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{"title":"RAC volume 33 issue 1 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2023.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2023.12","url":null,"abstract":"An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135954008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
{"title":"RAC volume 33 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2023.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2023.11","url":null,"abstract":"An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135953392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT This article presents a new account of the Catholic Summer School of America (CSSA), founded in 1892 as the “Catholic Chautauqua.” Long relegated to the footnotes of book history and Catholic studies, the Summer School and its reading circle antecedents are here reclaimed for the study of women and American religion. As a Catholic institution, the Summer School was directed by clergy and laymen; men's names fill the published histories of the site as a religious and educational retreat. I argue, however, that it was Summer School women who nurtured a complementary vision of middle-class respectability and intimate association among a white Catholic elite that promoted theirs as the aspirational and ascendant U.S. Catholic “style” at the turn of the new century. Loosened from their parish boundaries, these summer Catholics traveled north to New York's Adirondack region and converged on the lakefront, lecture hall, and ballroom, extending their social networks, and creating an exclusive space of belonging that distinguished themselves from the diverse “immigrant church” at home. With close readings of the traces that Summer School visitors left behind in visual and textual sources—including photographs, postcards, local newspaper reports, and previously overlooked fiction and nonfiction by Catholic women writers—I draw attention to the Summer School during its first decades as a critical site for studying an upwardly mobile white Catholic leisure class concerned with its social and cultural reproduction.
{"title":"“Catholicism Is Getting to Be the Style”: White Women and the Making of Catholic Culture at the Catholic Summer School of America, 1892–1914","authors":"Monica L. Mercado","doi":"10.1017/rac.2022.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2022.8","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article presents a new account of the Catholic Summer School of America (CSSA), founded in 1892 as the “Catholic Chautauqua.” Long relegated to the footnotes of book history and Catholic studies, the Summer School and its reading circle antecedents are here reclaimed for the study of women and American religion. As a Catholic institution, the Summer School was directed by clergy and laymen; men's names fill the published histories of the site as a religious and educational retreat. I argue, however, that it was Summer School women who nurtured a complementary vision of middle-class respectability and intimate association among a white Catholic elite that promoted theirs as the aspirational and ascendant U.S. Catholic “style” at the turn of the new century. Loosened from their parish boundaries, these summer Catholics traveled north to New York's Adirondack region and converged on the lakefront, lecture hall, and ballroom, extending their social networks, and creating an exclusive space of belonging that distinguished themselves from the diverse “immigrant church” at home. With close readings of the traces that Summer School visitors left behind in visual and textual sources—including photographs, postcards, local newspaper reports, and previously overlooked fiction and nonfiction by Catholic women writers—I draw attention to the Summer School during its first decades as a critical site for studying an upwardly mobile white Catholic leisure class concerned with its social and cultural reproduction.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46582052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT From its founding in 1987, the Alliance of Baptists’ stance on women in ministry served as the nexus point from which the small denominational body departed from its denominational forebears in the Southern Baptist Convention. As the Alliance adopted more and more progressive theological and social ideas, Southern Baptists adopted more and more conservative counterpoints, at times in response to each other. In 2021, the divergence of these two bodies came to the fore. As members of the Alliance of Baptists adopted a new covenant statement committing the denomination to “act to dismantle systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and abusive power,” the Southern Baptists had walked away from working through their pro-slavery past and were agitating against critical race theory. Theological moves that began in a debate over women's ordination morphed into larger shifts that redefined what it meant to be a Baptist in the modern United States. How both denominational bodies came to embrace different systems of authority and governance in the late 1980s set both groups on divergent paths, leading to strikingly antithetical positions not only on issues of gender but also on issues surrounding race. The contrast further affirms that questions of gender and religious authority and questions of racism and white supremacy within denominational contexts are not isolated, separate questions but rather are deeply intertwined and related to one another. Overall, this SBC–Alliance history demonstrates how denominational bodies actively consider proximate organizations as they develop their own policies, processes, and public proclamations.
