The religious persecution and intellectual intolerance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries compelled many heterodox groups and thinkers to resort to misdirection, hidden meaning, secrecy, and deceit. In this highly unusual interpretation, Perez Zagorin traces the theory and practice of religious leaders, philosophers, intellectuals, and men of letters who used deception to cloak dissident beliefs.
Zagorin surveys some of the chief sources of early modern doctrines of dissimulation in the Bible and the works of theologians from Jerome andAugustine to Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin. Subjects covered include Nicodemism, the name given by Calvin to secret Protestants who concealed their faith behind a facade of conformity to Catholic worship; crypto-Judaism in Spain; and the hidden beliefs of English Catholics. Other topics include the Catholic doctrine of mental reservation; the place of dissimulation in English Protestant casuistry; occultism; and dissimulation of religious unbelief among philosophers and men of letters. In charting the widespread phenomenon of lying and deceit and by exploring its evolutions, Perez Zagorin has made an important contribution to the historiography of an intellectually roiling and perilous time. He adds a vital dimension to our understanding of the religious, intellectual, and cultural history of the epoch before the modern. Lacey Baldwin Smith finds this hook “an impressive and scholarly work of cultural synthesis that coins a fresh label for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the age of dissimulation. Zagorin’s efforts to compare and contrast Catholic and Protestant styles of dissimulation and Nicodemism are important, casting a new perspective and focus on the religious and intellectual dissent of the era.”
“Well-written, absorbing, and a great pleasure to read . . . will appeal to Christians struggling to square their traditional beliefs with acceptance of homosexuality as well as to all those interested in adoption, lesbian marriage, and the changing shape of America’s families.”
—Elizabeth C. Fine, Virginia Tech University
Waiting for the Call takes readers from the foothills of the Appalachians—where Jacqueline Taylor was brought up in a strict evangelical household—to contemporary Chicago, where she and her lesbian partner are raising a family. In a voice by turns comic and loving, Taylor recounts the amazing journey that took her in profoundly different directions from those she or her parents could have ever envisioned.
Taylor’s father was a Southern Baptist preacher, and she struggled to deal with his strictures as well as her mother’s manic-depressive episodes. After leaving for college, Taylor finds herself questioning her faith and identity, questions that continue to mount when—after two divorces, a doctoral degree, and her first kiss with a woman—she discovers her own lesbianism and begins a most untraditional family that grows to include two adopted children from Peru.
Even as she celebrates and cherishes this new family, Taylor insists on the possibility of maintaining a loving connection to her religious roots. While she and her partner search for the best way to explain adoption to their children and answer the inevitable question, “Which one is your mom?” they also seek out a church that will unite their love of family and their faith. Told in the great storytelling tradition of the American South, full of deep feeling and wry humor, Waiting for the Call engagingly demonstrates how one woman bridged the gulf between faith and sexual identity without abandoning her principles.
How did canonization take place, and what difference does it make?
Essays in this collection probe the canonical process: Why were certain books, but not others, included in the canon? What criteria were used to select the books of the canon? Was canonization a divine fiat or human act? What was the nature of the authority of the laws and narratives of the Torah? How did prophecy come to be included in the canon? Others reflect on the consequences of canonization: What are the effects in elevating certain writings to the status of “Holy Scriptures”? What happens when a text is included in an official list? What theological and hermeneutical questions are at stake in the fact of the canon? Should the canon be unsealed or reopened to include other writings?
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Celebrate 125 years of women's history in the Society of Biblical Literature.
Fourteen years after eight male biblical scholars met in Philip Schaff's study to create the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, the Society admitted its first woman, Anna Ely Rhoads, in 1894. Since Rhoads joined, the careers and lives of women in SBL have changed radically from those earliest members, whose careers were largely tied to the careers of their fathers or spouses and to institutions concerned with the education of young women. Current members now serve on editorial boards and committees; women present papers and publish books; they teach and mentor students. Leading women biblical scholars from around the world reflect on their experiences studying the Bible academically in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This volume is a valuable tool for scholars and students interested in the lives and experiences of women in academic fields, the history of the SBL, and developments in the academic study of the Bible.
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Celebrate the career of an inspirational scholar and teacher concerned with revealing voices from the margins
This volume of essays honors Susan Niditch, author of War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (1993), “My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man”: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel (2008), and most recently, The Responsive Self: Personal Religion in Biblical Literature of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods (forthcoming), among other influential publications. Essays touch on topics such as folklore, mythology, and oral history, Israelite religion, ancient Judaism, warfare, violence, and gender.
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Expand the discourse and open the spheres of engagement to include new voices of scholars and bold, innovative interpretive approaches
This edited volume brings together cross-generational and cross-cultural readings of the Bible and other sacred sources by including scholars from the Caribbean, India, and Africa who have not traditionally fit into the narrow U.S., African American paradigm for understanding womanist biblical interpretation. The volume engages the reader in a wide range of interdisciplinary methods and perspectives, such as gender and feminist criticism, social-scientific methods, post-colonial and psychoanalytical theory that emphasize the inherently intersectional dynamics of race, ethnicity, and class at work in womanist thought and analysis.
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An international collection of ecumenical, gender-sensitive interpretations
The latest volume in the Bible and Women series seeks to provide an ecumenical, gender-sensitive interpretation and reception history of the Writings and later wisdom traditions including Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon. Articles trace the living conditions of women, examine the presentation of female figures in the Israelite wisdom tradition, discuss women and gender relations in single books, and explore narratives about great female protagonists, such as Ruth, Esther, and Susanna, who prove their wit and strength in situations of conflict.
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New perspectives on Israelite warfare for biblical studies, military studies, and social theory
Contributors investigate what constituted a symbol in war, what rituals were performed and their purpose, how symbols and rituals functioned in and between wars and battles, what effects symbols and rituals had on insiders and outsiders, what ways symbols and rituals functioned as instruments of war, and what roles rituals and symbols played in the production and use of texts.
