Title: Gender and morality in Anglo-American culture, 1650-1800
Author: Bloch, Ruth H 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Christianity | Women's Studies | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Ruth Bloch's stellar essays on the origins of Anglo-American conceptions of gender and morality are brought together in this valuable book, which collects six of her most influential pieces in one place for the first time and includes two new essays. The volume illuminates the overarching theme of her work by addressing a basic historical question: Why did the attitudes toward gender and family relations that we now consider traditional values emerge when they did? Bloch looks deeply into eighteenth-century culture to answer this question, highlighting long-term developments in religion, intellectual history, law, and literature, showing that the eighteenth century was a time of profound transformation for women's roles as wives and mothers, for ideas about sexuality, and for notions of female moral authority. She engages topics from British moral philosophy to colonial laws regarding courtship, and from the popularity of the sentimental novel to the psychology of religious revivalism. Lucid, provocative, and wide-ranging, these eight essays bring a revisionist challenge to both women's studies and cultural studies as they ask us to reconsider the origins of the system of gender relations that has dominated American culture for two hundred years.   [brief]
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Title: God, Harlem U.S.A.: the Father Divine story
Author: Watts, Jill
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | United States History | Christianity | American Studies | African American Studies | African Studies
Publisher's Description: How did an African-American man born in a ghetto in 1879 rise to such religious prominence that his followers addressed letters to him simply "God, Harlem U.S.A."?Using hitherto unknown materials, Jill Watts portrays the life and career of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing religious leaders, Father Divine. Starting as an itinerant preacher, Father Divine built an unprecedented movement that by the 1930s had attracted followers across the nation and around the world. As his ministry grew, so did the controversy surrounding his enormous wealth, flamboyant style, and committed "angels" - black and white, rich and poor alike.Here for the first time a full account of Father Divine's childhood and early years challenges previous contentions that he was born into a sharecropping family in the deep South. While earlier biographers have concentrated on Father Divine's social and economic programs, Watts focuses on his theology, which gives new meaning to secular activities that often appeared contradictory. Although much has been written about Father Divine, God, Harlem U.S.A . finally provides a balanced and intimate account of his life's work.   [brief]
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Title: Golden inches: the China memoir of Grace Service 
Author: Service, Grace 1879-1954
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Autobiographies and Biographies | Christianity | Asian History | China
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Title: The Gothic enterprise: a guide to understanding the Medieval cathedral
Author: Scott, Robert A 1935-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Medieval Studies | Architecture | European Studies | Christianity | European History | Architectural History | Sociology | Sociology
Publisher's Description: The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe are among the most astonishing achievements of Western culture. Evoking feelings of awe and humility, they make us want to understand what inspired the people who had the audacity to build them. This engrossing book surveys an era that has fired the historical imagination for centuries. In it Robert A. Scott explores why medieval people built Gothic cathedrals, how they built them, what conception of the divine lay behind their creation, and how religious and secular leaders used cathedrals for social and political purposes. As a traveler's companion or a rich source of knowledge for the armchair enthusiast, The Gothic Enterprise helps us understand how ordinary people managed such tremendous feats of physical and creative energy at a time when technology was rudimentary, famine and disease were rampant, the climate was often harsh, and communal life was unstable and incessantly violent. While most books about Gothic cathedrals focus on a particular building or on the cathedrals of a specific region, The Gothic Enterprise considers the idea of the cathedral as a humanly created space. Scott discusses why an impoverished people would commit so many social and personal resources to building something so physically stupendous and what this says about their ideas of the sacred, especially the vital role they ascribed to the divine as a protector against the dangers of everyday life. Scott's narrative offers a wealth of fascinating details concerning daily life during medieval times. The author describes the difficulties master-builders faced in scheduling construction that wouldn't be completed during their own lifetimes, how they managed without adequate numeric systems or paper on which to make detailed drawings, and how climate, natural disasters, wars, variations in the hours of daylight throughout the year, and the celebration of holy days affected the pace and timing of work. Scott also explains such things as the role of relics, the quarrying and transporting of stone, and the incessant conflict cathedral-building projects caused within their communities. Finally, by drawing comparisons between Gothic cathedrals and other monumental building projects, such as Stonehenge, Scott expands our understanding of the human impulses that shape our landscape.   [brief]
