A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY95 start with B start with B
Once rarely discussed in medical circles, the relationship between spirituality and health has become an important topic in health care. This change is evidenced in courses on religion and medicine taught in most medical schools, articles in journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, and conferences being held all over the country. Yet, much of the discussion of the role of religion and spirituality in health care keeps the critical distance of only being about spirituality. A Balm for Gilead goes further, offering a work of spirituality.
Sulmasy moves between the poetic and the speculative, addressing his subject in the tradition of great spiritual writers like Augustine and Bonaventure. He draws from philosophical and theological sources—specifically, Hebrew and Christian scripture—to illuminate how the art of healing is integrally tied to a sense of the divine and our ultimate interconnectedness. Health care professionals—and anyone else involved with the care of the sick and dying—will find this series of meditations both inspiring and instructive.
Sulmasy addresses the spiritual malaise that physicians, nurses, and other health care workers experience in their professional lives, and explores how these Christian healers can be inspired to persevere in the care of the sick. Drawing on the parable of the prodigal son, for instance, Sulmasy illustrates how some physicians have put financial gain ahead of their patients, and how genuine spirituality might change their hearts. He examines both enigmatic topics such as the relationship between sinfulness, sickness, and suffering and the spirituality of more routine topics such as preventive medicine. In one especially stirring and poignant meditation, he reflects on the spirituality of dying in the light of Christian hope.
A Balm for Gilead interweaves prayer and reflection, pointing the way to a twenty-first-century spirituality for health care professionals and their patients.
Since 1979 Southern Baptists have been noisily struggling to agree on symbols, beliefs, and practices as they attempt to make sense of their changing social world. Nancy Ammerman has carefully documented their struggle. She tells the story of the Baptist reversal from a moderate to a fundamentalist outlook and speculates on the future of the denomination.
Ammerman places change among the Southern Baptists in the context of the cultural and economic changes that have transformed the South from its rural past into an urbanizing, culturally diverse region. Not only did the South change; Southern Baptists did as well. Reflecting this diversity, the Southern Baptist bureaucracy was relatively progressive. During the 1960s and 1970s, moderate sentiments prevailed, while fundamentalists remained on the margins. These two were, however, becoming increasingly divergent in what they considered important about being a Baptist, in their views about the Bible, in their attitudes on the origination of women, on Christian morals, and on national politics.
Late in the 1970s, a fundamentalist coalition emerged, followed by unsuccessful efforts by moderates to oppose it. The battles escalated until 1985, when 45,000 Baptists gathered in Dallas to decide between contending presidential candidates. That dramatic event illustrated the extent to which organized political resources were determining the course of the conflict. Ammerman studies these strategies and resources as well.
Examining how this tension affected Baptists, Ammerman begins with case studies of the change it is producing in Baptist agencies. But she also brings us back to the local churches and individual believers who are renegotiating their relationships within their denomination. She asks whether the denomination’s polity can accommodate an increasingly diverse group of Baptists, of whether the only way dissidents can have a voice is through schism.
A princely tale inspired by Christianity and Buddhism.
One of the best known examples of the hagiographic novel, this is the tale of an Indian prince who becomes aware of the world’s miseries and is converted to Christianity by the monk Barlaam. Barlaam and Josaphat (Ioasaph) were believed to have re-converted India after her lapse from conversion to Christianity, and they were numbered among the Christian saints. Centuries ago likenesses were noticed between the life of Josaphat and the life of the Buddha; the resemblances are in incidents, doctrine, and philosophy, and Barlaam’s rules of abstinence resemble the Buddhist monk’s. But not till the mid-nineteenth century was it recognized that, in Josaphat, the Buddha had been venerated as a Christian saint for about a thousand years.
The origin of the story of Barlaam and Ioasaph—which in itself has little peculiar to Buddhism—appears to be a Manichean tract produced in Central Asia. It was welcomed by the Arabs and by the Georgians. The Greek romance of Barlaam appears separately first in the 11th century. Most of the Greek manuscripts attribute the story to John the Monk, and it is only some later scribes who identify this John with John Damascene (ca. 676–749). There is strong evidence in Latin and Georgian as well as Greek that it was the Georgian Euthymius (who died in 1028) who caused the story to be translated from Georgian into Greek, the whole being reshaped and supplemented. The Greek romance soon spread throughout Christendom, and was translated into Latin, Old Slavonic, Armenian, and Arabic. An English version (from Latin) was used by Shakespeare in his caskets scene in The Merchant of Venice.
David M. Lang’s Introduction traces parallels between the Buddhist and Christian legends, discusses the importance of Arabic versions, and notes influences of the Manichean creed.
“Be always converting, and be always converted; turn us again, O Lord,” Thomas Shepard urged his Cambridge congregation in the 1640s. This mandate coming down from American Puritan times to New Age seekers, to be “always converting, and always converted,” places a radical burden on the self as site of renewal and world-change, even as conversion becomes surrounded by deconversion (rejection of prior beliefs) and counterconversion (turns to alternative beliefs) across global modernity.
Rob Wilson’s reconceptualization of the American project of conversion begins with the story of Henry ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia, the first Hawaiian convert to Christianity, “torn from the stomach” of his Native Pacific homeland and transplanted to New England. Wilson argues that ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s conversion is both remarkable and prototypically American, because he dared to redefine himself via this drive to rebirth.
By mapping the poetics and politics of conversion and counterconversion, Wilson returns conversion to its central place in the American literature, history, and psyche. Through ‘Ōpūkaha‘ia’s story, and through the works of the Tongan social scientist and fiction writer Epeli Hau‘ofa, Wild West poet Ai, and the mercurial Bob Dylan, Wilson demonstrates that conversion—seemingly an anachronistic concern in this secular age—is instead a global, yet deeply American subject, less about “salvation” or finality than about “experimentation” and the quest for modern beatitude.
As we all know and as many of our well-established textbooks have argued for decades, the Inquisition was one of the most frightening and bloody chapters in Western history; Pope Pius XII was anti-Semitic and rightfully called “Hitler’s Pope,” the Dark Ages were stunting the progress of knowledge to be redeemed only by the secular spirit of the Enlightenment. The religious Crusades were an early example of the rapacious Western thirst for riches and power. But what if these long held beliefs were all wrong?
In this stunning, powerful, and ultimately persuasive book, Rodney Stark, one of the most highly regarded sociologists of religion and bestselling author of The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco 1997), argues that some of our most firmly held ideas about history, ideas that paint the Catholic Church in the least favorable light are, in fact, fiction. Why have we held these wrongheaded ideas so firmly and for so long? And if our beliefs are wrong, what is the truth?
In each chapter, Stark takes on a well-established anti-Catholic myth, gives a fascinating history of how each myth became conventional wisdom and presents a startling picture of the real truth. For example, instead of the Spanish Inquisition being an anomaly of torture and murder of innocent people persecuted for “imaginary” crimes such as witchcraft and blasphemy, Stark argues that not only did the Spanish Inquisition spill very little blood, but it was a major force in support of moderation and justice.
Stark dispels the myth of Pope Pius XII being apathetic or even helpful to the Nazi movement, such as to merit the title “Hitler’s Pope,” and instead shows that the campaign to link Pope Pius XII to Hitler was initiated by the Soviet Union, presumably in hopes of neutralizing the Vatican in post-World War II affairs. Many praised Pope Pius XIIs vigorous and devoted efforts to saving Jewish lives during the war.
Instead of understanding the Dark Ages as a millennium of ignorance and backwardness inspired by the Catholic Church’s power, Stark argues that the whole notion of the “Dark Ages” was an act of pride perpetuated by anti-religious intellectuals who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of “Enlightenment.”
