Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Early American Music and the Construction of Race(University of California Press, 2021-12) Barnes, Rhae L.; Goodman, Glenda; Gordon, Bonnie; Ryan, Maria; Bailey, Candace; Garcia, David F.; Ramsey, Guthrie P., Jr.; Marshall, Caitlin; Eyerly, Sarah; Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsItem Commentary: Pain, Stigma, and the Politics of Self-Management(Oxford, 2020-05) Jain, Andrea R.; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsItem Western Esotericism in Brazil: The Influence of Esoteric Thought on the Valley of the Dawn(University of California Press, 2020-02) Hayes, Kelly E.; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsThe Brazilian religion known as the Valley of the Dawn is an international new religious movement known for its eclectic cosmology and collective rituals performed by adepts dressed in ornate garments. Headquartered outside of Brasília, the Valley of the Dawn was founded in the 1960s by Neiva Chaves Zelaya (1925–85) a clairvoyant medium affectionately referred to as Aunt Neiva. This article highlights the work of Mário Sassi (1921–94) and the significance of esoteric thought in the development of the movement’s Doctrine. An early convert who became Aunt Neiva’s life partner, Sassi was an intellectual seeker who drew selectively on esoteric ideas popularized through theosophical and spiritist texts to interpret and systematize Aunt Neiva’s visions. Together Aunt Neiva and Mário Sassi created a Brazilian form of Western esotericism that today includes over 600 affiliated temples across Brazil and worldwide.Item ‘Namaste All Day’: Containing Dissent in Commercial Spirituality(Harvard Divinity School, 2019) Jain, Andrea R.; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsItem The Transnational and Diasporic Future of African American Religions in the United States(Oxford, 2019-06) Curtis, Edward E., IV; Johnson, Sylvester A.; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsThis article calls forth a vision for the future study of African American religions in the United States by examining how transnational contact and diasporic consciousness have affected the past practice and are likely to affect the future practice of Christianity, Islam, and African-derived, Orisha-based religions in Black America. It offers a synthesis of scholarly literature and charts possible directions for analyzing Africana religions beyond the ideological and geographical boundaries of the nation-state. The article focuses on two primary forms of imagined and physical movement: the immigration of self-identifying Black people from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Mexico, and other places to the United States; and the travel, tourism, pilgrimage, and other movement—whether physical or not—of American-born Black people to places outside the Unites States.Item Review of Adam Jortner's, The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier(American Antiquarian Society, 2012-07) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsI wanted to like this book. I really did. But Jortner lost me pretty early on. The premise appeared promising. He would show how two religious cultures—Indian nativism and Anglo-American deism—clashed and led to the dramatic battle at Tippecanoe, where the nativist Shawnee Prophet (Tenskwatawa) and his brother Tecumseh faced off against deist William Henry Harrison, who later became our nation's oldest (until Reagan) and shortest-serving president. My initial misgivings—prompted by the "holy war" in the title—soon grew into more serious reservations.Item Review of Linford D. Fisher's The Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America(The University of Chicago Press, 2014) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsLinford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening joins a growing body of scholarship on Native American engagement with Christianity. Much of that work so far (including my own) has focused on particular individuals or communities. Fisher’s is the first to take a broader, longer scope to survey the landscape of Native engagement with Christianity in southern New England (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Long Island, and western Massachusetts) through the eighteenth century (1700–1820), and it offers a welcome contribution. Fisher’s aim is to understand Native encounter with Christianity “in the fullest possible context of local colonial interactions and the broader, transatlantic tugs of imperial power.”Item Review of Craig Atwood's Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem(The University of Chicago Press, 2004) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsColonial Moravians are far more popular today than they ever were in the eighteenth century. Then, Moravians were suspected of being “papists” on account of their liturgical practices, mistrusted because of their close relations with Indians and slaves, and thought more than a little odd in their communal living arrangements. These qualities, combined with their prodigious record keeping, have proven enticing to sociologists, historians, and ethnohistorians alike, studying everything from the life course of religious movements (Gillian Lindt Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds [New York, 1968], and Beverly Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem [Philadelphia, 1988]) to interracial religious communities (Jon Sensbach, A Separate Canaan [Chapel Hill, NC, 1998]) to the dynamics of ethnic identity in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania (Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads [Chapel Hill, NC, 2003]). All of the studies cited above treat Moravian belief and practice to a greater or lesser extent, but none goes so far as Craig Atwood’s new work in taking seriously the distinctive religiosity of the Moravian Bru¨dergemeine. Community of the Cross is a dual biography of the colorful Saxon Count, Ludwig von Zinzendorf (the main force behind the growth of the Moravian movement in the eighteenth century) and of the community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which Atwood treats as the incarnation of Zinzendorf’s theology.Item Review of Daniel R. Mandell's Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880(MIT Press, 2009) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsVirtually every nineteenth-century local history of a New England town begins with a chapter about the last “red man” to have lived there. The tone is generally somber but optimistic—marking the sad but inevitable passing away of a noble race, thus allowing for the rise of true civilization. Scholarship of the last decade or so has been chipping away at this trope, but none has done so as comprehensively as Mandell. Studies of New England Indian history are rich, though heavily weighted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the larger field of Indian history, the Old Northwest garners most attention in the era of the early Republic, before shifting to the Southeast in the era of Removal, and the West in the latter half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Item Charlottesville, Exodus, and the Politics of Nostalgia(2017-08-22) Wheeler, Rachel
- «
- 1 (current)
- 2
- 3
- »