Download or read book Intelligently Designed written by Edward Caudill and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the growth of creationism in America as a political movement, this book explains why the particularly American phenomenon of anti-evolution has succeeded as a popular belief. Conceptualizing the history of creationism as a strategic public relations campaign, Edward Caudill examines why this movement has captured the imagination of the American public, from the explosive Scopes trial of 1925 to today's heated battles over public school curricula. Caudill shows how creationists have appealed to cultural values such as individual rights and admiration of the rebel spirit, thus spinning creationism as a viable, even preferable, alternative to evolution. In particular, Caudill argues that the current anti-evolution campaign follows a template created by Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, the Scopes trial's primary combatants. Their celebrity status and dexterity with the press prefigured the Moral Majority's 1980s media blitz, more recent staunchly creationist politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, and creationists' savvy use of the Internet and museums to publicize their cause. Drawing from trial transcripts, media sources, films, and archival documents, Intelligently Designed highlights the importance of historical myth in popular culture, religion, and politics and situates this nearly century-old debate in American cultural history.

Download or read book Doctrine and Race written by Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Doctrine and Race examines the history of African American Baptists and Methodists of the early twentieth century and their struggle for equality in the context of white Protestant fundamentalism. By presenting African American Protestantism in the context of white Protestant fundamentalism, Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars demonstrates that African American Protestants were acutely aware of the manner in which white Christianity operated and how they could use that knowledge to justify social change. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s study scrutinizes how white fundamentalists wrote blacks out of their definition of fundamentalism and how blacks constructed a definition of Christianity that had, at its core, an intrinsic belief in racial equality. In doing so, this volume challenges the prevailing scholarly argument that fundamentalism was either a doctrinal debate or an antimodernist force. Instead, it was a constantly shifting set of priorities for different groups at different times. A number of African American theologians and clergy identified with many of the doctrinal tenets of the fundamentalism of their white counterparts, but African Americans were excluded from full fellowship with the fundamentalists because of their race. Moreover, these scholars and pastors did not limit themselves to traditional evangelical doctrine but embraced progressive theological concepts, such as the Social Gospel, to help them achieve racial equality. Nonetheless, they identified other forward-looking theological views, such as modernism, as threats to “true” Christianity. Mathews demonstrates that, although traditional portraits of “the black church” have provided the illusion of a singular unified organization, black evangelical leaders debated passionately among themselves as they sought to preserve select aspects of the culture around them while rejecting others. The picture that emerges from this research creates a richer, more profound understanding of African American denominations as they struggled to contend with a white American society that saw them as inferior. Doctrine and Race melds American religious history and race studies in innovative and compelling ways, highlighting the remarkable and rich complexity that attended to the development of African American Protestant movements.

Download or read book The Colors of Zion written by George Bornstein and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-02 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major reevaluation of relationships among Blacks, Jews, and Irish in the years between the Irish Famine and the end of World War II, The Colors of Zion argues that the cooperative efforts and sympathies among these three groups, each persecuted and subjugated in its own way, was much greater than often acknowledged today. For the Black, Jewish, and Irish writers, poets, musicians, and politicians at the center of this transatlantic study, a sense of shared wrongs inspired repeated outpourings of sympathy. If what they have to say now surprises us, it is because our current constructions of interracial and ethnic relations have overemphasized conflict and division. As George Bornstein says in his Introduction, he chooses “to let the principals speak for themselves.” While acknowledging past conflicts and tensions, Bornstein insists on recovering the “lost connections” through which these groups frequently defined their plights as well as their aspirations. In doing so, he examines a wide range of materials, including immigration laws, lynching, hostile race theorists, Nazis and Klansmen, discriminatory university practices, and Jewish publishing houses alongside popular plays like The Melting Pot and Abie’s Irish Rose, canonical novels like Ulysses and Daniel Deronda, music from slave spirituals to jazz, poetry, and early films such as The Jazz Singer. The models of brotherhood that extended beyond ethnocentrism a century ago, the author argues, might do so once again today, if only we bear them in mind. He also urges us to move beyond arbitrary and invidious categories of race and ethnicity.

Download or read book The Secular Spectacle written by Chad E. Seales and published by Oxford University Press, USA. 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.

Download or read book Babel in Zion written by Liora Halperin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The promotion and vernacularization of Hebrew, traditionally a language of Jewish liturgy and study, was a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine. Viewing twentieth-century history through the lens of language, author Liora Halperin questions the accepted scholarly narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism during the years following World War I, demonstrating how Jews in Palestine remained connected linguistically by both preference and necessity to a world outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew community even as it promoted Hebrew and achieved that language's dominance. The story of language encounters in Jewish Palestine is a fascinating tale of shifting power relationships, both locally and globally. Halperin's absorbing study explores how a young national community was compelled to modify the dictates of Hebrew exclusivity as it negotiated its relationships with its Jewish population, Palestinian Arabs, the British, and others outside the margins of the national project and ultimately came to terms with the limitations of its hegemony in an interconnected world.