In the end, readers of Bearing False Witness will have a more accurate history of the Catholic Church and will also understand why it became unfairly maligned for so long. Bearing False Witness is a compelling and sobering account of how egotism and ideology often work together to give us a false truth.
Practices such as the examination of conscience, general confession, and spiritual exercises, which until the 1400s had been restricted to monastic elites, breached the walls of monasteries in the period that followed. Thanks in large part to Franciscans and Jesuits, lay urban elites—both men and women—gained access to spiritual practices whose goal was to enhance belief and create new selves. Using Michel Foucault’s writing on the hermeneutics of the self, and the French philosopher’s intuition that the early modern period was a moment of transition in the configurations of the self, Sluhovsky offers a broad panorama of spiritual and devotional techniques of self-formation and subjectivation.
In Beheading the Saint, Geneviève Zubrzycki studies that transformation through a close investigation of the annual Feast of St. John the Baptist of June 24. The celebrations of that national holiday, she shows, provided a venue for a public contesting of the dominant ethno-Catholic conception of French Canadian identity and, via the violent rejection of Catholic symbols, the articulation of a new, secular Québécois identity. From there, Zubrzycki extends her analysis to the present, looking at the role of Québécois identity in recent debates over immigration, the place of religious symbols in the public sphere, and the politics of cultural heritage—issues that also offer insight on similar debates elsewhere in the world.
A new history illuminates the Society of Jesus in its first century from the perspective of those who knew it best: the early Jesuits themselves.
The Society of Jesus was established in 1540. In the century that followed, thousands sought to become Jesuits and pursue vocations in religious service, teaching, and missions. Drawing on scores of unpublished biographical documents housed at the Roman Jesuit Archive, Camilla Russell illuminates the lives of those who joined the Society, building together a religious and cultural presence that remains influential the world over.
Tracing Jesuit life from the Italian provinces to distant missions, Russell sheds new light on the impact and inner workings of the Society. The documentary record reveals a textual network among individual members, inspired by Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. The early Jesuits took stock of both quotidian and spiritual experiences in their own records, which reflect a community where the worldly and divine overlapped. Echoing the Society’s foundational writings, members believed that each Jesuit’s personal strengths and inclinations offered a unique contribution to the whole—an attitude that helps explain the Society’s widespread appeal from its first days.
Focusing on the Jesuits’ own words, Being a Jesuit in Renaissance Italy offers a new lens on the history of spirituality, identity, and global exchange in the Renaissance. What emerges is a kind of genetic code—a thread connecting the key Jesuit works to the first generations of Jesuits and the Society of Jesus as it exists today.
From 1400 through 1700, the number of reports of demonic possessions among European women was extraordinarily high. During the same period, a new type of mysticism—popular with women—emerged that greatly affected the risk of possession and, as a result, the practice of exorcism. Many feared that in moments of rapture, women, who had surrendered their souls to divine love, were not experiencing the work of angels, but rather the ravages of demons in disguise. So how then, asks Moshe Sluhovsky, were practitioners of exorcism to distinguish demonic from divine possessions?
Drawing on unexplored accounts of mystical schools and spiritual techniques, testimonies of the possessed, and exorcism manuals, Believe Not Every Spirit examines how early modern Europeans dealt with this dilemma. The personal experiences of practitioners, Sluhovsky shows, trumped theological knowledge. Worried that this could lead to a rejection of Catholic rituals, the church reshaped the meaning and practices of exorcism, transforming this healing rite into a means of spiritual interrogation. In its efforts to distinguish between good and evil, the church developed important new explanatory frameworks for the relations between body and soul, interiority and exteriority, and the natural and supernatural.
Emma Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America.
Pierre-Anthoine Pastedechouan was born into a nomadic indigenous community of Innu living along the St. Lawrence River in present-day Quebec. At age eleven, he was sent to France by Catholic missionaries to be educated for five years, and then brought back to help Christianize his people.
Pastedechouan's youthful encounter with French Catholicism engendered in him a fatal religious ambivalence. Robbed of both his traditional religious identity and critical survival skills, he had difficulty winning the acceptance of his community upon his return. At the same time, his attempts to prove himself to his people led the Jesuits to regard him with increasing suspicion. Suspended between two worlds, Pastedechouan ultimately became estranged--with tragic results--from both his native community and his missionary mentors.
An engaging narrative of cultural negotiation and religious coercion, Betrayal of Faith documents the multiple betrayals of identity and culture caused by one young man's experiences with an inflexible French Catholicism. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and non-native peoples.
Guenée chooses as his frame the momentous period from the height of Saint Louis's reign in the mid-thirteenth century to the beginning of the Italian wars two hundred years later. During this time of schism in the church, of war between nascent states, and of treachery among princes, Bernard Gui (1261-1331), Gilles Le Muisit (1272-1353), Pierre D'Ailly (1351-1420), and Thomas Basin (1412-1490) all rose from modest circumstances to the dignity of office. Guenée shows us how these prelates used their talent, ambition, patrons, zeal, and experience to juggle the competing demands of obedience to church and state; to overcome competition from an upcoming new generation; and to cope with plague, war, and violence. Free of jargon yet steeped in learning, Between Church and State reveals the career patterns and politics of an era while forging a new model for points of departure in historical scholarship.
One week after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) repeatedly and overwhelmingly voted down resolutions congratulating fellow Southern Baptist Harry Truman on his role in Israel’s creation. From today’s perspective, this seems like a shocking result. After all, Christians—particularly the white evangelical Protestants who populate the SBC—are now the largest pro-Israel constituency in the United States. How could conservative evangelicals have been so hesitant in celebrating Israel’s birth in 1948? How did they then come to be so supportive?
Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel addresses these issues by exploring how Southern Baptists engaged what was called the “Palestine question”: whether Jews or Arabs would, or should, control the Holy Land after World War I. Walker Robins argues that, in the decades leading up to the creation of Israel, most Southern Baptists did not directly engage the Palestine question politically. Rather, they engaged it indirectly through a variety of encounters with the land, the peoples, and the politics of Palestine. Among the instrumental figures featured by Robins are tourists, foreign missionaries, Arab pastors, converts from Judaism, biblical interpreters, fundamentalist rebels, editorialists, and, of course, even a president. While all revered Palestine as the Holy Land, each approached and encountered the region according to their own priorities.
Nevertheless, Robins shows that Baptists consistently looked at the region through an Orientalist framework, broadly associating the Zionist movement with Western civilization, modernity, and progress over and against the Arabs, whom they viewed as uncivilized, premodern, and backward. He argues that such impressions were not idle—they suggested that the Zionists were bringing to fruition Baptists’ long-expressed hopes that Israel would regain the prosperity it had held in the biblical era, the Holy Land would one day be revived, and biblical prophecies preceding the return of Christ would be fulfilled.
With texts from such organizations as the Christian Coalition, the Heritage Foundation, and Concerned Women for America, and writings by Elizabeth Dole, Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, and Rush Limbaugh, Kintz traces the usefulness of this activism for the secular claim that conservative political economy is, in fact, simply an expression of the deepest and most admirable elements of human nature itself. The discussion of Limbaugh shows how he draws on the skepticism of contemporary culture to create a sense of absolute truth within his own media performance—its truth guaranteed by the market. Kintz also describes how conservative interpretations of the Holy Scriptures, the U.S. Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence have been used to challenge causes such as feminism, women’s reproductive rights, and gay and lesbian rights. In addition to critiquing the intellectual and political left for underestimating the power of right-wing grassroots organizing, corporate interests, and postmodern media sophistication, Between Jesus and the Market discusses the proliferation of militia groups, Christian entrepreneurship, and the explosive growth and "selling" of the Promise Keepers.
