scholarly journals Discipline and Divinity: Colonial Quakerism, Christianity, and “Heathenism” in the Seventeenth Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Plank
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Christian Teaching ◽  
The Social ◽  
Christian Message

Quakers began arriving in the Caribbean and North America when their religious society was still new and struggling to define its core beliefs and institutional structure. There were tensions within the Society of Friends stemming from the Quakers’ validation of individual inspiration and their communal commitment to the Christian message as contained in the Bible. A bitter debate over scriptural authority wracked Quaker meetings for the remainder of the seventeenth century, and the controversy included arguments over the Quakers’ relations with Native Americans, Africans, and others outside of Europe beyond the reach of formal Christian teaching. On both sides of the Atlantic opponents of Quaker discipline challenged long-standing assumptions about the source and content of the Christian message and the social hierarchies that resulted when some groups claimed privileged access to truth. The ensuing argument influenced the Quakers’ plans for their colonies in North America, and their debate over slavery.

John Eliot, John Veniaminov, and Christian engagement with the indigenous peoples of North America: A comparative missiology

2020 ◽  
pp. 009182961988717
Author(s):  
Joseph William Black
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Early American ◽  
The Bible ◽  
John Eliot ◽  
The Face ◽  
Christian Literature

John Eliot was the 17th-century settler Puritan clergyman who sought to engage his Wampanoag neighbors with the Christian gospel, eventually learning their language, winning converts, establishing schools, translating the Bible and other Christian literature, even establishing villages of converted native Americans, before everything was wiped out in the violence of the King Philip War. John Eliot is all but forgotten outside the narrow debates of early American colonial history, though he was one of the first Protestants to attempt to engage his indigenous neighbors with the gospel. John Veniaminov was a Russian Orthodox priest from Siberia who felt called to bring Christianity to the indigenous Aleut and Tinglit peoples of island and mainland Alaska. He learned their languages, established schools, gathered worshiping communities, and translated the liturgies and Christian literature into their languages. Even in the face of later American persecution and marginalization, Orthodoxy in the indigenous communities of Alaska remains a vital and under-acknowledged Christian presence. Later made a bishop (Innocent) and then elected the Metropolitan of Moscow, Fr. John (now St. Innocent) is lionized in the Russian Church but almost unknown outside its scope, even in Orthodox circles. This article examines the ministries of these men, separated by time and traditions, and yet working in similar conditions among the indigenous peoples of North America, to learn something of both their missionary motivation and their methodology.

scholarly journals Manna in Winter: Indigenous Americans, Huckleberries, and Blueberries

HortScience ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim E. Hummer
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
The Social ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
Production History ◽  
Food Needs ◽  
First Contact ◽  
Roger Williams

More than 35 species of blueberries (Vaccinium L.) and huckleberries (Vaccinium and Gaylussacia Kunth.) are indigenous to North America. The indigenous North American peoples, wise in the ways of survival, recognized the quality of these edible fruits and revered these plants. Beyond food needs, these plants played significant roles in their culture, sociology, economics, and spirituality. Because these traditions, developed and gathered over millennia, were transmitted orally, documentation of these uses have been determined through archeological data, written records from western civilization after first contact, and recent surveys of present-day native peoples. The wealth of indigenous knowledge on blueberries, huckleberries, and other foods was shared with European immigrants. These fruits were used by many tribes throughout North America. Samuel de Champlain documented that fresh and dried blueberries provided “manna in winter” when other food was scarce. Pemmican, a preserved concoction of lean meat, fat, and blueberries or other fruit, enabled survival. Blueberry products such as ohentaqué, hahique, satar, sakisatar, sautauthig, k’enkash, navag, and nunasdlut’i were important to Native Americans. Roger Williams, Meriwether Lewis, and Henry David Thoreau were each impressed with the uses of blueberries by indigenous Americans. The social, technological, and horticultural changes that gave rise to a commercial wild huckleberry and blueberry gathering and production history are summarized.