Download or read book Black Fundamentalists written by Daniel R Bare and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the history of Black Fundamentalists during the early part of the twentieth century As the modernist-fundamentalist controversy came to a head in the early twentieth century, an image of the “fighting fundamentalist” was imprinted on the American cultural consciousness. To this day, the word “fundamentalist” often conjures the image of a fire-breathing preacher—strident, unyielding in conviction . . . and almost always white. But did this major religious perspective really stop cold in its tracks at the color line? Black Fundamentalists challenges the idea that fundamentalism was an exclusively white phenomenon. The volume uncovers voices from the Black community that embraced the doctrinal tenets of the movement and, in many cases, explicitly self-identified as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists of the early twentieth century felt the pressing need to defend the “fundamental” doctrines of their conservative Christian faith—doctrines like biblical inerrancy, the divinity of Christ, and the virgin birth—against what they saw as the predations of modernists who represented a threat to true Christianity. Such concerns, attitudes, and arguments emerged among Black Christians as well as white, even as the oppressive hand of Jim Crow excluded African Americans from the most prominent white-controlled fundamentalist institutions and social crusades, rendering them largely invisible to scholars examining such movements. Black fundamentalists aligned closely with their white counterparts on the theological particulars of “the fundamentals.” Yet they often applied their conservative theology in more progressive, racially contextualized ways. While white fundamentalists were focused on battling the teaching of evolution, Black fundamentalists were tying their conservative faith to advocacy for reforms in public education, voting rights, and the overturning of legal bans on intermarriage. Beyond the narrow confines of the fundamentalist movement, Daniel R. Bare shows how these historical dynamics illuminate larger themes, still applicable today, about how racial context influences religious expression.

Download or read book Muslim Zion written by Faisal Devji and published by Hurst Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: London: C.Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., 2013.

Download or read book Antifundamentalism in Modern America written by David Harrington Watt and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Harrington Watt's Antifundamentalism in Modern America gives us a pathbreaking account of the role that the fear of fundamentalism has played—and continues to play—in American culture. Fundamentalism has never been a neutral category of analysis, and Watt scrutinizes the various political purposes that the concept has been made to serve. In 1920, the conservative Baptist writer Curtis Lee Laws coined the word "fundamentalists." Watt examines the antifundamentalist polemics of Harry Emerson Fosdick, Talcott Parsons, Stanley Kramer, and Richard Hofstadter, which convinced many Americans that religious fundamentalists were almost by definition backward, intolerant, and anti-intellectual and that fundamentalism was a dangerous form of religion that had no legitimate place in the modern world. For almost fifty years, the concept of fundamentalism was linked almost exclusively to Protestant Christians. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the establishment of an Islamic republic led to a more elastic understanding of the nature of fundamentalism. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans became accustomed to using fundamentalism as a way of talking about Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists, as well as Christians. Many Americans came to see Protestant fundamentalism as an expression of a larger phenomenon that was wreaking havoc all over the world. Antifundamentalism in Modern America is the first book to provide an overview of the way that the fear of fundamentalism has shaped U.S. culture, and it will lead readers to rethink their understanding of what fundamentalism is and what it does.

Download or read book American Genesis written by Jeffrey P. Moran and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolution has been a perennial flash-point in American politics. But it is not merely a political issue. In American Genesis, Jeffrey P. Moran explores the ways in which the evolution debate has reverberated beyond the confines of state legislatures and courthouses. Moran shows that social forces such as gender, regionalism, and race have intersected with the debate over evolution in ways that shed light on modern American culture. He investigates, for instance, how antievolutionism deepened the cultural divisions between North and South - as when northern elites embraced evolution as a sign of sectional enlightenment while southern opponents defined themselves as the standard bearers of true Christianity. Evolution debates also exposed a deep gulf between conservative Black Christians and secular intellectuals such as W. E. B. DuBois. In addition, Moran explores the motives and methods of antievolutionism, and the ways in which the struggle has played out in the universities, on the internet, and even within the evangelical community. Throughout, Moran shows that evolution has served as a weapon, as an enforcer of identity, and as a polarizing force both within and without the churches.

Download or read book American Evangelicals written by Barry Hankins and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2009-02-16 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There may be no group in American society that is more talked about but so little understood as Evangelical Christians. Sometimes dismissed as violent fundamentalists and ignorant flat earthers, few can doubt the political, cultural, and religious significance of the Evangelicals. Barry Hankins puts the Evangelical movement in historical perspective, reaching back to its roots in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century and leading up to the formative moments of contemporary conservative Protestantism. Taking on key topics such as the standing of science, the authority of scripture, and gender and racial equality, Hankins analyzes what is most essential for us to understand today about this potent movement.