For the early Christians, “pagan” referred to a multitude of unbelievers: Greek and Roman devotees of the Olympian gods, and “barbarians” such as Arabs and Germans with their own array of deities. But while these groups were clearly outsiders or idolaters, who and what was pagan depended on the outlook of the observer, as Christopher Jones shows in this fresh and penetrating analysis. Treating paganism as a historical construct rather than a fixed entity, Between Pagan and Christian uncovers the ideas, rituals, and beliefs that Christians and pagans shared in Late Antiquity.
While the emperor Constantine’s conversion in 312 was a momentous event in the history of Christianity, the new religion had been gradually forming in the Roman Empire for centuries, as it moved away from its Jewish origins and adapted to the dominant pagan culture. Early Christians drew on pagan practices and claimed important pagans as their harbingers—asserting that Plato, Virgil, and others had glimpsed Christian truths. At the same time, Greeks and Romans had encountered in Judaism observances and beliefs shared by Christians such as the Sabbath and the idea of a single, creator God. Polytheism was the most obvious feature separating paganism and Christianity, but pagans could be monotheists, and Christians could be accused of polytheism and branded as pagans. In the diverse religious communities of the Roman Empire, as Jones makes clear, concepts of divinity, conversion, sacrifice, and prayer were much more fluid than traditional accounts of early Christianity have led us to believe.
Cain wanders the frontier as a Bigfoot-like hairy beast and confronts an early Mormon apostle. An evil band of murderers from Mormon scripture, known as the Gadianton robbers, provides an excuse for the failure of a desert town. Stories of children raised from the dead with decayed bodies and damaged minds help draw boundaries between the proper spheres of human and divine action. Mormons who observe UFOs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries find ways to explain them in relation to the church’s cosmology. The millenarian dimension of that belief system induces church members to invest in the Dream Mine, a hidden treasure that a would-be heir to Joseph Smith wraps in prophecy of the end times. A Utah version of Nessie haunts a large mountain lake. Non-Mormons attempt to discredit Joseph Smith with tales that he had tried and failed to walk on water.
Mormons gave distinctive meanings to supernatural legends and events, but their narratives incorporated motifs found in many cultures. Many such historical legends and beliefs found adherents down to the present. This collection employs folklore to illuminate the cultural and religious history of a people.
Although persecuted and banned from practicing their beliefs by the Nazi regime in 1933, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ unified resistance has been largely forgotten. Basing his work on a wide range of sources, including documents and archives previously unconsidered as well as critical analyses of Jehovah’s Witness literature and survivor interviews, Detlef Garbe chronicles the Nazi’s relentless persecution of this religious group before and during World War II.
The English translation of this important work features a series of original photographs not published in the German edition. These striking images bring a sense of individual humanity to this story and help readers comprehend the reality of the events documented. Between Resistance and Martyrdom is an indispensable work that will introduce an English-speaking audience to this important but lesser-known part of Holocaust history.
Between the Brown and the Red captures the multifaceted nature of church-state relations in communist Poland, relations that oscillated between mutual confrontation, accommodation, and dialogue. Ironically, under communism the bond between religion and nation in Poland grew stronger. This happened in spite of the fact that the government deployed nationalist themes in order to portray itself as more Polish than communist. Between the Brown and the Red also introduces one of the most fascinating figures in the history of twentieth-century Poland and the communist world.
In this study of the complex relationships between nationalism, communism, authoritarianism, and religion in twentieth-century Poland, Mikołaj Kunicki shows the ways in which the country’s communist rulers tried to adapt communism to local traditions, particularly ethnocentric nationalism and Catholicism. Focusing on the political career of Bolesław Piasecki, a Polish nationalist politician who began his surprising but illuminating journey as a fascist before the Second World War and ended it as a procommunist activist, Kunicki demonstrates that Polish communists reinforced an ethnocentric self-definition of Polishness and—as Piasecki’s case demonstrates—thereby prolonged the existence of Poland’s nationalist Right.
Beyond Betrayal charts a nationwide identity shift through the story of one chapter of Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), an organization founded in the scandal’s aftermath. VOTF had three goals: helping survivors of abuse; supporting priests who were either innocent or took risky public stands against the wrongdoers; and pursuing a broad set of structural changes in the church. Patricia Ewick and Marc W. Steinberg follow two years in the life of one of the longest-lived and most active chapters of VOTF, whose thwarted early efforts at ecclesiastical reform led them to realize that before they could change the Catholic Church, they had to change themselves. The shaping of their collective identity is at the heart of Beyond Betrayal, an ethnographic portrait of how one group reimagined their place within an institutional order and forged new ideas of faith in the wake of widespread distrust.
A breakthrough in the theology of parenthood, integrating Catholic social thought and social scientific studies of child well-being in order to offer a more diverse and inclusive interpretation
The Catholic Church has a long and diverse history of tolerating various child-rearing arrangements. The dominant Catholic framework for conceptualizing parenthood, however, is highly influenced by concerns over sexual ethics and gender norms. While sexual and reproductive ethics are important, the present consensus that theological consideration of parenthood necessarily hinges on these matters diverts attention from actual parenting practices in their social and cultural contexts. In reality, kinship and caregiving are often negotiated in complex ways.
In Beyond Biology, Jacob M. Kohlhaas uses a historical and interdisciplinary theological method that engages both analytically and appreciatively with tradition to sketch a broader Catholic anthropology of parenthood. Kohlhaas’s identification of interpretive options within the Catholic tradition creates room for meaningful, intellectually convincing, and theologically rich responses to challenges facing Catholic parents and families today.
By marshaling the diversity of the Christian tradition and exploring contemporary research in the social sciences and humanities, Kohlhaas frames a theological conversation on parenthood as parenthood—considering the needs and well-being of children as well as the potentials and capabilities of adult caregivers. In his discussion, Kohlhaas considers adoption and nonbiological parenthood, fathers as primary caregivers and nurturers, caregiving by siblings and grandparents, and communal parenting and coparenting beyond the spousal pair. In Kohlhaas’s view, conceptions of parenthood should be guided by the meaning of Christian kinship rooted in baptism as well as concern for the actual caregiving capacities of adults and the needs of children.
Beyond Compare is a remarkable work that offers a commentary on spiritual learning for the twenty-first century rooted in two classic texts from the Hindu and Christian traditions: the Essence of the Three Auspicious Mysteries by Śrī Vedānta Deśika and Treatise on the Love of God by St. Francis de Sales.
In his commentary, Clooney achieves multiple goals—the book is a contribution to Christian spiritual theology, highlighting for today the beautiful insights into love by St. Francis de Sales (1567-1623), Doctor of the Church. At the same time it points out how even in our world of many religious paths, we can recover and deepen the ancient tradition of loving surrender into God's hands by opening ourselves to the wisdom of India and one of Hindu India's most famous traditions of loving God, explained to us by the south Indian Hindu theologian Śrī Vedānta Deśika (1268-1369). Clooney goes further, offering a comparative study of these classic works in which he self-consciously writes about the process of reading the two works and the impact this approach has on the reader. The good advice found through this deep engagement with these texts offers a deeper insight into how we can most fruitfully and spiritually think about religious pluralism in the 21st century, remaining open in heart and mind while loyal still to our own tradition.
