesting racism and sexism through a “politics of respectability” and in demanding civil rights, voting rights, equal employment, and educational opportunities.

Righteous Discontent finally assigns women their rightful place in the story of political and social activism in the black church. It is central to an understanding of African American social and cultural life and a critical chapter in the history of religion in America.

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The Rise to Respectability
Race, Religion, and the Church of God in Christ
Calvin White
University of Arkansas Press, 2015
The Rise to Respectability documents the history of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and examines its cultural and religious impact on African Americans and on the history of the South. It explores the ways in which Charles Harrison Mason, the son of slaves and founder of COGIC, embraced a Pentecostal faith that celebrated charismatic forms of religious expression that many blacks had come to view as outdated, unsophisticated, and embarrassing. While examining the intersection of race, religion, and class, The Rise to Respectability details how the denomination dealt with the stringent standard of bourgeois behavior imposed on churchgoers as they moved from southern rural areas into the urban centers in both the South and North. Rooted in the hardships of slavery and coming of age during Jim Crow, COGIC's story is more than a religious debate. Rather, this book sees the history of the church as interwoven with the Great Migration, the struggle for modernity, class tension, and racial animosity--all representative parts of the African American experience.
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Religion of Fear
The True Story of the Church of God of the Union Assembly
David Cady
University of Tennessee Press, 2020
Religion of Fear reveals the story of how a Pentecostal sect, the Church of God of the Union Assembly, a small splinter group of the holiness Church of God movement, evolved into one of the largest and wealthiest cults in America. At its height in 1995, the Union Assembly included fifty-four churches spread across nineteen states. Spanning nearly a hundred years and three generations of family leadership and relying on hundreds of interviews with members and former members, David Cady’s groundbreaking investigation begins, in 1917, with the Church’s illiterate but magnetic founder, Charlie (C. T.) Pratt, summoning a congregation of resilient followers with little more than a flair for spectacle. As power dynamics stir within the maturing Church, Cady turns to C. T.’s fourth son, Jesse, who conspires to wrest the Union Assembly from his five brothers and dismiss his own parents from the church they had created. Jesse dominated the Church with fear and a demand of total obedience from its nearly 15,000 members until his mysterious death at age fifty-six.

As Cady reveals, this event triggered a succession crisis in the Pratt-family ranks as Jesse’s wife fostered her son Jesse Junior’s rise to power and spurned other heirs presumptive to the Church. Jesse Junior turned out to be a tormented leader who drove his followers to the brink of poverty with an uncompromising demand that they give their all to God—and to him. The church’s fortune squandered and its future under threat, Jesse Junior’s mother was finally forced to have her favored son removed and defrocked. For all its troubling twists and turns, Cady’s chronicle ends with a minor miracle, as Jesse’s younger brother, Charlie T. Pratt III, takes over leadership and manages to expel the oppressive air of authoritarianism from the body of the Church and hold the community together in the process.
 
 
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front cover of Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire
Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire
Nazarite Women's Performance in South Africa
Carol Ann Muller
University of Chicago Press, 1999
With close to one million members, the Church of the Nazarites (ibandla lamaNazaretha) is one of the most popular indigenous religious communities in South Africa. Founded in 1910 by Isaiah Shembe, it offers South Africans—particularly disadvantaged black women and girls—a way to remake and reconnect to ancient sacred traditions disrupted by colonialism and apartheid. Ethnomusicologist Carol Muller explores the everyday lives of Nazarite women through their religious songs and dances, dream narratives, and fertility rituals, which come to life both musically and visually on CD-ROM.

Against the backdrop of South Africa's turbulent history, Muller shows how Shembe's ideas of female ritual purity developed as a response to a regime and culture that pushed all things associated with women, cultural expression, and Africanness to the margins.

Carol Muller breaks new ground in the study of this changing region and along the way includes fascinating details of her own poignant journey, as a young, white South African woman, to the "other" side of a divided society.
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Recovering the Margins of American Religious History
The Legacy of David Edwin Harrell Jr.
B. Dwain Waldrep
University of Alabama Press, 2012
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Recovering the Margins of American Religious History, a celebration of the life and work of David Edwin Harrell Jr., brings together essays from Harrell’s colleagues, peers, and students that explore his impact and legacy in the field of American religious studies. Raised in an upper-class family in mid-twentieth-century Jacksonville, Florida, Harrell’s membership in the Church of Christ helped establish his sense of self as a spiritual outsider. This early exclusion from the Christian mainstream laid a foundation for Harrell’s pioneering studies of marginalized faiths, including the first stirrings of neo-fundamentalism and the diminishingly influential social gospel movement.
 
