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Secularism In Antebellum America
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Book Synopsis Secularism in Antebellum America by : John Lardas Modern
Download or read book Secularism in Antebellum America written by John Lardas Modern and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghosts, railroads, Sing Sing, sex machines - these are just a few of the phenomena that appear in this pioneering account of religion and society in 19th-century America.
Book Synopsis Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America by : Richard Carwardine
Download or read book Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America written by Richard Carwardine and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A book of uncommon significance, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America compels us to rethink the causes for the Civil War and once again place the moral issue of slavery at the heart of the matter". -- Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Journal of Southern History "This superbly researched and expertly written book makes a signal contribution to American history as well as to the history of religion". -- Mark Noll, Christianity Today "Carwardine's book is a major contribution to our understanding of pre-Civil War politics.... Few, after reading this sophisticated account, will deny the important role evangelicals played in shaping mid-nineteenth-century American political culture".-Curtis D. Johnson, American Historical Review This book, first published in 1993 to great acclaim, examines the relationship between evangelical Protestant piety and political life in the critical twenty years before the Civil War. It is the first study to address directly the questions of how effectively evangelicals engaged in secular politics, how far they fashioned American political culture and party developments, and how instrumental they were in shaping the lines of sectional antagonism. Richard Carwardine explores the complex character of the evangelical movement and its impact during the antebellum era. He reveals how evangelicals, both North and South, re-inforced the drive toward two-party, adversarial politics by encouraging voting and responsible citizenship, pressuring politicians, and forcing questions of education, the removal of Native Americans, war, drink, and, above all, slavery onto the political agenda. This book goes further than any previous study to argue that religion was thecoin of politics in the early 1800s and that the roots of the Civil War lay in religious as well as secular factors.
Book Synopsis Secularism in Antebellum America by : John Lardas Modern
Download or read book Secularism in Antebellum America written by John Lardas Modern and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-11-11 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern’s pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York’s penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism’s emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism—in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear’s erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.
Book Synopsis Liberalism, Theology, and the Performative in Antebellum American Literature by : Patrick McDonald
Download or read book Liberalism, Theology, and the Performative in Antebellum American Literature written by Patrick McDonald and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-19 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1850s United States witnessed a far-reaching political, social, and economic crisis. Symptomatic of this, a wide range of narrative fiction from sentimental novels to sensational drama identifies a foundational link between liberal institutions and performative utterances. Auctions, trials, marriages, and contracts, this fiction contends, all depend on the self-constituting authority of words and performances which anybody and everybody can appropriate and are always subject to misfiring. Rather than viewing this as a liberatory and egalitarian political force, however, writers from Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper to Captain Mayne Reid and E.D.E.N. Southworth insist that such naked authority must be supplemented. A broad swath of 1850s literature insists that this supplement ought to come from Christianity. Anticipating thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, these works suggest that legitimate political authority depends upon its ability to represent Christian transcendence and account for revealed truth, something firmly outside of speech acts’ and performance’s purview. In so doing, this diverse body of fiction registers a desire to reconstitute political authority on transcendent and representable ground, augmenting institutional reliance on mere words and assuaging the contemporary crises of confidence and authority.
Book Synopsis Religion in America to 1865 by : Bryan F. LeBeau
Download or read book Religion in America to 1865 written by Bryan F. LeBeau and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The text provides an introduction to the history of religion in America from colonisation to the Civil War. The principle themes are growth, diversity and adaptation. Coverage includes native American religion and religion in the colonial period, the eve of the American Revolution, the early republic, the age of reform, and the Civil War. The topics are ordered chronologically, following the time lines of the secular history of America, allowing connection to be made between religious and secular history.
Book Synopsis Race and Secularism in America by : Jonathon S. Kahn
Download or read book Race and Secularism in America written by Jonathon S. Kahn and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology draws bold comparisons between secularist strategies to contain, privatize, and discipline religion and the treatment of racialized subjects by the American state. Specializing in history, literature, anthropology, theology, religious studies, and political theory, contributors expose secularism's prohibitive practices in all facets of American society and suggest opportunities for change.