Not merely a book about loving surrender to God, Beyond Compare offers us the opportunity to advance along that path ourselves, learning from the wisdom of St. Francis de Sales and Śrī Vedānta Deśika, meditating on their two paths together, deepening our own love and willingness to surrender in love to God.
Does Christianity have an essence? How should the identity of Christianity be defined in the modern world? As early as 1903, German theologian Ernst Troeltsch began to question the then-popular concept of an “essence of Christianity.” In his search for alternative categories and methods for conceptualizing Christianity and its potential roles in modern society, Troeltsch immersed himself in the study and analysis of Christian history. This book demonstrates the intimate connection between Troeltsch’s philosophical writings on the essence of Christianity and his historical investigations of Christianity’s past, focusing on Troeltsch’s conceptions of Christian origins, historical development, and the ideal types of church-sect-mysticism.
Lori Pearson argues that as a result of his historical work, Troeltsch moved beyond the category of essence and sought new ways of theorizing Christian identity in the context of modernity’s pluralistic yet fragmented society.
Contributors. An Yountae, Ellen Armour, J. Kameron Carter, Eleanor Craig, Amy Hollywood, Vincent Lloyd, Filipe Maia, Mayra Rivera, Devin Singh, Joseph R. Winters
––Benedict XVI, General Audience, 27 February 2013
Roberto Regoli offers a keen and comprehensive preview of Pope Benedict XVI's pontificate, which will be better understood only after time has passed and more becomes available. As an historian, Regoli provides ample context to frame the theology and pastoral priorities of a pope, professor, priest, and figure of history who has been shaped by his times, and who will undoubtedly be remembered as deeply orienting the Church toward the future. The perspective and questions offered by Regoli will likewise be a key component to the scholarship surrounding Pope Benedict's pontificate for decades to come, and he significantly broadens what has already been compiled by Anglophone writers.
Patrick Lally Michelson's intellectual history of asceticism in Russian Orthodox thought traces the development of these competing arguments from the early nineteenth century to the early months of World War I. He demonstrates that this discourse was an imaginative interpretation of lived Orthodoxy, primarily meant to satisfy the ideological needs of Russian thinkers and Orthodox intellectuals as they responded to the socioeconomic, political, and cultural challenges of modernity.
Though the Bible is a product of West Asia, its influence on Europe and the Americas has received far more attention than its complex career in the East. R. S. Sugirtharajah corrects this imbalance with an expansive new study of Asia's subversive and idiosyncratic relationship with the Bible. This is the story of missionaries, imperialists, exegetes, reformers, and nationalists who molded Biblical texts according to their own needs in order to influence religion, politics, and daily life from India to China.
When the Bible reached east and south Asia in the third century CE, its Christian scriptures already bore traces of Asian commodities and Indian moral stories. In China, the Bible merged with the teachings of Buddha and Lao Tzu to produce the Jesus Sutras. As he recounts the history of how Christianity was influenced by other Asian religions, Sugirtharajah deftly highlights the controversial issue of Buddhist and Vedic influence on Biblical religion.
Once used to justify European rule in Asia, the Bible has also served to promote the spiritual salvation of women, outcasts, and untouchables. The Bible has left a literary mark on Asia in two ways: through its influence on Asian writers and through the reinvigoration of modern Asian vernaculars when proselytizing missionaries introduced Western print culture to the East.
Like other Christian denominations, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) has been engaged in the battle for the Bible since challenges to biblical authority began to exert significant influence in America toward the end of the nineteenth century. Other believing communities have responded with various reevaluations of the biblical text. Latter-day Saints have experimented with similar approaches, often taking liberal positions on biblical authority and conservative positions on history and authorship. However, Latter-day Saints accept additional scripture and embrace a theology notably distinct from traditional Christianity. Hence, they relate to the Bible differently from other Christians, creating gaps with mainstream biblical studies. This volume bridges that gap.
From comparing the Book of Mormon to the Bible or the Dead Sea Scrolls, to Mormon feminists’ views on the Gospels, this volume takes a comprehensive and inclusive approach to understanding Bible scholarship’s role in Mormon history, exploring these differences for both scholars and students. A diverse group of contributors presents an accessible resource to mediate between Latter-day Saint traditions and the broader context of biblical history, literature, and scholarship. Each essay provides a synopsis of relevant major scholarly views and delivers new insights into varied crosscurrents of biblical studies.
Bible believer (also Bible-believer,Bible-believing Christian,Bible-believing Church) is a self-description by conservative Christians to differentiate their teachings from others who see non- or extrabiblical tradition as higher or equal in authority.
In normal usage, "Bible believer" means an individual or organisation that believes the Christian Bible is true in some significant way. However, this combination of words is given a unique meaning in fundamentalist Protestant circles, where it is equated with the belief that the Christian Bible "contains no theological contradictions, historical discrepancies, or other such 'errors'", otherwise known as biblical inerrancy.
Engaging voices crossing textual limits, race, and ethnic lines
In this collection of essays, scholars from Oceania open a new dialog regarding the vast, complex, and slippery nature of the Bible and the fluid meanings of borders and belongings. From belonging in a place, a group, or movement to belongings as material and cultural possessions, from borders of a text, discipline, or thought to borders of nations, communities, or bodies, the authors follow the currents of Oceania to the shores of Asia and beyond. Scholars contributing essays include Jeffrey W. Aernie, Merilyn Clark, Jione Havea, Gregory C. Jenks, Jeanette Mathews, Judith E. McKinlay, Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon, David J. Neville, John Painter, Kathleen P. Rushton, Ruth Sheridan, Nasili Vaka‘uta, and Elaine M. Wainwright. Michele A. Connolly, David M. Gunn, and Mark G. Brett provide responses to the essays.
Features:
- Discussion of the impacts of natural disasters and political and ecological upheavals on biblical interpretation and theological reflection
- Fourteen essays on texts in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament
- Three responses to the essays provide a range of views on the topics
Contributors. Irena Backus, Guy Bedouelle, Kalman P. Bland, Kenneth G. Hagen, Scott H. Hagen, Scott H. Hendrix, R. Gerald Hobbs, Jean-Claude Margolin, H. C. Erik Midelfort, Richard A. Muller, John B. Payne, David C. Steinmetz
Established in 1958 in the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church immediately sought to establish a welcoming religious community—focusing initially on bringing in both Black and White congregants and, as ideas about inclusivity developed, on accepting all people, regardless of identity. By naming itself for a theologically progressive preacher and professor, the fledgling church signaled a perspective unfamiliar to Baptists in the South, which gave the church a radical edge. The church’s first pastor, Robert Seymour, also possessed a progressive vision that resonated with his congregants and pushed them to commit to justice and equality. Soon after its founding, the church strived to challenge inequality in segregated Chapel Hill. Although it remained predominantly White well into the twenty-first century, Binkley evolved to become increasingly aware of issues of gender equality, equity, LGBTQ inclusion, and climate justice. Addressing these issues was Binkley’s way of building God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
Binkley: A Congregational History tells the story of a single church with a complicated past, demonstrating that, while liberal in heritage, it operated with an unconsciously White, heteronormative worldview that slowly evolved into a distinct expression of faith. The author also draws on scholarship within the broader field of American religious history to position Binkley—with all its complexities, conflicts, and nuances—within the broader context of twentieth-century liberal Protestantism. Perhaps most importantly, Gardner tells the story of a place animated by a vision of Christianity that is often overlooked or drowned out by larger and louder Christian groups. He compellingly shows how this progressive vision of Christianity has shaped Binkley’s commitment to its community and beyond.