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Title: Gregory the Great: perfection in imperfection
Author: Straw, Carole Ellen
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | European History | Classical History | Christianity
Publisher's Description: Gregory I (590-604) is often considered the first medieval pope and the first exponent of a truly medieval spirituality. Carole Straw places Gregory in his historical context and considers the many facets of his personality - monk, preacher, and pope - in order to elucidate the structure of his thou . . . [more]
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Title: The human difference: animals, computers, and the necessity of social science 
Author: Wolfe, Alan 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Social Theory | Political Theory | Postcolonial Studies | Religion | Christianity
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Title: Inside organized racism: women in the hate movement
Author: Blee, Kathleen M
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Sociology | Gender Studies | Social Problems | Public Policy | Christianity
Publisher's Description: Kathleen M. Blee's disturbing and provocative look at the hidden world of organized racism focuses on women, the newest recruiting targets of racist groups and crucial to their campaign for racial supremacy. Through personal interviews with women active in the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi groups, Christian Identity sects, and white power skinhead gangs across the United States, Blee dispels many misconceptions of organized racism. Women are seldom pushed into the racist movement by any compelling interest, belief, or need, she finds. Most are educated. Only the rare woman grew up poor. Most were not raised in abusive families. Most women did not follow men into the world of organized racism. Inside Organized Racism offers a fascinating examination of the submerged social relations and the variety of racist identities that lie behind the apparent homogeneity of the movement. Following up her highly praised study of the women in the 1920s Ku Klux Klan, Blee discovers that many of today's racist women combine dangerous racist and anti-Semitic agendas with otherwise mainstream lives. Few of the women she interviews had strong racist or anti-Semitic views before becoming associated with racist groups. Rather, they learned a virulent hatred of racial minorities and anti-Semitic conspiratorial beliefs by being in racist groups. The only national sample of a broad spectrum of racist activists and the only major work on women racists, this well-written and important book also sheds light on how gender relationships shape participation in the movement as a whole.   [brief]
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Title: La lucha for Cuba: religion and politics on the streets of Miami 
Author: De La Torre, Miguel A
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Religion | Latino Studies | Politics | Christianity
Publisher's Description: For many in Miami's Cuban exile community, hating Fidel Castro is as natural as loving one's children. This hatred, Miguel De La Torre suggests, has in fact taken on religious significance. In La Lucha for Cuba, De La Torre shows how Exilic Cubans, a once marginalized group, have risen to power and privilege - distinguishing themselves from other Hispanic communities in the United States - and how religion has figured in their ascension. Through the lens of religion and culture, his work also unmasks and explores intra-Hispanic structures of oppression operating among Cubans in Miami. Miami Cubans use a religious expression, la lucha, or "the struggle," to justify the power and privilege they have achieved. Within the context of la lucha, De La Torre explores the religious dichotomy created between the "children of light" (Exilic Cubans) and the "children of darkness" (Resident Cubans). Examining the recent saga of the Elián González custody battle, he shows how the cultural construction of la lucha has become a distinctly Miami-style spirituality that makes el exilio (exile) the basis for religious reflection, understanding, and practice - and that conflates political mobilization with spiritual meaning in an ongoing confrontation with evil.   [brief]
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Title: Language, charisma, and creativity: the ritual life of a religious movement 
Author: Csordas, Thomas J
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Christianity