{"title":"“From Ordaining Women to Combating White Supremacy: Oppositional Shifts in Social Attitudes between the Southern Baptist Convention and the Alliance of Baptists”","authors":"A. Gardner, Gerardo Martí","doi":"10.1017/rac.2022.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2022.7","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT From its founding in 1987, the Alliance of Baptists’ stance on women in ministry served as the nexus point from which the small denominational body departed from its denominational forebears in the Southern Baptist Convention. As the Alliance adopted more and more progressive theological and social ideas, Southern Baptists adopted more and more conservative counterpoints, at times in response to each other. In 2021, the divergence of these two bodies came to the fore. As members of the Alliance of Baptists adopted a new covenant statement committing the denomination to “act to dismantle systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and abusive power,” the Southern Baptists had walked away from working through their pro-slavery past and were agitating against critical race theory. Theological moves that began in a debate over women's ordination morphed into larger shifts that redefined what it meant to be a Baptist in the modern United States. How both denominational bodies came to embrace different systems of authority and governance in the late 1980s set both groups on divergent paths, leading to strikingly antithetical positions not only on issues of gender but also on issues surrounding race. The contrast further affirms that questions of gender and religious authority and questions of racism and white supremacy within denominational contexts are not isolated, separate questions but rather are deeply intertwined and related to one another. Overall, this SBC–Alliance history demonstrates how denominational bodies actively consider proximate organizations as they develop their own policies, processes, and public proclamations.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47179505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT This essay explores the human stakes of theorizing religion in the early nineteenth century, on the borderlands of an expanding U.S. empire. It does so through the lens of a single text, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie) during Thirty Years Residence among the Indians. Published in 1830, the Narrative offers an entrée into the circulation of knowledge and debates about religion among Native Americans and white settlers in a time and place from which we have little record of such debates. Tanner joined in the Midewiwin of the Ojibwe and cultivated the Anishinaabe practice of medicine hunting; held back his own skepticism, perhaps retrospectively exaggerated, at the messages of those he called “Indian prophets”; and discussed the differences, solidified in the telling, between white and Indigenous religions. His editor, Edwin James, meanwhile, drew on comparative scholarship about mythology and religion around the world to defend his own preferred theories about the religious and racial character of Indigenous peoples. Religion has long been theorized far beyond the academy and the centers of empire. Relatively unfamiliar accounts, like Tanner's, reveal how everyday people have engaged with these theories and the consequences of these theories on the ground. Tanner's Narrative, in short, usefully illuminates the webs of knowledge about religion in early America and its human stakes for people caught in the crosshairs of a transforming imperial world.
{"title":"John Tanner, Colonial Credulity, and Comparative Religions: Theorizing Religion on the Borderlands of U.S. Empire","authors":"T. Wenger","doi":"10.1017/rac.2022.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2022.4","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay explores the human stakes of theorizing religion in the early nineteenth century, on the borderlands of an expanding U.S. empire. It does so through the lens of a single text, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie) during Thirty Years Residence among the Indians. Published in 1830, the Narrative offers an entrée into the circulation of knowledge and debates about religion among Native Americans and white settlers in a time and place from which we have little record of such debates. Tanner joined in the Midewiwin of the Ojibwe and cultivated the Anishinaabe practice of medicine hunting; held back his own skepticism, perhaps retrospectively exaggerated, at the messages of those he called “Indian prophets”; and discussed the differences, solidified in the telling, between white and Indigenous religions. His editor, Edwin James, meanwhile, drew on comparative scholarship about mythology and religion around the world to defend his own preferred theories about the religious and racial character of Indigenous peoples. Religion has long been theorized far beyond the academy and the centers of empire. Relatively unfamiliar accounts, like Tanner's, reveal how everyday people have engaged with these theories and the consequences of these theories on the ground. Tanner's Narrative, in short, usefully illuminates the webs of knowledge about religion in early America and its human stakes for people caught in the crosshairs of a transforming imperial world.