Results by title

Sex and Salvation chronicles the coming of age of a generation of women in Tamatave in the years that followed Madagascar’s economic liberalization. Eager to forge a viable future amid poverty and rising consumerism, many young women have entered the sexual economy in hope of finding a European husband. Just as many Westerners believe that young people break with the past as they enter adulthood, Malagasy citizens fear that these women have severed the connection to their history and culture.

Jennifer Cole’s elegant analysis shows how this notion of generational change is both wrong and consequential. It obscures the ways young people draw on long-standing ideas of gender and sexuality, it ignores how urbanites relate to their rural counterparts, and it neglects the relationship between these husband-seeking women and their elders who join Pentecostal churches. And yet, as talk about the women circulates through the city’s neighborhoods, bars, Internet cafes, and churches, it teaches others new ways of being.

Cole’s sophisticated depiction of how a generation’s coming of age contributes to social change eschews a narrow focus on crisis. Instead, she reveals how fantasies of rupture and conceptions of the changing life course shape the everyday ways that people create the future.

Exploring the theological, social, and cultural dimensions of one of America’s most ambitious prophetic movements 

The Shakers’ Era of Manifestations ranks among the most astounding events in American religious history. During the 1840s, members of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing embarked on an audacious project of receiving visions, revelations, and other manifestations from the spirit world and convincing both themselves and the world’s people of their reality. Gifted Shakers known as “instruments” surrendered their bodies to possessing spirits and celestial beings who, in turn, provided the Believers with an unimaginable number of revelatory communications that collapsed time and space, rewrote the Bible, and vastly expanded traditional Protestant beliefs and practices. The fruits of Shaker spiritualism would gain a permanent place in America’s public consciousness. 

Hundreds of volumes and thousands of pages of inspired writings, music, and art from the New Era or period of Mother's Work, as the Shakers called it, crowd the shelves of a half dozen major research libraries. The archive is so vast, so extraordinary, so seemingly bizarre that few scholars have dared tackle it in its totality. The authors of this volume, specialists in nineteenth-century American religious studies, have collaborated to produce an extensive analysis of Mother Ann’s Work. They examine a fascinating range of topics: speaking with the dead; the spectacle of Shaker rituals; race, gender, and family life; and the material culture of physical and spiritual things; as well as manuscripts, books, songs, objects, and art produced during the New Era. 

Shakers at the Center brings the sprawling elements of the Era of Manifestations together in a single volume. Written for students, scholars, and general readers alike, it will stand for years as the definitive history of the Shakers’ most fascinating and vexing historical period. 

Contributors include the volume editor as well as Emily Suzanne Clark, Brett Malcolm Grainger, Sonia Hazard, Dana Logan, Carol Medlicott, Sally M. Promey, Erik R. Seeman, Ryan K. Smith, and David Walker. 

In 1695, workers in Pavia, Italy, chanced upon a collection of bones in the crypt of the Cathedral of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro. The workers later testified that they had seen the name of St. Augustine written in charcoal on the surface of the casket they had uncovered. Yet by the time of the official inquest, all traces of the writing had disappeared. 

Rich with new insights into urban literacy and conceptions of reading, this book explores the controversy that ensued over the alleged discovery of Augustine's bones. Manuscripts, broadsides, pamphlets—even whole books—were devoted to proving or disproving the authenticity of the remains. Although these works were addressed to members of the clergy, they were also intended for the general reading public in Pavia, Milan, and Venice. Their dissemination helped create a temporary public sphere in which the merits of the case were examined in a spirit of free debate. 

A reexamination of the dispute over St. Augustine's bones illuminates aspects of Catholic spirituality in Northern Italy during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It also reveals the different ways in which Catholic scholars, local religious leaders, and the papal administration sought to influence and direct local popular religious belief and practices. Although the controversy was officially resolved by the papacy in 1728, the debate over the relics of San Pietro continued into the twentieth century. 

By combining methods developed in the burgeoning field of the history of the book with the tools of cultural analysis, Harold Samuel Stone not only recovers the stories surrounding St. Augustine's bones, but also reconstructs the mental world of those who read or heard them.

Considers the question “Who is a Jew?”— a critical rhetorical issue with far-reaching consequences for Jews and non-Jews alike

Hatzaad Harishon ("The First Step") was a New York-based, multiracial Jewish organization that worked to increase recognition and legitimacy for Black Jews in the sixties and seventies. In Stepping into Zion, Janice W. Fernheimer examines the history and archives of Hatzaad Harishon to illuminate the shifting definitions and borders of Jewish identity, which have critical relevance to Jews of all traditions as well as to non-Jews.

Fernheimer focuses on a period when Jewish identity was in flux and deeply influenced by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In 1964, white and Black Jews formed Hatzaad Harishon to foster interaction and unity between Black and white Jewish communities. They raised the question of who or what constitutes Jewishness or Jewish identity, and in searching for an answer succeeded—both historically and rhetorically—in gaining increased recognition for Black Jews. Fernheimer traces how, despite deep disagreement over definitions, members of Hatzaad Harishon were able to create common ground in a process she terms "interruptive invention": an incremental model for rhetorical success that allows different groups to begin and continue important but difficult discussions when they share little common ground or make unequal claims to institutional and discursive power, or when the nature of common ground is precisely what is at stake. Consequently, they provide a practical way out of the seemingly incommensurable stalemate incompatible worldviews present.

Through insightful interpretations of Hatzaad Harishon's archival materials, Fernheimer chronicles the group's successes and failures within the larger rhetorical history of conflicts that emerge when cultural identities shift or expand.