Publisher's Description: Thomas Csordas's eloquent analysis of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, part of the contemporary cultural and media phenomenon known as conservative Christianity, embraces one of the primary tasks of anthropology: to stimulate critical reflection by making the exotic seem familiar and the familiar appear strange. This story, unlike an ethnography of a little-known tribal society, is about people who are quite like everybody else but at the same time inhabit a substantially different phenomenological world.Csordas has observed and studied Charismatic groups throughout the United States. He begins with an introduction to the Charismatic Renewal and a history of its development during the roughly thirty years of its existence. He describes the movement's internal diversity as well as its international extent, emphasizing Charismatic identity and the transformation of space and time in Charismatic daily life. Language, Charisma, and Creativity extends and builds on the ideas of self-transformation that Csordas introduced in his earlier book on Charismatic healing. This work makes an original, important contribution to anthropology, studies of religion and ritual, linguistic-semiotic and rhetorical studies, the multidisciplinary study of social movements, and American studies.   [brief]
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Title: Looking for God in Brazil: the progressive Catholic Church in urban Brazil's religious arena
Author: Burdick, John 1959-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Christianity
Publisher's Description: For a generation, the Catholic Church in Brazil has enjoyed international renown as one of the most progressive social forces in Latin America. The Church's creation of Christian Base Communities (CEBs), groups of Catholics who learn to read the Bible as a call for social justice, has been widely hailed. Still, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that the CEBs are lagging far behind the explosive growth of Brazil's two other major national religious movements - Pentacostalism and Afro-Brazilian Umbanda .On the basis of his extensive fieldwork in Rio di Janeiro, including detailed life histories of women, blacks, youths, and the marginal poor, John Burdick offers the first in-depth explanation of why the radical Catholic Church is losing, and Pentecostalism and Umbanda winning, the battle for souls in urban Brazil.   [brief]
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Title: Loyola's acts: the rhetoric of the self 
Author: Boyle, Marjorie O'Rourke 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Literature | Renaissance History | Christianity | Rhetoric | Art History | Medieval History
Publisher's Description: This revisionist view of Ignatius Loyola argues that his "autobiography" - until now taken to be a literal, documentary account - is in reality a work of rhetoric, a moral narrative that exploits the techniques of fiction. In radically reinterpreting this canonical text, our main source of information about the founder of the largest and most powerful religious order in Roman Catholicism, Boyle paints a vivid picture of Loyola's world. She surveys rhetorical and artistic theory, religious iconography, everyday custom, and an astonishing array of scenes and subjects: from curiosity, to codes of honor, to the holy places of Spain, to the significance of apparitions and flying serpents.Written in the tradition of Renaissance studies on individualism, Loyola's Acts engages current interest in autobiography and in the history of private life. The book also provides a powerful heuristic for interpreting a wide range of texts of the Christian tradition. Finally, this secular treatment of a canonized saint provides revealing insights into how a prestigious sixteenth-century figure like Loyola understood himself.   [brief]
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Title: The making of a heretic: gender, authority, and the Priscillianist controversy 
Author: Burrus, Virginia
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Religion | Religion | Christianity | Classical Religions
Publisher's Description: Silenced for 1,600 years, the "heretics" speak for themselves in this account of the Priscillianist controversy that began in fourth-century Spain. In a close examination of rediscovered texts, Virginia Burrus provides an unusual opportunity to explore heresy from the point of view of the followers of Priscillian and to reevaluate the reliability of the historical record. Her analysis takes into account the concepts of gender, authority, and public and private space that informed established religion's response to this early Christian movement.Priscillian, who began his career as a lay teacher with particular influence among women, faced charges of heresy along with accusations of sorcery and sexual immorality following his ordination to the episcopacy. He was executed along with several of his followers circa 386. His purportedly "gnostic" doctrines produced controversy and division within the churches of Spain, dissension that continued into the early decades of the fifth century.Burrus's thorough and wide-ranging study enlarges upon previous scholarship, particularly in bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the gendered constructions of religious orthodoxies, making a valuable contribution to the recent commentary that explores new ways of looking at early Christian controversies.   [brief]
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Title: The making of fornication: eros, ethics, and political reform in Greek philosophy and early Christianity
Author: Gaca, Kathy L
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical Philosophy | Classical Religions | Classical Politics | Christianity | Ethics | Social and Political Thought | Ancient History | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory - with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order - as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers.   [brief]
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Title: The Mathers: three generations of Puritan intellectuals, 1596-1728
