{"title":"RAC volume 31 issue 1 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2021.8","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57087271","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 interpretation of the famous folktale about enslaved Africans flying home, including the legend that only those who refrained from eating salt could fly back to Africa. It rejects claims that the tale is rooted in Igbo culture and relates to suicide as a desperate attempt to escape from slavery. Rather, an analysis of historical documents in combination with ethnographic and linguistic research makes it possible to trace the tale back to West-Central Africa. It relates objections to eating salt to the Kikongo expression curia mungua (to eat salt), meaning baptism, and claims that the tale originated in the context of discussions among the enslaved about the consequences of a Christian baptism for one's spiritual afterlife.
{"title":"Flying Back to Africa or Flying to Heaven? Competing Visions of Afterlife in the Lowcountry and Caribbean Slave Societies","authors":"J. Dewulf","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.12","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article presents a new interpretation of the famous folktale about enslaved Africans flying home, including the legend that only those who refrained from eating salt could fly back to Africa. It rejects claims that the tale is rooted in Igbo culture and relates to suicide as a desperate attempt to escape from slavery. Rather, an analysis of historical documents in combination with ethnographic and linguistic research makes it possible to trace the tale back to West-Central Africa. It relates objections to eating salt to the Kikongo expression curia mungua (to eat salt), meaning baptism, and claims that the tale originated in the context of discussions among the enslaved about the consequences of a Christian baptism for one's spiritual afterlife.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086457","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 Reconstruction period, Black religion and politics intersected and fostered ideas about black interdependent independence in predominantly white churches. We see this form of black religious politics exemplified in the experiences and ideas of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal priest who was educated at the Branch Theological School (BTS) in Petersburg, Virginia. It was upon the foundation of Bragg's experiences at the BTS, established as a racially segregated alternative to the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary (in Alexandria, Virginia), and in the Readjuster Movement (a biracial political coalition that controlled Virginia's legislature from 1879–1885), that he wrote histories of Black people in the Episcopal Church, histories that extolled black leadership, the need for (white) economic support for but also autonomous action of black churches and black leaders, and the efficacy of the Episcopal Church as a political training ground for black church members. Bragg's case both demonstrates how broadening the definitions of black religion reconfigures studies of religion, reconstruction, and Blackness, and expands our notions of Black political critique as deriving from more than the familiar binaries of protest and accommodation.
{"title":"The Politics of Interdependent Independence in Black Religion: The Case of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal Priest","authors":"N. Turner","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.18","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the Reconstruction period, Black religion and politics intersected and fostered ideas about black interdependent independence in predominantly white churches. We see this form of black religious politics exemplified in the experiences and ideas of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal priest who was educated at the Branch Theological School (BTS) in Petersburg, Virginia. It was upon the foundation of Bragg's experiences at the BTS, established as a racially segregated alternative to the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary (in Alexandria, Virginia), and in the Readjuster Movement (a biracial political coalition that controlled Virginia's legislature from 1879–1885), that he wrote histories of Black people in the Episcopal Church, histories that extolled black leadership, the need for (white) economic support for but also autonomous action of black churches and black leaders, and the efficacy of the Episcopal Church as a political training ground for black church members. Bragg's case both demonstrates how broadening the definitions of black religion reconfigures studies of religion, reconstruction, and Blackness, and expands our notions of Black political critique as deriving from more than the familiar binaries of protest and accommodation.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086537","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 examines the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s as an indication of the decade's changing attitudes toward Jews, antisemitism, and religious pluralism, and so contributes to scholarly research on both social protest literature and mid-twentieth-century American religious culture. Recent scholarship has shown that American Jews responded to the Holocaust earlier than had previously been assumed. The anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s were one of the popular culture arenas in which this response to the horrors of Nazi Germany occurred, as fiction proved an ideal genre for imagining and presenting possible solutions to the problem of antisemitism. These solutions often involved a change from a racial to a religious conception of Jews. Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) was the most culturally significant of this 1940s genre of anti-antisemitism novels (a subgenre of social protest literature), in part because of its foregrounding of non-Jewish responses to antisemitism. Archival research into the roots of Hobson's novel reveals that news of other female authors writing popular anti-antisemitism fiction encouraged Hobson, allowing Hobson to feel part of a movement of anti-antisemitism writers that would eventually extend to her readers, as demonstrated by readers’ letters. Although Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) is frequently cited as the midcentury book that heralded a postwar shift toward religious pluralism, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s reveal signs of this shift a decade earlier.
