Results by title

4743 books match the query 'Religion' and 235 start with m

cover of Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960

Modern American Religion, Volume 3

Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960

Martin E. Marty

University of Chicago Press, 1996

In this third volume of his acclaimed chronicle of faith in twentieth-century America, Martin E. Marty presents the first authoritative account of American religious culture from the entry of the United States into World War II through the Eisenhower years.

Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960 is the first book to systematically address religion and the roles it played in shaping the social and political life of mid-century America. A work of exceptional clarity and historical depth, it will interest general readers as well as historians of American and church history.

"The series will become a standard account of the nation's variegated religious culture during the current century. The four volumes, the fruition of decades of research, may rank as much honored Marty's most significant contribution to U.S. studies."—Richard N. Ostling, Time

"When America needs some advice or commentary on the state of modern theology, the person it turns to is Martin Marty."—Publishers Weekly
[more]
cover of Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics

Modern French Jewish Thought

Writings on Religion and Politics

Edited by Sarah Hammerschlag

Brandeis University Press, 2018

“Modern Jewish thought” is often defined as a German affair, with interventions from Eastern European, American, and Israeli philosophers. The story of France’s development of its own schools of thought has not been substantially treated outside the French milieu. This anthology of modern French Jewish writing offers the first look at how this significant and diverse body of work developed within the historical and intellectual contexts of France and Europe. Translated into English, these documents speak to two critical axes—the first between Jewish universalism and particularism, and the second between the identification and disidentification of French Jews with France as a nation. Offering key works from Simone Weil, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Emmanuel Levinas, Albert Memmi, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and many others, this volume is organized in roughly chronological order, to highlight the connections linking religion, politics, and history, as they coalesce around a Judaism that is unique to France.
[more]
cover of Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

Modern Inquisitions

Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

Irene Silverblatt

Duke University Press, 2004

Trying to understand how “civilized” people could embrace fascism, Hannah Arendt searched for a precedent in modern Western history. She found it in nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule, racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. Modern Inquisitions takes Arendt’s insights into the barbaric underside of Western civilization and moves them back to the sixteenth century and seventeenth, when Spanish colonialism dominated the globe. Irene Silverblatt describes how the modern world developed in tandem with Spanish imperialism and argues that key characteristics of the modern state are evident in the workings of the Inquisition. Her analysis of the tribunal’s persecution of women and men in colonial Peru illuminates modernity’s intricate “dance of bureaucracy and race.”

Drawing on extensive research in Peruvian and Spanish archives, Silverblatt uses church records, evangelizing sermons, and missionary guides to explore how the emerging modern world was built, experienced, and understood by colonists, native peoples, and Inquisition officials: Early missionaries preached about world history and about the races and nations that inhabited the globe; Inquisitors, able bureaucrats, defined who was a legitimate Spaniard as they executed heretics for “reasons of state”; the “stained blood” of Indians, blacks, and descendants of Jews and Moors was said to cause their deficient character; and native Peruvians began to call themselves Indian.

In dialogue with Arendt and other theorists of modernity, Silverblatt shows that the modern world’s underside is tied to its origins in colonialism and to its capacity to rationalize violence. Modern Inquisitions forces the reader to confront the idea that the Inquisition was not only a product of the modern world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but party to the creation of the civilized world we know today.

[more]
cover of Modern Jewish Ethics since 1970: Writings on Methods, Sources, and Issues

Modern Jewish Ethics since 1970

Writings on Methods, Sources, and Issues

Edited by Jonathan K. Crane, Emily A. Filler, and Mira Beth Wasserman

Brandeis University Press, 2025

The field of Jewish ethics is never far from foundational questions about how to do Jewish ethics – and these questions are inseparable from other kinds of scholarly conclusions or prescriptions. In part because Jewish ethics is inherently deliberative, the volume is organized not by standalone essays but by small sets of curated conversations between scholars from different time periods, academic subfields, and religious commitments (or lack thereof).

These deliberate juxtapositions are to encourage scholars and students to develop similar meta-ethical analyses on Jewish ethics, broadly construed. Jewish ethics is not just a set of propositions or principles; nor can it be reduced to a single trajectory of thought or abstracted as an elaborate system of ideas. Jewish ethics is the field of study that engages Jewish texts, ideas, history, and experience in conversations about values and virtues, justice and good judgment, human relations and responsibilities. This volume presents some of those conversations to spark many more.
[more]
cover of Modern Muslims: A Sudan Memoir

Modern Muslims

A Sudan Memoir

Steve Howard

Ohio University Press, 2016

Steve Howard departed for the Sudan in the early 1980s as an American graduate student beginning a three-year journey in which he would join and live with the Republican Brotherhood, the Sufi Muslim group led by the visionary Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. Taha was a religious intellectual who participated in the early days of Sudan’s anticolonial struggle, but quickly turned his movement into a religious reform effort based on his radical reading of the Qur’an. He was executed in 1985 for apostasy. Decades after returning to the life of an academic in the United States, Howard brings us this memoir of his time with the Republican Brotherhood, who advocated, among other things, equality for women. Modern Muslims describes Howard’s path to learning not only about Islam and Sufism but also about Sudan’s history and culture. When the Brotherhood was thrust into confrontation with Sudan’s then-president Jaafar Nimeiry, Howard had a front-line perspective on the difficult choices communities make as they try to reform and practice their faith freely. As well as a story of personal transformation, the book offers an insider’s perspective on a modernist nonviolent Islamic movement that thrived and was brutally suppressed. An important book for our times, Modern Muslims yields significant insights for our understanding of modern Islam, African history, and contemporary geopolitics.
[more]
cover of Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century

Modern Occult Rhetoric

Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century

Joshua Gunn

University of Alabama Press, 2005

Uncovering how secrecy, symbolism, and hidden meanings shape modern culture and communication.

The occult has traditionally been understood as the study of secrets of the practice of mysticism or magic. This book broadens our understanding of the occult by treating it as a rhetorical phenomenon tied to language and symbols and more central to American culture than is commonly assumed.

Joshua Gunn approaches the occult as an idiom, examining the ways in which acts of textual criticism and interpretation are occultic in nature, as evident in practices as diverse as academic scholarship, Freemasonry, and television production. Gunn probes, for instance, the ways in which jargon employed by various social and professional groups creates barriers and fosters secrecy. From the theory wars of cultural studies to the Satanic Panic that swept the national mass media in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gunn shows how the paradox of a hidden, buried, or secret meaning that cannot be expressed in language appears time and time again in Western culture.

These recurrent patterns, Gunn argues, arise from a generalized, popular anxiety about language and its limitations. Ultimately, Modern Occult Rhetoric demonstrates the indissoluble relationship between language, secrecy, and publicity, and the centrality of suspicion in our daily lives.

 

[more]
cover of Modern Reform Responsa - PDF Electronic Version

Modern Reform Responsa - PDF Electronic Version

Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1971

This volume of Responsa deals with such questions as whether Torah can be read on Friday nights, wearing a Tallit in Reform services, and questions related to marriage, conversion, and more. Originally published in 1971, this collection provides insight into questions that were of critical importance at that time.
 

