front cover of Quaker Brotherhood
Quaker Brotherhood
Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee, 1917-1950
Allan W. Austin
University of Illinois Press, 2012
 
The Religious Society of Friends and its service organization, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) have long been known for their peace and justice activism. The abolitionist work of Friends during the antebellum era has been well documented, and their contemporary anti-war and anti-racism work is familiar to activists around the world. Quaker Brotherhood is the first extensive study of the AFSC's interracial activism in the first half of the twentieth century, filling a major gap in scholarship on the Quakers' race relations work from the AFSC's founding in 1917 to the beginnings of the civil rights movement in the early 1950s.
 
Allan W. Austin tracks the evolution of key AFSC projects such as the Interracial Section and the American Interracial Peace Committee, which demonstrate the tentativeness of the Friends' activism in the 1920s, as well as efforts in the 1930s to make scholarly ideas and activist work more theologically relevant for Friends. Documenting the AFSC's efforts to help European and Japanese American refugees during World War II, Austin shows that by 1950, Quakers in the AFSC had honed a distinctly Friendly approach to interracial relations that combined scholarly understandings of race with their religious views.
 
In tracing the transformation of one of the most influential social activist groups in the United States over the first half of the twentieth century, Quaker Brotherhood presents Friends in a thoughtful, thorough, and even-handed manner. Austin portrays the history of the AFSC and race--highlighting the organization's boldness in some aspects and its timidity in others--as an ongoing struggle that provides a foundation for understanding how shared agency might function in an imperfect and often racist world.
 
Highlighting the complicated and sometimes controversial connections between Quakers and race during this era, Austin uncovers important aspects of the history of Friends, pacifism, feminism, American religion, immigration, ethnicity, and the early roots of multiculturalism.
[more]

front cover of The Quaker Community on Barbados
The Quaker Community on Barbados
Challenging the Culture of the Planter Class
Larry Gragg
University of Missouri Press, 2009
Prior to the Quakers’ large-scale migration to Pennsylvania, Barbados had more Quakers than any other English colony. But on this island of sugar plantations, Quakers confronted material temptations and had to temper founder George Fox’s admonitions regarding slavery with the demoralizing realities of daily life in a slave-based economy—one where even most Quakers owned slaves. In The Quaker Community on Barbados, Larry Gragg shows how the community dealt with these contradictions as it struggled to change the culture of the richest of England’s seventeenth-century colonies.

Gragg has conducted meticulous research on two continents to re-create the Barbados Quaker community. Drawing on wills, censuses, and levy books along with surviving letters, sermons, and journals, he tells how the Quakers sought to implement their beliefs in peace, simplicity, and equality in a place ruled by a planter class that had built its wealth on the backs of slaves. He reveals that Barbados Quakers were a critical part of a transatlantic network of Friends and explains how they established a “counterculture” on the island—one that challenged the practices of the planter class and the class’s dominance in island government, church, and economy.

In this compelling study, Gragg focuses primarily on the seventeenth century when the Quakers were most numerous and active on Barbados. He tells how Friends sought to convert slaves and improve their working and living conditions. He describes how Quakers refused to fund the Anglican Church, take oaths, participate in the militia, or pay taxes to maintain forts—and how they condemned Anglican clergymen, disrupted their services, and wrote papers critical of the established church. By the 1680s, Quakers were maintaining five meetinghouses and several cemeteries, paying for their own poor relief, and keeping their own records of births, deaths, and marriages. Gragg also tells of the severe challenges and penalties they faced for confronting and rejecting the dominant culture.

With their civil disobedience and stand on slavery, Quakers on Barbados played an important role in the early British Empire but have been largely neglected by scholars. Gragg’s work makes their contribution clear as it opens a new window on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
[more]

logo for University of Illinois Press
Quakers and Abolition
Brycchan Carey
University of Illinois Press, 2018
This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. Contributors from a range of disciplines, nations, and faith backgrounds show Quaker's beliefs to be far from monolithic. They often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about the morality of slaveholding and the best approach to abolition. Not surprisingly, contributors explain, this complicated and evolving antislavery sensibility left behind an equally complicated legacy. While Quaker antislavery was a powerful contemporary influence in both the United States and Europe, present-day scholars pay little substantive attention to the subject. This volume faithfully seeks to correct that oversight, offering accessible yet provocative new insights on a key chapter of religious, political, and cultural history. Contributors include Dee E. Andrews, Kristen Block, Brycchan Carey, Christopher Densmore, Andrew Diemer, J. William Frost, Thomas D. Hamm, Nancy A. Hewitt, Maurice Jackson, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner, Gary B. Nash, Geoffrey Plank, Ellen M. Ross, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, James Emmett Ryan, and James Walvin.
[more]

front cover of Quakers and Abolition
Quakers and Abolition
Edited by Brycchan Carey and Geoffrey Plank
University of Illinois Press, 2014

