{"title":"RAC volume 30 issue 3 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":"1 1","pages":"f1 - f4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2021.1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086835","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 30 issue 1 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2020.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2020.6","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":"30 1","pages":"b1 - b1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2020.6","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57085966","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}
Kathleen Holscher, Jonathan H. Ebel, J. Riess, Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds, Angie Heo, Ari Y. Kelman
{"title":"Forum: The Religious Situation, 1968 (Part 1)","authors":"Kathleen Holscher, Jonathan H. Ebel, J. Riess, Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds, Angie Heo, Ari Y. Kelman","doi":"10.1017/rac.2019.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2019.1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":"29 1","pages":"1 - 35"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2019.1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44385696","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 29 issue 2 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2019.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2019.7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":"8 1","pages":"b1 - b1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2019.7","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57085493","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 highlights the U.S. Armed Forces’ appointment of the YMCA to train American soldiers in boxing during World War I and so contributes to scholarly research on religion and war as well as religion and sports. As the YMCA taught the fistic art to white regiments in stateside military camps and to the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, I argue that World War I was a watershed moment for both Muscular Christianity and boxing. Religious, political, and military leaders announced boxing to be ideal for the close-proximity encounters in the trenches, and they championed the YMCA as being best equipped to turn newly enlisted recruits into hardened trench-pugs. To the YMCA-military, the practical benefits of boxing were that soldiers would not just be “good with their hands” but also have a good manly character, a “fighting spirit.” In the establishment of a new world order, boxing thereby became a bellicose technique for unmaking evil others and a Christian method for remaking “overcivilized” white men. Immediately after the war—because of the Y—the sport of boxing, previously believed unscrupulous, was redeemed. Protestant Christians and a larger public recast boxing as less an activity for the morally corrupt and the criminal underworld and more an enlightened pursuit in the realization of an authentic, God-given human nature. Legalized, mainstreamed, and backed by antimodern logic, Christian theology, and white fears of racial devolution, boxing was for “character” more than crime.
{"title":"“Fighting Spirit”: World War I and the YMCA's Allied Boxing Program","authors":"Adam Park","doi":"10.1017/rac.2019.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2019.10","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article highlights the U.S. Armed Forces’ appointment of the YMCA to train American soldiers in boxing during World War I and so contributes to scholarly research on religion and war as well as religion and sports. As the YMCA taught the fistic art to white regiments in stateside military camps and to the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, I argue that World War I was a watershed moment for both Muscular Christianity and boxing. Religious, political, and military leaders announced boxing to be ideal for the close-proximity encounters in the trenches, and they championed the YMCA as being best equipped to turn newly enlisted recruits into hardened trench-pugs. To the YMCA-military, the practical benefits of boxing were that soldiers would not just be “good with their hands” but also have a good manly character, a “fighting spirit.” In the establishment of a new world order, boxing thereby became a bellicose technique for unmaking evil others and a Christian method for remaking “overcivilized” white men. Immediately after the war—because of the Y—the sport of boxing, previously believed unscrupulous, was redeemed. Protestant Christians and a larger public recast boxing as less an activity for the morally corrupt and the criminal underworld and more an enlightened pursuit in the realization of an authentic, God-given human nature. Legalized, mainstreamed, and backed by antimodern logic, Christian theology, and white fears of racial devolution, boxing was for “character” more than crime.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":"29 1","pages":"391 - 430"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2019.10","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57085717","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 Founded in 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada (MSA) expanded to 116 local chapters by 1968, with members representing more than forty countries. During the Cold War, the MSA embraced the project of daʿwa, or renewing and correcting other Muslims’ devotional practice, and improving the public image of Islam. Extant scholarship on the MSA portrays the organization as ambivalent, if not antagonistic, toward U.S. society during the Cold War because it was deeply enmeshed in the political and religious ideologies associated with the global Islamic Revival. This article offers a different view by examining female-authored writings published under the auspices of the MSA Women's Committee between 1963 and 1980. Aspirational in scope and pedagogical in approach, MSA women's literature shifts conceptions of the MSA's political and religious priorities during this period, from one of detachment to one of selective engagement with American culture. This article makes three main interventions. First, it demonstrates that a focus on the publications of MSA female members yields a more robust understanding of how this important group of American Muslims envisioned daʿwa as a local and global project of religious revival during the Cold War. Second, it shows that, to achieve their revivalist aims, female MSA members identified points of affinity with certain religious non-Muslim Americans, namely, upwardly mobile Christians and Jews. For these authors, the ground on which they found affinity with families of other faiths was not theology or Abrahamic lineage but, rather, a shared gendered and classed vision of raising devout children to meet the unique threats posed by modernity. Finally, this article examines how female MSA authors conceived of the patriarchally organized yet maternally driven nuclear family as essential for reinvigorating Muslim practice.