摘要:本文考察了20世纪40年代的反反犹主义小说，认为这十年来人们对犹太人、反犹主义和宗教多元主义态度的变化，从而有助于社会抗议文学和20世纪中期美国宗教文化的学术研究。最近的学术研究表明，美国犹太人对大屠杀的反应比之前假设的要早。20世纪40年代的反反犹主义小说是大众文化的舞台之一，其中发生了对纳粹德国恐怖的反应，因为小说被证明是想象和提出反犹主义问题可能解决方案的理想类型。这些解决方案往往涉及到从种族到宗教对犹太人观念的转变。劳拉·z·霍布森(Laura Z. Hobson)的《绅士协定》(Gentleman's Agreement, 1947)是20世纪40年代反反犹主义小说(社会抗议文学的一个分支)中最具文化意义的一部，部分原因是它突出了非犹太人对反犹主义的反应。对霍布森小说根源的档案研究表明，其他女性作家写流行的反犹太主义小说的消息鼓舞了霍布森，让霍布森觉得自己是反犹太主义作家运动的一部分，这最终会扩展到她的读者身上，正如读者的来信所证明的那样。虽然威尔·赫伯格的《新教、天主教、犹太人》(1955)经常被认为是本世纪中叶的著作，预示着战后宗教多元化的转变，但20世纪40年代的反反犹主义小说在十年前就揭示了这种转变的迹象。
{"title":"The 1940s as the Decade of the Anti-Antisemitism Novel","authors":"R. Gordan","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.6","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s as an indication of the decade's changing attitudes toward Jews, antisemitism, and religious pluralism, and so contributes to scholarly research on both social protest literature and mid-twentieth-century American religious culture. Recent scholarship has shown that American Jews responded to the Holocaust earlier than had previously been assumed. The anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s were one of the popular culture arenas in which this response to the horrors of Nazi Germany occurred, as fiction proved an ideal genre for imagining and presenting possible solutions to the problem of antisemitism. These solutions often involved a change from a racial to a religious conception of Jews. Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947) was the most culturally significant of this 1940s genre of anti-antisemitism novels (a subgenre of social protest literature), in part because of its foregrounding of non-Jewish responses to antisemitism. Archival research into the roots of Hobson's novel reveals that news of other female authors writing popular anti-antisemitism fiction encouraged Hobson, allowing Hobson to feel part of a movement of anti-antisemitism writers that would eventually extend to her readers, as demonstrated by readers’ letters. Although Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) is frequently cited as the midcentury book that heralded a postwar shift toward religious pluralism, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s reveal signs of this shift a decade earlier.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2021.6","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57087090","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 31 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.14","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086497","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 Like much of the American West, a history of material conquest and natural resource extraction has precluded sustained study of Montana's religious past. This article uses the case of gold miners in the southwestern corner of the Territory of Montana from 1862 to 1889 to argue for the value of place-based studies of American religious experience. Rather than serving as a restrictive lens, place-based studies reveal religion in process. In Montana gold mining communities, religion was produced and reproduced through the labors of daily life, intricately tied to the limits and possibilities of place, never static or complete. Protestant missionaries adopted alternative tools of evangelism to fit the particularities of place. Those who succeeded found that the “get-saved-quick” approach of revivals appealed to the “get-rich-quick” lifestyle of mining communities. Dominated by male miners, defined by physical toil for uncertain reward, and subject to national economic trends, gold rush communities reveal how religion shifts and transforms in relation to labor, gender relations, and the natural world. Situated at the nexus of mineral extraction and missionary adaptation and appropriation, this article reflects on the ways in which religion in the United States develops across borders and through practical engagement with regional landscapes.