Harrell’s connections with these religious movements point to his deeper ongoing concerns with class, gender, and race as core factors behind religious institutions, and he has unblinkingly investigated a wide range of social dynamics. Combining an extensive knowledge of and long-standing passion for American religious history with a comprehensive understanding of the developing world, Harrell’s research and writings over his lifetime have produced compelling portraits of the American religious underclass, an increased integration of religion into the narrative of world history, and innovative new comparative studies in the healing and charismatic movements of the developing world.
 
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Contributors
Scott C. Billingsley / Wayne Flynt / James R. Goff Jr. / John C. Hardin / Samuel S. Hill / Richard T. Hughes / Beth Barton Schweiger / Grant Wacker / B. Dwain Waldrep / Charles Reagan Wilson
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Restoration and Philosophy
New Philosophical Engagements with the Stone-Campbell Tradition
J. Caleb Clanton
University of Tennessee Press, 2019
A product of the Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century, the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement gave rise to such denominations as the Church of Christ (a cappella), the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and the independent Christian Churches/ Churches of Christ. While scholars have examined many of the historical, ecclesial, socio-cultural, and biographical dimensions of this indigenously American religious tradition, few have singled it out for philosophical exploration and critique.
 
In Restoration and Philosophy, editor J. Caleb Clanton and a team of philosophers engage with the Stone-Campbell Restoration tradition to address issues related to epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, aesthetics, environmentalism, and race. Along the way, the authors help to contextualize the Stone- Campbell Restoration tradition within American religious history—and within Christian philosophy more generally—and they show its continuing relevance today.

Scholars and students of philosophy and religious studies, as as well as ministers and those interested in this uniquely American Christian tradition, will benefit from this carefully edited, thoroughly researched, and highly readable collection of essays by eminent philosophers and religious scholars.
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Roots and Fruits of a Powerful Peace Testimony
Bruce Birchard
QuakerPress, 2004

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Resistance and Obedience to God
David Ferris
QuakerPress, 2001

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Race Patriotism
Protest and Print Culture in the A.M.E. Church
Julius H. Bailey
University of Tennessee Press, 2012

Race Patriotism: Protest and Print Culture in the A.M.E. Church examines important nineteenth-century social issues through the lens of the AME Church and its publications.  This book explores the ways in which leaders and laity constructed historical narratives around varied locations to sway public opinion of the day.  Drawing on the official church newspaper, the Christian Recorder, and other denominational and rare major primary sources, Bailey goes beyond previously published works that focus solely on the founding era of the tradition or the eastern seaboard or post-bellum South to produce a work than breaks new historiographical ground by spanning the entirety of the nineteenth century and exploring new geographical terrain such as the American West.

Through careful analysis of AME print culture, Bailey demonstrates that far from focusing solely on the “politics of uplift” and seeking to instill bourgeois social values in black society as other studies have suggested, black authors, intellectuals, and editors used institutional histories and other writings for activist purposes and reframed protest in new ways in the postbellum period.

Adding significantly to the literature on the history of the book and reading in the nineteenth century, Bailey examines AME print culture as a key to understanding African American social reform recovering the voices of black religious leaders and writers to provide a more comprehensive and nuanced portrayal of the central debates and issues facing African Americans in the nineteenth century such as migration westward, selecting the appropriate referent for the race, Social Darwinism, and the viability of emigration to Africa.  Scholars and students of religious studies, African American studies, American studies, history, and journalism will welcome this pioneering new study.

Julius H. Bailey is the author of Around the Family Altar: Domesticity in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1865–1900.  He is an associate professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Redlands in Redlands, California.

 

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Roots of Modern Mormonism
Mark P. Leone
Harvard University Press, 1979

Mark Leone comes to new conclusions about the evolution of Mormonism, both as a self-sufficient religious sect and as a movement within the broader context of American history. Applying the tools of anthropology for the first time to this subject, he identifies the features that have allowed an outcast utopia of the nineteenth century to achieve worldwide success in the twentieth.

The author explores the ways in which a minority survives in a hostileenvironment, both physical and cultural. He focuses especially on theMormon settlements of eastern Arizona, whose rich records reveal inmicrocosm the workings of a modern theocracy. The early Mormon radicalism emerges as an appropriateresponse to contemporary conditions. With the shift of Mormonismfrom independence to colonial statusat the turn of the century, Mormonideas begin their transformation toconservatism, again illustrating theflexibility that is a key to thereligion's stunning success.