Book Synopsis The Secular Spectacle by : Chad E. Seales
Download or read book The Secular Spectacle written by Chad E. Seales and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using ethnographic and archival sources, Chad E. Seales argues in The Secular Spectacle that white Protestants in Siler ritually engaged material cultures of racial segregation and southern industrialization that had been forged in the early twentieth century in order to reclaim public space following the arrival of Latino Catholics.
Book Synopsis Realist Ecstasy by : Lindsay V. Reckson
Download or read book Realist Ecstasy written by Lindsay V. Reckson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the intersection and history of American literary realism and the performance of spiritual and racial embodiment. Recovering a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism, Realist Ecstasy travels from camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals to explore realism’s relationship to spiritual experience. In her approach to realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practices—including literature, photography, audio recording, and early film—Lindsay V. Reckson argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped construct and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance: its production of new and immanent forms of being beside. Across her readings of Stephen Crane, James Weldon Johnson, and Nella Larsen, among others, Reckson triangulates secularism, realism, and racial formation in the post-Reconstruction moment. Realist Ecstasy shows how post-Reconstruction realist texts mobilized gestures—especially the gestures associated with religious ecstasy—to racialize secularism itself. Reckson offers us a distinctly new vision of American realism as a performative practice, a sustained account of how performance lives in and through literary archives, and a rich sense of how closely secularization and racialization were linked in Jim Crow America.
Book Synopsis Secularists, Religion and Government in Nineteenth-Century America by : Timothy Verhoeven
Download or read book Secularists, Religion and Government in Nineteenth-Century America written by Timothy Verhoeven and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-19 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how, through a series of fierce battles over Sabbath laws, legislative chaplains, Bible-reading in public schools and other flashpoints, nineteenth-century secularists mounted a powerful case for a separation of religion and government. Among their diverse ranks were religious skeptics, liberal Protestants, members of minority faiths, labor reformers and defenders of slavery. Drawing on popular petitions to Congress, a neglected historical source, the book explores how this secularist mobilization gathered energy at the grassroots level. The nineteenth century is usually seen as the golden age of an informal Protestant establishment. Timothy Verhoeven demonstrates that, far from being crushed by an evangelical juggernaut, secularists harnessed a range of cultural forces—the legacy of the Revolutionary founders, hostility to Catholicism, a belief in national exceptionalism and more—to argue that the United States was not a Christian nation, branding their opponents as fanatics who threatened both democratic liberties as well as true religion.
Book Synopsis Heaven's Interpreters by : Ashley Reed
Download or read book Heaven's Interpreters written by Ashley Reed and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Heaven's Interpreters, Ashley Reed reveals how nineteenth-century American women writers transformed the public sphere by using the imaginative power of fiction to craft new models of religious identity and agency. Women writers of the antebellum period, Reed contends, embraced theological concepts to gain access to the literary sphere, challenging the notion that theological discourse was exclusively oppressive and served to deny women their own voice. Attending to modes of being and believing in works by Augusta Jane Evans, Harriet Jacobs, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Elizabeth Stoddard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner, Reed illuminates how these writers infused the secular space of fiction with religious ideas and debates, imagining new possibilities for women's individual agency and collective action. Thanks to generous funding from Virginia Tech and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Book Synopsis Secularists, Religion and Government in Nineteenth-Century America by : Timothy Verhoeven
Download or read book Secularists, Religion and Government in Nineteenth-Century America written by Timothy Verhoeven and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-19 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shows how, through a series of fierce battles over Sabbath laws, legislative chaplains, Bible-reading in public schools and other flashpoints, nineteenth-century secularists mounted a powerful case for a separation of religion and government. Among their diverse ranks were religious skeptics, liberal Protestants, members of minority faiths, labor reformers and defenders of slavery. Drawing on popular petitions to Congress, a neglected historical source, the book explores how this secularist mobilization gathered energy at the grassroots level. The nineteenth century is usually seen as the golden age of an informal Protestant establishment. Timothy Verhoeven demonstrates that, far from being crushed by an evangelical juggernaut, secularists harnessed a range of cultural forces—the legacy of the Revolutionary founders, hostility to Catholicism, a belief in national exceptionalism and more—to argue that the United States was not a Christian nation, branding their opponents as fanatics who threatened both democratic liberties as well as true religion.