Download or read book The South of the Mind written by Zachary J. Lechner and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction. Raising the white South -- The many faces of the South: national images of white southernness during the civil rights era, 1960-1971 -- "This world from the standpoint of a rocking chair": country-rock and the South in the countercultural imagination -- "When in doubt, kick ass": the masculine South(s) of George Wallace, Walking tall, and Deliverance -- A tale of two Souths: the Allman Brothers Band's countercultural southernness and Lynyrd Skynyrd's rebel macho -- "I respect a good southern white man": Jimmy Carter's healing southernness and the 1976 presidential campaign -- Epilogue. Playing that dead band's song -- Appendix. Southern rock in the 1970s: survey questions

Download or read book Re thinking the Day of YHWH and Restoration of Fortunes in the Prophet Zephaniah written by Michael Ufok Udoekpo and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The prophecy of Zephaniah is a compendium of prophetic thoughts on the nature of YHWH's relationship with His people. This research critically builds on past scholarships and exegetically demonstrates the thematic, literary and theological relationships of Zeph 1:14-18 and 3:14-20 with the rest of the Twelve Minor Prophets, Deuteronomistic History and with Psalm 126 and insists on Zephaniah's creative and unique understanding of God, His judgment and saving roles. Taking the judgment and wrath narrative in Zeph 1:14-18 as its pericope of exegetical departure, the author diachronically and synchronically studies in detail the contents, meaning, relevance and the theological values of Zephaniah's Day of YHWH to all cultures and religious communities. In particular, he emphasizes the fuller and salvific notion of a God who not only judges, intervenes in human history, punishes sinners, but loves, shows mercy, rewards, saves, inspires hope and restores the fortunes of the remnant who repents (Zeph 3:14-20).

Download or read book Mapping the End Times written by Dr Jason Dittmer and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-11-28 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last quarter-century, evangelicalism has become an important social and political force in modern America. Here, new voices in the field are brought together with leading scholars such as William E. Connolly, Michael Barkun, Simon Dalby, and Paul Boyer to produce a timely examination of the spatial dimensions of the movement, offering useful and compelling insights on the intersection between politics and religion. This comprehensive study discusses evangelicalism in its different forms, from the moderates to the would-be theocrats who, in anticipation of the Rapture, seek to impose their interpretations of the Bible upon American foreign policy. The result is a unique appraisal of the movement and its geopolitical visions, and the wider impact of these on America and the world at large.

Download or read book Wesley One Volume Commentary written by Kenneth J. Collins and published by Abingdon Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 1510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This one volume commentary on the entire Bible was written by more than 40 scholars from the broad range of Wesleyan denominations, including The United Methodist Church, The Church of the Nazarene, The Church of God (Anderson), The Church of God (Cleveland), The Wesleyan Church, The Free Methodist Church, and The Salvation Army. It is the only specifically Wesleyan Bible commentary available and assists pastors in sermon preparation, small group leaders in lesson preparation, and laypeople in Bible study. Joel B. Green, Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Fuller Seminary, called this commentary, “The Wesley Study Bible +++.” The commentary form will allow for a much greater exploration of Wesleyan themes and theology than a Study Bible ever could.

Download or read book Lamentations in Ancient and Contemporary Cultural Contexts written by Nancy C. Lee and published by Society of Biblical Lit. This book was released on 2008 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Personal tragedy and communal catastrophe up to the present day are universal human experiences that call forth lament. Lament singers--from the most ancient civilizations to traditional oral poets to the biblical psalmists and poets of Lamentations to popular singers across the globe--have always raised the cry of human suffering, giving voice to the voiceless, illuminating injustice, or pleading for divine help. This volume gathers an international collection of essays on biblical lament and Lamentations, illuminating their genres, artistry, purposes, and significant place in the history and theologies of ancient Israel. It also explores lament across cultures, both those influenced by biblical traditions and those not, as the practices of composition, performance, and interpretation of life's suffering continue to shed light on our knowledge of biblical lament. --From publisher's description.

Download or read book Re thinking Dionysius the Areopagite written by Sarah Coakley and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dionysius the Areopagite, the early sixth-century Christian writer, bridged Christianity and neo-Platonist philosophy. Bringing together a team of international scholars, this volume surveys how Dionysius’s thought and work has been interpreted, in both East and West, up to the present day. One of the first volumes in English to survey the reception history of Dionysian thought, both East and West Provides a clear account of both modern and post-modern debates about Dionysius’s standing as philosopher and Christian theologian Examines the contrasts between Dionysius’s own pre-modern concerns and those of the post-modern philosophical tradition Highlights the great variety of historic readings of Dionysius, and also considers new theories and interpretations Analyzes the main points of hermeneutical contrast between East and West

Download or read book Religion and Class in America written by Sean McCloud and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Class has always played a role in American religion. Class differences in religious life are inevitably felt by both those in the pews and those on the outside looking in. This volume starts a long overdue discussion about how class continues to matter - and perhaps even ways in which it does not - in American religion. Class is indeed important, whether one examines it through analysis of events and documents, surveys and interviews, or participant observation of religious groups. The chapters herein examine class as a reality that is both material and symbolic, individual and corporate. "Religion and Class in America" examines the myriad ways in which class continues to interact with the theologies, practices, beliefs, and group affiliations of American religion.