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A thorough study of the socio-economic and literary contexts of women in the Deuteronomistic History
Mercedes L. García Bachmann examines the key texts in the Deuteronomistic History that mention women in service occupations: slaves and dependents, cooks, wet nurses, childcare givers, prostitutes, and scribes. The mostly anonymous women who performed this work for others are sometimes mentioned only in a single verse. Consequently, they often are as unrecognized in modern scholarship as they seem in the biblical text. García Bachmann shows that these women were honored not in relation to matters such as sexual purity or marital faithfulness but on account of the valuable service that they provided.
Essential reading for scholars and students in wisdom studies
This collection of essays explores questions that challenge the traditional notion of a wisdom tradition among the Israelite literati, such as: Is the wisdom literature a genre or mode of literature or do we need new terminology? Who were the tradents? Is there such a thing as a “wisdom scribe” and what would that look like? Did the scribes who composed wisdom literature also have a hand in producing the other “traditions,” such as the priestly, prophetic, and apocalyptic, as well as other non-sapiential works? Were Israelite sages open to non-sapiential forms of knowledge in their conceptualization of wisdom?
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In the wake of life-changing events—whether as global in reach as the terrorist attacks on September 11 or as personal as the death of a child—the first question that springs to mind is “Why?” Why do good people suffer pain and loss? Why does God allow these things to happen?
In this simple, straightforward book, Bruce Henderson tackles some of the most difficult questions that people of faith face in their lives. Drawing from the wisdom of visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, who wrestled with these same questions more than two hundred years ago, Henderson describes a universe in which God allows us free will and choice, subtly guiding the course of our lives with an insight no mortal can comprehend. Pain and suffering ultimately lead to good, and as we walk the path, we draw ever closer to heaven.
In the end, the question is not why these things happen, but what good can come of them, and how we can use our gift of free will to create a better world for ourselves and others. In this, Henderson says, God is our partner and guiding hand, turning pain to hope and trust.
The Bolognese nun Diodata Malvasia was presumed to have authored only one work, The Arrival and the Miraculous Workings of the Glorious Image of the Virgin (1617). In her recently discovered second manuscript chronicle, A Brief Discourse on What Occurred to the Most Reverend Sisters of the Joined Convents of San Mattia and San Luca (1575), her writing demonstrates active resistance to Tridentine convent reform. Together, Malvasia’s works read as the bookends to a lifelong crusade on behalf of her convent.
In this poignant and startlingly original book, Brian Doyle examines the heart as a physical organ—how it is supposed to work, how surgeons try to fix it when it doesn’t—and as a metaphor: the seat of the soul, the power house of the body, the essence of spirituality. In a series of profoundly moving ruminations, Doyle considers the scientific, emotional, literary, philosophical, and spiritual understandings of the heart—from cardiology to courage, from love letters and pop songs to Jesus. Weaving these strands together is the torment of Doyle’s own infant son’s heart surgery and the inspiring story of the young heart doctor who saved Liam’s life.
The Wet Engine is a book that will change how you feel and think about the mysterious, fragile human heart. This new paperback edition includes a foreword by Dr. Marla Salmon, dean of the University of Washington School of Nursing.
Between 1000 and 1250, the Catholic Church confronted the threat of heresy with increasing force. Some of the most portentous events in medieval history-the Cathar crusade, the persecution and mass burnings of heretics, the papal inquisition established to identify and suppress beliefs that departed from the true religion-date from this period. Fear of heresy molded European society for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond, and violent persecutions of the accused left an indelible mark. Yet, as R. I. Moore suggests, the version of these events that has come down to us may be more propaganda than historical reality.
Popular accounts of heretical events, most notably the Cathar crusade, are derived from thirteenth-century inquisitors who saw organized heretical movements as a threat to society. Skeptical of the reliability of their reports, Moore reaches back to earlier contemporaneous sources, where he learns a startling truth: no coherent opposition to Catholicism, outside the Church itself, existed. The Cathars turn out to be a mythical construction, and religious difference does not explain the origins of battles against heretic practices and beliefs.
A truer explanation lies in conflicts among elites-both secular and religious-who used the specter of heresy to extend their political and cultural authority and silence opposition. By focusing on the motives, anxieties, and interests of those who waged war on heresy, Moore's narrative reveals that early heretics may have died for their faith, but it was not because of their faith that they were put to death.
A distinctive Christian heresy? A competitor of burgeoning Christianity? A pre-Christian folk religion traceable to "Oriental syncretism"? How do we account for the disparate ideas, writings, and practices that have been placed under the Gnostic rubric? To do so, Karen King says, we must first disentangle modern historiography from the Christian discourse of orthodoxy and heresy that has pervaded--and distorted--the story.
Exciting discoveries of previously unknown ancient writings--especially the forty-six texts found at Nag Hammadi in 1945--are challenging historians of religion to rethink not only what we mean by Gnosticism but also the standard account of Christian origins. The Gospel of Mary and The Secret Book of John, for example, illustrate the variety of early Christianities and are witness to the struggle of Christians to craft an identity in the midst of the culturally pluralistic Roman Empire. King shows how historians have been misled by ancient Christian polemicists who attacked Gnostic beliefs as a "dark double" against which the new faith could define itself. Having identified past distortions, she is able to offer a new and clarifying definition of Gnosticism. Her book is thus both a thorough and innovative introduction to the twentieth-century study of Gnosticism and a revealing exploration of the concept of heresy as a tool in forming religious identity.
The power of religion as a symbolic, salvationÐpromising enterprise resides in its authority to create and shape reality for believers and command their obedience. This power can inspire tremendous acts of human kindness, charity, compassion, and hope. But witch hunts, inquisitions, crusades, and pogroms show us how religious authority can be used for far darker purposes. This abuse of power by religious authorities at the expense of their followers is termed clergy malfeasance by editor Anson Shupe and examined by the contributors to Wolves within the Fold.