{"title":"Gospel of Gold: Unearthing Religious Spaces in the Nineteenth-Century American West","authors":"Brennan Keegan","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.3","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Like much of the American West, a history of material conquest and natural resource extraction has precluded sustained study of Montana's religious past. This article uses the case of gold miners in the southwestern corner of the Territory of Montana from 1862 to 1889 to argue for the value of place-based studies of American religious experience. Rather than serving as a restrictive lens, place-based studies reveal religion in process. In Montana gold mining communities, religion was produced and reproduced through the labors of daily life, intricately tied to the limits and possibilities of place, never static or complete. Protestant missionaries adopted alternative tools of evangelism to fit the particularities of place. Those who succeeded found that the “get-saved-quick” approach of revivals appealed to the “get-rich-quick” lifestyle of mining communities. Dominated by male miners, defined by physical toil for uncertain reward, and subject to national economic trends, gold rush communities reveal how religion shifts and transforms in relation to labor, gender relations, and the natural world. Situated at the nexus of mineral extraction and missionary adaptation and appropriation, this article reflects on the ways in which religion in the United States develops across borders and through practical engagement with regional landscapes.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2021.3","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086712","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 paper considers how print culture was mobilized in the early 1990s to transmit spiritual beliefs, experiences, and emotions through an examination of the pragmatics of reading endorsed by Jewish Lights Publishing (founded in 1990). Using interviews, advertisements, internal memos, books, jacket copy, and reviews, this study reconstructs the ecology out of which Jewish Lights Publishing emerged, as well as the goals and assumptions about Judaism, Jews, and books that animated the creation of a new, and specifically spiritual, Jewish press. I argue that what makes Jewish Lights a spiritual press is not only the content and design of the books, but also the instructions the press offers for how to use the books it produces. This paper is not only about the production and circulation of spiritual Jewish books, but the production and circulation of beliefs about what spiritual Jewish books do for an imagined community of readers.
{"title":"How to Read This Book: Jewish Lights Publishing and the Pragmatics of Spiritual Reading","authors":"Arielle Levites","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.4","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper considers how print culture was mobilized in the early 1990s to transmit spiritual beliefs, experiences, and emotions through an examination of the pragmatics of reading endorsed by Jewish Lights Publishing (founded in 1990). Using interviews, advertisements, internal memos, books, jacket copy, and reviews, this study reconstructs the ecology out of which Jewish Lights Publishing emerged, as well as the goals and assumptions about Judaism, Jews, and books that animated the creation of a new, and specifically spiritual, Jewish press. I argue that what makes Jewish Lights a spiritual press is not only the content and design of the books, but also the instructions the press offers for how to use the books it produces. This paper is not only about the production and circulation of spiritual Jewish books, but the production and circulation of beliefs about what spiritual Jewish books do for an imagined community of readers.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2021.4","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086868","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 31 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2021.7","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57087220","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 31 issue 3 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.20","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.20","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086631","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 Did Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, really find gold plates? This article considers that basic question from a new materialist perspective. Drawing on textual and material-bibliographical evidence, it argues that Smith, and possibly also a group of witnesses, may have had a formative physical encounter with a set of plates and that this encounter was partly responsible for provoking the events and interpretations that followed. These plates could have been either stereotype plates or copper plates, both commonly used for industrial printing in the nineteenth-century United States. This article also takes the empirical investigation into what Smith may have encountered as an occasion to reflect, methodologically and theoretically, on the role of ordinary material objects in processes of religious and historical change.
{"title":"How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism","authors":"Sonia Hazard","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.11","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Did Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, really find gold plates? This article considers that basic question from a new materialist perspective. Drawing on textual and material-bibliographical evidence, it argues that Smith, and possibly also a group of witnesses, may have had a formative physical encounter with a set of plates and that this encounter was partly responsible for provoking the events and interpretations that followed. These plates could have been either stereotype plates or copper plates, both commonly used for industrial printing in the nineteenth-century United States. This article also takes the empirical investigation into what Smith may have encountered as an occasion to reflect, methodologically and theoretically, on the role of ordinary material objects in processes of religious and historical change.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086448","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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