Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Sociology of Religion

The women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America has primarily been interpreted as a secular movement. However, in From Preachers to Suffragists, Beverly Zink-Sawyer examines the lives of three nineteenth-century clergywomen--Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Olympia Brown, and Anna Howard Shaw--who, seeing their calling to the suffrage movement as an extension of their call to ministry, left the parish to join and become leaders in the movement. Zink-Sawyer tells the stories of their courageous lives, quoting their sermons and writings and tracing their struggles before and...

Two aspects are fundamental to Hispanic/Latina theology: rich diversity and a collaborative spirit. In this groundbreaking book, Hispanic scholars come together to create a theology drawn from the collaboration of Latino and Latina Protestants in North America. The authors discuss a range of topics--God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the importance of scripture, the church, humanity, the doctrine of sin, spirituality--and the challenges facing Hispanic/Latina Protestant theology.

Women throughout American history have repeatedly been accused of "stepping out of their places" as many have fought for more rewarding roles in the church and society. In this book, Susan Hill Lindley demonstrates that just as religion in the traditional sense has influenced the lives of American women through its institutions, values, and sanctions, so women themselves have had significant effect on the shape of American religion through the years.

Few expressions of New Age spirituality evoke greater skepticism and derision than does channeling, the practice of serving as a vessel for the voices of ancient or otherworldly beings. Channelers claim to be possessed by angels, aliens, and "ascended masters" who speak through them, offering advice and solace. Intellectuals dismiss them as cranks and charlatans; evangelical Christians accuse them of trafficking with Satanic forces. Meanwhile, the steady spread of channeling from the West Coast to the American heartland fuels the fear that the United States now confronts an epidemic of...

Sacrifice--ranging from the sacrifice of virgins to circumcision to giving up what is most valued--is essential to all religions. Could there be a natural, even biological, reason for these practices? Something that might explain why religions of so many different cultures share so many rituals and concepts? In this extraordinary book, one of the world's leading authorities on ancient religions explores the possibility of natural religion--a religious sense and practice naturally proceeding from biological imperatives.

Because they lack later refinements, the earliest religions from...

In the nineteenth century, American tourists, scholars, evangelists, writers, and artists flocked to Palestine as part of a "Holy Land mania." Many saw America as a New Israel, a modern nation chosen to do God's work on Earth, and produced a rich variety of inspirational art and literature about their travels in the original promised land, which was then part of Ottoman-controlled Palestine. In American Palestine, Hilton Obenzinger explores two "infidel texts" in this tradition: Herman Melville's Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1876) and Mark Twain's The...

By examining the ongoing tension between popular and official religion in Europe, this collection of essays contributes significantly to the continuing effort to understand the religious experience of ordinary people. Ranging from the Mediterranean to northern Europe and including both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, the ethnographic contexts evoked in these essays enable us to see people actively and creatively shaping their religious domain, sometimes in collaboration with official ritual specialists, often in open rebellion against them. The use of folklore texts and...

Outside the Fold is a radical reexamination of religious conversion. Gauri Viswanathan skillfully argues that conversion is an interpretive act that belongs in the realm of cultural criticism. To that end, this work examines key moments in colonial and postcolonial history to show how conversion questions the limitations of secular ideologies, particularly the discourse of rights central to both the British empire and the British nation-state. Implicit in such questioning is an attempt to construct an alternative epistemological and ethical foundation of national community....

How did the United States, founded as colonies with explicitly religious aspirations, come to be the first modern state whose commitment to the separation of church and state was reflected in its constitution? Frank Lambert explains why this happened, offering in the process a synthesis of American history from the first British arrivals through Thomas Jefferson's controversial presidency.

Lambert recognizes that two sets of spiritual fathers defined the place of religion in early America: what Lambert calls the Planting Fathers, who brought Old World ideas and dreams of...