This collection of fifteen insightful essays examines the complexity and diversity of Quaker antislavery attitudes across three centuries, from 1658 to 1890. Contributors from a range of disciplines, nations, and faith backgrounds show Quaker's beliefs to be far from monolithic. They often disagreed with one another and the larger antislavery movement about the morality of slaveholding and the best approach to abolition.

Not surprisingly, contributors explain, this complicated and evolving antislavery sensibility left behind an equally complicated legacy. While Quaker antislavery was a powerful contemporary influence in both the United States and Europe, present-day scholars pay little substantive attention to the subject. This volume faithfully seeks to correct that oversight, offering accessible yet provocative new insights on a key chapter of religious, political, and cultural history.

Contributors include Dee E. Andrews, Kristen Block, Brycchan Carey, Christopher Densmore, Andrew Diemer, J. William Frost, Thomas D. Hamm, Nancy A. Hewitt, Maurice Jackson, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Jones Lapsansky-Werner, Gary B. Nash, Geoffrey Plank, Ellen M. Ross, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, James Emmett Ryan, and James Walvin.

[more]

front cover of Queering Black Atlantic Religions
Queering Black Atlantic Religions
Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou
Roberto Strongman
Duke University Press, 2019
In Queering Black Atlantic Religions Roberto Strongman examines Haitian Vodou, Cuban Lucumí/Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé to demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine. In these rituals, the commingling of humans and the divine produces gender identities that are independent of biological sex. As opposed to the Cartesian view of the spirit as locked within the body, the body in Afro-diasporic religions is an open receptacle. Showing how trance possession is a primary aspect of almost all Afro-diasporic cultural production, Strongman articulates transcorporeality as a black, trans-Atlantic understanding of the human psyche, soul, and gender as multiple, removable, and external to the body.
[more]

front cover of Quest for a Christian America, 1800–1865
Quest for a Christian America, 1800–1865
A Social History of the Disciples of Christ, Volume 1
David Edwin Harrell Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2003

The definitive social history of the Disciples of Christ in the 19th century

The Disciples of Christ, led by reformers such as Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone, was one of a number of early-19th-century primitivist religious movements seeking to “restore the ancient order of things.” The Disciples movement was little more than a loose collection of independent congregations until the middle of the 19th century, but by 1900 three clear groupings of churches had appeared. Today, more than 5 million Americans—members of the modern-day Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), Independent Christian Churches, and Churches of Christ, among others—trace their religious heritage to this “Restoration Movement.”
 

[more]

front cover of Questions on Aristotle's Categories
Questions on Aristotle's Categories
John Duns Scotus
Catholic University of America Press, 2014
This work is the first English translation of Scotus's commentary on Aristotle's Quaestiones super Praedicamenta. Although there are numerous Latin commentaries on Aristotle's Categories, Scotus's Questions is one of the few commentaries on the Categories written in the thirteenth century covering all of Aristotle's text, including the often neglected post-praedicamenta, and the only complete Latin commentary available in English. Moreover, unlike many of the commentaries, Scotus's text is one of the last commentaries to be written before the nominalist reduction of the categories to substance and quality. The question format allows Scotus a great deal of liberty to discuss the categories in detail, as well as matters that are only remotely raised by the text. Altogether, the forty-four questions cover the following subjects: questions 1-4 are prolegomena to the work itself and raise the question of its subject matter as well as whether there can be a science of the categories; questions 5-8 deal with equivocals, univocals, and denominatives; questions 9-11 discuss Aristotle's two rules regarding predication and the sufficiency of the categories; questions 12-36 discuss the four main categories treated by Aristotle, namely, substance, quantity, relation, and quality; and the remaining eight questions discuss the post-praedicamenta.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Questions on Exodus
Philo
Harvard University Press

Syncretistic exegesis.

