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Reformed America
The Middle and Southern States 1783-1837
Fred J. Hood
University of Alabama Press, 1980
Analyzes the success of the Reformed in the middle and southern states
 
The success of the Reformed of the middle and southern states at shaping a distinctly American ideology of the relationship of religion and government was truly amazing. Unlike their New England counterparts, many of whom continued to enjoy some sort of establishment well into the nineteenth century, these Reformed entered the national experience with a backlog of experience in religious diversity and practical disestab­lishment, and even, in the South, as religious dissenters. They would have preferred a religious establishment that would have essentially recognized the validity of their understanding of Christianity. It was perhaps their own rigidity that caused them to fail in that attempt, especially in Virginia. But for such a rigid people, and they were rigid, they demonstrated a remarkable flexibility. When it became apparent that the American legal settlement would be one in which the state disen­gaged from the support of religion, the Reformed of the middle and southern states welcomed it and declared it to be the solution that would be most conducive to the spread and ultimate domination of Reformed Christianity. Unlike twentieth-century liberals, the Reformed inter­preted disestablishment as the legal and official recognition of the twin Reformation doctrines of the priesthood of all believers and the absolute and unquestioned authority of the Christian Scriptures. And, to a very large degree, it was their definition, rather than the thinking of Jefferson and Madison, that captured the imagination of the American people and became the dominant popular opinion in the land.
 
But perhaps of even greater significance, the Reformed of the middle and southern states forged an ideology that ultimately based American national prosperity on national adherence to Reformed Christianity. Under the tutelage of John Witherspoon and Samuel Stanhope Smith, the Reformed captured the Enlightenment and brought it into the ser­vice of Reformed Christianity, altering traditional Calvinism in the pro­cess. Witherspoon and Smith, declaring that the truth of the law of nations could be devised by observation and reason alone, propounded a doctrine of natural law and political science that substantially reinforced the Calvinistic doctrine of providence in an era of skepticism and en­lightenment. All history, they argued, proved beyond any reasonable doubt that those nations that adhered to the moral principles taught by Christianity had prospered and those that had taken a contrary route had fallen into ruin. The Reformed preachers of whatever denomina­tion picked up this message and proclaimed it throughout the land. The United States, if it were to prosper, was required to be a Christian nation.
 
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Zion on the Hudson
Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals
Fabend, Firth Haring
Rutgers University Press, 2000

Winner of the 2001 New Jersey Author's Award by the New Jersey Academic Alliance

The Dutch came to the New World in the seventeenth century as explorers and traders, but religion soon followed, for it was accepted in the Netherlands that state and church were mutually benefited by advancing the “true Christian religion.” The influence of “Dutchness”—defined here as loyalty to what are presumed to be the distinctive qualities of Dutch national character and culture—persisted in New York and New Jersey for more than 200 years after Dutch emigration ended. Why?

Firth Haring Fabend finds the explanation in the devotion of the Reformed Dutch Church membership to the doctrines and traditions of their church. She looks at the individual and personal beliefs and behaviors of this often-neglected ethnic group. Thus, Zion on the Hudson presents both a broad and an intimate look at the way one mainstream Protestant denomination dealt with the transformative events of the evangelical era.

As Fabend describes the efforts of the Dutch to preserve the European standards and traditions of their church, while developing a taste for a new kind of theology and a preference for an American identity, she documents how Dutchness finally became a historical memory. The Americanization of the Reformed Dutch Church, Fabend writes, is a microcosm of the story of the Americanization of the United States itself.

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The Gender of Piety
Family, Faith, and Colonial Rule in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe
Wendy Urban-Mead
Ohio University Press, 2015

The Gender of Piety is an intimate history of the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe, or BICC, as related through six individual life histories that extend from the early colonial years through the first decade after independence. Taken together, these six lives show how men and women of the BICC experienced and sequenced their piety in different ways. Women usually remained tied to the church throughout their lives, while men often had a more strained relationship with it. Church doctrine was not always flexible enough to accommodate expected masculine gender roles, particularly male membership in political and economic institutions or participation in important male communal practices.

The study is based on more than fifteen years of extensive oral history research supported by archival work in Zimbabwe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The oral accounts make it clear, official versions to the contrary, that the church was led by spiritually powerful women and that maleness and mission-church notions of piety were often incompatible.

The life-history approach illustrates how the tension of gender roles both within and without the church manifested itself in sometimes unexpected ways: for example, how a single family could produce both a legendary woman pastor credited with mediating multiple miracles and a man—her son—who joined the armed wing of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union nationalist political party and fought in Zimbabwe’s liberation war in the 1970s. Investigating the lives of men and women in equal measure, The Gender of Piety uses a gendered interpretive lens to analyze the complex relationship between the church and broader social change in this region of southern Africa.

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Red-Hot and Righteous
The Urban Religion of The Salvation Army
Diane Winston
Harvard University Press, 2000

In this engrossing study of religion, urban life, and commercial culture, Diane Winston shows how a (self-styled "red-hot") militant Protestant mission established a beachhead in the modern city. When The Salvation Army, a British evangelical movement, landed in New York in 1880, local citizens called its eye-catching advertisements "vulgar" and dubbed its brass bands, female preachers, and overheated services "sensationalist." Yet a little more than a century later, this ragtag missionary movement had evolved into the nation's largest charitable fund-raiser--the very exemplar of America's most cherished values of social service and religious commitment.

