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Examines how religious belief reshaped concepts of gender during the New South period that took place from 1877 to 1915 in ways that continue to manifest today

Modernity remade much of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was nowhere more transformational than in the American South. In the wake of the Civil War, the region not only formed new legal, financial, and social structures, but citizens of the South also faced disorienting uncertainty about personal identity and even gender itself. Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him traces the changes in southern gender roles during the New South period of 1877–1915 and demonstrates that religion is the key to perceiving how constructions of gender changed.

The Civil War cleaved southerners from the culture they had developed organically during antebellum decades, raising questions that went to the very heart of selfhood: What does it mean to be a man? How does a good woman behave? Unmoored from traditional anchors of gender, family, and race, southerners sought guidance from familiar sources: scripture and their churches. In Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him, Colin Chapell traces how concepts of gender evolved within the majority Baptist and Methodist denominations as compared to the more fluid and innovative Holiness movement.

Grounded in expansive research into the archives of the Southern Baptist Convention; Methodist Episcopal Church, South; and the Holiness movement, Chapell’s writing is also enlivened by a rich trove of primary sources: diaries, sermons, personal correspondence, published works, and unpublished memoirs. Chapell artfully contrasts the majority Baptist and Methodist view of gender with the relatively radical approaches of the emerging Holiness movement, thereby bringing into focus how subtle differences in belief gave rise to significantly different ideas of gender roles.

Scholars have explored class, race, and politics as factors that contributed to contemporary southern identity, and Chapell restores theology to its intuitive place at the center of southern identity. Probing and illuminating, Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him offers much of interest to scholars and readers of the South, southern history, and religion.

How our understanding of the ancient Egyptian afterlife was shaped by Christianity.
 
Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterlife. But, as Rune Nyord shows, even today, our understanding of the Egyptian afterlife has been formulated to a striking extent in Christian terms. Nyord argues that this is no accident, but rather the result of a long history of Europeans systematically retelling the religion of ancient Egypt to fit the framework of Christianity. The idea of ancient Egyptians believing in postmortem judgment with rewards and punishments in the afterlife was developed during the early modern period through biased interpretations that were construed without any detailed knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, hieroglyphs, and sources.
 
As a growing number of Egyptian images and texts became available through the nineteenth century, these materials tended to be incorporated into existing narratives rather than being used to question them. Against this historical background, Nyord argues that we need to return to the indigenous sources and shake off the Christian expectations that continue to shape scholarly and popular thinking about the ancient Egyptian afterlife.
 

Yes Gawd! explores the effects of religious belief and practice on political behavior among the LGBT community, a population long persecuted by religious institutions and generally considered to be non-religious. Royal Cravens deftly shows how faith impacts the politics of LGBT people. He details how the queer community creates, defines, and experiences spirituality and spiritual affirmation as well as the consequences this has for their identity, socialization, and political development.

Cravens also demonstrates the mobilizing power of faith for LGBT people by contrasting the effects of participation in faith and secular communities on political activism. He explores how factors such as coming out, race, and LGBT-affirming churches influence political attitudes and behavior and explains how the development of LGBT politico-religious activism provides opportunities for LGBT people to organize politically.

Ultimately, Cravens provides a cohesive account of how religion acts as a catalyst for and facilitator in the political development of LGBT people in the United States. In the process, he shows that there is room for both religion in LGBT communities and LGBT people in religious communities.

A very large number of people have asked: can Christians practice yoga? To put it more precisely: may Christians practice yoga without betraying, undermining, or diluting their faith? Might yoga strengthen Christian belief and practice—or at least be as neutral as baseball or soccer are toward it? Although these questions could be motivated by solely commercial interests or by mere curiosity, this work is a theological investigation that emerges from the spiritual need to know whether practicing yoga would be compatible with Christian faith and practice. The book begins by establishing an Aristotelian-Boethian method of definition of systematic comparison. It spells out the investigation’s primary sources, noting the great diversity of texts, teachings, and practice that adopt the name “yoga,” and the unified works in Catholicism that guide later comparison, especially the Church Fathers in relation to Greco-Roman paganism. After considering the historical development of yoga, the book asks questions such as, “Is yoga a branch of Hinduism?” and, “Is yoga a philosophy?” A great variety of yogic sources then help formulate a definition of yoga according to its material, formal, efficient, and final causes. After this, the semiology of St. Augustine and John of St. Thomas illuminates the meaning of yogic postures, and the issue of Hindu gods in relation to yoga practice. The investigation concludes by assessing the moral and spiritual issues bound up with yoga practice, including how intentionality affects yoga practice, and whether postural practices always have spiritual effects. Finally, lessons are drawn up from the adaptive missionary work of Jesuit Roberto de Nobili in sixteenth-century India, and the physical prayer postures of St. Dominic, the founder of the Order of Preachers. With fresh insights and original research throughout, this theological investigation into yoga has wide-ranging consequences for today’s Church as it faces non-Christian practices and beliefs throughout the world.