The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BC to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Greek as well as Jewish learning. In attempting to reconcile biblical teachings with Greek philosophy he developed ideas that had wide influence on Christian and Jewish religious thought.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of the works of Philo is in ten volumes and two supplements, distributed as follows. Volume I: Creation; Interpretation of Genesis II and III. II: On the Cherubim; The Sacrifices of Abel and Cain; The Worse Attacks the Better; The Posterity and Exile of Cain; On the Giants. III: The Unchangeableness of God; On Husbandry; Noah's Work as a Planter; On Drunkenness; On Sobriety. IV: The Confusion of Tongues; The Migration of Abraham; The Heir of Divine Things; On the Preliminary Studies. V: On Flight and Finding; Change of Names; On Dreams. VI: Abraham; Joseph; Moses. VII: The Decalogue; On Special Laws Books I–III. VIII: On Special Laws Book IV; On the Virtues; Rewards and Punishments. IX: Every Good Man Is Free; The Contemplative Life; The Eternity of the World; Against Flaccus; Apology for the Jews; On Providence. X: On the Embassy to Gaius; indexes. Supplement I: Questions on Genesis. II: Questions on Exodus; index to supplements.

[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
Questions on Genesis
Philo
Harvard University Press

Syncretistic exegesis.

The philosopher Philo was born about 20 BC to a prominent Jewish family in Alexandria, the chief home of the Jewish Diaspora as well as the chief center of Hellenistic culture; he was trained in Greek as well as Jewish learning. In attempting to reconcile biblical teachings with Greek philosophy he developed ideas that had wide influence on Christian and Jewish religious thought.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of the works of Philo is in ten volumes and two supplements, distributed as follows. Volume I: Creation; Interpretation of Genesis II and III. II: On the Cherubim; The Sacrifices of Abel and Cain; The Worse Attacks the Better; The Posterity and Exile of Cain; On the Giants. III: The Unchangeableness of God; On Husbandry; Noah's Work as a Planter; On Drunkenness; On Sobriety. IV: The Confusion of Tongues; The Migration of Abraham; The Heir of Divine Things; On the Preliminary Studies. V: On Flight and Finding; Change of Names; On Dreams. VI: Abraham; Joseph; Moses. VII: The Decalogue; On Special Laws Books I–III. VIII: On Special Laws Book IV; On the Virtues; Rewards and Punishments. IX: Every Good Man Is Free; The Contemplative Life; The Eternity of the World; Against Flaccus; Apology for the Jews; On Providence. X: On the Embassy to Gaius; indexes. Supplement I: Questions on Genesis. II: Questions on Exodus; index to supplements.

[more]

front cover of The Quotable Saint Jerome
The Quotable Saint Jerome
Jerome Saint Jerome
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
Among the illustrious writers of the early Church, Saint Jerome (345-420) had a way with words few could equal. To honor the 1600th anniversary of the death of this patron saint of librarians and Scripture scholars, the Catholic University of America Press is releasing The Quotable Jerome, a well-organized collection of memorable wisdom from this early witness to Catholic truth. While Jerome is known for acerbic wits, editor Justin McClain shows that much of the time, Jerome's writings are instructive and even inspiring. Homilists will easily be able to find what Jerome said on any number of topics--Scripture, the Trinity, the sacraments, persecution, heresy, divine revelation, or chastity--just to name a few. All citations are clearly sourced if the reader wants to pursue the longer passage in question. “I am upset because I am human; I control my tongue because I am a Christian. Anger surges up in my heart, but I do not give vent to it.” - Homilies on the Psalms, Homily 10, Psalm 76 (77) (FOTC 48) “The doer of evil has, indeed, killed his own soul; but the heretic—the liar—has killed as many souls as he has seduced.” - Homilies on the Psalms, Homily 2, Psalm 5 (FOTC 48) “The Church does not consist in walls, but in the truths of her teachings. The Church is there where there is true faith.” - Homilies on the Psalms, Homily 46, Psalm 133 (134) “To err is human, but to lay snares is diabolical.” - Dogmatic and Polemical Works, The Apology Against the Books of Rufinus, Book Three, paragraph 33 (FOTC 53) “So much for what Scripture says; learn now what it means.” - Homilies on the Psalms, Homily 15, Psalm 82 (83) (FOTC 48)
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter