Christian Colonialism and Capitalism

The nineteenth century tells the story of Christian success in England and America. Victorian England set a model of patriarchal family virtue rooted in “biblical Christianity.” God rewarded it with industrial development and capitalist expansion in its colonial ventures. The Industrial Revolution advances these curricula’s crucial economic argument: economic success reveals God’s favor. England’s virtues also allowed it to avoid the political tumult that beset the European continent. England and the United States enjoyed religious revivals, and missionaries spread Christianity throughout the world. Colonialism opened the world to missionary evangelization in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The capitalist success of the United States reveals it as the beneficiary of Divine Providence. Nineteenth-century evangelicals not only asserted these claims but also saw Christian hegemony as a realistic aspiration.

Dead is not better: The multiple resurrections of Stephen King’s Revival

Stephen King’s 2014 novel, Revival, plays with its title in several respects. It is first a familiar Frankenstein-esque narrative about a mad scientist who seeks to revive the dead. It is also, however, about religious revivals, both in the specific sense of the religious gatherings held by minister and main antagonist Charles Jacobs, and in the more general sense of attempting to find something in which to place one’s faith in a world where accidents can claim the lives of loved ones. Beyond this, Revival plays with its title in two more senses. First, it elaborates on the recurring theme in King of existentialist angst precipitated by the death of a child or loved one, which King uses to question God’s benevolence or existence. In order to ask these questions, King also resurrects the spirit of Mary Shelley, taking from Frankenstein the theme of reanimation of the dead. The narrative’s conclusion, however, offers yet another revival as it transitions us from the horror of Shelley to the weird fiction of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft. Thus, through these various revivals, King’s novel charts the evolution of twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror from Shelley to Lovecraft and our contemporary ‘weird’ moment.

Vitrine-Gothic: A Secular Revival Of The Gothic

<p><b>Gothic for a time was the architectural style that represented all of Western civilization, in subsequent centuries it has been reasserted as the Western style in periods of cultural, national, and religious revivals. The thesis identifies the current societal conditions as conducive to potentially another such revival, this is the niche the thesis explored architecturally. To consider Gothic architecture in the context of modern secular society, using fractal based computational design to realize this ‘new secular Gothic’, a ‘Vitrine-Gothic’.</b></p> <p>The concept of a Vitrine-Gothic was explored through the development of tool sets and design processes, experimenting with the best methods for integrating fractals as a secular substitute for traditional Gothic symbolism. The tools aimed for maximal adaptability, and design control, which were tested by how well they responded to a range of secular user requirements derived from spiritual concepts. Demonstrated architecturally in the creation of experimental pavilion’s, illustrating the validity of the developed tools, and the cultural relevancy of the architectural results in aesthetic, and functional terms.</p> <p>The research suggests that there is an opportunity for merging digital tools with traditional architecture, to re-examine the fundamentals of traditional architecture in terms of aesthetics, function, symbolism, etc, in relation to the cultural and technological realities of modern society. Thus producing architectural results with greater cultural relevancy.</p>

Vitrine-Gothic: A Secular Revival Of The Gothic

<p><b>Gothic for a time was the architectural style that represented all of Western civilization, in subsequent centuries it has been reasserted as the Western style in periods of cultural, national, and religious revivals. The thesis identifies the current societal conditions as conducive to potentially another such revival, this is the niche the thesis explored architecturally. To consider Gothic architecture in the context of modern secular society, using fractal based computational design to realize this ‘new secular Gothic’, a ‘Vitrine-Gothic’.</b></p> <p>The concept of a Vitrine-Gothic was explored through the development of tool sets and design processes, experimenting with the best methods for integrating fractals as a secular substitute for traditional Gothic symbolism. The tools aimed for maximal adaptability, and design control, which were tested by how well they responded to a range of secular user requirements derived from spiritual concepts. Demonstrated architecturally in the creation of experimental pavilion’s, illustrating the validity of the developed tools, and the cultural relevancy of the architectural results in aesthetic, and functional terms.</p> <p>The research suggests that there is an opportunity for merging digital tools with traditional architecture, to re-examine the fundamentals of traditional architecture in terms of aesthetics, function, symbolism, etc, in relation to the cultural and technological realities of modern society. Thus producing architectural results with greater cultural relevancy.</p>

The Voices of Moses: Theologies of Revelation in an Early Hasidic Circle

The subject of revelation appears with striking frequency in the writings and sermons of the early Hasidic masters. Their attempts to reimagine Sinai and to redefine its spiritual significance were key to their theological project. The present article examines the theophany at Sinai as presented in the teachings of three important Hasidic leaders: Menaḥem Naḥum of Chernobil, Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, and Levi Yitsḥak of Barditshev, all of whom were students of Rabbi Dov Ber Friedman, the Maggid of Mezritsh. Each of the three constructed their teachings upon foundational elements of the Maggid’s theology. This shared inheritance links Dov Ber’s students to one another, but careful consideration of these Hasidic sources will reveal important differences in foci and ideational message. These homilies refer to revelation as an unfolding process in which the ineffable divine is continuously translated into human language, reflecting upon—and justifying—the emergence of Hasidism and its theology through reimagining revelation. Such fundamental questions of language and devotion also throb at the heart of religious revivals the world over. When read critically and carefully, these Hasidic sources have much to offer scholars interested in the interface of renewal, exegesis, and revelation more broadly.

Restoring religion through collective memory: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices after the Cultural Revolution

China has experienced remarkable religious revivals since the Cultural Revolution. I argue that the revivals rely on religious elites summoning collective memory to restore religion, among other factors. In addition, a micro-level perspective is taken, to see how collective memory, more than a group’s collective representation, is the product and resources of religious elites in pursuit of their own interest; the remembrance of the sacred past is a contested, unfolding process of key actors engaging in varied mnemonic practices. Through data collected from long-term fieldwork, I demonstrate how Chinese Pentecostals, after lengthy political suppression, use religious collective memory to rebuild the national community, strengthen the leadership by proving their orthodox character, and fight against mystical separatists. In conclusion, I explain why religious collective memory matters in the case of China in particular, where the state tends to repress religious institutionalization, and Chinese people emphasize the importance of orthodoxy lineage.

Social Reform in America

Any discussion of nineteenth-century religious Dissent must look carefully at gender. Although distinct from one another in important respects, Nonconformist congregations were patterned on the household as the first unit of God-given society, a model which fostered questions about the relationship between male and female. Ideas of gender coalesced with theology and praxis to shape expectations central to the cultural ethos of Nonconformity. Existing historiographical interpretations of gender and religion that use the separate spheres model have argued that evangelical piety was identified with women who were carefully separated from the world, while men needed to be reclaimed for religion. Despite their virtues, these interpretations suppose that evangelicalism was a hegemonic movement about which it is possible to generalize. Yet the unique history and structures of Nonconformity ensured a high degree of particularity. Gender styles were subtly interpreted and negotiated in Dissenting culture over and against the perceived practices and norms of the mainstream, creating what one Methodist called a ‘whole sub-society’ differentiated from worldly patterns in the culture at large. Dissenting men, for instance, deliberately sought to effect coherence between public and private arenas and took inspiration from the published lives of ‘businessmen “saints”’. Feminine piety in Dissent likewise rested on integration, not separation, with women credited with forming godly communities. The insistence on inherent spiritual equality was important to Dissenters and was imaged most clearly in marriage, which transcended the public/private divide and supplied a model for domestic and foreign mission. Missionary work also allowed for the valorization and mobilization of distinctive feminine and masculine types, such as the single woman missionary who bore ‘spiritual offspring’ and the manly adventurer. Over the century, religious revivals in Dissent might shift these patterns somewhat: female roles were notably renegotiated in the Salvation Army, while Holiness revivals stimulated demands for female preaching and women’s religious writing, making bestsellers of writers such as Hannah Whitall Smith. Thus Dissent was characterized throughout the Anglophone world by an emphasis on spiritual equality combined with a sharpened perception of sexual difference, albeit one which was subject to dynamic reformulation throughout the century.

Introduction

Darkness Falls on the Land of Light opens with the story of two families—the Coreys and Holbrooks—who once worshipped side by side in the Sturbridge, Massachusetts, Congregational church but by 1750 no longer experienced religion in commensurate ways as a result of their experiences during the combustive religious revivals of the Great Awakening. The introduction frames the larger argument of the study and defines the key terms of analysis, including the categories of religious experience and religious practices.