The essays provide an innovative examination of behavior that is sometimes illegal and always unethical, sometimes punished but often not. Topics range from a cultural study of Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese apocalyptic group now infamous for releasing lethal gas into the Tokyo subway system, to a sociological analysis of financial scandals among evangelical religious groups. Groups analyzed include the Roman Catholic Church, Protestant denominations, televangelists, and the Hare Krishnas.
Since World War II, Protestant sermons have been an influential tool for defining American citizenship in the wake of national crises.
In the aftermath of national tragedies, Americans often turn to churches for solace. Because even secular citizens attend these services, they are also significant opportunities for the Protestant religious majority to define and redefine national identity and, in the process, to invest the nation-state with divinity. The sermons delivered in the wake of crises become integral to historical and communal memory—it matters greatly who is mourned and who is overlooked.
Melissa M. Matthes conceives of these sermons as theo-political texts. In When Sorrow Comes, she explores the continuities and discontinuities they reveal in the balance of state power and divine authority following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the Rodney King verdict, the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, the Newtown shootings, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She argues that Protestant preachers use these moments to address questions about Christianity and citizenship and about the responsibilities of the Church and the State to respond to a national crisis. She also shows how post-crisis sermons have codified whiteness in ritual narratives of American history, excluding others from the collective account. These civic liturgies therefore illustrate the evolution of modern American politics and society.
Despite perceptions of the decline of religious authority in the twentieth century, the pulpit retains power after national tragedies. Sermons preached in such intense times of mourning and reckoning serve as a form of civic education with consequences for how Americans understand who belongs to the nation and how to imagine its future.
From one of our foremost church historians comes an overarching analysis of the three modern Catholic councils—an assessment of what Catholicism was and has become today.
Catholic councils are meetings of bishops. In this unprecedented comparison of the three most recent meetings, John O’Malley traverses more than 450 years of Catholic history and examines the councils’ most pressing and consistent concerns: questions of purpose, power, and relevance in a changing world. By offering new, sometimes radical, even troubling perspectives on these convocations, When Bishops Meet analyzes the evolution of the church itself.
The Catholic Church today is shaped by the historical arc starting from Trent in the sixteenth century to Vatican II. The roles of popes, the laity, theologians, and others have varied from the bishop-centered Trent, to Vatican I’s declaration of papal infallibility, to a new balance of power in the mid-twentieth century. At Trent, lay people had direct influence on proceedings. By Vatican II, their presence was token. At each gathering, fundamental issues recurred: the relationship between bishops and the papacy, the very purpose of a council, and doctrinal change. Can the teachings of the church, by definition a conservative institution, change over time?
Councils, being ecclesiastical as well as cultural institutions, have always reflected and profoundly influenced their times. Readers familiar with John O’Malley’s earlier work as well as those with no knowledge of councils will find this volume an indispensable guide for essential questions: Who is in charge of the church? What difference did the councils make, and will there be another?
During four years in session, Vatican Council II held television audiences rapt with its elegant, magnificently choreographed public ceremonies, while its debates generated front-page news on a near-weekly basis. By virtually any assessment, it was the most important religious event of the twentieth century, with repercussions that reached far beyond the Catholic church. Remarkably enough, this is the first book, solidly based on official documentation, to give a brief, readable account of the council from the moment Pope John XXIII announced it on January 25, 1959, until its conclusion on December 8, 1965; and to locate the issues that emerge in this narrative in their contexts, large and small, historical and theological, thereby providing keys for grasping what the council hoped to accomplish.
What Happened at Vatican II captures the drama of the council, depicting the colorful characters involved and their clashes with one another. The book also offers a new set of interpretive categories for understanding the council’s dynamics—categories that move beyond the tired “progressive” and “conservative” labels. As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the calling of the council, this work reveals in a new way the spirit of Vatican II. A reliable, even-handed introduction to the council, the book is a critical resource for understanding the Catholic church today, including the pontificate of Benedict XVI.
Aelred (1110–1167), abbot of Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, has always been a controversial figure. He was beloved by his monks and widely admired, but also sharply criticized for his frankness about his own sinfulness and what some considered his favoritism and excessive leniency.
Writings on Body and Soul includes a selection of the prolific abbot’s theological, historical, and devotional works. Each contains autobiographical elements, showing Aelred at turns confident and fearful, tormented and serene. In A Pastoral Prayer, he asserts his unworthiness and pleads for divine aid in leading his monks wisely and compassionately. Spiritual Friendship adapts Cicero’s dialogue on friendship for Christian purposes. A Certain Marvelous Miracle offers a riveting account of a pregnant teenage nun, the bloody vengeance wreaked on her seducer, and the miracle of her release from her fetters. Finally, Teachings for Recluses, addressed to Aelred’s sister, is a guide for women pursuing solitary religious perfection.
Freshly revised editions of the Latin texts appear here alongside new English translations.
Appealing to dialogue is often just a safe way of referring to something negative, or at best blandly neutral: the avoidance of conflict, the denial of similarity, not stirring deep-seated disagreement, etc. When Bernard o’Connor says pope Benedict XVI facilitated dialogue, however, he means something quite positive, very much tangible and certainly transformative. In providing an account of the pope’s interactions with various groups of the international community, O’Connor attempts to convey Benedict XVI’s diplomacy as encounter, where even in the sphere of international relations exhortations to “dialogue” are invitations to see more clearly and be moved as much as move.
To dialogue is to embrace, revise perception such that our approaches to the great questions of our day are not simply shared but correct. As O’Connor writes, “Pope Benedict attempts to promote the outlook that a renewed emphasis upon objective, critical and structured philosophical reasoning positions practice, diplomatic and otherwise, to regain its lost foundation and framework. the quest for integrity, if nothing else, should motivate our fidelity to academic pursuit, to intellectual investigation, and to rigorous interdisciplinary inquiry. so influenced, practice will then reject what is arbitrary and be guided by what is time-tested and enduring.”
O’Connor illustrates true dialogue emerging from the encounter, and in turn provides scores of characteristics of this encounter as it unfolds in papal diplomacy. In providing scores of addresses and speeches to various bodies, O’Connor presents pope Benedict XVI as an example of effective diplomacy that treats the meetings on the world stage as engaging in true dialogue. encounter is the true basis of dialogue and one that allows it to open to what is truly a catalyst for change toward cooperation––witness, both personal and collective. As o’Connor shows, “where there is authentic encounter, as meeting in mutual trust, what arises is context for witness.” If authentic even the diplomatic encounter has the means to deepen and transform one’s being.
Witness Through Encounter intends to fulfill multiple needs. the diplomatic approach exemplified herein is singular and worthy of study among political scientists, sociologists, philosophers and diplomats eager to embrace a worldview that is more personal than simply humanistic. this work will also be useful in inter-religious settings. An additional advantage of O’Connor’s presentation of Benedict XVI’s diplomatic approach, his witness through encounter, is that it contains insight valuable to the scholar alongside the resources used.
Between 1939 and 1945 more than 17,000 Catholic German priests and seminarians were conscripted into Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Men who had devoted their lives to God found themselves advancing the cause of an abhorrent regime. Lauren Faulkner Rossi draws on personal correspondence, official military reports, memoirs, and interviews to present a detailed picture of Catholic priests who served faithfully in the German armed forces in the Second World War. Most of them failed to see the bitter irony of their predicament.
Wehrmacht Priests plumbs the moral justifications of men who were committed to their religious vocation as well as to the cause of German nationalism. In their wartime and postwar writings, these soldiers often stated frankly that they went to war willingly, because it was their spiritual duty to care for their countrymen in uniform. But while some priests became military chaplains, carrying out work consistent with their religious training, most served in medical roles or, in the case of seminarians, in general infantry. Their convictions about their duty only strengthened as Germany waged an increasingly desperate battle against the Soviet Union, which they believed was an existential threat to the Catholic Church and German civilization.
Wehrmacht Priests unpacks the complex relationship between the Catholic Church and the Nazi regime, including the Church’s fierce but futile attempts to preserve its independence under Hitler’s dictatorship, its accommodations with the Nazis regarding spiritual care in the military, and the shortcomings of Catholic doctrine in the face of total war and genocide.
Feminist thought has wrestled with the question of whether religion has been principally responsible for the oppression of women or instead has provided access to culture, public life, and--sometimes--power. This study of Italian women and Catholicism from the fourth through the twentieth century reflects this conflict and the tension between the masculine character of divinity in the Catholic Church and the potential for equality in the gospels and early writings ("neither male nor female, but one in Jesus").
The various chapters in this book consider the institutions within which religious women lived, many of which they themselves founded or reorganized. In addition to overviews of women and the religious life throughout the periods under study, specific chapters focus on mystical marriage, religious writings by women, secular writings by nuns, women in sacred images, women in the nineteenth-century Christian family, Marian pilgrimages, and depictions of sisters and saints in film. The authors, leading American, Italian, and French scholars, have drawn on rich resources to provide a panorama of sixteen centuries of Italian history, religious history, and women's history.
Organized as a companion volume to Karl Rahner's master work, Foundations of Christian Faith, this book, now again available, also provides the most useful introduction to his theology as a whole. Each chapter presents a broad commentary on the corresponding chapter of Foundations, beginning with Rahner's method and anthropology and concluding with his theology of the church and eschatology. It includes a separate chapter on Rahner's moral thought. Valuable for classroom or individual use, this volume provides questions for discussion, suggestions for further reading, and an extensive glossary of specialized terminology.
An erudite abbess of Port-Royal, Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly (1624 – 1684) resisted the demands of church and state to condemn the Jansenist theological doctrines which the convent had long upheld. In her autobiographical Report on Captivity, Angélique de Saint-Jean recounts her personal methods of spiritual resistance as she and her fellow nuns underwent waves of persecution resulting in exile, house arrest, interdict, and excommunication. Her voluminous theological writings present the theoretical basis for this resistance, limiting the claims of political and ecclesiastical authorities over the conscience of the individual. In particular, she defends the right of women to refuse to surrender their convictions due to specious appeals to obedience and humility.
Barack Obama has called him “one of my favorite philosophers.” John McCain wrote that he is “a paragon of clarity about the costs of a good war.” Andrew Sullivan has said, “We need Niebuhr now more than ever.” For a theologian who died in 1971, Reinhold Niebuhr is maintaining a remarkably high profile in the twenty-first century.
In Why Niebuhr Now? acclaimed historian John Patrick Diggins tackles the complicated question of why, at a time of great uncertainty about America’s proper role in the world, leading politicians and thinkers are turning to Niebuhr for answers. Diggins begins by clearly and carefully working through Niebuhr’s theology, which focuses less on God’s presence than his absence—and the ways that absence abets the all-too-human sin of pride. He then shows how that theology informed Niebuhr’s worldview, leading him to be at the same time a strong opponent of fascism and communism and a leading advocate for humility and caution in foreign policy.
Turning to the present, Diggins highlights what he argues is a misuse of Niebuhr’s legacy on both the right and the left: while neoconservatives distort Niebuhr’s arguments to support their call for an endless war on terror in the name of stopping evil, many liberal interventionists conveniently ignore Niebuhr’s fundamental doubts about power. Ultimately, Niebuhr’s greatest lesson is that, while it is our duty to struggle for good, we must at the same time be wary of hubris, remembering the limits of our understanding.
The final work from a distinguished writer who spent his entire career reflecting on America’s history and promise, Why Niebuhr Now? is a compact and perceptive book that will be the starting point for all future discussions of Niebuhr.