Book Synopsis Culture and Redemption by : Tracy Fessenden
Download or read book Culture and Redemption written by Tracy Fessenden and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-27 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many Americans wish to believe that the United States, founded in religious tolerance, has gradually and naturally established a secular public sphere that is equally tolerant of all religions--or none. Culture and Redemption suggests otherwise. Tracy Fessenden contends that the uneven separation of church and state in America, far from safeguarding an arena for democratic flourishing, has functioned instead to promote particular forms of religious possibility while containing, suppressing, or excluding others. At a moment when questions about the appropriate role of religion in public life have become trenchant as never before, Culture and Redemption radically challenges conventional depictions--celebratory or damning--of America's "secular" public sphere. Examining American legal cases, children's books, sermons, and polemics together with popular and classic works of literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, Culture and Redemption shows how the vaunted secularization of American culture proceeds not as an inevitable by-product of modernity, but instead through concerted attempts to render dominant forms of Protestant identity continuous with democratic, civil identity. Fessenden shows this process to be thoroughly implicated, moreover, in practices of often-violent exclusion that go to the making of national culture: Indian removals, forced acculturations of religious and other minorities, internal and external colonizations, and exacting constructions of sex and gender. Her new readings of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Stowe, Twain, Gilman, Fitzgerald, and others who address themselves to these dynamics in intricate and often unexpected ways advance a major reinterpretation of American writing.
Download or read book Credulity written by Emily Ogden and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1830s to the Civil War, Americans could be found putting each other into trances for fun and profit in parlors, on stage, and in medical consulting rooms. They were performing mesmerism. Surprisingly central to literature and culture of the period, mesmerism embraced a variety of phenomena, including mind control, spirit travel, and clairvoyance. Although it had been debunked by Benjamin Franklin in late eighteenth-century France, the practice nonetheless enjoyed a decades-long resurgence in the United States. Emily Ogden here offers the first comprehensive account of those boom years. Credulity tells the fascinating story of mesmerism’s spread from the plantations of the French Antilles to the textile factory cities of 1830s New England. As it proliferated along the Eastern seaboard, this occult movement attracted attention from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and ignited the nineteenth-century equivalent of flame wars in the major newspapers. But mesmerism was not simply the last gasp of magic in modern times. Far from being magicians themselves, mesmerists claimed to provide the first rational means of manipulating the credulous human tendencies that had underwritten past superstitions. Now, rather than propping up the powers of oracles and false gods, these tendencies served modern ends such as labor supervision, education, and mediated communication. Neither an atavistic throwback nor a radical alternative, mesmerism was part and parcel of the modern. Credulity offers us a new way of understanding the place of enchantment in secularizing America.
Download or read book Sincerely Held written by Charles McCrary and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-04-08 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel account of the relationship between sincerity, religious freedom, and the secular in the United States. “Sincerely held religious belief” is now a common phrase in discussions of American religious freedom, from opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court to local controversies. The “sincerity test” of religious belief has become a cornerstone of US jurisprudence, framing what counts as legitimate grounds for First Amendment claims in the eyes of the law. In Sincerely Held, Charles McCrary provides an original account of how sincerely held religious belief became the primary standard for determining what legally counts as authentic religion. McCrary skillfully traces the interlocking histories of American sincerity, religion, and secularism starting in the mid-nineteenth century. He analyzes a diverse archive, including Herman Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man, vice-suppressing police, Spiritualist women accused of being fortune-tellers, eclectic conscientious objectors, secularization theorists, Black revolutionaries, and anti-LGBTQ litigants. Across this history, McCrary reveals how sincerity and sincerely held religious belief developed as technologies of secular governance, determining what does and doesn’t entitle a person to receive protections from the state. This fresh analysis of secularism in the United States invites further reflection on the role of sincerity in public life and religious studies scholarship, asking why sincerity has come to matter so much in a supposedly “post-truth” era.