This challenging collection is required reading for anyone concerned with the history of racism, discrimination, and the Latter-day Saints.
America’s first Black bishop and his struggle to rebuild the African American presence inside the Episcopal Church
In 1918, the Right Reverend Edward T. Demby took up the reins as Suffragan (assistant) Bishop for Colored Work in Arkansas and the Province of the Southwest, an area encompassing Arkansas, Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and New Mexico. Set within the context of a series of experiments in black leadership conducted by the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas in the early decades of the twentieth century, Demby's tenure in a segregated ministry illuminates the larger American experience of segregation disguised as a social good.
Intent on demonstrating the industry and self-reliance of black Episcopalians to the church at large, Demby set about securing black priests for the diocese, baptizing and confirming communicants, and building schools and other institutions of community service. A gifted leader and a committed Episcopalian, Demby recognized that black service institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and orphanages, would be the means to draw African Americans back to the Episcopal Church, which they had abandoned in droves after emancipation as the church of their former masters.
For more than twenty years, hamstrung by white apathy, lack of funds, jurisdictional ambiguity, and the Great Depression, Demby doggedly tried to establish the credibility of a ministry that was as ill-conceived as it was well intended. Michael J. Beary skillfully narrates the shifting alliances within the Episcopal Church and shows how race was but one aspect of a more elemental struggle for power. He demonstrates how Demby's steadiness of purpose and non-confrontational manner gathered allies on both sides of the color line and how, ultimately, his judgment and the weight of his experience carried the church past its segregationist experiment.
Drawing on interviews with more than 1,800 black clergy in both urban and rural settings, combined with a comprehensive historical overview of seven mainline black denominations, C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya present an analysis of the Black Church as it relates to the history of African Americans and to contemporary black culture. In examining both the internal structure of the Church and the reactions of the Church to external, societal changes, the authors provide important insights into the Church’s relationship to politics, economics, women, youth, and music.
Among other topics, Lincoln and Mamiya discuss the attitude of the clergy toward women pastors, the reaction of the Church to the civil rights movement, the attempts of the Church to involve young people, the impact of the black consciousness movement and Black Liberation Theology and clergy, and trends that will define the Black Church well into the next century.
This study is complete with a comprehensive bibliography of literature on the black experience in religion. Funding for the ten-year survey was made possible by the Lilly Endowment and the Ford Foundation.
Blessed Are the Activists examines US Catholic activists’ influence on US-Guatemalan relations during the Guatemalan civil war’s most violent years in the 1970s and 1980s. Cangemi argues that Catholic activists’ definition of human rights, advocacy methods, and structure caused them to act as a transnational human rights NGO that engaged Guatemalan and US government officials on human rights issues, reported on Guatemala’s human rights violations, and criticized US foreign policy decisions as a contributing factor in Guatemala’s inequality, poverty, and violence. His work foregrounds how Catholic activists emphasized dignity for Guatemala’s poorest citizens and the connections they made between justice, solidarity, and peace and brought Guatemala’s violence, poverty, and inequality to greater global attention, often at great personal risk.
Cangemi pays considerable attention to multiple facets of the strained US-Guatemala diplomatic relationship, including how and why Guatemala’s military dictatorship exposed the internal flaws within the Carter administration’s decision to link military aid to human rights and how internal foreign policy debates in the Carter and Reagan administrations helped to intensify Guatemala’s bloody civil war. He also includes interviews conducted with Guatemalan genocide survivors and refugees to provide firsthand accounts of the consequences of those policymaking decisions. Finally, he offers readers an in-depth examination of the US Catholic press’s sharp rebukes of US policies on Guatemala and all of Central America when the broader Roman Catholic Church began to move farther toward the ideological right under John Paul II.
Blessed Are the Activists offers rich, original research and a gripping narrative. With Guatemala and other countries in Latin America still experiencing human rights abuses, this book will continue to provide context. It will appeal to a broad swath of readers, from scholars to the general public and students.
Why then, asks noted gay commentator Mark D. Jordan, are so many churches vehemently opposed to blessing same-sex unions? In this incisive work, Jordan shows how carefully selected ideals of Christian marriage have come to dominate recent debates over same-sex unions. Opponents of gay marriage, he reveals, too often confuse simplified ideals of matrimony with historical facts. They suppose, for instance, that there has been a stable Christian tradition of marriage across millennia, when in reality Christians have quarreled among themselves for centuries about even the most basic elements of marital theology, authorizing experiments like polygamy and divorce.
Jordan also argues that no matter what the courts do, Christian churches will have to decide for themselves whether to bless same-sex unions. No civil compromise can settle the religious questions surrounding gay marriage. And queer Christians, he contends, will have to discover for themselves what they really want out of marriage. If they are not just after legal recognition as a couple or a place at the social table, do they really seek the blessing of God? Or just the garish melodrama of a white wedding? Posing trenchant questions such as these, Blessing Same-Sex Unions will be a must-read for both sides of the debate over gay marriage in America today.
The ritual murder accusation is one of a series of myths that fall under the label blood libel, and describes the medieval legend that Jews require Christian blood for obscure religious purposes and are capable of committing murder to obtain it. This malicious myth continues to have an explosive afterlife in the public sphere, where Sarah Palin's 2011 gaffe is only the latest reminder of its power to excite controversy. Blood Libel is the first book-length study to analyze the recent historiography of the ritual murder accusation and to consider these debates in the context of intellectual and cultural history as well as methodology. Hannah R. Johnson articulates how ethics shapes methodological decisions in the study of the accusation and how questions about methodology, in turn, pose ethical problems of interpretation and understanding. Examining recent debates over the scholarship of historians such as Gavin Langmuir, Israel Yuval, and Ariel Toaff, Johnson argues that these discussions highlight an ongoing paradigm shift that seeks to reimagine questions of responsibility by deliberately refraining from a discourse of moral judgment and blame in favor of an emphasis on historical contingencies and hostile intergroup dynamics.
P. L. Gaus’s Blood of the Prodigal, a mystery in the tradition of Tony Hillerman, is back in a new edition, including an exclusive interview with the author, discussion questions for reading groups, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio, with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
In Holmes County, Ohio—home to the largest Amish and Mennonite settlements in the world—mystery and foreboding lurk in the quiet Old Order Amish community led by Bishop Eli Miller.
The illusion of peace is shattered one early morning when a young Amish boy goes missing—abducted from his home and from Bishop Miller’s care. At first, the bishop suspects the child’s father, who was exiled from the Old Order ten years ago, but a murder soon casts doubt on the bishop’s theory. With a strong distrust of law enforcement and the modern “English” ways, the bishop must put his faith in an unlikely partnership with Professor Michael Branden before it’s too late.With the help of the peaceful pastor Cal Troyer and the reckless Sheriff Bruce Robertson, Branden plunges headlong into the closed culture to unravel the mystery of the missing child and uncover truths many would prefer to leave undisturbed.
Here for the first time, Allen J. Frantzen traces these chivalric ideals from the Great War back to their origins in the Middle Ages and shows how they resulted in highly influential models of behavior for men in combat. Drawing on a wide selection of literature and images from the medieval period, along with photographs, memorials, postcards, war posters, and film from both sides of the front, Frantzen shows how such media shaped a chivalric ideal of male sacrifice based on the Passion of Jesus Christ. He demonstrates, for instance, how the wounded body of Christ became the inspiration for heroic male suffering in battle. For some men, the Crucifixion inspired a culture of revenge, one in which Christ's bleeding wounds were venerated as badges of valor and honor. For others, Christ's sacrifice inspired action more in line with his teachings—a daring stay of hands or reason not to visit death upon one's enemies.
Lavishly illustrated and eloquently written, Bloody Good will be must reading for anyone interested in World War I and the influence of Christian ideas on modern life.
The Body of Faith is the first account of American religious history to highlight the biological body. Robert C. Fuller brings a crucial new perspective to the study of American religion, showing that knowledge about the biological body deeply enriches how we explain dramatic episodes in American religious life. Fuller shows that the body’s genetically evolved systems—pain responses, sexual passion, and emotions like shame and fear—have persistently shaped the ways that Americans forge relationships with nature, to society, and to God.
The first new work to appear in the Chicago History of American Religion series in decades, The Body of Faith offers a truly interdisciplinary framework for explaining the richness, diversity, and endless creativity of American religious life.
Bold Conscience chronicles the shifting conception of conscience in early modern England, as it evolved from a faculty of restraint—what Shakespeare labels “coward conscience”—to one of bold and forthright self-assertion. The concept of conscience played an important role in post-Reformation England, from clerical leaders to laymen, not least because of its central place in determining loyalties during the English Civil War and the regicide of King Charles I. Yet the most complex and lasting perspectives on conscience emerged from deliberately literary voices—William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton.
Joshua Held argues that literary texts by these authors transform the idea of conscience as a private, shameful state to one of boldness fit for navigating both royal power and common dissent in the public realm. Held tracks the increasing political power of conscience from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Henry VIII to Donne’s court sermons and Milton’s Areopagitica, showing finally that in Paradise Lost, Milton roots boldness in the inner paradise of a pure, common conscience.
Applying a fine-grain analysis to literary England from about 1601 to 1667, this study also looks back to the 1520s, to Luther’s theological foundations of the concept, and forward to 1689, to Locke’s transformation of the idea alongside the term “consciousness.” Ultimately, Held’s study shows how conscience emerges at once as a bulwark against absolute sovereignty and as a stronghold of personal certainty.
The story of queer Mormons is one that some might not expect to be joyful. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has traditionally asserted that queerness is counter to God’s plan and that gender as determined at birth is eternal. Any marriage other than a monogamous pairing of male and female is “counterfeit.” So called “wickedness,” we are told, “never was happiness.”
But queer Mormons tell different stories—stories filled with joy. This collection includes essays by queer Mormons across the LGBTQ spectrum who, when they looked inside themselves, found divinity rather than sin. Stories by people who are made exactly as they are meant to be, and live accordingly.
Queer Mormons who feel forced out of the institutional church don’t typically find despair on the outside or abandonment by the divine. Instead, their lives are rich and beautiful—made all the more so by the struggle. The Book of Mormon tells us, “Men are that they might have joy.” The Book of Queer Mormon Joy affirms that trans, nonbinary, intersex, asexual, bisexual, polyamorous, and gay people have joy. Joy is for everyone.
Eric Jager traces the history and psychology of the self-as-text concept from antiquity to the modern day. He focuses especially on the Middle Ages, when the metaphor of a "book of the heart" modeled on the manuscript codex attained its most vivid expressions in literature and art. For instance, medieval saints' legends tell of martyrs whose hearts recorded divine inscriptions; lyrics and romances feature lovers whose hearts are inscribed with their passion; paintings depict hearts as books; and medieval scribes even produced manuscript codices shaped like hearts.
"The Book of the Heart provides a fresh perspective on the influence of the book as artifact on our language and culture. Reading this book broadens our appreciation of the relationship between things and ideas."—Henry Petroski, author of The Book on the Bookshelf
A book about the role of books in shaping the ancient religious landscape
This collection of essays by leading scholars from a variety of academic disciplines explores the ongoing relevance of Harry Gamble’s Books and Readers in the Early Church (1995) for the study of premodern book cultures. Contributors expand the conversation of book culture to examine the role the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an played in shaping the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions in the ancient and medieval world. By considering books as material objects rather than as repositories for stories and texts, the essays examine how new technologies, new materials, and new cultural encounters contributed to these holy books spreading throughout territories, becoming authoritative, and profoundly shaping three global religions.
Features:
- Comparative analysis of book culture in Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic contexts
- Art-historical, papyrological, philological, and historical modes of analysis
- Essays that demonstrate the vibrant, ongoing legacy of Gamble’s seminal work
Winner of the 2014 Latina/o Studies Section - LASA Outstanding Book Award
In Borderlands Saints, Desirée A. Martín examines the rise and fall of popular saints and saint-like figures in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Focusing specifically on Teresa Urrea (La Santa de Cabora), Pancho Villa, César Chávez, Subcomandante Marcos, and Santa Muerte, she traces the intersections of these figures, their devotees, artistic representations, and dominant institutions with an eye for the ways in which such unofficial saints mirror traditional spiritual practices and serve specific cultural needs.
Popular spirituality of this kind engages the use and exchange of relics, faith healing, pilgrimages, and spirit possession, exemplifying the contradictions between high and popular culture, human and divine, and secular and sacred. Martín focuses upon a wide range of Mexican and Chicano/a cultural works drawn from the nineteenth century to the present, covering such diverse genres as the novel, the communiqué, drama, the essay or crónica, film, and contemporary digital media. She argues that spiritual practice is often represented as narrative, while narrative—whether literary, historical, visual, or oral—may modify or even function as devotional practice.
rate, rising from fifty thousand at the outbreak of revolution to more than a million as the nation
edged toward civil war. As the Second Great Awakening swept through the Old Southwest, it generated
religious enthusiasm among Methodist and Baptist converts who were intent upon replacing
old forms of Protestantism with an evangelical vibrancy that reflected and often contributed
to the unsettled social relations of the new republic. No place was better suited to embrace this
enthusiasm than Kentucky. In Born of Water and Spirit, Richard C. Traylor explores the successes
and failures of Baptists in this area, using it as a window into the elements of Baptist life
that transcended locale.
Traylor argues that the achievements of Baptists in Kentucky reflect, in many ways, their success
and coming of age in the early national period of America. The factionalism that characterized
frontier Baptists, he asserts, is an essential key to understanding who the colonial Baptists had
been, who they were becoming in the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, and
who they would become after the Civil War.
In this highly nuanced study, Traylor looks at the denomination in light of what he calls its
“Baptist impulse”—the movement’s fluid structure and democratic spirit. These characteristics
have proven to be its greatest strength as well as the source of its most terrible struggles. Yet, confronting
theological clashes, along with the challenges that come with growth, forged the Baptist
identity and shaped its future.
The first three chapters examine the primary elements of the impulse: rituals of conversion,
baptism, and communion; the Baptist preacher; and the significance of the local church to the
sect. Following these chapters are explorations of the reformations and forces of change in the
early to mid-1800s, the role of women and African Americans in developing the group, and the
refinement and reorientation of priorities from 1840 to 1860. This important denominational history
will be of great value to scholars of American religious history and the history of the early
American republic.
Richard C. Traylor is a professor of history at Hardin-Simmons University in
Abilene, Texas. His articles have been published in Baptist History and Heritage and
Missouri Historical Review.
The essays in this magnificent volume examine a variety of aspects of Boswell's interpretation of events in the development of sexuality from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, including a Roman emperor's love letters to another man; suspicions of sodomy among medieval monks, knights, and crusaders; and the gender-bending visions of Christian saints and mystics. Also included are discussions of Boswell's career, including his influence among gay and lesbian Christians and his role in academic debates between essentialists and social constructionists.
Elegant and thought-provoking, this collection provides a fitting twenty-fifth anniversary tribute to the incalculable influence of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and its author.
