This book examines the nature of messianic movements by studying a specific case history. Carole Myscovski argues that underlying any single messianic movement is a messianic tradition that draws together messianic and related religious beliefs, rituals, and social structures. She traces the Luso-Brazilian messianic tradition from its origins in sixteenth-century Portugal to its flowering in colonial Brazil to its expression in three nineteenth-century messianic movements. Challenging sociopolitical and psychological analyses that reduce religious activity to proto-nationalism or psychosis,...

Victor Turner altered the way ritual is viewed, by emphasizing its role as an agent of social change rather than an agent for conserving the status quo. This book reconsiders and clarifies Turner's theory of ritual in response to its frequent misinterpretation and then demonstrates its usefulness for interpreting such phenomena as ritual possession in a politically militant African-American Pentecostal congregation and the countercultural theatrical experiments of Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theater.

Chinese theologian Kwok Pui-lan draws on a wide variety of archival material to reconstruct the life of Chinese women in the church. She analyzes their participation in social reform, and looks at their relationship to the feminist movement in China. Compared to their Chinese sisters, Christian women had more prolonged exposure to Western civilization through the Christian Church, mission schools, and Christian benevolence. Their responses, shows Kwok, provide rare information on how Chinese women reacted to foreign influences and religion in particular. At the same time, Kwok's study...

This book offers an important contribution to the recovery and articulation of African-American womanist experience. Ida Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) was an activist, social reformer, and churchwoman. Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope recovers her life and historical context and examines the extent to which her perspective can be a resource for a contemporary womanist Christian social ethic. Beginning with a brief biographical sketch of Wells-Barnett, Emilie Townes examines the religious and social world in which she worked as well as her many speeches and publciations. Townes focuses especially...

In the popular mind, the mystic is seen as the supreme solitary. This image, if accurate, would make the mystical quest marginal in an era when much theology has emphasized socially responsible praxis. Against the popular image, Mary Frohlich develops a theological model -- based on the writings of Bernard Lonergan and the "self-psychology" of Heinz Kohut -- that both respects mysticism's irreducible character and shows how it concretely transforms people and systems. She then applies this model to an interpretation of a classic expression of spiritual transformation, the Interior Castle of...