Book Synopsis Interrogating Secularism by : Danielle Haque
Download or read book Interrogating Secularism written by Danielle Haque and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-25 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interrogating Secularism is a call to rethink binary categories of "religion" and "secularism" in contemporary Arab American fiction and art. While most studies that explore the traffic between literature and issues of secularism emphasize how canonical texts naturalize and reinforce secular values, Interrogating Secularism approaches this nexus through novels written by and about ethnic and religious minorities. Haque juxtaposes accounts of secular experience in the writing of Arab Anglophone authors such as Mohja Kahf, Rabih Alameddine, Khaled Mattawa, Laila Lalami, and Rawi Hage, with Arab and Muslim artists such as Ninar Esber, Mounir Fatmi, Hasan Elahi, and Emily Jacir. Looking at multiple genres and modes of aesthetic production, including AIDS narratives, visual art, and digital media, Haque explores how their conventions are used to subvert the ideals tied to secularism and the various anxieties and investments that support secularism as a premise. These authors and artists critique Western iterations of secular thought in spaces such as art exhibits, airports, borders, and literary discourses to capture how the secularism thesis reproduces the exclusivity it intends to remedy.
Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Secularism by : Phil Zuckerman
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Secularism written by Phil Zuckerman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 793 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As recent headlines reveal, conflicts and debates around the world increasingly involve secularism. National borders and traditional religions cannot keep people in tidy boxes as political struggles, doctrinal divergences, and demographic trends are sweeping across regions and entire continents. And secularity is increasing in society, with a growing number of people in many regions having no religious affiliation or lacking interest in religion. Simultaneously, there is a resurgence of religious participation in the politics of many countries. How might these diverse phenomena be better understood? Long-reigning theories about the pace of secularization and ideal church-state relations are under invigorated scrutiny by scholars studying secularism with new questions, better data, and fresh perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Secularism offers a wide-ranging and in-depth examination of this global conversation, bringing together the views of an international collection of prominent experts in their respective fields. This is the essential volume for comprehending the core issues and methodological approaches to the demographics and sociology of secularity; the history and variety of political secularisms; the comparison of constitutional secularisms across many countries from America to Asia; the key problems now convulsing church-state relations; the intersections of liberalism, multiculturalism, and religion; the latest psychological research into secular lives and lifestyles; and the naturalistic and humanistic worldviews available to nonreligious people.
Book Synopsis Make Yourselves Gods by : Peter Coviello
Download or read book Make Yourselves Gods written by Peter Coviello and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the perspective of Protestant America, nineteenth-century Mormons were the victims of a peculiar zealotry, a population deranged––socially, sexually, even racially––by the extravagances of belief they called “religion.” Make Yourselves Gods offers a counter-history of early Mormon theology and practice, tracking the Saints from their emergence as a dissident sect to their renunciation of polygamy at century’s end. Over these turbulent decades, Mormons would appear by turns as heretics, sex-radicals, refugees, anti-imperialists, colonizers, and, eventually, reluctant monogamists and enfranchised citizens. Reading Mormonism through a synthesis of religious history, political theology, native studies, and queer theory, Peter Coviello deftly crafts a new framework for imagining orthodoxy, citizenship, and the fate of the flesh in nineteenth-century America. What emerges is a story about the violence, wild beauty, and extravagant imaginative power of this era of Mormonism—an impassioned book with a keen interest in the racial history of sexuality and the unfinished business of American secularism.