Author: Middlekauff, Robert
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | United States History | Intellectual History | Christianity
Publisher's Description: In this classic work of American religious history, Robert Middlekauff traces the evolution of Puritan thought and theology in America from its origins in New England through the early eighteenth century. He focuses on three generations of intellectual ministers - Richard, Increase, and Cotton Mather - in order to challenge the traditional telling of the secularization of Puritanism, a story of faith transformed by reason, science, and business. Delving into the Mathers' private papers and unpublished writings as well as their sermons and published works, Middlekauff describes a Puritan theory of religious experience that is more creative, complex, and uncompromising than traditional accounts have allowed. At the same time, he portrays changing ideas and patterns of behavior that reveal much about the first hundred years of American life.   [brief]
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Title: The memory of the eyes: pilgrims to living saints in Christian late antiquity
Author: Frank, Georgia 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Religion | Christianity | Classical Religions | Classical History
Publisher's Description: Pilgrims in the deserts of Egypt and the holy land during the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. often reported visiting holy people as part of their tours of holy places. This is the first comprehensive study of pilgrimage to these famous ascetics of late antique Christianity. Through an original analysis of pilgrim writings of this period, Georgia Frank discovers a literary imagination at work, one that both recorded and shaped the experience of pilgrimage to living saints. Taking an important new approach to these texts, Frank finds in them a record of the writers' and readers' spiritual expectations and uses these fresh insights to add substantially to our understanding of the purposes and practices of pilgrimage. Frank focuses in particular on two important and well-known early texts - The History of the Monks in Egypt (ca. 400) and Palladius's The Lausiac History (ca. 420), situating these narratives in their literary, historical, and spiritual contexts. She compares these narratives to exotic travel writing and to tales of otherworldly journeys. Bringing in contemporary theory, she demonstrates the importance of sight as a means of spiritual progress and explores the relation between the function of sight in these narratives and in other expressions of visual piety in late antiquity Christianity, such as the veneration of relics and, eventually, icons. With its unique focus on the sensory dimensions of pilgrimage - especially visuality - this absorbing book widens our understanding of early Christian pilgrims and those who read their accounts. At the same time, it also sheds new light on the relation between religious experience and the senses, on literary representations of visual experience, and on the literature of pious travel.   [brief]
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Title: The messiah before Jesus: the suffering servant of the Dead Sea scrolls
Author: Knohl, Israel
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Religion | Jewish Studies | Christianity
Publisher's Description: In a work that challenges notions that have dominated New Testament scholarship for more than a hundred years, Israel Knohl gives startling evidence for a messianic precursor to Jesus who is described as the "Suffering Servant" in recently published fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Messiah before Jesus clarifies many formerly incomprehensible aspects of Jesus' life and confirms the story in the New Testament about his messianic awareness. The book shows that, around the time of Jesus' birth, there came into being a conception of "catastrophic" messianism in which the suffering, humiliation, and death of the messiah were regarded as an integral part of the redemptive process. Scholars have long argued that Jesus could not have foreseen his suffering, death, and resurrection because the concept of a slain savior who rises from the dead was alien to the Judaism of his time. But, on the basis of hymns found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Knohl argues that, one generation before Jesus, a messianic leader arose in the Qumran sect who was regarded by his followers as ushering in an era of redemption and forgiveness. This messianic leader was killed by Roman soldiers in the course of a revolt that broke out in Jerusalem in 4 B.C.E. The Romans forbade his body to be buried and after the third day his disciples believed that he was resurrected and rose to heaven. This formed the basis for Jesus' messianic consciousness, Knohl argues; it was because of this model that Jesus anticipated he would suffer, die, and be resurrected after three days. Knohl takes his fascinating inquiry one step further by suggesting that this messiah was a figure known to us from historical sources of the period. This identification may shed new light on the mystery of the "Paraclete" in the Gospel of John. A pathbreaking study, The Messiah before Jesus will reshape our understanding of Christianity and its relationship to Judaism.   [brief]
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Title: Myths in stone: religious dimensions of Washington, D.C
Author: Meyer, Jeffrey F