Drawing on a range of sources—interviews, government documents, church periodicals, books, pamphlets, and articles—Sernett shows how the mass migration created an institutional crisis for black religious leaders. He describes the creative tensions that resulted when the southern migrants who saw their exodus as the Second Emancipation brought their religious beliefs and practices into northern cities such as Chicago, and traces the resulting emergence of the belief that black churches ought to be more than places for "praying and preaching." Explaining how this social gospel perspective came to dominate many of the classic studies of African American religion, Bound for the Promised Land sheds new light on various components of the development of black religion, including philanthropic endeavors to "modernize" the southern black rural church. In providing a balanced and holistic understanding of black religion in post–World War I America, Bound for the Promised Land serves to reveal the challenges presently confronting this vital component of America’s religious mosaic.
The dramatic account of a Revolutionary-era conspiracy in which a band of farmers opposed to military conscription and fearful of religious persecution plotted to kill the governor of North Carolina.
Less than a year into the American Revolution, a group of North Carolina farmers hatched a plot to assassinate the colony’s leading patriots, including the governor. The scheme became known as the Gourd Patch or Lewellen Conspiracy. The men called themselves the Brethren.
The Brethren opposed patriot leaders’ demand for militia volunteers and worried that “enlightened” deist principles would be enshrined in the state constitution, displacing their Protestant faith. The patriots’ attempts to ally with Catholic France only exacerbated the Brethren’s fears of looming heresy. Brendan McConville follows the Brethren as they draw up plans for violent action. After patriot militiamen threatened to arrest the Brethren as British sympathizers in the summer of 1777, the group tried to spread false rumors of a slave insurrection in hopes of winning loyalist support. But a disaffected insider denounced the movement to the authorities, and many members were put on trial. Drawing on contemporary depositions and legal petitions, McConville gives voice to the conspirators’ motivations, which make clear that the Brethren did not back the Crown but saw the patriots as a grave threat to their religion.
Part of a broader Southern movement of conscription resistance, the conspiracy compels us to appreciate the full complexity of public opinion surrounding the Revolution. Many colonists were neither loyalists nor patriots and came to see the Revolutionary government as coercive. The Brethren tells the dramatic story of ordinary people who came to fear that their Revolutionary leaders were trying to undermine religious freedom and individual liberty—the very causes now ascribed to the Founding generation.
Thus, by 1877, some 400 Mormon settlements spanned the western frontier from Salt Lake City to outposts in Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, and California. As prophet of the LDS Church and governor of the proposed State of Deseret, Young led several campaigns for Utah statehood while defending polygamy and local sovereignty. His skillful and authoritarian leadership led historian Bernard de Voto to classify him as an “American genius,” responsible for turning Joseph Smith’s visions “into the seed of life.”
Young’s diaries and journals reveal a man dedicated to his church, defensive of his spiritual and temporal claims to authority, and determined to create a modern Zion within the Utah desert. Editor George D. Smith’s careful organization and annotation of Young’s personal writings provide insights into the mind of Mormonism’s dynamic church leader and frontier statesman.
Thus, by 1877, some 400 Mormon settlements spanned the western frontier from Salt Lake City to outposts in Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, and California. As prophet of the LDS Church and governor of the proposed State of Deseret, Young led several campaigns for Utah statehood while defending polygamy and local sovereignty. His skillful and authoritarian leadership led historian Bernard de Voto to classify him as an “American genius,” responsible for turning Joseph Smith’s visions “into the seed of life.”
Young’s diaries and journals reveal a man dedicated to his church, defensive of his spiritual and temporal claims to authority, and determined to create a modern Zion within the Utah desert. Editor George D. Smith’s careful organization and annotation of Young’s personal writings provide insights into the mind of Mormonism’s dynamic church leader and frontier statesman.
Brigham Young was a rough-hewn craftsman from New York whose impoverished and obscure life was electrified by the Mormon faith. He trudged around the United States and England to gain converts for Mormonism, spoke in spiritual tongues, married more than fifty women, and eventually transformed a barren desert into his vision of the Kingdom of God. While previous accounts of his life have been distorted by hagiography or polemical exposé, John Turner provides a fully realized portrait of a colossal figure in American religion, politics, and westward expansion.
After the 1844 murder of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Young gathered those Latter-day Saints who would follow him and led them over the Rocky Mountains. In Utah, he styled himself after the patriarchs, judges, and prophets of ancient Israel. As charismatic as he was autocratic, he was viewed by his followers as an indispensable protector and by his opponents as a theocratic, treasonous heretic.
Under his fiery tutelage, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints defended plural marriage, restricted the place of African Americans within the church, fought the U.S. Army in 1857, and obstructed federal efforts to prosecute perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. At the same time, Young's tenacity and faith brought tens of thousands of Mormons to the American West, imbued their everyday lives with sacred purpose, and sustained his church against adversity. Turner reveals the complexity of this spiritual prophet, whose commitment made a deep imprint on his church and the American Mountain West.
In this 12th volume of the Arrington Lecture Series, Thomas Alexander (Lemuel Redd Professor of Western American History, Emeritus, at Brigham Young University), asserts that Brigham Young and the LDS Church’s governing Quorum of Twelve made timely and diligent efforts to investigate the massacre and encouraged legal proceedings but were hindered by federal territorial officials and lied to by massacre participant John D. Lee, preventing Young from learning the full truth for many years.
The purpose of Brigham Young University: A House of Faith is to outline the struggle the Mormon church has encountered in trying to blend academics and faith and in reconciling church standards with norms at other American universites, not to produce a comprehensive, chronological history of BYU. Instead, a selective approach has been taken–a thematic introduction to events, incidents, and statements, both published and private, in selected areas where tensions between scholarship and faith, freedom and regimentation have been the most pronounced. Examples include the development of a religious curriculum, the honor code, the controversy surrounding organic evolution, politics, student life, athletics, the arts, and faculty research. We hope that this approach will help readers appreciate the religious and intellectual dilemma facing educators and church leaders, as well as the fundamental sincerity of those involved in trying to establish academic rigor within religious parameters or to prevent moral deterioration when traditional restraints are left unchecked. Whatever the particular issue under discussion, an attempt has been made to keep the presentation balanced and impartial, yet sympathetic. While some readers may question the descriptive, largely noninterpretive approach, it is hoped that most will, through this approach, at least gain a greater understanding of the complex challenges involved in successfully integrating religion and academics.
We especially hope that Brigham Young University: A House of Faith will be of use to those who appreciate more than a cursory history of Mormonism–in this case, the Mormon concept of education–and who relish the rich fabric of pluralism. Brigham Young University has an engaging past, which, we believe, deserves more than a superficial treatment. Perhaps this book can be a springboard for more thorough investigations into other areas of the school’s past. There have been so many noteworthy accomplishments, discouraging defeats, moving religious experiences, humorous accounts of human foibles, and undocumented daily routine, that much remains in describing all that has gone into making the university founded more than a century ago by Brigham Young.
In presenting the sources cited in this work, we have followed the recommendations of the 1982 edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, with slight modifications. Readers will notice, for example, our incorporation of Chicago’s “down style” approach to capitalization. In order to facilitate future research, complete source citations are included as endnotes. To avoid a cumbersome and ultimately unworkable linking of each sentence with its corresponding source and bibliographic reference, we have instead referenced each paragraph and [p. xiii]cited sources in the endnotes section in the order in which material is presented in the paragraph indicated. Where the reader would otherwise encounter difficulty in identifying the specific source of a given piece of information, or where the source is considered especially important, it is provided in the text in an abbreviated form within parentheses.
