Download or read book Religious Melancholy and Protestant Experience in America written by Julius H. Rubin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-01-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original examination of the spiritual narratives of conversion in the history of American Protestant evangelical religion reveals an interesting paradox. Fervent believers who devoted themselves completely to the challenges of making a Christian life, who longed to know God's rapturous love, all too often languished in despair, feeling forsaken by God. Ironically, those most devoted to fostering the soul's maturation neglected the well-being of the psyche. Drawing upon many sources, including unpublished diaries and case studies of patients treated in nineteenth-century asylums, Julius Rubin's fascinating study thoroughly explores religious melancholy--as a distinctive stance toward life, a grieving over the loss of God's love, and an obsession and psychopathology associated with the spiritual itinerary of conversion. The varieties of this spiritual sickness include sinners who would fast unto death ("evangelical anorexia nervosa"), religious suicides, and those obsessed with unpardonable sin. From colonial Puritans like Michael Wigglesworth to contemporary evangelicals like Billy Graham, among those who directed the course of evangelical religion and of their followers, Rubin shows that religious melancholy has shaped the experience of self and identity for those who sought rebirth as children of God.
Download or read book Protestantism and Capitalism written by Jere Cohen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguably, the most important single work in classical sociology is Max Weber's thesis on how Protestantism makes its impact on capitalism. Cohen's argument is that Protestantism affects capitalism in several different ways. Each is linked as a separate mechanism of influence, and may therefore be assessed separately. Weber himself stated or suggested several possible mechanisms of influence. Protestantism gave the spirit of capitalism its duty to profit and thus helped to legitimate capitalism. Its religious asceticism also produced personalities well-suited for work discipline. Finally, the new turn in Christian doctrine contributed to the quest to prove one's salvation, because God's favor could be shown through business success.Cohen's argument is that some of these processes worked as Weber indicated and others did not. This makes a blanket assessment of his famous thesis inappropriate. The Weber thesis has been difficult to prove or disprove because the refutation of some suggested mechanisms still leaves others viable. Only a comprehensive testing of all of Weber's sub-hypotheses can provide a proper assessment of his work. By simultaneously examining these sub-texts, the author pulls together Weber's arguments and points of criticism. The book juxtaposes historical evidence pro and con.Cohen revisits, reexamines, and tests the classic Weberian thesis that the beliefs and presuppositions of the English Puritans, rather than the forces of economic determinism, ushered in the era of modern capitalism. He divides Weber's single argument into two main mechanisms of influence: one behavioral, confined to which Puritan tenets in particular affected a believer's economic activity; the other, a more prevalent and far-reaching cultural mechanism, which became part of the mainstream. By taking advantage of present day information, including recently discovered diaries of two seventeenth-century Puritan merchants, Cohen's text sums up many years of argument in the journal literature. The book will find a place in a wide range of courses, from sociology of religion, sociological theory, social economics, political science, to European history.Jere Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore County, is the author of numerous journal articles, many of them also dealing with Max Weber and his Protestant Ethic thesis.
Download or read book A History of Christian Conversion written by David W. Kling and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 853 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversion has played a central role in the history of Christianity. In this first in-depth and wide-ranging narrative history, David Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and people groups. Global in reach, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity's expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming). However, when examined over two millennia, it emerges as a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest. No single, unitary paradigm defines conversion and no easily explicable process accounts for why people convert to Christianity. Rather, a multiplicity of factors-historical, personal, social, geographical, theological, psychological, and cultural-shape the converting process. A History of Christian Conversion not only narrates the conversions of select individuals and peoples, it also engages current theories and models to explain conversion, and examines recurring themes in the conversion process: divine presence, gender and the body, agency and motivation, testimony and memory, group- and self-identity, "authentic" and "nominal" conversion, and modes of communication. Accessible to scholars, students, and those with a general interest in conversion, Kling's book is the most satisfying and comprehensive account of conversion in Christian history to date; this major work will become a standard must-read in conversion studies.