[more]
cover of Modern Sovereign: The Body of Power in Central Africa (Congo and Gabon)

Modern Sovereign

The Body of Power in Central Africa (Congo and Gabon)

Joseph Tonda

Seagull Books, 2020

The “Modern Sovereign,” a notion indebted both to Hobbes’s Leviathan and Marx’s conception of capital, refers to the power that governed the African multitudes from the earliest colonial days to the post-colonial era. It is an internalized power, responsible for the multiform violence exerted on bodies and imaginations. Joseph Tonda contends that in Central Africa—and particularly in Gabon and the Congo—the body is at the heart of political, religious, sexual, economic, and ritual power. This, he argues, is confirmed by the strong link between corporeal and political matters, and by the ostentatious display of bodies in African life. The body of power asserts itself as both matter and spirit, and it incorporates the seductive force of money, commodities, sex, and knowledge. Tonda’s incisive analysis reveals how this sovereign power is a social relation, historically constituted by the violence of the African cultural Imaginary and the realities of State, Market, and Church. It is to be understood, he asserts, through a generalized theory economic, political, and religious fetishism. By introducing this crucial critical voice from contemporary Africa into the English language, The Modern Sovereign makes a significant contribution to field of anthropology, political science, and African studies.
 
[more]
cover of Modern Trends in Islam

Modern Trends in Islam

H. A. R. Gibb

University of Chicago Press, 1974

Based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Chicago 1945, Modern Trends in Islam analyzes the evolving religious beliefs of practicing Muslims during the author’s own time. It was one of the first texts in English to treat Islam not as an unchanging set of beliefs and practices but as a dynamic religion whose meaning is continually redefined by its adherents. In six chapters, this concise book covers Islam’s confrontation with Western Modernism in the first half of the twentieth century in realms of law, society, and religious thought. In doing so, these essays anticipate many of the tensions between progressivism and fundamentalism that have characterized Islamic life, thought, and politics over the last seventy years.

[more]
cover of Modernists and Mystics

Modernists and Mystics

C. J. T Talar

Catholic University of America Press, 2009

In the six original essays included in this volume, the authors discuss how von Hügel, Blondel, Bremond, and Loisy all found inspiration in the great mystics of the past.
[more]
cover of Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought

Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought

Chad Alan Goldberg

University of Chicago Press, 2017

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions and emphasized different features of modern society, they repeatedly invoked Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity in a context of rapid social change.

In Modernity and the Jews in Western Social Thought, Chad Alan Goldberg brings us a major new study of Western social thought through the lens of Jews and Judaism. In France, where antisemites decried the French Revolution as the “Jewish Revolution,” Émile Durkheim challenged depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. When German thinkers such as Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, they reproduced, in secularized form, cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city and its new modes of social organization in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, social thinkers invoked real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of their own wider societies. Goldberg rounds out his fascinating study by proposing a novel explanation for why Jews were such an important cultural reference point. He suggests a rethinking of previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America, arguing that history extends into the present, with the Jews—and now the Jewish state—continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the twenty-first century.
[more]
cover of Modernity without Restraint (CW5): Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics and Gnosticism

Modernity without Restraint (CW5)

Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics and Gnosticism

Eric Voegelin, Edited & Intro by Manfred Henningsen

University of Missouri Press, 2000

Published together for the first time in one volume are Eric Voegelin's Political Religions, The New Science of Politics, and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism.Political Religions was first published in 1938 in Vienna, the year of Voegelin's forced emigration from Austria to the United States. The New Science of Politics was written in 1952 and established Voegelin's reputation as a political philosopher in America. Science, Politics, and Gnosticism was Voegelin's Inaugural Lecture at the University of Munich in 1958 and introduced him to the West German intellectual public.

Although these books were written during remarkably different historical circumstances of Voegelin's life, all three present an analysis of modern Western civilization that has lost its spiritual foundations and is challenged by various ideological persuasions. Voegelin critiques in these texts a "modernity without restraint." It is a modernity with Hegelian, Marxian, Nietzschean, Heideggerian, positivist, Fascist, and other predominantly German characteristics. The author confronts this modernity with Western meaning as it emerged in ancient Greece, Rome, Israel, and Christianity and became transformed in the European Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, and the Anglo- American political formation.

This three-in-one volume delves into the intellectual and spiritual complications of modernity, tracing its evolution from the ancient civilizations to the twentieth century. In his substantial new introduction, Manfred Henningsen explores the experiential background that motivated Voegelin's theoretical analyses and the new relevance that his work has gained in recent years with the unexpected collapse of state socialism in East Germany, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union. Modernity without Restraint will be a valuable addition to intellectual history and Voegelin studies.

[more]
cover of Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief

Modes of Faith

Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief

Theodore Ziolkowski

University of Chicago Press, 2007

In the decades surrounding World War I, religious belief receded in the face of radical new ideas such as Marxism, modern science, Nietzschean philosophy, and critical theology. Modes of Faith addresses both this decline of religious belief and the new modes of secular faith that took religion’s place in the minds of many writers and poets.

Theodore Ziolkowski here examines the motives for this embrace of the secular, locating new modes of faith in art, escapist travel, socialism, politicized myth, and utopian visions. James Joyce, he reveals, turned to art as an escape while Hermann Hesse made a pilgrimage to India in search of enlightenment. Other writers, such as Roger Martin du Gard and Thomas Mann, sought temporary solace in communism or myth. And H. G. Wells, Ziolkowski argues, took refuge in utopian dreams projected in another dimension altogether.

Rooted in innovative and careful comparative reading of the work of writers from France, England, Germany, Italy, and Russia, Modes of Faith is a critical masterpiece by a distinguished literary scholar that offers an abundance of insight to anyone interested in the human compulsion to believe in forces that transcend the individual.

[more]
cover of Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System

Mojo Workin'

The Old African American Hoodoo System

Katrina Hazzard-Donald

University of Illinois Press, 2013

A bold reconsideration of Hoodoo belief and practice

Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. She examines Hoodoo culture and history by tracing its emergence from African traditions to religious practices in the Americas. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The spread came about through the mechanism of the "African Religion Complex," eight distinct cultural characteristics familiar to all the African ethnic groups in the United States.

The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Hazzard-Donald examines Hoodoo material culture, particularly the "High John the Conquer" root, which practitioners employ for a variety of spiritual uses. She also examines other facets of Hoodoo, including rituals of divination such as the "walking boy" and the "Ring Shout," a sacred dance of Hoodoo tradition that bears its corollaries today in the American Baptist churches. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between "Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.

[more]
cover of Moments That Matter: Marking Transitions in Midlife and Beyond

Moments That Matter

Marking Transitions in Midlife and Beyond

Rabbi Laura Geller and Rabbi Beth Lieberman

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2025

Moments That Matter offers a fresh perspective on life’s later chapters, transforming them into opportunities for personal growth, meaning, and renewal. With warmth and wisdom, Rabbi Laura Geller and Rabbi Beth Lieberman explore the unique challenges and joys of midlife and beyond, from launching children to launching oneself anew, navigating retirement, downsizing and moving, facing illness and caregiving, and embracing love at any age. The chapters weave Jewish wisdom with practical rituals, interspersed with personal stories and ways to adapt each ceremony for a communal setting. Moments That Matter empowers readers to embrace these milestones with creativity and intention, offering tools to craft personalized and deeply moving rituals that honor the complexity of this rich stage of life.