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46277854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT Mordecai Kaplan's Judaism as a Civilization (1934) is most often read as Kaplan's effort at a rapprochement between Judaism and America. In contrast to conventional readings of that work, this article highlights Kaplan's suspicion of America, and liberal modernity more generally, by engaging with his analysis of the categories of religion and race. Kaplan, I argue, is haunted by the prospect that in adopting either of these categories, American Judaism will surrender its particularity and collectivity to the liberal, ultimately Christian, state. Indeed, in his own context, Kaplan considered Reform Judaism to be proof of the perils of Jewish accommodation of either category. The article attends to Kaplan's analysis of religion and race as an unlikely resource for thinking through a number of contemporary issues with respect to religion, race, and Jewishness in American life. I argue that Kaplan's anxieties about Christianity and modern liberalism demonstrate a striking prescience about the denaturing of American Judaism in its being annexed to whiteness. The article puts Kaplan into conversation with James Baldwin, who clearly saw Jewish whiteness as yet another casualty of conquest by that “old, rugged Roman cross.” Finally, Kaplan's comments in Civilization about anti-Black racism are few. Read together with his diary, however, they evince sensitivity to the religious constraints put on Black life in America. This article thus concludes by putting Kaplan in conversation with Sylvester Johnson's work on “Black ethnics” and Judith Weisenfeld's research on “religio-racial movements.” This engagement suggests that Kaplan's analysis is not specific to Judaism only, but is more broadly related to the issue of how the modern logics of religion and race continue to discipline expressions of otherness that do not abide by the boundaries of these categories. Kaplan thus contributes an important Jewish vantage on the continued over-determination of American religious life by white Christianity.
{"title":"American Judaism between Religion and Race: Reflections on Mordecai Kaplan and Jewish Whiteness","authors":"Judah Isseroff","doi":"10.1017/rac.2022.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2022.1","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Mordecai Kaplan's Judaism as a Civilization (1934) is most often read as Kaplan's effort at a rapprochement between Judaism and America. In contrast to conventional readings of that work, this article highlights Kaplan's suspicion of America, and liberal modernity more generally, by engaging with his analysis of the categories of religion and race. Kaplan, I argue, is haunted by the prospect that in adopting either of these categories, American Judaism will surrender its particularity and collectivity to the liberal, ultimately Christian, state. Indeed, in his own context, Kaplan considered Reform Judaism to be proof of the perils of Jewish accommodation of either category. The article attends to Kaplan's analysis of religion and race as an unlikely resource for thinking through a number of contemporary issues with respect to religion, race, and Jewishness in American life. I argue that Kaplan's anxieties about Christianity and modern liberalism demonstrate a striking prescience about the denaturing of American Judaism in its being annexed to whiteness. The article puts Kaplan into conversation with James Baldwin, who clearly saw Jewish whiteness as yet another casualty of conquest by that “old, rugged Roman cross.” Finally, Kaplan's comments in Civilization about anti-Black racism are few. Read together with his diary, however, they evince sensitivity to the religious constraints put on Black life in America. This article thus concludes by putting Kaplan in conversation with Sylvester Johnson's work on “Black ethnics” and Judith Weisenfeld's research on “religio-racial movements.” This engagement suggests that Kaplan's analysis is not specific to Judaism only, but is more broadly related to the issue of how the modern logics of religion and race continue to discipline expressions of otherness that do not abide by the boundaries of these categories. Kaplan thus contributes an important Jewish vantage on the continued over-determination of American religious life by white Christianity.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57087339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT The consecration of Samuel Seabury as bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Connecticut in November 1784 is typically taken to mark the threshold that divides the magisterial pretensions of the old-world confessional state from the pluralism of the new-world denominational order. In such accounts, a chastened Anglicanism reluctantly sacrificed its royalism and claims to establishment in acquiescence to the pluralistic religious ecology of the republican United States. The Church of England, in this telling, possessed no native conception of the separation of church and state. The Americanization of Anglicanism, therefore, entailed the acceptance of ecclesiological premises foreign and inimical to its tradition—stemming largely from the intellectual world of the enlightenment and Protestant nonconformity. Such a narrative of denominational beginnings, this article demonstrates, fails to grapple seriously with the strain of antiestablishmentarian thought within Anglicanism itself. The separation of church and state necessarily implicated in Seabury's securing of “a free, valid and purely Ecclesiastical Episcopacy” was neither an alien imposition nor a mere epiphenomenon of American religious liberty. The catholic tendency in Anglicanism had long developed its own conception of ecclesiastical independence, which rejected both state superintendence as well as religious voluntarism. The consecration of Samuel Seabury, this article argues, was secured and defended in an Atlantic milieu characterized by this dual-sided antipathy. By setting the events and controversies surrounding the Seabury consecration back into this broader Atlantic milieu, we will glean a clearer sense of the imperative of ecclesial separateness and distinctiveness that characterized American Episcopalianism in the early republic. American Episcopalianism in the nineteenth century, particularly that of the high church tendency, was remarkably free of the establishmentarian and political impulses of other denominations because it was founded in explicit rejection of them.