Winston illustrates how the Army borrowed the forms and idioms of popular entertainments, commercial emporiums, and master marketers to deliver its message. In contrast to histories that relegate religion to the sidelines of urban society, her book shows that Salvationists were at the center of debates about social services for the urban poor, the changing position of women, and the evolution of a consumer culture. She also describes Salvationist influence on contemporary life--from the public's post-World War I (and ongoing) love affair with the doughnut to the Salvationist young woman's career as a Hollywood icon to the institutionalization of religious ideals into nonsectarian social programs.

Winston's vivid account of a street savvy religious mission transformed over the decades makes adroit use of performance theory and material culture studies to create an evocative portrait of a beloved yet little understood religious movement. Her book provides striking evidence that, counter to conventional wisdom, religion was among the seminal social forces that shaped modern, urban America--and, in the process, found new expression for its own ideals.

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The Unification Church
Studies in Contemporary Religion
Massimo Introvigne
Signature Books, 2000
 Unificationists believe in “reconciling the internal truth pursued by religion with the external truth pursued by science.” They promote anti-Communism, family values, and the teachings of Jesus Christ and the Hebrew prophets.

Where they depart from traditional Christianity is in their acceptance of the Divine Principle as a companion to the Bible and in their assertion that founder Rev. Sun Myung Moon is Lord of the Second Advent, that with his wife (together the “True Parents”), Original Sin is conquered through special blessings.

Since 1954 Unificationism has evolved toward a more normative approach to worship and lifestyle, if not belief—a point that Italian scholar Massimo Introvigne emphasizes in his balanced overview of the church’s history, doctrine, spirituality, missionary activities, and controversies. He notes that in doctrine Unificationism has moved away from mainstream churches toward increased emphasis on contact with the spirit world, numerology, and construction of a modern “Garden of Eden” in Brazil.

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Domestic Broils
Shakers, Antebellum Marriage, and the Narratives of Mary and Joseph Dyer
Elizabeth De Wolfe
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
In 1813, Joseph Dyer, his wife Mary, and their five children joined the Shaker community in Enfield, New Hampshire. Joseph quickly adapted to the Shaker way of life, but Mary chafed under its strictures and eventually left the community two years later. When the local elders and her husband refused to release the couple’s children to Mary, she embarked on what would become a fifty-year campaign against the Shakers, beginning with the publication in 1818 of A Brief Statement of the Sufferings of Mary Dyer. The following year the Shakers countered by publishing Joseph’s A Compendious Narrative, a scathing attack on what the title page called “the character, disposition and conduct of Mary Dyer.” Reproduced here for the first time since their original publication, the Dyers’ dueling accounts of the breakup of their marriage form the core of Domestic Broils. In Mary’s telling, the deceptions of a cruel husband, backed by an unyielding Shaker hierarchy, destroyed what had once been a happy, productive family. Joseph’s narrative counters these claims by alleging that Mary abused her children, neglected her husband, and engaged in extramarital affairs. In her introduction to the volume, Elizabeth De Wolfe places the Dyers’ marital dispute in a broader historical context, drawing on their personal testimony to examine connected but conflicting views of marriage, family life, and Shakerism in the early republic. She also shows how the growing world of print facilitated the transformation of a private family quarrel into a public debate. Salacious, riveting, and immensely popular throughout New England, the Dyers’ narratives not only captured imaginations but also reflected public anxieties over rapid cultural change in antebellum America.
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Shaker Vision
Seeing Beauty in Early America
Joseph Manca
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
The Shakers are known for self-denial and austerity in everyday living and their material world, as embodied by the heavenly simplicity and purity of their chairs and blanket chests. Yet the believers also enjoyed a diversity of visual pleasures, from flowers, sunsets, rainbows, and the northern lights as seen at home to waterfalls, ocean waves, and dramatic cliffs viewed while traveling across America.

In Shaker Vision, Joseph Manca explores original texts, especially diaries and travel journals, and material culture to demonstrate that Shakers enjoyed a remarkably deep experience of the visual world. Shakers shared tastes with mainstream Americans and often employed a similar aesthetic vocabulary, but all within a belief system that made them distinct. In addition to their well-known ascetic architecture, furniture, and handicraft styles, they expressed themselves through ornate and detailed spiritual art and in vivid, visionary experiences. Based on firsthand accounts of the believers themselves, this richly illustrated volume will dramatically change how we assess the visual world of this uniquely American religious sect.
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Sisters in the Faith
Shaker Women and Equality of the Sexes
Glendyne R. Wergland
University of Massachusetts Press, 2011
In 1788, following the death of charismatic founder Mother Ann Lee, the celibate religious group known as the Shakers set out to institutionalize equality of the sexes in their theology, government, and daily practice. In this book, Glendyne Wergland evaluates how well they succeeded in that mission by examining the experiences of women within Shaker communities over more than a century.

Drawing on an extensive archive of primary documents, Wergland discusses topics ranging from girlhood, health, and dress to why women joined the Shakers and how they were viewed by those outside their community. She analyzes the division of labor between men and women, showing that there was considerable cooperation and reciprocity in carrying out most tasks-from food production to laundering to gathering firewood-even as gendered conflicts remained.