[more]
cover of Monks and Magic: Revisiting a Classic Study of Religious Ceremonies in Thailand

Monks and Magic

Revisiting a Classic Study of Religious Ceremonies in Thailand

Barend Jan Terwiel

National University of Singapore Press, 2012

First published in 1975, B.J. Terwiel's "Monks and Magic" remains a widely cited text. This is an absorbing study of Buddhism as practised at that time in a community in rural Central Thailand. It describes how esoteric spells and magical diagrams were the main interest of children and adolescents but full ritual knowledge was obtained in adulthood and tempered by life experiences. As death approaches, the Buddhist world-view stimulates merit-making. This fourth edition of the work is a major revision that updates the original text, adds new material and offers a contemporary perspective on the original study.
[more]
cover of Moral Absolutes: Tradition, Revision, and Truth (Michael J. McGivney Lectures of the John Paul II Institute)

Moral Absolutes

Tradition, Revision, and Truth (Michael J. McGivney Lectures of the John Paul II Institute)

John Finnis

Catholic University of America Press, 1991

Moral Absolutes sets forth a vigorous but careful critique of much recent work in moral theology. It is illustrated with examples from the most controversial aspects of Christian moral doctrine, and a frank account is given of the roots of the upheaval in Roman Catholic moral theology in and after the 1960s.
[more]
cover of Moral Resistance and Spiritual Authority: Our Jewish Obligation to Social Justice

Moral Resistance and Spiritual Authority

Our Jewish Obligation to Social Justice

Rabbi Seth M. Limmer, DHL and Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner

Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2019

This foundational new book reminds us of our ancient obligation to bring justice to the world. The essays in this collection explore the spiritual underpinnings of our Jewish commitment to justice, using Jewish text and tradition, as well as contemporary sources and models. Among the topics covered are women's health, LGBTQ rights, healthcare, racial justice, speaking truth to power, and community organizing.
 
[more]
cover of Moral Visions: Ethics and the Book of Mormon

Moral Visions

Ethics and the Book of Mormon

Edited by Courtney S. Campbell and Kelly Sorensen

University of Illinois Press, 2025

Though used by millions as a guide for how to live one’s life, the Book of Mormon’s links with contemporary ethics remain largely unexamined. Courtney S. Campbell and Kelly Sorensen edit essays that spotlight and encourage further thought on these connections.

Contributors in the first section discuss foundational issues such as the Book of Mormon’s moral psychology, its minimalist and covenantal moralities, the nature of the good and how the good is known, the question of whether value depends on a certain kind of future, the Book of Mormon's strategy for moral persuasion, and God’s participation in human choices. In the second section, the essayists turn to everyday ethical questions concerning resistance to forced cultural assimilation, clothing and dress, authority, and memory. The final chapter further explores practical moral visions.

A rich and thought-provoking analysis, Moral Visions examines the Book of Mormon through a variety of methods while aiming to deepen understanding of both the text’s messages and its potential place in future discussions of ethics. Contributors: Daniel Becerra, Courtney S. Campbell, Ryan Davis, Michael D. K. Ing, Ariel Bybee Laughton, Kimberly Matheson, Rachel Esplin Odell, Kelly Sorensen, Joseph M. Spencer

[more]
cover of Moralia et Ascetica Armeniaca: The Oft-Repeated Discourses

Moralia et Ascetica Armeniaca

The Oft-Repeated Discourses

Abraham Terian

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

The twenty-three discourses presented in this volume have a long textual history that ascribes them to St. Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia (d. 328), a prevalent view that lasted through the nineteenth century. Armenian scholarship through the last century has tended to ascribe them to St. Mashtots‘, the inventor of the Armenian alphabet (d. 440). In his critical introduction to this first-ever English translation of the discourses, Terian presents them as an ascetic text by an anonymous abbot writing near the end of the sixth century. The very title in Armenian, Yačaxapatum Čaŕk‘, literally, “Oft-Repeated Discourses,” further validates their ascetic environment, where they were repeatedly related to novices. For want of answers to introductory questions regarding authorship and date, and because of the pervasive grammatical difficulties of the text, the document has remained largely unknown in scholarship. The discourses include many of the Eastern Fathers’ favorite theological themes. They are heavily punctuated with biblical quotations and laced with recurring biblical images and phraseology; the doctrinal and functional centrality of the Scriptures is emphasized throughout. They are replete with traditional Christian moral teachings that have acquired elements of moral philosophy transmitted through Late Antiquity. Echoes of St. Basil’s thought are heard in several of them, and some evidence of the author’s dependence on the Armenian version of the saint’s Rules, translated around the turn of the sixth century, is apparent. On the whole they show how Christians were driven by the Johannine love-command and the Pauline Spirit-guided practice of virtuous living, ever maturing in the ethos of an in-group solidarity culminating in monasticism.
[more]
cover of Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America

Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America

Wayne E. Fuller

University of Illinois Press, 2003

Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America explores the evolution of postal innovations that sparked a communication revolution in nineteenth-century America. Wayne E. Fuller examines how evangelical Protestants, the nation’s dominant religious group, struggled against those transformations in American society that they believed threatened to paganize the Christian nation they were determined to save.

Drawing on House and Senate documents, postmasters general reports, and the Congressional Record, as well as sermons, speeches, and articles from numerous religious and secular periodicals, Fuller illuminates the problems the changed postal system posed for evangelicals, from Sunday mail delivery and Sunday newspapers to an avalanche of unseemly material brought into American homes via improved mail service and reduced postage prices. Along the way, Fuller offers new perspectives on the church and state controversy in the United States as well as on publishing, politics, birth control, the lottery, censorship, Congress’s postal power, and the waning of evangelical Protestant influence.
 
[more]
cover of Morality: The Catholic View

Morality

The Catholic View

Servais O.P. Pinckaers

St. Augustine's Press, 2003

Fr. Servais Pinckaers’s work is well on its way to being accepted as the work on Catholic moral thinking for the coming generation of laymen and students. Pinckaers sharply distinguishes this view of morality from modern “moralities of obligation,” which regard the moral life primarily as obedience to rules that limit human freedom and curb human desires. Pinckaers sees moralities of obligation as the logical outcome of a new understanding of human freedom. Instead of regarding freedom as the capacity to engage in excellent acts of virtue (freedom for excellence), the modern view understands freedom as the radical ability to do good or evil indifferently (freedom of indifference). Pinckaers argues convincingly that this view of freedom and the morality of obligation that flows from it have impoverished the Catholic understanding of the moral life. This work offers the reader a compelling itinerary of moral development, rooted in the theology of St. Paul and the morality of the Gospels.

Now, for a new generation of students, the book is made available in an ebook version.

In addition, under the direction of Fr. Michael Sherwin, a teacher’s edition of the work is to be published, which will greatly aid the teacher in high school or home school to help his or her students to gain the most from this seminal work.