Download or read book The American Puritan Elegy written by Jeffrey A. Hammond and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey Hammond's study takes an anthropological approach to the most popular form of poetry in early New England - the funeral elegy. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to a specific process of mourning defined by Puritan views on death and grief. The elegies emerge, he argues not as 'poems' to be read and appreciated in a post-romantic sense, but as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience of loss in accordance with theological expectation. Read in the framework of their own time and place, the elegies shed light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture. Hammond's book reassesses a body of poems whose importance on their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours. It represents the first full-length study of its kind in English.
Download or read book Affect and Power written by David J. Libby and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2005 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan published his groundbreaking work White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 and opened up new avenues for thinking about sex, slavery, race, and religion in American culture. Over the course of a forty-year career at the University of California and the University of Mississippi, he continued to write about these issues and to train others to think in new ways about interactions of race, gender, faith, and power. Written by former students of Jordan, these essays are a tribute to the career of one of America's great thinkers and perhaps the most influential American historian of his generation. The book visits historical locales from Puritan New England and French Louisiana to nineteenth-century New York and Mississippi, all the way to Harlem swing clubs and college campuses in the twentieth century. In the process, authors listen to the voices of abolitionists and white supremacists, preachers and politicos, white farm women and black sorority sisters, slaves, and jazz musicians. Each essay represents an important contribution to the collection's larger themes and at the same time illustrates the impact Jordan exerted on the scholarly life of each author. Collectively, these pieces demonstrate the attentiveness to detail and sensitivity to sources that are hallmarks of Jordan's own work. David J. Libby, San Antonio, Texas, is the author of Slavery and Frontier Mississippi: 1720-1835 (University Press of Mississippi). Paul Spickard, Santa Barbara, California, is the co-editor of Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence and the author of Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America. Susan Ditto, Oxford, Mississippi, is the associate editor of Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives.
Download or read book The American Eton written by Tom Horton and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2012-05 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moses Waddel (1770-1840) founded one of the most famous classical academies in early America. Among his most famous students were John C. Calhoun, Andrew Crawford, Hugh Swinton Legare, and James Louis Petigru. Waddel is also famous for turning tiny Franklin College into the University of Georgia.
Download or read book Oldspeak newspeak written by Charles W. Kneupper and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Noble Savage in the New World Garden written by Gaile McGregor and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a literary history of the Noble Savage and a comprehensive metamorphology of the American mind. Wide-ranging and deep-diving, this book suggests many reevaluations of American heroes and attitudes.
Download or read book The Diagonal Line written by August J. Nigro and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suggests that the understanding of American literature can be expanded through an examination of the universal symbolic pattern that underlies the Adamic myth -- the pattern of separation from and reparation with the boundless.
Download or read book Spirit Faith and Church written by Laurence Lux-Sterritt and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contradictions are legion when it comes to women and spirituality. In Christian cultures, the worth of the female sex is highly ambivalent, since virginity and motherhood are construed respectively as badges of purity and fruitfulness, whilst the biological processes which underlie them are considered taboo or impure. Throughout history, women are in turn represented as inferior, defective creatures or as privileged ‘empty vessels’ in their relationship with the divine. This polarized conception of woman has influenced the way in which religious institutions, learned writers, or indeed women themselves consider the female personal and collective relationship with the supernatural, with the divine, and with the institutions which represent it. Through eleven original essays, this volume questions how women from the English-speaking world have negotiated their roles in the spiritual and religious spheres. From early-modern Catholics and Puritan groups to twenty-first century nuns, Anglican ministers and Mormons, how did women define their roles in male-dominated institutions? How did they react to the public perceptions of their bodies as either incompatible with or facilitating access to the divine? The questions at the core of this book hinge upon the articulation between the female self (body and soul) and its experience of the preternatural, of faith, and of institutionalized groups. Are there specific forms of female spirituality and do they lead to a feminized/feminist conception of God?
Download or read book A World Made Safe for Differences written by Christopher Shannon and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2001 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first prince is destined to lead the kingdom, be the strong and just ruler, to have the adoration of the kingdom at his feet.The second prince is destined to be the scholar, the genius, the adviser, the manager of the kingdom, the essential cog that keeps the clock turning.The third prince is destined to be the hero, the fighter, the soldier, destined to conquer lands and fight off evil whilst keeping his morals and honour. But what about the fourth prince? He does not have any titles or stories but does he have a tale to tell too?When Fin fins out some shocking news from his father, a set of events occur that change everything for the young prince and his friends.
Download or read book The Story Upon a Hill written by Christopher Leise and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A timely study of contemporary American literature that highlights the everpresence of Puritan myths in American identity and culture"--
Download or read book The Force of Fantasy written by Ernest G. Bormann and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, first published in 1985, Ernest G. Bormann explores mass persuasion in America from 1620 to 1860, examining closely four rhetorical communities: the revivals of 1739-1740, the hot gospel of the postrevolutionary period, the evangelical revival and reform of the 1830s, and the Free Soil and Republican parties. Each community varies greatly, but Bormann asserts that each succeeding community shares a rhetorical vision of restoring the "American Dream" that is essentially a modification of the previous visions. Thus, they form a family of rhetorical visions that constitutes a rhetorical tradition of importance in nineteenth-century American popular culture.
Download or read book As a City on a Hill written by Daniel T. Rodgers and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill," John Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans at New England's founding in 1630. More than three centuries later, Ronald Reagan remade that passage into a timeless celebration of American promise. How were Winthrop's long-forgotten words reinvented as a central statement of American identity and exceptionalism? In As a City on a Hill, leading American intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers tells the surprising story of one of the most celebrated documents in the canon of the American idea. In doing so, he brings to life the ideas Winthrop's text carried in its own time and the sharply different yearnings that have been attributed to it since. As a City on a Hill shows how much more malleable, more saturated with vulnerability, and less distinctly American Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity" was than the document that twentieth-century Americans invented. Across almost four centuries, Rodgers traces striking shifts in the meaning of Winthrop's words--from Winthrop's own anxious reckoning with the scrutiny of the world, through Abraham Lincoln's haunting reference to this "almost chosen people," to the "city on a hill" that African Americans hoped to construct in Liberia, to the era of Donald Trump. As a City on a Hill reveals the circuitous, unexpected ways Winthrop's words came to lodge in American consciousness. At the same time, the book offers a probing reflection on how nationalism encourages the invention of "timeless" texts to straighten out the crooked realities of the past.
Download or read book Puritanism and Liberty written by Arthur Sutherland Pigott Woodhouse and published by . This book was released on 1974-01-01 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 1 1590 1820 written by Sacvan Bercovitch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-28 with total page 846 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume I of The Cambridge History of American Literature was originally published in 1997, and covers the colonial and early national periods and discusses the work of a diverse assemblage of authors, from Renaissance explorers and Puritan theocrats to Revolutionary pamphleteers and poets and novelists of the new republic. Addressing those characteristics that render the texts distinctively American while placing the literature in an international perspective, the contributors offer a compelling new evaluation of both the literary importance of early American history and the historical value of early American literature.
Download or read book Suffering and the Sovereignty of God written by John Piper and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2006-09-13 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last few years, 9/11, a tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and many other tragedies have shown us that the vision of God in today's churches in relation to evil and suffering is often frivolous. Against the overwhelming weight and seriousness of the Bible, many Christians are choosing to become more shallow, more entertainment-oriented, and therefore irrelevant in the face of massive suffering. In Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, contributors John Piper, Joni Eareckson Tada, Steve Saint, Carl Ellis, David Powlison, Dustin Shramek, and Mark Talbot explore the many categories of God's sovereignty as evidenced in his Word. They urge readers to look to Christ, even in suffering, to find the greatest confidence, deepest comfort, and sweetest fellowship they have ever known.