{"title":"Daʿwa in the Neighborhood: Female-Authored Muslim Students Association Publications, 1963–1980","authors":"J. Howe","doi":"10.1017/rac.2019.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2019.11","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Founded in 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada (MSA) expanded to 116 local chapters by 1968, with members representing more than forty countries. During the Cold War, the MSA embraced the project of daʿwa, or renewing and correcting other Muslims’ devotional practice, and improving the public image of Islam. Extant scholarship on the MSA portrays the organization as ambivalent, if not antagonistic, toward U.S. society during the Cold War because it was deeply enmeshed in the political and religious ideologies associated with the global Islamic Revival. This article offers a different view by examining female-authored writings published under the auspices of the MSA Women's Committee between 1963 and 1980. Aspirational in scope and pedagogical in approach, MSA women's literature shifts conceptions of the MSA's political and religious priorities during this period, from one of detachment to one of selective engagement with American culture. This article makes three main interventions. First, it demonstrates that a focus on the publications of MSA female members yields a more robust understanding of how this important group of American Muslims envisioned daʿwa as a local and global project of religious revival during the Cold War. Second, it shows that, to achieve their revivalist aims, female MSA members identified points of affinity with certain religious non-Muslim Americans, namely, upwardly mobile Christians and Jews. For these authors, the ground on which they found affinity with families of other faiths was not theology or Abrahamic lineage but, rather, a shared gendered and classed vision of raising devout children to meet the unique threats posed by modernity. Finally, this article examines how female MSA authors conceived of the patriarchally organized yet maternally driven nuclear family as essential for reinvigorating Muslim practice.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":"29 1","pages":"291 - 325"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2019.11","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57085740","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 29 issue 3 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2019.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2019.12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":"29 1","pages":"f1 - f4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2019.12","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57085894","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 29 issue 1 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2018.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2018.5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":"29 1","pages":"f1 - f4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2018.5","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57085549","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 wake of the Civil War, Father Isaac Hecker launched several publishing ventures to advance his dream of a Catholic America, but he and his partners soon found themselves embroiled in a debate with other American Catholics, notably his friend and fellow convert Orestes Brownson, over the “use and abuse of reading.” Although the debate was certainly part of a contemporary conversation about the compatibility of Catholicism and American culture, this essay argues that it was equally rooted in a moment of American anxiety over a shifting social order, a moment when antebellum faith in the individual was being tested by the rights claims of women and Americans of color. Tacitly accepting and internalizing historical claims of intrinsic and through-going Catholic “difference,” claims offered both by American Protestants and American Catholics like Brownson, scholars often presume that debates within American Catholicism reflect “Catholic” concerns first and foremost, qualifying their utility as sources of “American” cultural history. By examining American Catholic discussions of reading, individual liberty, social order, and gender in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay argues that Brownson's arguments against the compatibility of American and Catholic life were in fact far more representative of ascendant ideas in American culture than Hecker's hopeful visions of a Catholic American future made manifest through the power of reading. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways that American Catholicism can be a valuable and complex site for studying the broader history of religion and culture in the United States.