“As Alasdair MacIntyre notes in the preface, the work of Pinckaers attracted strong and fully justified notice in this country with the publication in English of his The Sources of Christian Ethics. As Pinckaers himself notes in the text, excellently translated by Michael Sherwin, the interest should in no way be limited to Roman Catholics. Morality recasts the earlier book in an argument that is both lower and upper case ‘catholic,’ and is accessible to readers and teachers outside the limited circle of moral theologians and academic ethicists. Pinckaers contends that Christian morality is not first of all about obligations but about happiness, understanding that the happiness of union with God is our natural destiny made possible by grace. The Sermon on the Mount is at the center of an approach to morality that turns on the distinction between ‘freedom for excellence’ and ‘freedom of indifference,’ the former understood as human flourishing and the latter as a ‘neutral’ capacity to choose between controversies. The proposal of Morality is thoroughly Christ-centered, humanistic, and faithful to the magisterial teaching of the Church. Warmly recommended.” - First Things

“If you want to have the experience of reflecting on Catholic morality as though you were reading about it for the first time, treat yourself to Father Servais Pinckaers’ Morality: The Catholic View. He has recovered the classical view of the moral life as the quest for happiness and has presented it with disarming simplicity. Bringing us back to the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 12–15, the writings of Augustine and Aquinas, and the theme of natural law, he has freed those texts from the layers of legalism which has hidden their liberating, spiritual powers for moral living. By distinguishing freedom of indifference from freedom for excellence, he has restored a wise vision of freedom. No one has shown better the role of virtues as building blocks for morality. Catechists need to read this book.” Rev. Alfred McBride, O.Praem., Professor of Homilectics and Catechetics at Blessed Pope John XXIII Seminary, Weston, Massachusetts


“Father Pinckaers has given us a masterful exposition of Christian living. The clarity and brevity of his presentation – captured well by the translator – make this book ideal for classroom and parish use. “Readers will find the historical and systematic observations very informative.” Romanus Cessario, St. John’s Seminary, Brighton, Massachusetts

[more]
cover of More God, Less Crime: Why Faith Matters and How It Could Matter More

More God, Less Crime

Why Faith Matters and How It Could Matter More

Byron Johnson

Templeton Press, 2012

 

In More God, Less Crime renowned criminologist Byron R. Johnson proves that religion can be a powerful antidote to crime. The book describes how faith communities, congregations, and faith-based organizations are essential in forming partnerships necessary to provide the human and spiritual capital to effectively address crime, offender rehabilitation, and the substantial aftercare problems facing former prisoners. There is scattered research literature on religion and crime but until now, there has never been one publication that systematically and rigorously analyzes what we know from this largely overlooked body of research in a lay-friendly format. The data shows that when compared to current strategies, faith-based approaches to crime prevention bring added value in targeting those factors known to cause crime: poverty, lack of education, and unemployment. In an age of limited fiscal resources, Americans can’t afford a criminal justice system that turns its nose up at volunteer efforts that could not only work better than the abysmal status quo, but also save billions of dollars at the same time. This book provides readers with practical insights and recommendations for a faith-based response that could do just that.

 

[more]
cover of More Than Friends: Muslim-Jewish Intimacy in Algerian Music

More Than Friends

Muslim-Jewish Intimacy in Algerian Music

Jonathan Glasser

University of Chicago Press, 2027

Explores the Muslim-Jewish relationship through music in Algeria and its diaspora.

Today, more than six decades after the departure of Jews from Algeria to France at the moment of decolonization, music remains a compelling site for remembering Muslim-Jewish intimacy before the moment of rupture. In this way, music works against dominant discourses of Muslim-Jewish conflict and Jewish outsider status, instead presenting music as a sign of Muslim-Jewish brotherhood and of Jewish rootedness in North Africa. Yet digging deeper into the lived past and its relation to contemporary memory uncovers the fragility of brotherhood as well as competing ways to read Muslim-Jewish intimacy around music, some of which edge into rivalry, hierarchy, and difference. In More than Friends, Jonathan Glasser draws on historical archives and ethnographic research in Algeria and in France to weigh these multiple interpretations of the Muslim-Jewish past, ultimately offering an alternative, more resilient way of imagining what it means to be intimate through music.

[more]
cover of Mormon Colonies in Mexico

Mormon Colonies in Mexico

Thomas Cottam Romney

University of Utah Press, 2005

"Romney’s unique vantage point is the strongest draw of this narrative: Romney and his family lived much of their life in the Mexican Mormon colonies. But the narrative’s value is much broader and deeper than just that. Romney’s insights into Mexican politics and personalities, and his view of the course of history from inside rather than from outside, are fascinating, colorful and opinionated. He was clear about who he admired and why, and who he did not."
—from the Foreword

In the 1880s, as a precondition to granting Utah statehood, the United States government enacted laws to put a stop to the Mormon practice of polygamy. Those who continued to practice this principle were forced underground as federal marshals roamed the territory searching for "polygs." In response, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints looked for safe places to send its members; many found refuge across the border in Mexico.

Unavailable since its original publication in 1938, this important document of a little-known chapter in Mormon history is now reprinted with a foreword by Martha Sonntag Bradley. Romney was raised and spent much of his life in the colonies, making this book a significant contribution to LDS history. It chronicles a new kind of Mormon pioneer facing the hardships of an unfamiliar land, a tenuous relationship with the government, and the necessary fortitude to hold fast to one’s belief in the face of difficulty and trial.

[more]
cover of Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith

Mormon Enigma

Emma Hale Smith

Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippetts Avery

University of Illinois Press, 1994

Winner of the Evans Biography Award, the Mormon History Association Best Book Award, and the John Whitmer Association (RLDS) Best Book Award.

Mormon Enigma is the bestselling biography of Emma Hale Smith, wife of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. It was Joseph Smith who announced that an angel of the Lord had commanded him to introduce a 'new order of marriage.' And it was Emma Hale Smith who confronted the practice of polygamy head on.

As the authors note in their introduction, "Early leaders in Utah castigated Emma from their pulpits for opposing Brigham Young and the practice of polygamy, and for lending support to the Reorganization. As these attitudes filtered down through the years, Emma was virtually written out of official Utah histories. In this biography, we have attempted to reconstruct the full story of this remarkable and much misunderstood woman's experiences.

[more]
cover of Mormon Envoy: The Diplomatic Legacy of Dr. John Milton Bernhisel

Mormon Envoy

The Diplomatic Legacy of Dr. John Milton Bernhisel

Bruce W. Worthen

University of Illinois Press, 2023

For more than twenty years, John Milton Bernhisel negotiated with the federal government on behalf of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bruce W. Worthen illuminates the life and work of the man whose diplomacy steered the Church’s relationship with Washington, D.C. from its early period of dangerous conflict to a peaceful and pragmatic coexistence.

Having risen from a Pennsylvania backcountry upbringing to become a respected member of the upper class, Bernhisel possessed a personal history that allowed him to reach common ground with politicians and other outsiders. He negotiated for Joseph Smith’s life and, after the Church’s relocation to the Utah Territory, took on the task of rehabilitating the public image of the Latter-day Saints. Brigham Young’s defiance of the government undermined Bernhisel’s work, but their close if sometimes turbulent relationship ultimately allowed Bernhisel to make peace with Washington, secure a presidential pardon for Young, and put Utah and the Latter-day Saints on the road to formally joining the United States.

