A fresh account of early American religious history that argues for a new understanding of ritual.

In the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War, there was an awkward persistence of sovereign rituals, vestiges of a monarchical past that were not easy to shed. In Awkward Rituals, Dana Logan focuses our attention on these performances, revealing the ways in which governance in the early republic was characterized by white Protestants reenacting the hierarchical authority of a seemingly rejected king. With her unique focus on embodied action, rather than the more common focus on discourse or law, Logan makes an original contribution to debates about the relative completeness of America’s Revolution.
 
Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.
 

Uniting Catholic Ireland and Protestant Ireland was a central idea of the "Irish Revival," a literary and cultural manifestation of Irish nationalism that began in the 1890s and continued into the early twentieth century. Yet many of the Revival's Protestant leaders, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and John Synge, failed to address the profound cultural differences that made uniting the two Irelands so problematic, while Catholic leaders of the Revival, particularly the journalist D. P. Moran, turned the movement into a struggle for greater Catholic power.

This book fully explores James Joyce's complex response to the Irish Revival and his extensive treatment of the relationship between the "two Irelands" in his letters, essays, book reviews, and fiction up to Finnegans Wake. Willard Potts skillfully demonstrates that, despite his pretense of being an aloof onlooker, Joyce was very much a part of the Revival. He shows how deeply Joyce was steeped in his whole Catholic culture and how, regardless of the harsh way he treats the Catholic characters in his works, he almost always portrays them as superior to any Protestants with whom they appear. This research recovers the historical and cultural roots of a writer who is too often studied in isolation from the Irish world that formed him.

The difficulties that have dogged the Northern Ireland peace process and the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement are rarely out of the headlines. This book gives an insight into one of the issues at stake for the people of Northern Ireland – the long-term impact of political violence on the civil population.

The result of extensive research among local communities, and drawing on survey and interview evidence, Northern Ireland After the Good Friday Agreement sets this issue within the context of past conflict and the continuing sectarian violence of the present. In particular it presents the views of ordinary people about their personal experiences of political violence and the impact it has had upon their lives.

Moreover, it shows how the Troubles have affected the young people of the region, and looks at the problems facing a society coming out of a protracted period of low-intensity conflict.

As the news shows us every day, contemporary American culture and politics are rife with people who demonize their enemies by projecting their own failings and flaws onto them. But this is no recent development. Rather, as John Corrigan argues here, it’s an expression of a trauma endemic to America’s history, particularly involving our long domestic record of religious conflict and violence.

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World spans from Christian colonists’ intolerance of Native Americans and the role of religion in the new republic’s foreign-policy crises to Cold War witch hunts and the persecution complexes that entangle Christians and Muslims today. Corrigan reveals how US churches and institutions have continuously campaigned against intolerance overseas even as they’ve abetted or performed it at home. This selective condemnation of intolerance, he shows, created a legacy of foreign policy interventions promoting religious freedom and human rights that was not reflected within America’s own borders. This timely, captivating book forces America to confront its claims of exceptionalism based on religious liberty—and perhaps begin to break the grotesque cycle of projection and oppression.

William J. Goode Book Award, American Sociological Association Family Section, 2000 "Path-breaking, brilliant, and a pleasure to read. The idea that women will be either career or home oriented is one that is long overdue for re-examination." --Arlene Kaplan Daniels, Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University In American culture, the image of balancing work and family life is most often represented in the glossy shot of the executive-track woman balancing cell-phone, laptop, and baby. In Weaving Work and Motherhood, Anita Ilta Garey focuses not on the corporate executives so frequently represented in American ads and magazines but, rather, on the women in jobs that typify the vast majority of women's employment in the United States. A sociologist, work, and family expert, Garey situates her research in the health service industry. Interviewing a racially and ethnically diverse group of women hospital workers--clerical workers, janitorial workers, nurses, and nurse's aids--Garey analyzes what it means to be at once a mother who is employed and a worker with children. Within the limits of the resources available to them, women integrate their identities as workers and their identities as mothers by valuing their relation to work while simultaneously preserving cultural norms about what it means to be a good mother. Some of these women work non-day shifts in order to have the right blocks of time at home, including, for example, a registered nurse who explains how working the night shift enables her to see her children off to school, greet them when they return, and attend school events in the way she feels "good mothers" should - even if she finds little time for sleep. Moving beyond studies of women, work, and family in terms of structural incompatibilities, Garey challenges images of the exclusively "work-oriented" or exclusively "family-oriented" mother. As women talk about their lives, Garey focuses on the meanings of motherhood and of work that underlie their strategies for integrating employment and motherhood. She replaces notions of how women "balance" work and family with a better understanding of how women integrate, negotiate, and weave together their identities as both workers and mothers. Breaking new ground in the study of work and family, Weaving Work and Motherhood offers new insights for those interested in sociology, gender and women's studies, social policy, child care, social welfare, and health care. "Anita Ilta Garey carves out new terrain by unifying the study of work and family in women's lives. Rich in detail about working mothers' experiences, this book inaugurates a powerful framework for future research in family studies." --Maxine Baca Zinn, co-editor of Women of Color in U.S. Society (Temple) "A perceptive account, especially good at making visible the work activities and commitments of women in female-dominated and part-time positions." --Marjorie DeVault, author of Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work "This gem of a study points out the kinds of social solutions that are needed to address how to integrate daily family life with labor force participation. Using a hospital to find respondents who are employed in typically female-dominated occupations, Garey conducted in-depth interviews with women that have children about their individual work and family strategies. She dispels the myth that women choose between employment and family." --Rosanna Hertz, author of More Equal Than Others: Women and Men in Dual-Career Marriages