In her conclusion, Wergland draws together all of these threads to show that Shaker communities achieved a remarkable degree of gender equality at a time when women elsewhere still suffered under the legal and social strictures of the traditional patriarchal order. In so doing, she argues, the experience of Shaker women served as a model for promoting women's rights in American political culture.
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One Shaker Life
Isaac Newton Youngs, 1793-1865
Glendyne R. Wergland
University of Massachusetts Press, 2006
A member of the United Society of Believers, better known as the Shakers, Isaac Newton Youngs spent most of his life in New Lebanon, New York, home of the society's central Ministry. As both a private diarist and the official village scribe, he kept meticulous records throughout those years of both his own experience and that of the community. All told, more than four thousand pages of Brother Isaac's journals have survived, documenting the history of the Shakers during the period of their greatest success and providing a revealing view of the daily life of a rank-and-file Believer.

In this deeply researched biography, Glendyne R. Wergland draws on Youngs's writings to tell his story and to explore "the tension between desire and discipline" at the center of his life. She follows Youngs from childhood and adolescence to maturity, through years of demanding responsibility into his fatal decline. In each of these stages, he remained a talented and committed yet independent Shaker, one who chose to stay with the community but often struggled to abide by its stringent rules, including the vow of celibacy. Perhaps above all, he was a man who spent most of his waking hours working diligently at a succession of tasks, making clocks, sewing clothes, fixing roofs, writing poetry, chronicling his daily acts and thoughts.

In his journals, Brother Isaac writes at length of his efforts to control his lust as a young man, and he complains repeatedly about overwork as he grows older. He defines the rules of his community and identifies transgressors, while enciphering his critical entries (and those chronicling his own sexual desires) to avoid detection and uphold the demand for conformity. At times he admits doubt, but without ever relinquishing the belief that he is on the straight and narrow path to salvation. What emerges in the end is the complex portrait of an ordinary man striving to live up to the imperatives of his faith.
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Unitarianism in the Antebellum South
The Other Invisible Institution
John Allen Macaulay
University of Alabama Press, 2001
John Macaulay's model study of Unitarianism in the antebellum south reestablishes the denomination's position as an influential religious movement in the early history of the region. By looking at benevolent societies, lay meetings, professional and civic activity, ecumenical interchange, intellectual forums, business partnerships, literary correspondence, friendships, and other associations in which southern Unitarians were engaged with other southerners on a daily basis, Macaulay sees a much greater Unitarian presence than has been previously recognized. Instead of relying on a count of church steeples to gauge numbers, this volume blurs the lines between southern Unitarianism and orthodoxy by demonstrating how their theologies coexisted and intertwined.
 
Macaulay posits that just beneath the surface of organized religion in the South was an "invisible institution" not unlike Franklin Frazier's Black Church, a nebulous network of liberal faith that represented a sustained and continued strand of Enlightenment religious rationalism alongside and within an increasingly evangelical culture. He shows that there were in fact two invisible religious institutions in the antebellum South, one in the slave quarters and the other in the urban landscape of southern towns. Whereas slave preachers rediscovered in music and bodily movement and in themes of suffering a vibrant Christian community, Unitarians witnessed the simple spiritual truth that reason and belief are one unified whole.
 
In offering this fresh argument, Macaulay has chipped away at stereotypes of the mid-19th-century South as unreservedly "evangelical" and contributed greatly to historians' understanding of the diversity and complexity in southern religion.
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Buddhism, Unitarianism, and the Meiji Competition for Universality
Michel Mohr
Harvard University Press, 2013

In the late 1800s, as Japanese leaders mulled over the usefulness of religion in modernizing their country, they chose to invite Unitarian missionaries to Japan. This book spotlights one facet of debates sparked by the subsequent encounter between Unitarianism and Buddhism—an intersection that has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature. Focusing on the cascade of events triggered by the missionary presence of the American Unitarian Association on Japanese soil between 1887 and 1922, Michel Mohr’s study sheds new light on this formative time in Japanese religious and intellectual history.

Drawing on the wealth of information contained in correspondence sent and received by Unitarian missionaries in Japan, as well as periodicals, archival materials, and Japanese sources, Mohr shows how this missionary presence elicited unprecedented debates on “universality” and how the ambiguous idea of “universal truth” was utilized by missionaries to promote their own cultural and ethnocentric agendas. At the turn of the twentieth century this notion was appropriated and reformulated by Japanese intellectuals and religious leaders, often to suit new political and nationalistic ambitions.

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William Ellery Channing
An Essay on the Liberal Spirit in America
Andrew Delbanco
Harvard University Press, 1981
This is a vivid portrayal of the man who led the movement toward liberal religion in America. Andrew Delbanco traces the development of Channing’s thinking on the relation of man to God and nature, on the reality of evil, on the autonomy of the individual. He reveals Channing’s hope and doubt concerning America’s contribution to human progress. And he recounts Channing’s emergence as a major voice in the antislavery movement—after a complex hesitation to embrace the cause. This is a study of the religious, literary, and political concerns of a man and his time. It will well serve all students of nineteenth-century American thought.
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Prairie Spirit
Perspectives on the Heritage of the United Church of Canada in the West
Dennis L. Butcher
University of Manitoba Press, 1985

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Douglas Horton and the Ecumenical Impulse in American Religion
Theodore Louis Trost
Harvard University Press, 2002
In this first complete biography of Douglas Horton, we are introduced to an extremely important but surprisingly unheralded twentieth-century religious leader. Throughout his life, Horton worked tirelessly for church and world unity under the banner of ecumenism, and his efforts bore fruit in a variety of venues. Horton introduced Americans to the work of Swiss theologian Karl Barth through his translation of The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928). He was the chief architect of the denominational merger that formed the United Church of Christ (1957). He also presided over the transformation of the Harvard Divinity School from a near moribund institution to a distinguished center of religious learning (1955–1959). Toward the end of his life, Horton coordinated the Protestant presence at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).
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The Unity Movement
Its Evolution and Spiritual Teachings
Neal Vahle
Templeton Press, 2002

Prayer meetings held in 1889 in the Kansas City living room of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore were the beginning of what grew to be an international religious and educational movement. This book is an in-depth study of the people and beliefs that shaped it into one of the fastest growing movements of our time.