[more]
cover of Mormon Garments: Sacred and Secret

Mormon Garments

Sacred and Secret

Nancy Ross, Jessica Finnigan, and Larissa Kanno Kindred

University of Illinois Press, 2026

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints requires that adult members wear garments under their clothes day and night. Though a central practice, the wearing of garments exists behind a wall of silence, as Church authorities and LDS culture discourage discussion of such a sacred matter. Nancy Ross, Jessica Finnigan, and Larissa Kanno Kindred draw on a survey of over 4,500 Church members and their own backgrounds to explore the multifaceted meanings and experiences of Mormon garments. As the authors show, garments also function as a tool of social control that shapes behavior and reinforces conformity around sexuality. The diverse lived experiences of Latter-day Saints reveal how belief and gender intersect with feelings of secrecy, shame, and obedience while creating complexities for LDS members as they navigate questions of faith, identity, and agency. In addition, the authors call for greater understanding of the people grappling with tensions between personal customs and religious expectation. Insightful and rich with detail, Mormon Garments sheds light on an intimate practice in the lives of Latter-day Saints.
[more]
cover of Mormon History

Mormon History

Ronald W. Walker, David J. Whittaker, James B. Allen

University of Illinois Press, 2010

A companion volume to their massive bibliography Studies in Mormon History, 1830–1997, this descriptive history by a team of top Mormon scholars provides a comprehensive view of how the writing of Mormon history has evolved since the establishment of the church. Mormon History offers an interpretive survey of Mormon historical writings, from the partisan and often ephemeral history of the nineteenth century through the shift in the twentieth toward a more balanced and professional approach and an emphasis on how the Mormons helped settle the American West. The authors examine Mormon biography and autobiography and discuss social science literature on the Mormons, including studies of social geography, rural sociology, and agricultural economics. Two valuable appendices round out this volume, one on the development and nature of Mormon imprints, the other on conducting historical research in Mormon sources.
[more]
cover of Mormon Mavericks: Essays on Dissenters

Mormon Mavericks

Essays on Dissenters

John Sillito

Signature Books, 2002

 Some left, some stayed. Each one found some aspect of their church’s history, doctrine, policies, or politics that they could not reconcile with their own personal ethics. Some felt burdened by the conflict, while others embraced it. A few were reticent, even apologetic about their disagreements. Others were barnstormers. Each possessed some quality that destined him or her to ride at the fringes rather than at the center.

Mormon Mavericks summarizes a few famous flashpoints in Mormon history; more importantly, it provides a telling study in human nature. Each contributor is an expert in his or her discipline, and all approach their topic with equal doses of sympathy and objectivity.

The following mavericks are featured in this collection of biographical essays:

Fawn McKay Brodie
Juanita Brooks
Thomas Stuart Ferguson
Amasa Mason Lyman
Sterling M. McMurrin
John E. Page
Sarah M. Pratt D. Michael Quinn
William Smith
Fanny Stenhouse
T. B. H. Stenhouse
James Strang
Samuel Woolley Taylor
Moses Thatcher
[more]
cover of Mormon Polygamy: A History

Mormon Polygamy

A History

Richard S. Van Wagoner

Signature Books, 1989

 In this comprehensive survey of Mormon Polygamy, Richard Van Wagoner details, with precision and detachment, the tumultuous reaction among insiders and outsiders to plural marriage. In an honest, methodical way, he traces the origins, the peculiarities common to the midwestern and later Utah periods, and post-1890 new marriages. Drawing heavily on first-hand accounts, he outlines the theological underpinnings and the personal trauma associated with this lifestyle.

What emerges is a portrait that neither discounts nor exaggerates the historical evidence. He presents polygamy in context, neither condemning nor defending, while relevant contemporary accounts are treated sympathetically but interpreted critically. No period of Mormon history is emphasized over another. The result is a systematic view that is unavailable in studies of isolated periods or in the repetitions of folklore that only disguise the reality of what polygamy was.

Scattered throughout the western United States today are an estimated 30,000 fundamentalist Mormons who still live “the principle.” They, too, are a part of Joseph Smith’s legacy and are included in this study.

[more]
cover of Mormon Trail: Yesterday and Today

Mormon Trail

Yesterday and Today

William E. Hill

Utah State University Press, 1996

Back in print, this essential reference for readers interested in the Mormon Trail is part history, part resource book, part guide and photographic essay. Driven from their home in Nauvoo, Illinois, Mormons led by Brigham Young began in 1846 to journey west to an expected haven in the Great Salt Lake Valley. The first party arrived there in July 1847. Thousands of members and converts later followed the Mormon Trail, which for much of its way traced the route of the Oregon Trail, although it generally stayed across the Platte River from the more-traveled way. It was thus, until the railroad's arrival in 1869, one of the West's most important and heavily used roads.

Although the Mormons' experience was in most ways similar to that of other emigrants, the religious motivations, tight organization, and family groups of the Mormons gave their migration a distinct character. William E. Hill introduces the Mormons, their eventful early history, and the characteristics of the migration west. His book also includes a chronology of trail-related events, excerpts from diaries and guidebooks, songs, historical maps, over 200 then-and-now illustrations, descriptions of major museums and displays on the trail, and recommendations for further reading.

[more]
cover of Mormon Vanguard Brigade Of 1847: Norton Jacob's Record

Mormon Vanguard Brigade Of 1847

Norton Jacob's Record

edited by Ronald O. Barney

Utah State University Press, 2005

There are no historical events that have more iconic significance for the people of Utah than the trek of the vanguard company of Mormons west in 1847. Its meaning may vary, but overall, the march has a highly symbolic and seminal historical importance for virtually all Utahns. While the journey has been widely celebrated, memorialized, and even sanctified and various books have been written about it, there is more that can be said and understood about the migration's place in western history; about its context, including events preceding and following it; and about the real experiences of its participants. Particularly lacking in most published accounts are the stories of the rank and file members, the individuals who, in contrast to the well-known leadership, with Brigham Young at the top, might fittingly be called foot soldiers. The 1847 company had a military-like organization, which is captured by Ronald Barney's term brigade in the title. Norton Jacob was such a man of the ranks in 1847. He had no special status in the Mormon Church, and there was little to make him stand out in the historical record than that he left what is regarded by many trail historians as one of the best and most informative journals of the early Mormon emigration. While the heart of Jacob's record concerns the 1847 journey, there is much more to it. The diary published here begins in 1844, the year of church founder Joseph Smith's murder. It continues through the crisis events that followed: the Mormons' flight from Nauvoo, their trudging journey across Iowa to Winter Quarters, and the beginnings of mass migration to Utah. After the apex of 1847, the arc of the narrative moves through accounts of Jacob's return to Nauvoo late that year and of the much larger Mormon emigration in 1848. It reaches denouement in a short record of his first years in Salt Lake Valley.
[more]
cover of Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness

Mormon Women at the Crossroads

Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness

Caroline Kline

University of Illinois Press, 2022

Winner of the Mormon History Association Best International Book Award

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continues to contend with longstanding tensions surrounding gender and race. Yet women of color in the United States and across the Global South adopt and adapt the faith to their contexts, many sharing the high level of satisfaction expressed by Latter-day Saints in general. Caroline Kline explores the ways Latter-day Saint women of color in Mexico, Botswana, and the United States navigate gender norms, but also how their moral priorities and actions challenge Western feminist assumptions. Kline analyzes these traditional religious women through non-oppressive connectedness, a worldview that blends elements of female empowerment and liberation with a broader focus on fostering positive and productive relationships in different realms. Even as members of a patriarchal institution, the women feel a sense of liberation that empowers them to work against oppression and against alienation from both God and other human beings.