{"title":"“The Manifest Distinction Established by Our Holy Religion”: Church, State and the Consecration of Samuel Seabury","authors":"Brent S. Sirota","doi":"10.1017/rac.2022.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2022.3","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The consecration of Samuel Seabury as bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Connecticut in November 1784 is typically taken to mark the threshold that divides the magisterial pretensions of the old-world confessional state from the pluralism of the new-world denominational order. In such accounts, a chastened Anglicanism reluctantly sacrificed its royalism and claims to establishment in acquiescence to the pluralistic religious ecology of the republican United States. The Church of England, in this telling, possessed no native conception of the separation of church and state. The Americanization of Anglicanism, therefore, entailed the acceptance of ecclesiological premises foreign and inimical to its tradition—stemming largely from the intellectual world of the enlightenment and Protestant nonconformity. Such a narrative of denominational beginnings, this article demonstrates, fails to grapple seriously with the strain of antiestablishmentarian thought within Anglicanism itself. The separation of church and state necessarily implicated in Seabury's securing of “a free, valid and purely Ecclesiastical Episcopacy” was neither an alien imposition nor a mere epiphenomenon of American religious liberty. The catholic tendency in Anglicanism had long developed its own conception of ecclesiastical independence, which rejected both state superintendence as well as religious voluntarism. The consecration of Samuel Seabury, this article argues, was secured and defended in an Atlantic milieu characterized by this dual-sided antipathy. By setting the events and controversies surrounding the Seabury consecration back into this broader Atlantic milieu, we will glean a clearer sense of the imperative of ecclesial separateness and distinctiveness that characterized American Episcopalianism in the early republic. American Episcopalianism in the nineteenth century, particularly that of the high church tendency, was remarkably free of the establishmentarian and political impulses of other denominations because it was founded in explicit rejection of them.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42828312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT As an amorphous, nonhierarchical collection of associations, evangelicalism has always lacked a clear source of authority. Since Christianity Today's beginning in 1956, it has aspired to serve as the mouthpiece of authoritative evangelical views, presenting itself as the voice of moderation while espousing conservative views with a combative, culture-war stance. With the emergence of the gay rights movement, evangelicals launched a culture war against “homosexuals” as the implicitly secular, liberal Other and then were forced to wrestle with how to apply this stance toward their gay Christian brothers and sisters. Evangelicals' self-conception led to a contradictory stance that they managed to maintain with little variation for decades. Committed to biblical inerrancy, they were definitive in condemning gay sexual behavior, but as self-identified postfundamentalists, they also desired to be compassionate toward gay people. They encouraged gay Christians to change their sexual orientation and simultaneously admitted that such change was impossible for most. Though evangelicals were slow to welcome the ex-gay movement, they eventually embraced it fully as the only plausible escape from their contradictory ideology. The collapse of the movement thus came as a major blow. Many evangelicals began to question the premise that sexual orientation was a chosen, changeable identity and began to rethink the theology of inerrancy that undergirded evangelical hermeneutics. Since 2010, a number of evangelical leaders have challenged CT's claim to represent the evangelical consensus on the issue. In the coming years, the progressive views of younger evangelicals will undoubtedly increase acceptance of same-sex relationships.