This collection surveys the many houses, residences, farms, and properties of Brigham Young, leader of the Mormon pioneers, first territorial governor of Utah, and second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The authors discuss, in addition to the buildings themselves, what went on within their walls, looking especially at the lives of Young's plural wives and their children. Their emphasis is on Young's residences as homes, not just structures. The text is heavily illustrated with photos, drawings and maps.
Bright Lights in the Desert explores the history of how members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Las Vegas have improved the regions’ neighborhoods, inspired educational institutions, brought integrity to the marketplace, and provided wholesome entertainment and cultural refinement. The LDS influence has helped shape the metropolitan city because of its members’ focus on family values and community service.
Woods discusses how, through their beliefs and work ethics, they have impacted the growth of the area from the time of their first efforts to establish a mission in 1855 through the present day. Bright Lights in the Desert reveals Las Vegas as more than just a tourist destination and shows the LDS community’s commitment to making it a place of deep religious faith and devotion to family.
Broken English is a tale of honor, deception, and revenge, one in which circumstances and the search for justice test the mettle of the closest of friends and reveal the desperate measures of the strongest of foes. Following on the critical and popular success of P. L. Gaus’ acclaimed Amish mystery series, this new edition of Broken English includes an exclusive interview with the author, discussion questions for reading groups, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio, with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
The peaceful town of Millersburg, Ohio, in the heart of Amish country, is rocked by the vicious murder of a woman at the hands of an ex-convict. When a local reporter covering the story turns up dead, while the convict is already behind bars, suspicion falls on David Hawkins, the first victim’s father. With Hawkins nowhere to be found among the protective Amish community that had taken him in as one of its own, Professor Michael Branden, Sheriff Bruce Robertson, and Pastor Cal Troyer set out to uncover the elusive truth in this otherwise quiet corner of the world.
Although he served as an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for only twelve and a half years, Bruce R. McConkie’s twenty-six years’ service in the First Council of Seventy had already made him a household name within the church. Called to full-time church service at age thirty-one, McConkie quickly gained a reputation as a theologian and doctrinal teacher. He became a prolific writer, and his controversial book, Mormon Doctrine, remained a bestseller for decades. His writing style, dogmatic approach, and quickness to reprimand others he believed in error made him many enemies, while others endeared themselves to him because of those very traits.
McConkie the man was far more complex than the serious and focused general authority most church members saw and heard at the pulpit. Those who knew him best experienced his profound sense of humor. His passion for jogging, rock hounding, and jewelry making occupied much of his free time. Those who witnessed his final address delivered days before his death felt compassion toward him, no matter how they had always viewed him as a writer, speaker, or leader. Truly, to understand Bruce R. McConkie one must look closely at the entire picture.
Building a Better Bridge is a record of the fourth "Building Bridges" seminar held in Sarajevo in 2005 as part of an annual symposium on Muslim-Christian relations cosponsored by Georgetown University and the Archbishop of Canterbury. This volume presents the texts of the public lectures with regional presentations on issues of citizenship, religious believing and belonging, and the relationship between government and religion—both from the immediate situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina and from three contexts further afield: Britain, Malaysia, and West Africa.
Both Christian and Muslim scholars propose key questions to be faced in addressing the issue of the common good. How do we approach the civic sphere as believers in particular faiths and as citizens of mixed societies? What makes us who we are, and how do our religious and secular allegiances relate to one another? How do we accommodate our commitment to religious values with acknowledgment of human disagreement, and how can this be expressed in models of governance and justice? How are we, mandated by scriptures to be caretakers, to respond to the current ecological and economic disorder of our world?
Michael Ipgrave and his contributors do not claim to provide definitive answers to these questions, but rather they further a necessary dialogue and show that, while Christian and Islamic understandings of God may differ sharply and perhaps irreducibly, the acknowledgment of one another as people of faith is the surest ground on which to build trust, friendship, and cooperation.
In Building a Protestant Left, Mark Hulsether uses the history of C&C as a case study to explore changing ideas about religion and society in the latter half of the twentieth century. He follows the twists and turns of this story from Niebuhr's Christian realist positions of the 1940s, through Protestant participation in the complex social movements of the 1950s and 1960s, to the emergence of various liberation theologies—African American, feminist, Latin American, and others—that used C&C as a central arena of debate in the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout, Hulsether places these changes in the context of postwar cultural and social history, relating C&C's theological and ethical positions to the broader social and political issues the journal addressed. Included, for example, is an illuminating discussion of C&C's positions in relation to one of the major developments of recent decades: the rise of neoconservatism and the religious right.
Engagingly written, Building a Protestant Left bridges the gap between secularized history and cultural studies on the one hand and traditional religious studies and religious ethics on the other. It also bridges an important generational gap within public-minded religious thought—it is as well informed on the issues that engaged the magazine during Niebuhr's heyday (from the 1940 to the 1960s) as on the liberation theologies and other radical positions that came afterward.
The Author: Mark Hulsether is assistant professor of religious studies and American studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Frederick Quinn, an Episcopal priest and historian, is adjunct professor of history at Utah State University and adjunct professor of political science at the University of Utah. His previous books include Democracy at Dawn, Notes From Poland and Points East, a TLS International Book of the Year, and African Saints, Martyrs, and Holy People, a Black Catholic Congress Book of the Month. A former chaplain at Washington National Cathedral, he holds a doctorate in history from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Sciorra spent thirty-five years researching these community art forms and interviewing Italian immigrant and U.S.-born Catholics. By documenting the folklife of this group, Sciorra reveals how Italian Americans in the city use expressive culture and religious practices to transform everyday urban space into unique, communal sites of ethnically infused religiosity. The folk aesthetics practiced by individuals within their communities are integral to understanding how art is conceptualized, implemented, and esteemed outside of museum and gallery walls. Yard shrines, sidewalk altars, Nativity presepi, Christmas house displays, a stone-studded grotto, and neighborhood processions—often dismissed as kitsch or prized as folk art—all provide examples of the vibrant and varied ways contemporary Italian Americans use material culture, architecture, and public ceremonial display to shape the city’s religious and cultural landscapes.
Written in an accessible style that will appeal to general readers and scholars alike, Sciorra’s unique study contributes to our understanding of how value and meaning are reproduced at the confluences of everyday life.
Joseph Sciorra is the director of Academic and Cultural Programs at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College. He is the editor of Italian Folk: Vernacular Culture in Italian-American Lives and co-editor of Embroidered Stories: Interpreting Women's Domestic Needlework from the Italian Diaspora.
The Business Francis Means aims to break through these walls, showing that Pope Francis has something to say to all Christians. His message, taken as a whole, keeps us from dividing the “seamless garment” of Christ: he reminds the conservatives of the problems of inequality and poverty, and the liberals that social justice is not enough – the Church is the bride of Christ, not a social institution or an NGO.
Monsignor Martin Schlag summarizes and explains the message of Pope Francis on business and the economy in this compact volume. The Business Francis Means will be of great interest to the Catholic layperson, especially one involved in political or economic life.
Written by specialists in several disciplines, this volume explores the parameters and significance of magic in Byzantine society, from the fourth century to after the empire's fall. The authors address a wide variety of questions, some of which are common to all historical research into magic, and some of which are peculiar to the Byzantine context.
The authors reveal the scope, the forms, and the functioning of magic in Byzantine society, throwing light on a hitherto relatively little-known aspect of Byzantine culture, and, at the same time, expanding upon the contemporary debates concerning magic and its roles in pre-modern societies.
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