Vivid and groundbreaking, Mormon Women at the Crossroads merges interviews with theory to offer a rare discussion of Latter-day Saint women from a global perspective.

[more]
cover of Mormonism Unvailed: Eber D. Howe, with critical comments by Dan Vogel

Mormonism Unvailed

Eber D. Howe, with critical comments by Dan Vogel

Eber Dudley Howe

Signature Books, 2015

 Any Latter-day Saint who has ever defended his or her beliefs has likely addressed issues first raised by Eber D. Howe in 1834. Howe’s famous exposé was the first of its kind, with information woven together from previous news articles and some thirty affidavits he and others collected. He lived and worked in Painesville, Ohio, where, in 1829, he had published about Joseph Smith’s discovery of a “golden bible.” Smith’s decision to relocate in nearby Kirtland sparked Howe’s attention. Of even more concern was that Howe’s wife and other family members had joined the Mormon faith. Howe immediately began investigating the new Church and formed a coalition of like-minded reporters and detractors. By 1834, Howe had collected a large body of investigative material, including affidavits from Smith’s former neighbors in New York and from Smith’s father-inlaw in Pennsylvania. Howe learned about Smith’s early interest in pirate gold and use of a seer stone in treasure seeking and heard theories from Smith’s friends, followers, and family members about the Book of Mormon’s origin. Indulging in literary criticism, Howe joked that Smith, “evidently a man of learning,” was a student of “barrenness of style and expression.” Despite its critical tone, Howe’s exposé is valued by historians for its primary source material and account of the growth of Mormonism in northeastern Ohio.
[more]
cover of Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion

Mormonism and the Making of a British Zion

Matthew L. Rasmussen

University of Utah Press, 2016

Mormonism in Britain began in the late 1830s with the arrival of American missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Not long afterward, thousands of British converts emigrated to Utah and became a kind of lifeblood for the early Mormon Church. The English North West, where Mormonism had its strongest presence, has since become a place of profound significance to the church, both institutionally and internationally. Despite its importance to Mormonism, this history has never been fully explored. Matthew Rasmussen provides the first detailed account and examines how Mormonism has changed and endured in Britain.

After many British believers left for America, church membership in England fell so sharply that the movement in Britain seemed to be on the brink of collapse. Yet British Mormonism gradually resurged and continues today. How did this religious minority flourish when so many nineteenth-century revivalist movements did not? Rasmussen explains Mormonism’s inception, perpetuation, and maturation in Britain in a compelling case study of a “new religious movement” with staying power. From its establishment in 1837 to its maturation in 1998, the Mormon perspective of Britain shifted dramatically. This book chronicles that shift, and illustrates how doctrinal adaptation has enabled Mormonism in Britain to persist. 
[more]
cover of Mormonism: THE STORY OF A NEW RELIGIOUS TRADITION

Mormonism

THE STORY OF A NEW RELIGIOUS TRADITION

Jan Shipps

University of Illinois Press, 1985

"Without fully and consciously realizing that they were doing so, the followers of Jesus established a new religious tradition. This book tells the story of yet another assembly of saints whose history, I believe, is in many respects analogous to the history of those early Christians who thought at first that they had found the only proper way to be Jews. Mormonism started to grow away from traditional Christianity almost immediately upon coming into existence. It began as a movement that understood itself as Christian, but. . . these nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints (as they came to be called) embarked on a path that led to developments that now distinguish their tradition from the Christian tradition as surely as early Christianity was distinguished from its Hebraic context."--From the preface
 
[more]
cover of Mormonisms in Asia: Stories of Global Faith and Local Lives

Mormonisms in Asia

Stories of Global Faith and Local Lives

Edited by Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye and Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

University of Illinois Press, 2026

Mormonism is often described as the quintessentially American religion, one that is highly centralized around its leadership and demographic presence in Utah. But given a dramatic increase in non-U.S. membership since 1960 in both the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Community of Christ, new questions about these movements come to the fore: How are these Restoration traditions lived and experienced in other parts of the world? How do church members outside the United States understand their relationship to a sacralized American past and an administrative hierarchy in Salt Lake City? And how has the relatively recent explosion of membership outside of the United States begun to shift the faith’s institutional, political, and cultural dynamics within those traditions? Most importantly, how do church members from different localities and cultures relate to each other, forming a global community? Or do they?

This volume focuses on Asia, a region that includes more than half the world's population, but where Restoration traditions specifically and Christianity broadly are minority faiths. It uses a combination of focused case studies and theoretical analysis to highlight broader trends and themes that those studies suggest about the meaning of a globalized faith in the twenty-first century. The first section of this book lays out ways of thinking about Mormonism’s global presence in terms of the nation-state, and the essays explore where and how Restoration traditions as institutional actors have made their way into new political and social contexts. The second section studies the tensions created by the encounters of LDS norms with preexisting cultural and political values in local settings. These essays burrow more deeply into political and religious realities and explore the variations in Mormon cultural assumptions about politics and society, as well as the relationship between local congregants and the Mormon administrative center. The final section presents fine-grained
studies that focus attention on one of the central features of LDS lived religion: the role of gender and the family in the religious community. In each case, divine dictates necessarily bump up against traditional societal norms that converts must navigate.

Contributors: John-Charles Duffy, Stacilee Ford, Taunalyn Ford, Conan Grames, David J. Howlett, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Keisha Lai, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Matthew Martinich, Meagan Rainock, Shinji Takagi, Pierre Vendassi
[more]
cover of Mormons and Mormonism: An Introduction to an American World Religion

Mormons and Mormonism

An Introduction to an American World Religion

Edited by Eric A. Eliason

University of Illinois Press, 2001

Mormons and Mormonism gathers key essays by leading scholars on the history, foundational ideas and practices, and worldwide expansion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The ideal introduction to Mormonism, this choice sampler provides a selective overview of what many historians consider the most innovative and successful religion to emerge during the spiritual ferment of antebellum America.
 
This volume explains how the earliest Mormons viewed their religion and suggests that the Book of Mormon appeared to them as an exciting document of social protest. Contributors consider the history of persecution of the Mormons, the church's relationship with the state of Utah and with other divisions of Christianity, and culture clashes in the church's missionary efforts. Mormons and Mormonism also places beliefs such as vicarious baptism for the dead in a larger context of community and religious ideals.
 
The founding of Mormonism and its rapid emergence as a new world religion are among the most intriguing aspects of American religious history and among the most neglected in the religion classroom. This much-needed volume lays the groundwork for a better understanding of the LDS Church and its historical and potential impact on the United States and the world.
 