{"title":"American Catholics and “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” 1865–1873","authors":"Erin Bartram","doi":"10.1017/rac.2018.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2018.3","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the wake of the Civil War, Father Isaac Hecker launched several publishing ventures to advance his dream of a Catholic America, but he and his partners soon found themselves embroiled in a debate with other American Catholics, notably his friend and fellow convert Orestes Brownson, over the “use and abuse of reading.” Although the debate was certainly part of a contemporary conversation about the compatibility of Catholicism and American culture, this essay argues that it was equally rooted in a moment of American anxiety over a shifting social order, a moment when antebellum faith in the individual was being tested by the rights claims of women and Americans of color. Tacitly accepting and internalizing historical claims of intrinsic and through-going Catholic “difference,” claims offered both by American Protestants and American Catholics like Brownson, scholars often presume that debates within American Catholicism reflect “Catholic” concerns first and foremost, qualifying their utility as sources of “American” cultural history. By examining American Catholic discussions of reading, individual liberty, social order, and gender in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay argues that Brownson's arguments against the compatibility of American and Catholic life were in fact far more representative of ascendant ideas in American culture than Hecker's hopeful visions of a Catholic American future made manifest through the power of reading. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways that American Catholicism can be a valuable and complex site for studying the broader history of religion and culture in the United States.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":"29 1","pages":"36 - 64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2018.3","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57085390","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 traces negotiations over the epistemic, ethical, and political authority of Judaism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and science in mid-twentieth-century America. Specifically, it examines how the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Dr. Louis Finkelstein, led a diverse group of intellectual elites as they planned and convened the 1940 Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life (CSPR). Based on the conference's transcripts, proceedings, and papers, in addition to Finkelstein's writings from the period, this article shows how Finkelstein used his vision of the Jewish tradition as a model to form a pluralistic intellectual space that brought together the representatives of multiple religious traditions and modern science. To accredit the American way of life to Judaism, Finkelstein traced America's ethical values, democratic politics, and scientific genius back to the Hebrew Prophets through Rabbinic Judaism. In response to Finkelstein's historiography and the political and ideological challenges of World War II, scientific and religious experts negotiated their authority and debated how to mobilize their traditions in a quest for political stability. By analyzing the CSPR as a meeting of multiple discourses, this article reinstates science as a fundamental player in the story of American pluralism and demonstrates the way a non-Protestant tradition shaped the terms of an elite public's understanding of the “democratic way of life.”
{"title":"A Prophetic Guide for a Perplexed World: Louis Finkelstein and the 1940 Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion","authors":"Cara Rock-Singer","doi":"10.1017/rac.2019.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2019.2","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article traces negotiations over the epistemic, ethical, and political authority of Judaism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and science in mid-twentieth-century America. Specifically, it examines how the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Dr. Louis Finkelstein, led a diverse group of intellectual elites as they planned and convened the 1940 Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life (CSPR). Based on the conference's transcripts, proceedings, and papers, in addition to Finkelstein's writings from the period, this article shows how Finkelstein used his vision of the Jewish tradition as a model to form a pluralistic intellectual space that brought together the representatives of multiple religious traditions and modern science. To accredit the American way of life to Judaism, Finkelstein traced America's ethical values, democratic politics, and scientific genius back to the Hebrew Prophets through Rabbinic Judaism. In response to Finkelstein's historiography and the political and ideological challenges of World War II, scientific and religious experts negotiated their authority and debated how to mobilize their traditions in a quest for political stability. By analyzing the CSPR as a meeting of multiple discourses, this article reinstates science as a fundamental player in the story of American pluralism and demonstrates the way a non-Protestant tradition shaped the terms of an elite public's understanding of the “democratic way of life.”","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":"29 1","pages":"179 - 215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2019.2","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57085441","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}