Leone's broad range ofsources, including diaries, nativehistories, judicial records, and correspondence, gives a full picture ofMormon life and history. He has alsodone extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Mormon settlementsalong the Little Colorado River, so asto be able to describe the movementin its own terms.

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Rational Theology
John A. Widtsoe
Signature Books, 1998
The decades framing the turn of the twentieth century constituted a period of progressive optimism, of increasing faith in science and technology, and of character-building education—vividly illustrated in the founding of Christian Science, for example, and in the Latter-day Saint magazine, the Improvement Era.

In keeping with the times, it is not surprising that former professor of chemistry and university president John A. Widtsoe was called to the LDS Quorum of Twelve Apostles in 1921. An inheritor and promoter of “reasonable” religion, his popular book, Joseph Smith as Scientist, and his influential LDS Melchizedek priesthood manual (later released as a book), Rational Theology, underscored his and other Mormon leaders’ positivist assumptions about the world—that science was good, that Mormonism would be proven true, and, drawing from Herbert Spencer’s application of evolution to ethics, that society would be perfected.

Like Widtsoe’s secular books (published nationally and internationally by Macmillan, Webb, and J. Wiley & Sons), Rational Theology would enjoy multiple printings domestically and several foreign translations. Although his other church writings (Evidences and ReconciliationsThe Gospel in the Service of Man, Guide Posts to Happiness: The Right to Personal Satisfaction, and others) proved to be influential, none so thoroughly summarized his embrace of science and Mormonism as Rational Theology.

John Andreas Widtsoe was born in Dalöe, Island of Fröyen, Norway, in 1872. He immigrated to Utah in 1883 and graduated from Brigham Young College in 1891 and from Harvard with high honors in 1894. Widtsoe married Leah Eudora Dunford, daughter of Susa Young Gates, in 1898 and had seven children. In 1899 he was awarded a Ph.D. with high honors from the University of Göttingen, Germany. He both taught at and served as president of Utah State Agricultural College and the University of Utah. He was elected to the Victoria Institute in England, an honor received by only one other Mormon scholar—James E. Talmage. Widtsoe served as editor of the Improvement Era and wrote more than thirty books, including religious, autobiographical, and professional publications. His essay on LDS temple worship has been included in the new edition of The House of the Lord: A Study of Holy Sanctuaries Ancient and Modern. He was an apostle from 1921 until his death in 1952.

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Revising Eternity
27 Latter-day Saint Men Reflect on Modern Relationships
Edited by Holly Welker
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Marriage’s central role in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints distinguishes the faith while simultaneously reflecting widespread American beliefs. But what does Latter-day Saint marriage mean for men? Holly Welker presents a collection of essays exploring this question. The essayists provide insight into challenges involving sexuality, physical and emotional illness, addiction, loss of faith, infidelity, sexual orientation, and other topics. Conversational and heartfelt, the writings reveal the varied experiences of Latter-day Saint marriage against the backdrop of a society transformed by everything from economic issues affecting marriage to evolving ideas about gender.

An insightful exploration of the gap between human realities and engrained ideals, Revising Eternity sheds light on how Latter-day Saint men view and experience marriage today.

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Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy
The Introduction and Implementation of the Principle, 1830–1853
Merina Smith
Utah State University Press, 2013
 In Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy historian Merina Smith explores the introduction of polygamy in Nauvoo, a development that unfolded amid scandal and resistance. Smith considers the ideological, historical, and even psychological elements of the process and captures the emotional and cultural detail of this exciting and volatile period in Mormon history. She illuminates the mystery of early adherents' acceptance of such a radical form of marriage in light of their dedication to the accepted monogamous marriage patterns of their day.

When Joseph Smith began to reveal and teach the doctrine of plural marriage in 1841, even stalwart members like Brigham Young were shocked and confused. In this thoughtful study, Smith argues that the secret introduction of plural marriage among the leadership coincided with an evolving public theology that provided a contextualizing religious narrative that persuaded believers to accept the principle.

This fresh interpretation draws from diaries, letters, newspapers, and other primary sources and is especially effective in its use of family narratives. It will be of great interest not only to scholars and the general public interested in Mormon history but in American history, religion, gender and sexuality, and the history of marriage and families.
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Radical Origins
Early Mormon Converts and Their Colonial Ancestors
Val D. Rust
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Val D. Rust's Radical Origins investigates whether the unconventional religious beliefs of their colonial ancestors predisposed early Mormon converts to embrace the (radical( message of Joseph Smith Jr. and his new church.
 