[more]
cover of Mormons in Paris: Polygamy on the French Stage, 1874-1892

Mormons in Paris

Polygamy on the French Stage, 1874-1892

Corry Cropper

Bucknell University Press, 2021

Winner of the 2021 Best International Book Award from the Mormon History Association

In the late nineteenth century, numerous French plays, novels, cartoons, and works of art focused on Mormons. Unlike American authors who portrayed Mormons as malevolent “others,” however, French dramatists used Mormonism to point out hypocrisy in their own culture. Aren't Mormon women, because of their numbers in a household, more liberated than French women who can't divorce? What is polygamy but another name for multiple mistresses? This new critical edition presents translations of four musical comedies staged or published in France in the late 1800s: Mormons in Paris (1874), Berthelier Meets the Mormons (1875), Japheth’s Twelve Wives (1890), and Stephana’s Jewel (1892). Each is accompanied by a short contextualizing introduction with details about the music, playwrights, and staging. Humorous and largely unknown, these plays use Mormonism to explore and mock changing French mentalities during the Third Republic, lampooning shifting attitudes and evolving laws about marriage, divorce, and gender roles.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
[more]
cover of Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America

Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America

Jake Johnson

University of Illinois Press, 2019

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted the vocal and theatrical traditions of American musical theater as important theological tenets. As Church membership grew, leaders saw how the genre could help define the faith and wove musical theater into many aspects of Mormon life. Jake Johnson merges the study of belonging in America with scholarship on voice and popular music to explore the surprising yet profound link between two quintessentially American institutions. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Mormons gravitated toward musicals as a common platform for transmitting political and theological ideas. Johnson sees Mormons using musical theater as a medium for theology of voice--a religious practice that suggests how vicariously voicing another person can bring one closer to godliness. This sounding, Johnson suggests, created new opportunities for living. Voice and the musical theater tradition provided a site for Mormons to negotiate their way into middle-class respectability. At the same time, musical theater became a unique expressive tool of Mormon culture.
[more]
cover of Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe

Mosques in the Metropolis

Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe

Elisabeth Becker

University of Chicago Press, 2021

Mosques in the Metropolis offers a unique look into two of Europe’s largest mosques and the communities they support. Elisabeth Becker provides a complex picture of Islam in Europe at a particularly fraught time, shedding light on both experiences of deep and enduring marginalization and the agency of Muslim populaces. She balances individual Muslim voices with the historical and structural forces at play, revealing, in all their complexity, the people for whom the mosques are centers of religion and community life. As her interlocutors come to life in the pages, the metropolis emerges as a space alternative to the nation in which they can contend with degrading images of Islam and Muslims. Ultimately Becker insists that caste is a crucial lens through which to view Muslims in Europe, and through this lens she critiques what she perceives as the failures of European pluralism. To amplify her point, she brings Jewish history and twentieth-century Jewish thought into the conversation directly, drawing on scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Zygmunt Bauman, and Hannah Arendt to describe both Jewish and Muslim life and marginality. By challenging Eurocentric notions, from “progress” to “civility,” “tolerance” to “freedom” and “equality, what is at stake, Becker insists, is the possibility of a truly plural Europe.
[more]
cover of Moth and Rust: Mormon Encounters with Death

Moth and Rust

Mormon Encounters with Death

Steven Carter

Signature Books, 2017

In Mormonism we are sometimes seemingly casual
about death: it’s a veil or a mission call to the spirit
world. But our actual encounters with the reality of
death inevitably change us in ways that are difficult
to articulate.
In this collection, Mormon writers wrestle with
mortality and its aftermath. A family sings a hesitant
rendition of Happy Birthday to a grief-stricken
mother who buried her toddler just a few hours earlier;
an agnostic son decides he’s Mormon enough to
arrange a funeral for his believing father.
Some essays use death as a means to understand
faith. One author imagines a world where Heavenly
Mother visits her children in the form of their
female ancestors, appearing to her descendants in
times of grief or pain.
Others address practicalities: how do you protect
your children from death while still allowing them
to experience the world; how do you get through
one more nausea-ridden day of cancer treatment?
Still others delve into death’s questions: does the
overwhelming suffering that occurs in the animal
kingdom have a function in the “plan of happiness”?
Sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking,
always thought-provoking, these personal essays,
poems, and stories may never be heard at a Mormon
funeral. But they probably should be.
[more]
cover of Mother Ann Lee: Morning Star of the Shakers

Mother Ann Lee

Morning Star of the Shakers

Nardi Reeder Campion

Brandeis University Press, 2026

The definitive biography of the founder of the Shaker movement, whose remarkable life is the subject of a new film, The Testament of Ann Lee.
 
This acclaimed, accessible, and thoroughly researched biography documents the life of Ann Lee, a controversial, religious leader and early feminist figure. Lee established the Shaker movement in 1770 in Manchester, England. The core principles of the Shakers were radical: in an era when wives were the possession of their husband, Lee proclaimed the equality of men and women. The Shakers were dedicated to beliefs in absolute pacifism, equality of the sexes, absolute celibacy, and the cleansing of sin through dancing and chanting to shake away the past.

The Shakers sought inner peace and harmony, but their unusual beliefs, including total abstinence from sex and their exhibitions of mystical ecstasy were considered suspect and led to the imprisonment of Lee and her followers. While jailed, Lee experienced a blinding, soul-splitting vision which reaffirmed her belief in celibacy and named her the second coming of Christ. Seeking religious freedom, she led her followers, known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, from England to settle in upstate New York, near Albany.

Mother Ann Lee died in 1784, but her movement continued to grow into the nineteenth century with at least eighteen utopian Shaker communities in Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Ohio. Today many of those Shaker settlements are museums. The last remaining Shaker community is at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village near Poland, Maine. The Testament of Ann Lee, starring Amanda Seyfried, drew on this book among other sources to tell Lee’s story.

[more]
cover of Mother Earth: An American Story

Mother Earth

An American Story

Sam D. Gill

University of Chicago Press, 1987

"The earth is my mother, and on her bosom I shall repose."

Attributed to Tecumseh in the early 1800s, this statement is frequently cited to uphold the view, long and widely proclaimed in scholarly and popular literature, that Mother Earth is an ancient and central Native American figure. In this radical and comprehensive rethinking, Sam D. Gill traces the evolution of female earth imagery in North America from the sixteenth century to the present and reveals how the evolution of the current Mother Earth figure was influenced by prevailing European-American imagery of America and the Indians as well as by the rapidly changing Indian identity.

Gill also analyzes the influential role of scholars in creating and establishing the imagery that underlay the recent origins of Mother Earth and, upon reflection, he raises serious questions about the nature of scholarship.

"Mother Earth might be modern, stressing the supposed biological ground of native life and its rich mythic tradition, but it hardly frees the native people from their long, lamentable involvement with the white man. For making this point clear, Gill deserves high praise."—Bernard W. Sheehan, Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"In one of the finest studies of recent years we have an ambitious attempt to satisfy scholar, Native American, popular reader, and truth."—Thomas McElwain, Western Folklore
[more]
cover of Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal

Mother Figured

Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal

Deirdre de la Cruz

University of Chicago Press, 2015

There is no female religious figure so widely known and revered as the Virgin Mary. Mary has inspired in cultures around the world a deep devotion, a desire to emulate her virtue, and a strong belief in her power. Perhaps no population has been so deeply affected by this maternal figure as Filipino Catholics, whose apparitions of Mary have increased in response to recent events, drawing from a broad repertoire of the Catholic supernatural and pulling attention to new articulations of Christianity in the Global South.
 