Misperceptions and Identities Mis-taken: Interpreting Various Hostilities Encountered by Moravians in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-174
Author(s):  
Travis L. Myers
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Family Cohesion ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Contested Spaces ◽  
The Social ◽  
Turbulent Times ◽  
International Fellowship ◽  
Historical Theology

This essay integrates Moravian studies, missiology and historical theology. It begins with a brief survey of the historiography of Moravian missions in colonial North America. It then surveys various reasons for periodic hostility against Moravians in New York and Pennsylvania between roughly 1740 and 1790. It recovers the ethnic and cultural diversity, prejudices and defensive actions of colonists that were a significant component of life in these contested spaces and turbulent times, thus demonstrating that so-called ‘religious’ persecution remains a complicated phenomenon. It suggests Moravians might have avoided certain instances of misperception and consequent ‘persecution’ had they adapted themselves culturally in ways they did not. Moravians were often perceived by other colonial Europeans as a threat to the security and stability of developing locales, and remained largely on the social periphery in colonial North America as a consequence of being both wrongly and rightly understood. As an international and transnational religious community pursuing its own global dispersal for the sake of mission, Moravian political neutrality and perceived ‘foreignness’ was misunderstood in times of war by English and Dutch colonists, especially, as sympathy for the enemy or even evidence of espionage, though the religious and secular fear of their being Catholic seems to have been eventually resolved. Because Moravians in the British colonies fraternised with Native Americans for the sake of mission and were part of an international fellowship also befriending Caribbean slaves, they were sometimes slandered by colonists who feared them as instigators of rebellion by these marginalised populations. Finally, the Moravian sense of being set apart by God from the broader society and called to suffer for the sake of their righteous difference and gospel influence, when acted upon, provoked hostility from colonists who perceived them as a threat to local balances of power, denominational order or family cohesion.

The Quaker “Invasion”

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Chastain Weimer
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
The West ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Social Challenges ◽  
Loyalty Oaths

Founded in the late 1640s, Quakerism reached America in the 1650s and quickly took root due to the determined work of itinerant missionaries over the next several decades. Quakers, or members of the Society of Friends, faced different legal and social challenges in each colony. Many English men and women viewed Friends with hostility because they refused to bear arms in a colony’s defense or take loyalty oaths. Others were drawn to Quakers’ egalitarian message of universal access to the light of Christ in each human being. After George Fox’s visit to the West Indies and the mainland colonies in 1671–1672, Quaker missionaries followed his lead in trying to include enslaved Africans and native Americans in their meetings. Itinerant Friends were drawn to colonies with the most severe laws, seeking a public platform from which to display, through suffering, a joyful witness to the truth of the Quaker message. English Quakers then quickly ushered accounts of their sufferings into print. Organized and supported by English Quakers such as Margaret Fell, the Quaker “invasion” of itinerant missionaries put pressure on colonial judicial systems to define the acceptable boundaries for dissent. Nascent communities of Friends from Barbados to New England struggled with the tension between Quaker ideals and the economic and social hierarchies of colonial societies.

The Bible in the Seventeenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Music Pedagogy ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Public Rhetoric ◽  
Religious Imagination ◽  
The Bible ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
And Linguistics

The Bible served as the principal source of religious imagination for English colonials in the seventeenth century. It was that which inspired their radical ecclesiastical, political, and societal reconstructions and that by which they measured their faithfulness to the Christian tradition. It proved to be a remarkable stimulus to the formation of colonial institutions and material culture, and the production of an entire range of literary genres, including spiritual memoir, public rhetoric and exhortation, history, poetry, music, pedagogy, law, and linguistics. The Bible also served as the template upon which colonials worked out their understanding of the alien and the alienating, both among Europeans of differing religious understandings and between Europeans, African slaves, and Native Americans.