Utilizing a unique set of meticulously compiled genealogical data, Rust uncovers the ancestors of early church members throughout what we understand as the radical segment of the Protestant Reformation. Coming from backgrounds in the Antinomians, Seekers, Anabaptists, Quakers, and the Family of Love, many colonial ancestors of the church(s early members had been ostracized from their communities.  Expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, some were whipped, mutilated, or even hanged for their beliefs.
 
Rust shows how family traditions can be passed down through the generations, and can ultimately shape the outlook of future generations. This, he argues, extends the historical role of Mormons by giving their early story significant implications for understanding the larger context of American colonial history. Featuring a provocative thesis and stunning original research, Radical Origins is a remarkable contribution to our understanding of religion in the development of American culture and the field of Mormon history.
 
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Recollections of Past Days
The Autobiography of Patience Loader Rozsa Archer
edited by Sandra Ailey Petree
Utah State University Press, 2006

For visitors to the Martin's Cove historic site in Wyoming, Patience Loader has become an icon of the disastrous winter entrapment of the Martin and Willie handcart companies. Her record of those events is important, but there is much else of interest in her autobiography. In fact, it is a bit unusual that someone such as her would have left such an engaging record of her life.

The daughter of an English gardener, Patience Loader became a boarding house servant, domestic maid, and seamstress. Converted to Mormonism, she shipped with her parents to America. They joined the ill-fated Martin company, which because of poor planning and a late start west, was caught poorly prepared by severe high plains snowstorms in October and November 1856. The combined fatalities of the Martin and Willie companies made this the worst disaster in the history of overland travel. Patience = s father was one of those who died. After reaching Utah, Patience took the unusual step for a Mormon of marrying a soldier, John Rozsa, stationed at Camp Floyd. The troops there had made up the Utah Expedition, sent to ensure federal authority over the Mormons. Rozsa was a Hungarian immigrant and Mormon convert. When the Utah troops were recalled for the Civil War, Patience accompanied her husband, as an army laundress, to Washington, D.C., running a boarding house while Rozsa fought. After the war, he died at Fort Leavenworth of consumption, and Patience returned alone to Utah, where she became a cook at a mining camp in American Fork Canyon. Her autobiography ends there in 1872, though she lived till 1922.

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Restless Pilgrim
Andrew Jenson's Quest for Latter-day Saint History
Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Andrew Jenson undertook a lifelong quest to render the LDS historical record complete and comprehensive. As Assistant Church Historian of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jenson tirelessly carried out his office's archival mission and advocated for fixed recordkeeping to become a duty for Latter-day Saints. Reid L. Neilson and Scott D. Marianno offer a new in-depth study of Jenson's long life and career. Their account follows Jenson from his arrival as a Danish immigrant to 1860s Utah through trips around the world to secure documents from far-flung missions, and on to his public life as a newspaper columnist and interpreter of LDS history. Throughout, Jenson emerges as a figure dedicated to the belief that recorded history united past and present Latter-day Saints in heaven and on earth--and for all eternity.

Engaging and informed, Restless Pilgrim is a groundbreaking study of an important figure in Latter-day Saint intellectual life during a transformative era in Church history.

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A Rascal by Nature, A Christian by Yearning
A Mormon Autobiography
Peterson, Levi S
University of Utah Press, 2006
I will introduce myself with a few facts. I was born and raised in Snowflake, a Mormon town in northern Arizona. I have lived most of my adult life in the cities of the American West. Although I consider myself a religious person, I know very little about God. At first I intended this book to be about wilderness, but as I wrote it, it became an autobiography with many themes. Among these themes are wilderness, my vexed and vexing relationship with Mormonism, my moral and emotional qualities, and my family.' So begins the autobiography of educator and author Levi S. Peterson.

Peterson has won a wide readership for his novels and short stories, his prize-winning biography of historian Juanita Brooks, and the essays that have appeared with regularity in western and Mormon literary and historical journals. In his autobiography, Peterson describes growing up on the Mormon frontier of rural Arizona, his growing skepticism with his Mormon faith, his teaching career at Weber State University, and his struggle to understand and master personal crises of confidence that kept him in therapy for almost two decades. Of particular interest to readers familiar with Peterson’s fiction are the many pages devoted to the creative process.

Winner of the Mormon History Association Turner-Bergera Best Biography Award. 
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Reconsidering No Man Knows My History
edited by Newell G. Bringhurst
Utah State University Press, 1996
Fawn Brodie's biography of the founding Mormon prophet has received both praise and condemnation since it's publication in 1945. In 1995, at a symposium to mark its fiftieth anniversary, several scholars gathered together to re-examine Brodie, her Joseph Smith biography and its continuing importance. Bringhurst has brought together many of the essays from that meeting.
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