Neal Vahle documents the lives of the spiritual visionaries who created, organized, and led the Unity movement: Myrtle Fillmore, the 40-year-old wife and mother who was inspired by a Christian Science practitioner to cure herself of tuberculosis; Charles Fillmore, who had planned a business career but found, through study, prayer, meditation, and dream analysis, that he had another calling; H. Emily Cady, a New York City homeopathic physician whose book on Unity teachings, Lessons in Truth, was published in 1901, and has sold more than 1.6 million copies; Lowell Fillmore, eldest son of Charles and Myrtle, who clarified and popularized Unity teaching; and the other descendants of Myrtle and Charles, each of whom made immeasurable contributions.

He explores the key factors that led to the steady growth of the movement: the creation of the Unity School of Christianity; the development of Unity Village in Missouri; the evolution of "Silent Unity"; the publication program; the training of students; the development of centers and churches; and he presents and analyzes the controversies and debates within the organization. Vahle concludes the book with a look at the challenges facing the movement in the twenty-first century.

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New Thought, Ancient Wisdom
The History and Future of the New Thought Movement
Glenn Mosley
Templeton Press, 2006

In this book, Glenn R. Mosley chronicles the history of the movement,   including biographical sketches and the philosophies of pioneers and influential leaders linked to the movement's development and growth. These include Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, the founders of Unity; Ernest Holmes, founder of the Science of Mind; Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ Science; Ralph Waldo Trine, philosopher, mystic, teacher, and early mentor of New Thought; Joel Goldsmith, founder of The Infinite Way, among others. 

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The Spiritual Journey of Charles Fillmore
Discovering the Power Within
Neal Vahle
Templeton Press, 2008

The Spiritual Journey of Charles Fillmore sheds new light on the life and work of an essential spiritual pioneer. In this landmark new biography, author Neal Vahle uses thorough new research, interviews with those who knew Fillmore, and his intimate familiarity with Fillmore's writings to introduce readers to the intriguing cofounder of the Unity movement. Beyond standard biography, Vahle's comprehensive treatment also extensively details Fillmore's era's philosophical and spiritual landscape. It gives readers an excellent overview of the metaphysical movement's evolution through time.

While it will serve as an excellent introduction for new students of the New Thought movement, even devoted enthusiasts will discover previously unknown dimensions of Fillmore's teachings in passages drawn from the archives of Unity magazine and other sources. This work, together with Vahle's earlier books Torch-bearer to Light the Way: The Life of Myrtle Fillmore (Open View, 1996) and The Unity Movement: Its Evolution and Spiritual Teaching (Templeton Foundation Press, 2002), established him as the premier historian of the Unity movement.

 

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The Autobiography of Daniel Parker, Frontier Universalist
Daniel Parker
Ohio University Press, 2021

A vastly informative and rare early-American pioneer autobiography rescued from obscurity.

In this remarkable memoir, Daniel Parker (1781–1861) recorded both the details of everyday life and the extraordinary historical events he witnessed west of the Appalachian Mountains between 1790 and 1840. Once a humble traveling salesman for a line of newly invented clothes washing machines, he became an outspoken advocate for abolition and education. With his wife and son, he founded Clermont Academy, a racially integrated, coeducational secondary school—the first of its kind in Ohio.

However, Parker’s real vocation was as a self-ordained, itinerant preacher of his own brand of universal salvation. Raised by Presbyterian parents, he experienced a dramatic conversion to the Halcyon Church, an alternative, millenarian religious movement led by the enigmatic prophet Abel Sarjent, in 1803. After parting ways with the Halcyonists, he continued his own biblical and theological studies, arriving at the universalist conclusions that he would eventually preach throughout the Ohio River Valley.

David Torbett has transcribed Parker’s manuscript and publishes it here for the first time, together with an introduction, epilogue, bibliography, and extensive notes that enrich and contextualize this rare pioneer autobiography.

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The Glass Church
Robert H. Schuller, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Strain of Megachurch Ministry
Mark T. Mulder
Rutgers University Press, 2020

Robert H. Schuller’s ministry—including the architectural wonder of the Crystal Cathedral and the polished television broadcast of Hour of Power—cast a broad shadow over American Christianity. Pastors flocked to Southern California to learn Schuller’s techniques. The President of United States invited him sit prominently next to the First Lady at the State of the Union Address. Muhammad Ali asked for the pastor’s autograph. It seemed as if Schuller may have started a second Reformation. And then it all went away. As Schuller’s ministry wrestled with internal turmoil and bankruptcy, his emulators—including Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, and Joel Osteen— nurtured megachurches that seemed to sweep away the Crystal Cathedral as a relic of the twentieth century. How did it come to this?

Certainly, all churches depend on a mix of constituents, charisma, and capital, yet the size and ambition of large churches like Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral exert enormous organizational pressures to continue the flow of people committed to the congregation, to reinforce the spark of charismatic excitement generated by high-profile pastors, and to develop fresh flows of capital funding for maintenance of old projects and launching new initiatives. The constant attention to expand constituencies, boost charisma, and stimulate capital among megachurches produces an especially burdensome strain on their leaders. By orienting an approach to the collapse of the Crystal Cathedral on these three core elements—constituency, charisma, and capital—The Glass Church demonstrates how congregational fragility is greatly accentuated in larger churches, a notion we label megachurch strain, such that the threat of implosion is significantly accentuated by any failures to properly calibrate the inter-relationship among these elements.