Predators and Pests

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-311
Author(s):  
Lauren Eichler ◽  
David Baumeister ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Central Mechanism ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Full Humanity

The tethering of Indigenous peoples to animality has long been a central mechanism of settler colonialism. Focusing on North America from the seventeenth century to the pres­ent, this essay argues that Indigenous animalization stems from the settler imposition onto Native Americans of dualistic notions of human/animal difference, coupled with the settler view that full humanity hinges on the proper cultivation of land. To further illustrate these claims, we attend to how Native Americans have been and continue to be animalized as both predators and pests, and show how these modes of animalization have and continue to provide settlers motive and justification for the elimination of Native peoples and the extractive domination of Native lands.

John Eliot, John Veniaminov, and engagement with the indigenous peoples of North America: A comparative missiology, part I

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-375
Author(s):  
Joseph William Black
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Early American ◽  
The Bible ◽  
John Eliot ◽  
The Face ◽  
Christian Literature

John Eliot was the 17th-century settler and Puritan clergyman who sought to engage with his Wampanoag neighbors with the Christian gospel, eventually learning their language, winning converts, establishing schools, translating the Bible and other Christian literature, even establishing villages of converted native Americans, before everything was wiped out in the violence of the King Philip War. John Eliot is all but forgotten outside the narrow debates of early American colonial history, though he was one of the first Protestants to attempt to engage his indigenous neighbors with the gospel. John Veniaminov was a Russian Orthodox priest from Siberia who felt called to bring Christianity to the indigenous Aleut and Tinglit peoples of island and mainland Alaska. He learned their languages, established schools, gathered worshiping communities, and translated the liturgies and Christian literature into their languages. Even in the face of later American persecution and marginalization, Orthodoxy in the indigenous communities of Alaska remains a vital and under-acknowledged Christian presence. Later made a bishop (Innocent) and then elected the Metropolitan of Moscow, Fr. John (now St. Innocent) is lionized in the Russian Church but almost unknown outside its scope, even in Orthodox circles. This 2-part article examines the ministries of these men, separated by time and traditions, and yet working in similar conditions among the indigenous peoples of North America, to learn something of both their missionary motivation and their methodology.

“Ravishing Odors of Paradise”: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-Century North America

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 827-852 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW KETTLER
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
New France ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Cultural Accommodation ◽  
Pays D'en Haut

In seventeenth-century North America, efforts at cultural accommodation through similarities in olfactory inclusive spiritual sensoriums helped to create cross-cultural concordance between Jesuit Fathers and Native Americans in New France, the St. Lawrence Valley, and the Pays d'en Haut. Jesuits engaged Native Americans towards Catholic conversion by using scentful tactics and sensory rhetoric. Jesuits increased their own respect for the olfactory during their North American encounters due to a siege mentality born of the Counter-Reformation and from a forcefully influential Native American respect for multisensory forms of environmental and spiritual literacy which included a heightened reverence for odors.

Thèmes et variations Réflexions stylistiques sur l’itinéraire d’Égérie

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 611-621
Author(s):  
Sára Horváthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Changes ◽  
The South ◽  
Hidden Information ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Social

SummaryEgeria, a 4th century pious woman from the south of present-day Spain, retold, after visiting Palestine with the Bible in hand, her observations to her sisters. If the linguistic aspects of her letters are quite well-known, much less is known about its stylistic value, inappropriately called “simple”.What seems to be boringly the same again and again, is in fact a constantly renewed and perfectly mastered “variation on a theme”, just as in a well-composed piece of music. Her apparent objectivity is indeed a wish to focus on what she considers the most important, namely to tell her community, as closely to reality as possible, what she observed during her pilgrimage. However, Egeria’s latin is also a testimony of the christian lexicon in construction and of the social changes that were in progress by that time.Linguistics and stylistics work together here, the choice of a word or a grammatical formula reveals hidden information about the proper style of an author who, despite her supposed objectivity, had real personal purposes.

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