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Religion | American Studies | Christianity | United States History
Publisher's Description: Washington, D.C., is a city of powerful symbols - from the dominance of the Capitol dome and Washington Monument to the authority of the Smithsonian. This book takes us on a fascinating and informative tour of the nation's capital as Jeffrey F. Meyer unravels the complex symbolism of the city and explores its meaning for our national consciousness. Meyer finds that mythic and religious themes pervade the capital - in its original planning, in its monumental architecture, and in the ritualized events that have taken place over the 200 years the city has been the repository for the symbolism of the nation. As Meyer tours the city's famous axial layout, he discusses many historical figures and events, compares Washington to other great cities of the world such as Beijing and Berlin, and discusses the meaning and history of its architecture and many works of art. Treating Washington, D.C., as a complex religious center, Meyer finds that the city functions as a unifying element in American consciousness. This book will change the way we look at Washington, D.C., and provide a provocative new look at the meaning of religion in America today. It will also be a valuable companion for those traveling to this city that was envisioned from its inception as the center of the world.   [brief]
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Title: A new world in a small place: church and religion in the Diocese of Rieti, 1188-1378 
Author: Brentano, Robert 1926-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Religion | Christianity | European History | Medieval History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Distinguished historian Robert Brentano provides an entirely new perspective on the character of the church, religion, and society in the medieval Italian diocese of Rieti from 1188 to 1378. Combing through a cache of previously ignored documents stored in a tower of the cathedral, he uses wills, li . . . [more]
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Title: One king, one faith: the Parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century 
Author: Roelker, Nancy L. (Nancy Lyman)
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | European History | Christianity | European Studies | French Studies
Publisher's Description: This book, the culmination of a lifelong career in French history, tackles head-on the central question of the French Religious Wars: Why did France prove so consistently hostile and resistant to Protestantism? Distinguished scholar Nancy Lyman Roelker claims that what ultimately motivated the passion and violence of the civil wars was religion. She demonstrates that not only the body politic but also the body social was defined by Gallican Catholicism.Roelker underscores the role the Parlement played in shaping and safeguarding the social, as well as the political, order. Her study is based on extensive research in the correspondence, memoirs, and tracts of mainstream Catholic magistrates as well as dissenters. It creates an overview of the mentalitè s of the Parlement, analyzes religious attitudes toward major events of the period, and examines the Parlement's role in the triumph of Henri IV. Along the way, it sheds light on the inner workings of the Parlement and other political institutions, on social structures, and on collective ideas. And above all, this distinguished work brilliantly illuminates the role of religion in society and the state. It will be the definitive work on the subject for many years to come.   [brief]
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Title: Passionate uncertainty: inside the American Jesuits
Author: McDonough, Peter 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Religion | Christianity | Sociology | Neuroscience
Publisher's Description: Founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus remains the largest and most controversial religious order of men in Catholicism. Since the 1960s, however, Jesuits in the United States have lost more than half of their members, and they have experienced a massive upheaval in what they believe and how they work and live. In this groundbreaking book, Peter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi draw on interviews and statements gathered from more than four hundred Jesuits and former Jesuits to provide an intimate look at turmoil among Catholicism's legendary best-and-brightest. Priests and former priests speak candidly about their reasons for joining (and leaving) the Jesuits, about their sexual development and orientation, about their spiritual crises and their engagement with other religious traditions. They discuss issues ranging from celibacy to the ordination of women, homosexuality, the rationale of the priesthood, the challenges of community life, and the divinity of Jesus. Passionate Uncertainty traces the transformation of the Society of Jesus from a fairly unified organization into a smaller, looser community with disparate goals and an elusive corporate identity. From its role as a traditional subculture during the days of immigrant Catholicism, the order has changed into an amalgam of countercultures shaped around social mission, sexual identity, and an eclectic spirituality. The story of the Jesuits reflects the crisis of clerical authority and the deep ambivalence surrounding American Catholicism's encounter with modernity.   [brief]
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