Wheat Flour Messiah follows the career of Eric Jansson from his boyhood on a farm near Biskopskulla (Bishop’s Hill) in Sweden until his murder in Illinois by a crazed follower in 1850. He was an untutored but brilliant charismatic leader, who by sheer insolence and self-confidence defied both the Swedish state church and the secular government and persuaded some twelve hundred of his wheat flour customers to throw in their lot with him. The essence of his teaching was that anyone who so desired could receive the grace of God in such rich measure that he would instantly be freed of sin and live in angelic innocence from then on. This doctrine was an imperfectly understood version of Methodist perfectionism, held without Wesleyan safeguards, and it doomed his followers to civil war against the Lutheran church.
Jansson went north to Hälsingland in Sweden to sell wheat flour, but his deeper intention was to hold large religious services in the farmyards of followers. On three occasions he and his followers burned all the allegedly heretical books written by such men as Luther, Nohrborg, and Arndt, singing hymns while the flames "destroyed the works of the Devil." Jansson was jailed six times, and six times he was freed. After his last trial, as he was being escorted to jail, he escaped and later arranged passage to America. His disciples followed him in a series of Atlantic crossings during 1847–49 and settled the utopian colony of Bishop Hill, 150 miles west of Chicago. They built impressive buildings, plowed the virgin prairie, and began some successful industry making wagons and weaving rugs.
Two fateful events spelled the doom of this utopian dream. The first, the cholera epidemic of 1849,killed over two hundred of the colonists. The other was the arrival of John Root, who subsequently married Jansson’s cousin, Charlotte, and who, after a series of altercations with Jansson over Charlotte, shot him to death in Cambridge, Illinois. The colony did not long survive without its Prophet, and ten years later the utopian dream ended. Today Bishop Hill remains little changed from a century ago—a colorful memory of American beginnings, a vivid reminder of its fascinating past.
Dr. Elmen’s book tells for the first time the life story of a folk hero, Eric Jansson. The Bishop Hill Colony was clearly the lengthened shadow of this extraordinary man. Students of utopian colonies, teachers and students of American history and religious movements will find here a definitive account of this piece of the American past. Any reader interested in the American Dream will enjoy this account of a vanished people who thought they could find somewhere on earth a great, good place, and who had to learn after much suffering that one cannot express in waking reality the character of man in his dreams.
Every great book has a great backstory. Here well-known historians describe their journeys of writing books that have influenced our understanding of the Mormon past, offering an unprecedented glimpse into why they wrote these important works. Writing Mormon History is a must-read for historians, students of history, scholars, and aspiring authors. The volume’s contributors are Polly Aird, Will Bagley, Todd Compton, Brian Hales, Melvin Johnson, William MacKinnon, Linda King Newell, Gregory Prince, D. Michael Quinn, Craig Smith, George D. Smith, Vickie Cleverley Speek, Susan Staker, Daniel Stone, and John Turner. The majority of the essays appear here for the first time.
The Book of Mormon’s narrative privileges Isaiah over other sources, provocatively interpreting and at times inventively reworking the biblical text. Joseph M. Spencer sees within the Book of Mormon a programmatic investigation regarding the meaning and relevance of the Book of Isaiah in a world increasingly removed from the context of the times that produced it. Working from the crossroads of reception studies and Mormon studies, Spencer investigates and clarifies the Book of Mormon’s questions about the vitality of Isaiah’s prophetic project. Spencer’s analysis focuses on the Book of Mormon’s three interactions with the prophet: the character of Abinadi; the resurrected Jesus Christ; and the nation-founding figure of Nephi. Working from the Book of Mormon as it was dictated, Spencer details its vital and overlooked place in Isaiah’s reception while recognizing the interpretation of Isaiah as an organizing force behind the Book of Mormon.
This allegorical retelling of the biblical creation story blends science, poetic understanding, and the spiritual revelations of Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Starting with the creation of the earth from the substance of the universe, Swedenborg takes the reader through the formation of plants, animals, and finally human beings. He puts particular emphasis on the spiritual nature of Adam and Adam’s marriage to Eve. Although not considered one of Swedenborg’s theological works, this book was written just prior to his visionary period and contains the seeds of many of his later ideas, particularly the biblical commentary in Secrets of Heaven. This edition is a reprint of a 1914 English translation by Alfred H. Stroh and Frank Sewall.
What happens to us when we die? Is there really a heaven and hell? Are there angels watching over us? These questions follow us from early childhood to old age, particularly in moments when we’re confronted with the loss of a loved one.
In Window to Eternity, Bruce Henderson draws from the teachings of visionary Emanuel Swedenborg to paint a vivid picture of heaven and hell, where the souls of the departed become angels and demons and indescribable wonders await. But far from being a distant destination, Henderson shows that heaven is a choice that each of us makes every day—ours to have or to turn away from, regardless of our background or religious upbringing.
Natives of the Iberian Peninsula and the twenty countries of Latin America, as well as their kinsfolk who've immigrated to the United States and around the world, share a common quality or identity characterized as la hispanidad. Or do they?
In this lively, provocative book, two distinguished intellectuals, a cultural critic and a historian, engage in a series of probing conversations in which they try to discern the nature of la hispanidad and debate whether any such shared identity binds the world's nearly half billion people who are "Hispanic." Their conversations range from La Reconquista and Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, who united the Spanish nation while expelling its remaining Moors and Jews, to the fervor for el fútbol (soccer) that has swept much of Latin America today. Along the way, they discuss a series of intriguing topics, including the complicated relationship between Latin America and the United States, Spanish language and the uses of Spanglish, complexities of race and ethnicity, nineteenth-century struggles for nationhood and twentieth-century identity politics, and popular culture from literary novels to telenovelas. Woven throughout are the authors' own enlightening experiences of crossing borders and cultures in Mexico and Chile and the United States.
Sure to provoke animated conversations among its readers, What is la hispanidad? makes a convincing case that "our hispanidad is rooted in a changing tradition, flexible enough to persist beyond boundaries and circumstances. Let us not fix it with a definition, but allow it instead to travel, always."
The events of September 11, 2001, forever changed the world as we knew it. In their wake, the quest for international order has prompted a reshuffling of global aims and priorities. In a fresh approach, Gilles Kepel focuses on the Middle East as a nexus of international disorder and decodes the complex language of war, propaganda, and terrorism that holds the region in its thrall.
The breakdown of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 2000 was the first turn in a downward spiral of violence and retribution. Meanwhile, a neo-conservative revolution in Washington unsettled U.S. Mideast policy, which traditionally rested on the twin pillars of Israeli security and access to Gulf oil. In Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, a transformation of the radical Islamist doctrine of Bin Laden and Zawahiri relocated the arena of terrorist action from Muslim lands to the West; Islamist radicals proclaimed jihad against their enemies worldwide.
Kepel examines the impact of global terrorism and the ensuing military operations to stem its tide. He questions the United States' ability to address the Middle East challenge with Cold War rhetoric, while revealing the fault lines in terrorist ideology and tactics. Finally, he proposes the way out of the Middle East quagmire that triangulates the interests of Islamists, the West, and the Arab and Muslim ruling elites. Kepel delineates the conditions for the acceptance of Israel, for the democratization of Islamist and Arab societies, and for winning the minds and hearts of Muslims in the West.
W. Raymond Wood played a leading role in the early days of Great Plains archaeology. In A White-Bearded Plainsman, he tells how his own career emerged, as the discipline of Plains archaeology developed during the post-World War II era. Readers will learn of the childhood influences that lead Wood to pursue the path of archaeologist, and of the events and people that shaped his professional life. In addition to telling Wood’s personal story, the book provides an intellectual history of the discipline of mid-continental archaeology over the last half century. It will thus be valuable to students and scholars in the field, as it describes how the paradigms in Plains and midwestern prehistory have changed over time. To understand the discipline, one must understand the cultural and intellectual underpinnings that shaped it. Wood’s book helps map for a new generation of archaeologists from whence they’ve come, and his role in the developments along the way.
Georgie White Clark-adventurer, raconteur, eccentric--first came to know the canyons of the Colorado River by swimming portions of them with a single companion. She subsequently hiked and rafted portions of the canyons, increasingly sharing her love of the Colorado River with friends and acquaintances. At first establishing a part-time guide service as a way to support her own river trips, she went on to become perhaps the canyons' best-known river guide, introducing their rapids to many others-on the river, via her large-capacity rubber rafts, and across the nation, via magazine articles and movies. Georgie Clark saw the river and her sport change with the building of Glen Canyon Dam, enormous increases in the popularity of river running, and increased National Park Service regulation of rafting and river guides. Adjusting, though not always easily, to the changes, she helped transform an elite adventure sport into a major tourist activity.
A longtime agitator against war and social injustice, Lawrence Wittner has been tear-gassed, threatened by police with drawn guns, charged by soldiers with fixed bayonets, spied upon by the U.S. government, arrested, and purged from his job for political -reasons. To say that this teacher-historian-activist has led an interesting life is a considerable understatement.
In this absorbing memoir, Wittner traces the dramatic course of a life and career that took him from a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1940s and ’50s to an education at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin to the front lines of peace activism, the fight for racial equality, and the struggles of the labor movement. He details his family background, which included the bloody anti-Semitic pogroms of late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and chronicles his long teaching career, which comprised positions at a small black college in Virginia, an elite women’s liberal arts college north of New York City, and finally a permanent home at the Albany campus of the State University of New York. Throughout, he packs the narrative with colorful vignettes describing such activities as fighting racism in Louisiana and Mississippi during the early 1960s, collaborating with peace-oriented intellectuals in Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, and leading thousands of antinuclear demonstrators through the streets of Hiroshima. As the book also reveals, Wittner’s work as an activist was matched by scholarly achievements that made him one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history of the peace and nuclear disarmament movements—a research specialty that led to revealing encounters with such diverse figures as Norman Thomas, the Unabomber, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Caspar Weinberger, and David Horowitz.
A tenured professor and renowned author who has nevertheless lived in tension with the broader currents of his society, Lawrence Wittner tells an engaging personal story that includes some of the most turbulent and significant events of recent history.
Lawrence S. Wittner, emeritus professor of history at the University at Albany, SUNY, is the author of numerous scholarly works, including the award-winning three-volume Struggle Against the Bomb. Among other awards and honors, he has received major grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Aspen Institute, the United States Institute of Peace, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
As she did in The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis here retrieves individual lives from historical obscurity to give us a window onto the early modern world. As women living in the seventeenth century, Glikl bas Judah Leib, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Maria Sibylla Merian, equally remarkable though very different, were not queens or noblewomen, their every move publicly noted. Rather, they were living “on the margins” in seventeenth-century Europe, North America, and South America. Yet these women—one Jewish, one Catholic, one Protestant—left behind memoirs and writings that make for a spellbinding tale and that, in Davis’ deft narrative, tell us more about the life of early modern Europe than many an official history.
All these women were originally city folk. Glikl bas Judah Leib was a merchant of Hamburg and Metz whose Yiddish autobiography blends folktales with anecdotes about her two marriages, her twelve children, and her business. Marie de l’Incarnation, widowed young, became a mystic visionary among the Ursuline sisters and cofounder of the first Christian school for Amerindian women in North America. Her letters are a rich source of information about the Huron, Algonquin, Montagnais, and Iroquois peoples of Quebec. Maria Sibylla Merian, a German painter and naturalist, produced an innovative work on tropical insects based on lore she gathered from the Carib, Arawak, and African women of Suriname. Along the way she abandoned her husband to join a radical Protestant sect in the Netherlands.