In Mother Figured, historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz offers a detailed examination of several appearances and miracles of the Virgin Mary in the Philippines from materials and sites ranging from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. By analyzing the effects of the mass media on the perception and proliferation of apparition phenomena, de la Cruz charts the intriguing emergence of new voices in the Philippines that are broadcasting Marian discourse globally. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and hitherto unexplored archives in the Philippines, the United States, and Spain, Mother Figured documents the conditions of Marian devotion’s modern development and tracks how it has transformed Filipinos’ social and political role within the greater Catholic world.
[more]
cover of Mother Goose, Mother Jones, Mommie Dearest: Biblical Mothers and Their Children

Mother Goose, Mother Jones, Mommie Dearest

Biblical Mothers and Their Children

Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan

SBL Press, 2009

Who are the mothers in the biblical text? What do they do? What kinds of power do they have? Issues of identity, authority, violence, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, sexual exploitation and rape-marriage, murder, and relation to God have haunted the characters and representations of motherhood from Eve to Mary and beyond. For better or for worse, these images speak potent messages even today. To explore biblical mothers and their relationships with their daughters and sons, the contributors to this volume participate in a comparative analysis between biblical mothers and mothers in popular media, history, literature, and the arts. The diversity of methods they employ prompts a rich discussion on the deconstruction of motherhood, offering new ways of envisioning both biblical and contemporary motherhood. The contributors are Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan and Tina Pippin, Madeline McClenney-Sadler, Wil Gafney, Brian Britt, Frank M. Yamada, Mignon R. Jacobs, Linda S. Schering, Mark Roncace and Deborah Whitehead, Andrew M. Mbuvi, Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Brenda Wallace, Margaret Aymer, Tat-siong Benny Liew, and Alison Jasper.
[more]
cover of Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481–1534: Visionary Sermons

Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481–1534

Visionary Sermons

Juana de la Cruz

Iter Press, 2016

Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) is a unique figure in the history of the Catholic Church, thanks to her public visionary experiences during which she lost consciousness, while a deep voice, identifying itself as Christ, issued from her, narrating the feasts and pageants taking place in heaven. Juana’s so called “sermons,” collected in a manuscript called Libro del Conorte, form a fascinating window into Castilian religiosity in the early sixteenth century. There is much to reap from these sermons concerning Spanish Renaissance culture, theology, mysticism, gender roles, and interreligious interactions.

[more]
cover of Mother Teresa's General Letters to Her Sisters

Mother Teresa's General Letters to Her Sisters

Brian Kolodiejchuk

Catholic University of America Press, 2024

Mother Teresa’s General Letters to Her Sisters is a collection of Mother Teresa’s circular letters to the members of her religious congregation, the Missionaries of Charity Sisters. Not intended for those outside her community, they were written informally and spontaneously, often with little editing. It was for Mother Teresa a way of “being present” to the members of her rapidly expanding religious order. Seemingly of little interest except for those to whom they were addressed, the letters reveal the spiritual depth and pragmatic leadership of one of the most popular modern saints, as well as the inner dynamics underlying one of the most flourishing religious congregations of the last century. At the same time, and perhaps surprisingly, these letters may also prove to be worthwhile reading for a wider audience. Something of God’s wisdom and love seems to shine through Mother Teresa’s guidance and counsels, giving the reader light and help even though he or she is not living the same religious life as one of the Sisters. Mother Teresa’s unpolished statements are at times humble and at times humbling. They inspire confidence and encourage generosity. Many a time they are humorous but more often challenging. They are sprinkled with serene joy but also permeated with deep pain. She delighted in her Sisters’ accomplishments yet did not shy away from correcting even the smallest flaw, which didn’t escape her very observant eye. Sometimes she sounded just like a mother, full of tender loving care, and at other times more like a commander in chief, exhibiting an iron will and uncompromising determination. In either case, her followers seemed to have been drawn into the mystery of her charism, endeavoring to keep pace with her. Was it the attraction of what could be termed as her “leadership style” in the unremitting service of the poorest of the poor, or the perceived love of a mother’s heart that made her so unanimously loved and admired by the members of her congregation? Or was it both? The letters will reveal the answer! Inspiring in their simplicity, the letters may well serve as a treasure trove where anyone from a reflective scholar to a caring mother of a family may find satisfaction for their spiritual palate. The attractiveness of perennial truth often makes Mother Teresa’s presentation of traditional spiritual themes likewise relevant for contemporary needs. In the context of Mother Teresa’s statement that “we are created for greater things, to love and to be loved’,” these letters will help the reader discover and experience God’s presence through the little miracles of His love in one’s daily life. They will inspire us “to put our love into living action,” sharing His love with all those we meet, and so make our lives “something beautiful for God.”
[more]
cover of Mother Teresa: Just a Pencil In God's Hand: Reflections in Honor of a Saint

Mother Teresa

Just a Pencil In God's Hand: Reflections in Honor of a Saint

Brian Kolodiejchuk

Catholic University of America Press, 2024

This anthology contains a collection of intellectual explorations honoring the enduring legacy of Mother Teresa. The symposium, held on 10 September 2022 at the Catholic University of America (CUA), brought together leading scholars to speak of Mother Teresa's legacy to produce the following papers, each shedding light on a life characterized by compassion, selflessness, and devoted service to the poorest of the poor, the forgotten, and the outcast of society. The keynote address by George Weigel, “Mother Teresa and John Paul II: Lessons for Our Troubled Times,” uncovers the lessons from the partnership of two great saints and their efforts to make way for Love in a dark world. "Mother Teresa: Holiness, Process of Canonization, and Miracle;" by the postulator of her cause, Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, MC, explores the nature of holiness, several characteristics of Mother Teresa’s holiness and the process that led to her canonization in 2016. In “Praxiological Approach to the Poor: Mother Teresa’s authentic retrieval of Christian praxis through faith, hope, and charity,” presented by Fr Darren Dentino, MC, we delve into Mother Teresa’s profound relationship with the underprivileged, showcasing a service approach that transcends simple social work and touches and heals the physical and inner wounds of many. Janice Breidenbach, a professor at Ave Maria University, sheds light on her own experience as a mother and explains Mother Teresa’s deep understanding of motherhood in her paper “Mother Teresa’s Philosophy of Motherhood.” "Mother Teresa: A Carmelite Perspective" by CUA professor, Fr Stephen Payne, OCD, explores the connections between Mother Teresa and the Carmelite tradition, highlighting the influence of Carmelite spirituality on her life and journey. Jim Towey's paper delves into Mother Teresa's motherhood and her humanity, emphasizing how her ordinary yet profound acts of love and compassion were reflective of her saintly character. In the annual conference held the following year, Catholic University of America professor Bradley Gregory, examines the phrase “you did it to me” from the judgment scene in the gospel of Matthew (25:40) which Mother Teresa would refer to as “the gospel on five fingers.” Drawing on the rich theological resources of Scripture and the Church’s tradition, Professor Bradley expounds on how this passage relates to the gospel of grace, which calls us into God’s work of redeeming and healing the world. Each paper testifies to Mother Teresa’s enduring legacy as a reflection of God’s love in the world, providing readers an opportunity to contemplate her steadfast dedication and honor the legacy of one of the 20th century's most profound figures.
[more]