{"title":"“A Definitive but Unsatisfying Answer”: The Evangelical Response to Gay Christians","authors":"David J. Neumann","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.21","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As an amorphous, nonhierarchical collection of associations, evangelicalism has always lacked a clear source of authority. Since Christianity Today's beginning in 1956, it has aspired to serve as the mouthpiece of authoritative evangelical views, presenting itself as the voice of moderation while espousing conservative views with a combative, culture-war stance. With the emergence of the gay rights movement, evangelicals launched a culture war against “homosexuals” as the implicitly secular, liberal Other and then were forced to wrestle with how to apply this stance toward their gay Christian brothers and sisters. Evangelicals' self-conception led to a contradictory stance that they managed to maintain with little variation for decades. Committed to biblical inerrancy, they were definitive in condemning gay sexual behavior, but as self-identified postfundamentalists, they also desired to be compassionate toward gay people. They encouraged gay Christians to change their sexual orientation and simultaneously admitted that such change was impossible for most. Though evangelicals were slow to welcome the ex-gay movement, they eventually embraced it fully as the only plausible escape from their contradictory ideology. The collapse of the movement thus came as a major blow. Many evangelicals began to question the premise that sexual orientation was a chosen, changeable identity and began to rethink the theology of inerrancy that undergirded evangelical hermeneutics. Since 2010, a number of evangelical leaders have challenged CT's claim to represent the evangelical consensus on the issue. In the coming years, the progressive views of younger evangelicals will undoubtedly increase acceptance of same-sex relationships.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43940035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"RAC volume 32 issue 3 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2023.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2023.4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57087558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT In the early nineteenth century, the “cosmological revolution” reached Americans with no special education or astronomical expertise. New ideas about the scale and nature of the cosmos, some of which had been gestating among elites for centuries, forced ordinary people to reevaluate traditional associations between higher places, higher beings, and higher meaning. As the old “heavens” became more like the modern “space”—larger, emptier, less morally alive—God and his kingdom became more abstract. This trend often mattered to people in ways that esoteric doctrine did not. It divided Americans. A placeless God and “state of being” afterlife found readier acceptance among educated people accustomed to thinking in abstract, immaterial terms and pursuing abstract, immaterial goods. Among nonintellectuals, the new heavens caused unsettling debates between people, and within them, about the locality and reality of higher things. Well before better-remembered disputes over Darwinism and geology, these cosmological debates opened foundational divisions in popular ideas, as some laypeople reluctantly accommodated the new heavens while others turned to defiant cosmic conservatism. On balance, Americans moved toward reformed conceptions of God and heaven, rebuilding divinity in the image of the new cosmos.
{"title":"Sky God: Remaking the Heavens and Divinity in the Nineteenth-Century United States","authors":"Trent MacNamara","doi":"10.1017/rac.2022.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2022.2","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the early nineteenth century, the “cosmological revolution” reached Americans with no special education or astronomical expertise. New ideas about the scale and nature of the cosmos, some of which had been gestating among elites for centuries, forced ordinary people to reevaluate traditional associations between higher places, higher beings, and higher meaning. As the old “heavens” became more like the modern “space”—larger, emptier, less morally alive—God and his kingdom became more abstract. This trend often mattered to people in ways that esoteric doctrine did not. It divided Americans. A placeless God and “state of being” afterlife found readier acceptance among educated people accustomed to thinking in abstract, immaterial terms and pursuing abstract, immaterial goods. Among nonintellectuals, the new heavens caused unsettling debates between people, and within them, about the locality and reality of higher things. Well before better-remembered disputes over Darwinism and geology, these cosmological debates opened foundational divisions in popular ideas, as some laypeople reluctantly accommodated the new heavens while others turned to defiant cosmic conservatism. On balance, Americans moved toward reformed conceptions of God and heaven, rebuilding divinity in the image of the new cosmos.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57087113","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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