A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
In addition to being the sixth bishop of the Diocese of New York, Henry Codman Potter (1835-1908) was a prominent voice in the Social Gospel movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book, the first in-depth study of Potter's life and work, examines his career in the Episcopal church as well as the origins and legacy of his progressive social views.
As industrialization and urbanization spread in the nineteenth century, the Social Gospel movement sought to apply Christian teachings to effect improvements in the lives of the less fortunate. Potter was firmly in this tradition, concerning himself especially with issues of race, the place of women in society, questions of labor and capital, and what he called "political righteousness." Placing Potter against the wider backdrop of nineteenth-century American Protestantism, Bourgeois explores the experiences and influences that led him to espouse these socially conscious beliefs, to work for social reform, and to write such works as Sermons of the City (1881) and The Citizen in His Relation to the Industrial Situation (1902).
In telling Potter's remarkable story, All Things Human stands as a valuable contribution to intellectual and religious history as well as an exploration of the ways in which religion and society interact.
The consensus of southern historians is that, since the Second Great Awakening, evangelicalism has dominated the South. This is certainly true when one considers the extent to which southern culture is dominated by evangelical rhetoric and ideas. However, in Alabama one non-evangelical group has played a significant role in shaping the state’s history. J. Barry Vaughn explains that, although the Episcopal Church has always been a small fraction (around 1 percent) of Alabama’s population, an inordinately high proportion, close to 10 percent, of Alabama’s significant leaders have belonged to this denomination. Many of these leaders came to the Episcopal Church from other denominations because they were attracted to the church’s wide degree of doctrinal latitude and laissez-faire attitude toward human frailty.
Vaughn argues that the church was able to attract many of the state’s governors, congressmen, and legislators by positioning itself as the church of conservative political elites in the state--the planters before the Civil War, the “Bourbons” after the Civil War, and the “Big Mules” during industrialization. He begins this narrative by explaining how Anglicanism came to Alabama and then highlights how Episcopal bishops and congregation members alike took active roles in key historic movements including the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement. Bishops, Bourbons, and Big Mules closes with Vaughn’s own predictions about the fate of the Episcopal Church in twenty-first-century Alabama.
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.
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.
The Education of Phillips Brooks probes the formative years of one of the best-known figures of Victorian America's "Gilded Age". Rigorously researched, bringing as yet untapped archival material into play, John F. Woolverton's book is an extremely readable and fascinating look at a gifted, persuasive clergyman and public figure. The sermon Brooks delivered at his Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia while Abraham Lincoln's body lay in state overnight in Independence Hall was published, making him nationally famous overnight. He also is known for penning the lyrics to "O Little Town of Bethlehem". Although Brooks was not a major theologian, he was nurtured in an atmosphere of serious religious thought. In the crisis era of pre-Civil War America, he sought a religious and cultural ideal in the "perfect manhood" of Jesus Christ and consequently "won a name" for himself, as his slightly envious cousin, Henry Adams, once remarked. Woolverton places Brooks in his cultural context and shows how this religious leader was shaped psychologically and by his times and how those factors helped him forge a spiritual ideal for a troubled nation.
Father Paul M. Washington rose to local and nation prominence as an unflagging supporter of civil and women's rights. One of a handful of black priests in a traditionally white church, he fought for understanding among all people, eventually serving twenty-five years as the Rector of the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood. Though his ideas about equality often went against the views of the Episcopal church leadership, he rejected threats of withdrawn funding or retaliation to follow his heart and his theology.
Father Washington's story is a window of insight into the struggles for justice and dignity in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the tumultuous 1960s he supported the Black Power movement, the Black Panther Party, and many other groups working for peace and justice, providing meeting places and guidance. He often found himself in the midst of racial disturbances—the riots on Susquehanna Avenue in 1963 and on Columbia Avenue in 1964, in front of the Board of Education where high school students protested the Eurocentric curriculum, and outside the walls of Girard College where citizens and civic leaders demonstrated against the school's exclusion of black children. In the 1980s, he helped Philadelphia city officials negotiate with MOVE members and was a vocal supporter of Ramona Africa, fighting for her release from prison. It was in his church on the corner of 18th and Diamond Streets that women were first ordained a priests in the Episcopal church. And it was one of his congregation, Barbara Harris, who became the first female Episcopal bishop.
In his evocative voice, Father Washington describes the pivotal events of his life and how each impacted upon his evolving ideas of the relationship between religion and justice. Spanning seven decades, his account is at once an insightful and unique historical account of political action, of the reformation of the church, of the changing urban landscape, and of a life graced by leadership and spiritual enlightenment.
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