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The Book of Mormon
A Reader's Edition
Edited by Grant Hardy
University of Illinois Press, 2003
Regarded as sacred scripture by millions, the Book of Mormon -- first published in 1830 -- is one of the most significant documents in American religious history. This new reader-friendly version reformats the complete, unchanged 1920 text in the manner of modern translations of the Bible, with paragraphs, quotations marks, poetic forms, topical headings, multichapter headings, indention of quoted documents, italicized reworkings of biblical prophecies, and minimized verse numbers. It also features a hypothetical map based on internal references, an essay on Book of Mormon poetry, a full glossary of names, genealogical charts, a basic bibliography of Mormon and non-Mormon scholarship, a chronology of the translation, eyewitness accounts of the gold plates, and information regarding the lost 116 pages and significant changes in the text.
The Book of Mormon claims to be the product of three historical interactions: the writings of the original ancient American authors, the editing of the fourth-century prophet Mormon, and the translation of Joseph Smith. The editorial aids and footnotes in this edition integrate all three perspectives and provide readers with a clear guide through this complicated text. New readers will find the story accessible and intelligible; Mormons will gain fresh insights from familiar verses seen in a broader narrative context. This is the first time the Book of Mormon has been published with quotation marks, select variant readings, and the testimonies of women involved in the translation process. It is also the first return to a paragraphed format since versification was added in 1879.
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Edward Said
Continuing the Conversation
Edited by Homi K. Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell
University of Chicago Press, 2005
In Edward Said: Continuing the Conversation, Edward Said's long-time friends and collaborators continue their dialogue with Said where they had left off following his death in the fall of 2003.

The essays, imagining and recalling the cadences of Said's conversation, take various forms, including elaborations on his ideas, applications of his thought to new problems, and recollections of the indescribable electricity that made conversation with him intense and memorable. This lively, personal tone is a direct result of editors Homi Bhabha and W. J. T. Mitchell urging contributors to write in the spirit of a conversation interrupted, a call on hold, a letter waiting for a reply, a question hanging in the air. This is a work of immense imaginative and intellectual force and compelling candor, honoring Said's legacy as an activist intellectual.

This collection includes essays by Lila Abu-Lughod, Daniel Barenboim, Akeel Bilgrami, Paul Bové, Timothy Brennan, Noam Chomsky, Ranajit Guha, Harry Harootunian, Saree Makdisi, Aamir Mufti, Roger Owen, Gyan Prakash, Dan Rabinowitz, Jacqueline Rose, and Gayatri Spivak.
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The Legacy of Edward W. Said
William V. Spanos
University of Illinois Press, 2008

With the untimely death of Edward W. Said in 2003, various academic and public intellectuals worldwide have begun to reassess the writings of this powerful oppositional intellectual. Figures on the neoconservative right have already begun to discredit Said’s work as that of a subversive intent on slandering America’s benign global image and undermining its global authority. On the left, a significant number of oppositional intellectuals are eager to counter this neoconservative vilification, proffering a Said who, in marked opposition to the “anti-humanism” of the great poststructuralist thinkers who were his contemporaries--Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault--reaffirms humanism and thus rejects poststructuralist theory.

In this provocative assessment of Edward Said’s lifework, William V. Spanos argues that Said’s lifelong anti-imperialist project is actually a fulfillment of the revolutionary possibilities of poststructuralist theory. Spanos examines Said, his legacy, and the various texts he wrote--including Orientalism,Culture and Imperialism, and Humanism and Democratic Criticism--that are now being considered for their lasting political impact.

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The Empire of Civilization
The Evolution of an Imperial Idea
Brett Bowden
University of Chicago Press, 2009

The term “civilization” comes with considerable baggage, dichotomizing people, cultures, and histories as “civilized”—or not. While the idea of civilization has been deployed throughout history to justify all manner of interventions and sociopolitical engineering, few scholars have stopped to consider what the concept actually means. Here, Brett Bowden examines how the idea of civilization has informed our thinking about international relations over the course of ten centuries.

            From the Crusades to the colonial era to the global war on terror, this sweeping volume exposes “civilization” as a stage-managed account of history that legitimizes imperialism, uniformity, and conformity to Western standards, culminating in a liberal-democratic global order. Along the way, Bowden explores the variety of confrontations and conquests—as well as those peoples and places excluded or swept aside—undertaken in the name of civilization. Concluding that the “West and the rest” have more commonalities than differences,this provocative and engaging bookultimately points the way toward an authentic intercivilizational dialogue that emphasizes cooperation over clashes. 

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Correspondence Across a Room
Vsevolod I. Ivanov and M.O. Gershenzon
Northwestern University Press, 1984
The twelve letters that constitute this volume were exchanged by two of Russia's leading intellectuals, who, in the summer of 1920, weakened by the privations of the Civil War, were admitted to a municipal rest home outside Moscow. At the Sanatorium for Scientific and Literary Workers, they found themselves installed in opposite corners of the same room.

Day-long conversations having drawn them away from their literary tasks, the two then decided to converse in writing. Correspondence, the result, examines the condition and future of Western culture-whose values, according to the historian Gershenzon, have deteriorated into a deadly burden upon mankind, into mankind's ultimate prison. For the poet Ivanov, it is not the disavowal of a cultural heritage but the struggle to recover man's own unity with God that alone guarantees his true, his spiritual freedom.
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Ideas Have Consequences
Expanded Edition
Richard M. Weaver
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Originally published in 1948, at the height of post–World War II optimism and confidence in collective security, Ideas Have Consequences uses “words hard as cannonballs” to present an unsparing diagnosis of the ills of the modern age. Widely read and debated at the time of its first publication,the book is now seen asone of the foundational texts of the modern conservative movement.

In its pages, Richard M. Weaver argues that the decline of Western civilization resulted from the rising acceptance of relativism over absolute reality. In spite of increased knowledge, this retreat from the realist intellectual tradition has weakened the Western capacity to reason, with catastrophic consequences for social order and individual rights. But Weaver also offers a realistic remedy. These difficulties are the product not of necessity, but of intelligent choice. And, today, as decades ago, the remedy lies in the renewed acceptance of absolute reality and the recognition that ideas—like actions—have consequences.

This expanded edition of the classic work contains a foreword by New Criterion editor Roger Kimball that offers insight into the rich intellectual and historical contexts of Weaver and his work and an afterword by Ted J. Smith III that relates the remarkable story of the book’s writing and publication.
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History of Western Civilization
A Handbook
William H. McNeill
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Renowned historian William H. McNeil provides a brilliant narrative chronology of the development of Western civilization, representing its socio-political as well as cultural aspects. This sixth edition includes new material for the twentieth-century period and completely revised bibliographies. An invaluable tool for the study of Western civilization, the Handbook is an essential complement to readings in primary and secondary sources such as those in the nine-volume University of Chicago Readings in Western Civilization.
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The Rise of the West
A History of the Human Community
William H. McNeill
University of Chicago Press, 1991
The Rise of the West, winner of the National Book Award for history in 1964, is famous for its ambitious scope and intellectual rigor. In it, McNeill challenges the Spengler-Toynbee view that a number of separate civilizations pursued essentially independent careers, and argues instead that human cultures interacted at every stage of their history. The author suggests that from the Neolithic beginnings of grain agriculture to the present major social changes in all parts of the world were triggered by new or newly important foreign stimuli, and he presents a persuasive narrative of world history to support this claim.

In a retrospective essay titled "The Rise of the West after Twenty-five Years," McNeill shows how his book was shaped by the time and place in which it was written (1954-63). He discusses how historiography subsequently developed and suggests how his portrait of the world's past in The Rise of the West should be revised to reflect these changes.

"This is not only the most learned and the most intelligent, it is also the most stimulating and fascinating book that has ever set out to recount and explain the whole history of mankind. . . . To read it is a great experience. It leaves echoes to reverberate, and seeds to germinate in the mind."—H. R. Trevor-Roper, New York Times Book Review
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The Ever-Present Origin
Part One: Foundations Of The Aperspectival World
Jean Gebser
Ohio University Press, 1986

This English translation of Gebser’s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking world for the recognition it deserves.

“The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the world is, briefly, as follows. In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the “dead end” of nature. Freud had redefined culture as illness—a result of drive sublimation; Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the “adversary of the soul,” propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the “Demise of the West” during the years following World War I. The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its foundations had been superseded.

It was with these foundations—the natural sciences—that Gebser began. As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration.…

Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest “urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms.”

Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality. He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics and sociology) as well as the arts in a discussion along similar lines. This was the point of departure of The Ever-Present Origin.

From In memoriam Jean Gebser by Jean Keckeis

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Popular Culture Theory and Methodology
A Basic Introduction
Edited by Harold E. Hinds, Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M.S. Nelson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
Since its birth in the 1960s, the study of popular culture has come a long way in defining its object, its purpose, and its place in academe. Emerging along the margins of a scholarly establishment that initially dismissed anything popular as unworthy of serious study-trivial, formulaic, easily digestible, escapist-early practitioners of the discipline stubbornly set about creating the theoretical and methodological framework upon which a deeper understanding could be founded. Through seminal essays that document the maturation of the field as it gradually made headway toward legitimacy, Popular Culture Theory and Methodology provides students of popular culture with both the historical context and the critical apparatus required for further growth.
    For all its progress, the study of popular culture remains a site of healthy questioning. What exactly is popular culture? How should it be studied? What forces come together in producing, disseminating, and consuming it? Is it always conformist, or has it the power to subvert, refashion, resist, and destabilize the status quo? How does it differ from folk culture, mass culture, commercial culture? Is the line between "high" and "low" merely arbitrary? Do the popular arts have a distinctive aesthetics? This collection offers a wide range of responses to these and similar questions. Edited by Harold E. Hinds, Jr., Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela M. S. Nelson, Popular Culture Theory and Methodology charts some of the key turning points in the "culture wars" and leads us through the central debates in this fast developing discipline. Authors of the more than two dozen studies, several of which are newly published here include John Cawelti, Russel B. Nye, Ray B. Browne, Fred E. H. Schroeder, John Fiske, Lawrence Mintz, David Feldman, Roger Rollin, Harold Schechter, S. Elizabeth Bird, and Harold E. Hinds, Jr. A valuable bibliography completes the volume.
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Taxi from Another Planet
Conversations with Drivers about Life in the Universe
Charles S. Cockell
Harvard University Press, 2022

Insightful, good-humored essays on the possibilities of alien life and the uses of space exploration, based on an astrobiologist’s everyday conversations with his fellow humans—taxi drivers, to be precise.

If you’ve ever sat in the back seat of a taxi, you know that cabbies like to talk. Sports or politics, your job or theirs, taxi drivers are fine conversationalists on just about any topic. And when the passenger is astrobiologist Charles Cockell, that topic is usually space and what, if anything, lives out there.

Inspired by conversations with drivers all over the world, Taxi from Another Planet tackles the questions that everyday people have about the cosmos and our place in it. Will we understand aliens? What if there isn’t life out in the universe? Is Mars our Plan B? And why is the government spending tax dollars on space programs anyway? Each essay in this genial collection takes questions like these as a starting point on the way to a range of insightful, even poignant, observations. Cockell delves into debates over the inevitability of life and looks to both human history and scientific knowledge to consider what first contact will be like and what we can expect from spacefaring societies. He also offers a forceful argument for the sympathies between space exploration and environmentalism.

A shrewd and entertaining foray into the most fundamental mysteries, Taxi from Another Planet brings together the wisdom of scientific experts and their fellow citizens of Earth, the better to understand how life might unfold elsewhere.

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Histories of the Future
Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding, eds.
Duke University Press, 2005
We live in a world saturated by futures. Our lives are constructed around ideas and images about the future that are as full and as flawed as our understandings of the past. This book is a conceptual toolkit for thinking about the forms and functions that the future takes. Exploring links between panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, technology and messianism, prophecy and trauma, it brings together critical meditations on the social, cultural, and intellectual forces that create narratives and practices of the future. The prognosticators, speculators, prophets, and visionaries have their say here, but the emphasis is on small narratives and forgotten conjunctures, on the connections between expectation and experience in everyday life.

In tightly linked studies, the contributors excavate forgotten and emergent futures of art, religion, technology, economics, and politics. They trace hidden histories of science fiction, futurism, and millennialism and break down barriers between far-flung cultural spheres. From the boardrooms of Silicon Valley to the forests of Java and from the literary salons of Tokyo to the roadside cafés of the Nevada desert, the authors stitch together the disparate images and stories of futures past and present. Histories of the Future is further punctuated by three interludes: a thought-provoking game that invites players to fashion future narratives of their own, a metafiction by renowned novelist Jonathan Lethem, and a remarkable graphic research tool: a timeline of timelines.

Contributors. Sasha Archibald, Susan Harding, Jamer Hunt, Pamela Jackson, Susan Lepselter, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Masco, Christopher Newfield, Elizabeth Pollman, Vicente Rafael, Daniel Rosenberg, Miryam Sas, Kathleen Stewart, Anna Tsing

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Looking Forward
Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America
Jamie L. Pietruska
University of Chicago Press, 2017
In the decades after the Civil War, the world experienced monumental changes in industry, trade, and governance. As Americans faced this uncertain future, public debate sprang up over the accuracy and value of predictions, asking whether it was possible to look into the future with any degree of certainty. In Looking Forward, Jamie L. Pietruska uncovers a culture of prediction in the modern era, where forecasts became commonplace as crop forecasters, “weather prophets,” business forecasters, utopian novelists, and fortune-tellers produced and sold their visions of the future. Private and government forecasters competed for authority—as well as for an audience—and a single prediction could make or break a forecaster’s reputation. 

Pietruska argues that this late nineteenth-century quest for future certainty had an especially ironic consequence: it led Americans to accept uncertainty as an inescapable part of both forecasting and twentieth-century economic and cultural life. Drawing together histories of science, technology, capitalism, environment, and culture, Looking Forward explores how forecasts functioned as new forms of knowledge and risk management tools that sometimes mitigated, but at other times exacerbated, the very uncertainties they were designed to conquer. Ultimately Pietruska shows how Americans came to understand the future itself as predictable, yet still uncertain.
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Questioning the Millennium
A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown, Revised Edition
Stephen Jay Gould
Harvard University Press, 2011
Gould addresses three questions about the millennium with his typical erudition, warmth, and whimsy: What is the concept of a millennium and how has its meaning shifted over time? How did the projection of Christ’s 1,000-year reign become a secular measure? And when exactly does the millennium begin—January 1, 2000, or January 2, 2001?
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Preview 2001+
Popular Culture Studies in the Future
Ray B. Browne
University of Wisconsin Press, 1995

The essays in this collection, written by some of the leading scholars in Popular Culture Studies, turn the page on the new millennium to see what are the directions of approach and the opportunities to be gained in recognition of the compelling need for studies in everyday cultures.

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A Short History of the Future
W. Warren Wagar
University of Chicago Press, 1989
In the tradition of H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come, W. Warren Wagar's A Short History of the Future is a memoir of postmodern times. Cast in the form of a history book, the narrative voice of the book's powerful vision is that of a far-future historian, Peter Jensen, who leaves this account of the world from the 1990s to the opening of the twenty-third century as a gift to his granddaughter. A dazzling and imaginative combination of fiction and scholarship, Wagar's speculative history of the future alternates between descriptions of world events and intimate glimpses of his fictive historian's family through the ages.

Jensen's tale traces the flow of the future from the early twenty-first-century reign of a megacorporate global economy, to its sudden collapse in 2044, when nuclear catastrophe envelops the world. In the traumatic aftermath, a socialist world commonwealth comes into being in the year 2062, followed by a lengthy transition to a decentralized order of technologically mature autonomous societies, many located in outer space. The riveting literary interludes that follow each chapter take the form of letters and documents from the history of Jensen's family, evoking the everyday lives of people in the midst of these global-historical events. Here we meet a woman in Brazil whose son is dying from a new immuno-deficiency disease, two brothers comparing life on earth with life in a space colony, and many more.