Drawing on Glikl’s memoirs, Marie’s autobiography and correspondence, and Maria’s writings on entomology and botany, Davis brings these women to vibrant life. She reconstructs the divergent paths their stories took, and at the same time shows us each amid the common challenges and influences of the time—childrearing, religion, an outpouring of vernacular literature—and in relation to men. The resulting triptych suggests the range of experience, self-consciousness, and expression possible in seventeenth-century Europe and its outposts. It also shows how persons removed from the centers of power and learning ventured in novel directions, modifying in their own way Europe’s troubled and ambivalent relations with other “marginal” peoples.
Women who were sixty or older at the turn of the twenty-first century have lived through some of recent history's most momentous moments—and yet these women often believe that their personal lives and stories are insignificant, not worthy of being recorded for future generations. To change that perception and capture some of these life stories before they are lost, the Story Circle Network, a national organization dedicated to helping women write about their lives, developed the Older Women's Legacy (OWL) Circle Memoir Workshops. During the first two years of the project (1998-2000), nearly 500 older women participated in workshops that offered them the opportunity and encouragement to reflect on and create written records of their lives.
With Courage and Common Sense presents an extensive selection of memoirs from the OWL Circle project. Organized thematically, they describe women's experiences of identity, place, work, family life, love and marriage, loss and healing, adventures great and small, major historical events, and legacies to keep and pass along. Taken as a whole, the memoirs chronicle far-reaching changes in the ways that women participated in the world during the twentieth century. They show how women learned to surmount obstacles, to courageously make the most of the opportunities that came their way, and to move quietly and wisely beyond the limits that were imposed upon them.
Writing History in the Digital Age began as a “what-if” experiment by posing a question: How have Internet technologies influenced how historians think, teach, author, and publish? To illustrate their answer, the contributors agreed to share the stages of their book-in-progress as it was constructed on the public web.
To facilitate this innovative volume, editors Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki designed a born-digital, open-access, and open peer review process to capture commentary from appointed experts and general readers. A customized WordPress plug-in allowed audiences to add page- and paragraph-level comments to the manuscript, transforming it into a socially networked text. The initial six-week proposal phase generated over 250 comments, and the subsequent eight-week public review of full drafts drew 942 additional comments from readers across different parts of the globe.
The finished product now presents 20 essays from a wide array of notable scholars, each examining (and then breaking apart and reexamining) if and how digital and emergent technologies have changed the historical profession.
Inspired by the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Utah’s American West Center, the oldest regional studies center in the United States, Western Lands, Western Voices explores the many dimensions of public history. This collection of thirteen essays is rooted in the real-world experiences of the authors and is the first volume to focus specifically on regional public history.
Contributors include tribal government officials, state and federal historians, independent scholars and historical consultants, and academics. Some are distinguished historians of the American West and others are emerging voices that will shape publicly engaged scholarship in the years to come. Among the issues they address are community history and public interpretation, tribal sovereignty, and the importance of historical research for land management. The volume will be indispensable to researchers and general readers interested in museum studies, Native American studies, and public lands history and policy.
"The ancient Celts capture the modern imagination as do few other people of classical times. Naked barbarians charging the Roman legions, Druids performing sacrifices of unspeakable horror, women fighting beside their men and even leading armies—these, along with stunning works of art, are the images most of us call to mind when we think of the Celts," observes Philip Freeman. "And for the most part, these images are firmly based in the descriptions handed down to us by the Greek and Roman writers."
This book draws on the firsthand observations and early accounts of classical writers to piece together a detailed portrait of the ancient Celtic peoples of Europe and the British Isles. Philip Freeman groups the selections (ranging from short statements to longer treatises) by themes—war, feasting, poetry, religion, women, and the Western Isles. He also presents inscriptions written by the ancient Celts themselves. This wealth of material, introduced and translated by Freeman to be especially accessible to students and general readers, makes this book essential reading for everyone fascinated by the ancient Celts.
Why did capitalism and colonialism arise in Europe and not elsewhere? Why were parliamentarian and democratic forms of government founded there? What factors led to Europe’s unique position in shaping the world? Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Why Europe? tackles these classic questions with illuminating results.
Michael Mitterauer traces the roots of Europe’s singularity to the medieval era, specifically to developments in agriculture. While most historians have located the beginning of Europe’s special path in the rise of state power in the modern era, Mitterauer establishes its origins in rye and oats. These new crops played a decisive role in remaking the European family, he contends, spurring the rise of individualism and softening the constraints of patriarchy. Mitterauer reaches these conclusions by comparing Europe with other cultures, especially China and the Islamic world, while surveying the most important characteristics of European society as they took shape from the decline of the Roman empire to the invention of the printing press. Along the way, Why Europe? offers up a dazzling series of novel hypotheses to explain the unique evolution of European culture.
Between 1870 and 1945, advances in communication and transportation simultaneously expanded and shrank the world. New technologies erased distance and accelerated the global exchange of people, products, and ideas on an unprecedented scale. A World Connecting focuses on an era when growing global interconnectedness inspired new ambitions but also stoked anxieties and rivalries that would erupt in two world wars—the most destructive conflicts in human history.
In five interpretive essays, distinguished historians Emily S. Rosenberg, Charles S. Maier, Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Dirk Hoerder, Steven C. Topik, and Allen Wells illuminate the tensions that emerged from intensifying interconnectedness and attempts to control and shape the effects of sweeping change. Each essay provides an overview of a particular theme: modern state-building; imperial encounters; migration; commodity chains; and transnational social and cultural networks. With the emergence of modern statehood and the fluctuating fate of empires came efforts to define and police territorial borders. As people, products, capital, technologies, and affiliations flowed across uneasily bounded spaces, the world both came together and fell apart in unexpected, often horrifying, and sometimes liberating ways.
A World Connecting goes beyond nations, empires, and world wars to capture the era’s defining feature: the profound and disruptive shift toward an ever more rapidly integrating world.
With so much at stake and so much already lost, why did World War I end with a whimper-an arrangement between two weary opponents to suspend hostilities? After more than four years of desperate fighting, with victories sometimes measured in feet and inches, why did the Allies reject the option of advancing into Germany in 1918 and taking Berlin? Most histories of the Great War focus on the avoidability of its beginning. This book brings a laser-like focus to its ominous end-the Allies' incomplete victory, and the tragic ramifications for world peace just two decades later.
In the most comprehensive account to date of the conflict's endgame, David Stevenson approaches the events of 1918 from a truly international perspective, examining the positions and perspectives of combatants on both sides, as well as the impact of the Russian Revolution. Stevenson pays close attention to America's effort in its first twentieth-century war, including its naval and military contribution, army recruitment, industrial mobilization, and home-front politics. Alongside military and political developments, he adds new information about the crucial role of economics and logistics.
The Allies' eventual success, Stevenson shows, was due to new organizational methods of managing men and materiel and to increased combat effectiveness resulting partly from technological innovation. These factors, combined with Germany's disastrous military offensive in spring 1918, ensured an Allied victory-but not a conclusive German defeat.
“This memoir illuminates key aspects of the war experience: the enthusiasm for fighting, tensions with officers, tedium with regard to noncombatant work, the variety of trench experiences, the sharp learning curve that the army underwent on the ground, and the confusing nature of combat for ground troops. As the centennial of the war approaches this well-annotated memoir that connects Patterson’s individual experiences to the larger U.S. experience of the war will appeal to general readers and specialists alike.” —Jennifer D. Keene, author of World War I: The American Soldier Experience
A journalist once called Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson “the toughest man in Washington” for his fervid efforts in managing U.S. mobilization in World War II. The World War I Memoirs of Robert P. Patterson: A Captain in the Great War recounts Patterson’s own formative military experiences in the First World War.
Written in the years following the conflict, this is a remarkable rendering of what it was like to be an infantry line officer during the so-called Great War. Patterson started his military career as a twenty-seven-year-old, barely-trained captain in the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F.). He was part of the 306th Infantry Regiment of New York’s famous 77th “Statue of Liberty” Division from July to November 1918. In this detailed account, Patterson describes in understated yet vivid prose just how raw and unprepared American soldiers were for the titanic battles on the Western Front. Patterson downplays his near-death experience in a fierce firefight that earned him and several of his men from Company F the Distinguished Service Cross. His depiction of the brutal Meuse-Argonne battle is haunting—the drenching cold rains, the omnipresent barbed wire, deep fog-filled ravines, the sweet stench of mustard gas, chattering German machine-guns, crashing artillery shells, and even a rare hot meal to be savored.
Dealing with more than just combat, Patterson writes of the friendships and camaraderie among the officers and soldiers of different ethnic and class backgrounds who made up the “melting pot division” of the 77th. He betrays little of the postwar disillusionment that afflicted some members of the “Lost Generation.”Editor J. Garry Clifford’s introduction places Patterson and his actions in historical context and illuminates how Patterson applied lessons learned from the GreatWar to his later service as assistant secretary, under secretary, and secretary of war from 1940 to 1947.
In 1918, Woodrow Wilson’s image as leader of the free world and the image of America as dispenser of democracy spread throughout Italy, filling an ideological void after the rout of Caporetto and diverting attention from a hapless ruling class. Wilson’s popularity depended not only on the modernity of his democratic message, but also on a massive propaganda campaign he conducted across Italy, using as conduits the American Red Cross, the YMCA, and the Committee on Public Information.
American popularity, though, did not ensure mutual understanding. The Paris peace negotiations revealed the limits of policies on both sides, illustrated most clearly in Wilson’s disastrous direct appeal to the Italian public. The estranged countries pulled inward, the Americans headed toward isolationism, the Italians toward fascism.
Rossini sets the Italian-American political confrontation within the full context of the two countries’ cultural perceptions of each other, different war experiences, and ideas about participatory democracy and peace. A stellar example of the new international history, this timely book highlights the impact of American ideology and sense of mission in the world.
For some women writers and photographers during the two world wars—Edith Wharton, Mildred Aldrich, Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller, H.D., and Gertrude Stein—the construction of the female subject as an observer of combat became a vital concern. Their explorations of vision took place against the backdrop of a larger shift in Western culture's understanding of what "seeing" meant in common practice and philosophical discourse alike. The role of visuality in their lives was massively transformed not only by the rigid gender roles of war but by the introduction of new combat practices and technologies such as aerial surveillance, trench warfare, and civilian bombardment.
In The World Wars Through the Female Gaze, Jean Gallagher maps one portion of the historicized, gendered territory of what Nancy K. Miller calls the "gaze in representation." Expanding the notion of the gaze in critical discourse, Gallagher situates a number of visual acts within specific historic contexts to reconstruct the wartime female subject. She looks at both the female observer's physical act of seeing—and the refusal to see—for example, a battlefield, a wounded soldier, a torture victim, a national flag, a fashion model, a bombed city, or a wartime hallucination.
The book begins with two instances of wartime propaganda written by American women in France in 1915. Both Edith Wharton's Fighting France and Mildred Aldrich's A Hilltop on the Marne offer a complex and often contradictory sense of a woman writer's struggles with authority, resistance, and killing. In the process, Gallagher teases out the role of specular vision and the impossibility of "directly" seeing the war.
Gallagher then turns to literary and visual texts produced by two female journalists between 1940 and 1945. Martha Gellhorn's 1940 novel A Stricken Field exhibits a range of gendered seeing positions within and in opposition to the visual ideologies of fascism during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Lee Miller's war correspondence and photography for Vogue show how Miller constructed herself and her predominantly female American audience as antifascist observers of war by working with and against some of the conventions of surrealist fashion photography.
Gallagher concludes by focusing on the experimental autobiographical prose of H.D. and Gertrude Stein to explore the functions of vision on two World War II "homefronts"—London during the Blitz and Vichy France.
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