Neither fiction nor nonfiction, Wagar's brilliantly creative work is not meant to forecast the future, but rather to draw attention to possibilities and alternatives for humankind and planet Earth. In doing so, it also serves as an unforgettable reminder that the future is being made now.
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A Short History of the Future
W. Warren Wagar
University of Chicago Press, 1992
A dazzling and imaginative combination of fiction and scholarship, this speculative history of the future is a memoir of postmodern times. This second edition shows how the events of 1989 and their aftermath reinforce Wagar's predictions of the future. "A breathtaking future history in the manner of Wells and Stapledon, unnerving in its mixture of facts, fiction, and personal perspectives."—George Zebrowski, New York Review of Science Fiction
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A Short History of the Future
W. Warren Wagar
University of Chicago Press, 1999
W. Warren Wagar's A Short History of the Future is a memoir of postmodern times, cast as a history. This powerful and visionary book is narrated by a far-future historian, Peter Jensen, who leaves this account of the world from the 1990s to the opening of the twenty-third century as a gift to his granddaughter. A combination of fiction and scholarship, this third edition of Wagar's speculative history of the future alternates between descriptions of world events and intimate glimpses of his fictive historian's family into the first centuries of the new millennium.

"Thanks to Wagar's magisterial command of futurist information and theory, his extrapolated near-term future is an incisive, dynamic vision of where we may indeed be heading."—H. Bruce Franklin, Washington Post

"A comprehensive, massively detailed script of a possible near future. . . . Intriguing."—San Francisco Chronicle

"A Short History of the Future reads with ease, raises provocative possibilities and presents challenging occasions for thought and argument."—Chicago Tribune

"A breathtaking future history in the manner of Wells and Stapledon, unnerving in its mixture of fact, fiction, and personal perspectives."—George Zebrowski, New York Review of Science Fiction
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Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume III
A Century of Advance. Book 3: Southeast Asia
Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. Van Kley
University of Chicago Press, 1993
This monumental series, acclaimed as a "masterpiece of comprehensive scholarship" in the New York Times Book Review, reveals the impact of Asia's high civilizations on the development of modern Western society. The authors examine the ways in which European encounters with Asia have altered the development of Western society, art, literature, science, and religion since the Renaissance.

In Volume III: A Century of Advance, the authors have researched seventeenth-century European writings on Asia in an effort to understand how contemporaries saw Asian societies and peoples.

Book 3: Southeast Asia examines European images of the lands, societies, religions, and cultures of Southeast Asia. The continental nations of Siam, Vietnam, Malaya, Pegu, Arakan, Cambodia, and Laos are discussed, as are the islands of Java, Bali, Sumatra, Borneo, Amboina, the Moluccas, the Bandas, Celebes, the Lesser Sundas, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Mindanao, Jolo, Guam, and the Marianas.
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Europe (in Theory)
Roberto M. Dainotto
Duke University Press, 2007
Europe (in Theory) is an innovative analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas about Europe that continue to inform thinking about culture, politics, and identity today. Drawing on insights from subaltern and postcolonial studies, Roberto M. Dainotto deconstructs imperialism not from the so-called periphery but from within Europe itself. He proposes a genealogy of Eurocentrism that accounts for the way modern theories of Europe have marginalized the continent’s own southern region, portraying countries including Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal as irrational, corrupt, and clan-based in comparison to the rational, civic-minded nations of northern Europe. Dainotto argues that beginning with Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws (1748), Europe not only defined itself against an “Oriental” other but also against elements within its own borders: its South. He locates the roots of Eurocentrism in this disavowal; internalizing the other made it possible to understand and explain Europe without reference to anything beyond its boundaries.

Dainotto synthesizes a vast array of literary, philosophical, and historical works by authors from different parts of Europe. He scrutinizes theories that came to dominate thinking about the continent, including Montesquieu’s invention of Europe’s north-south divide, Hegel’s “two Europes,” and Madame de Staël’s idea of opposing European literatures: a modern one from the North, and a pre-modern one from the South. At the same time, Dainotto brings to light counter-narratives written from Europe’s margins, such as the Spanish Jesuit Juan Andrés’s suggestion that the origins of modern European culture were eastern rather than northern and the Italian Orientalist Michele Amari’s assertion that the South was the cradle of a social democracy brought to Europe via Islam.

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front cover of Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume I
Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume I
The Century of Discovery. Book 1.
Donald F. Lach
University of Chicago Press, 1994
Praised for its scope and depth, Asia in the Making of Europe is the first comprehensive study of Asian influences on Western culture. For volumes I and II, the author has sifted through virtually every European reference to Asia published in the sixteenth-century; he surveys a vast array of writings describing Asian life and society, the images of Asia that emerge from those writings, and, in turn, the reflections of those images in European literature and art. This monumental achievement reveals profound and pervasive influences of Asian societies on developing Western culture; in doing so, it provides a perspective necessary for a balanced view of world history.

Volume I: The Century of Discovery brings together "everything that a European could know of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, from printed books, missionary reports, traders' accounts and maps" (The New York Review of Books). Volume II: A Century of Wonder examines the influence of that vast new body of information about Asia on the arts, institutions, literatures, and ideas of sixteenth-century Europe.
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