Mind Cure and Meditation at Greenacre and Beyond

Mind Cure ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 63-99
Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Buddhist Meditation ◽  
American Interest ◽  
Thought Leaders

This chapter examines the practices of Buddhist meditation and Raja yoga in New Thought. Leaders of New Thought were first exposed to Buddhism and Vedanta philosophy through the publications of European Orientalists and the Theosophical Society and, later, though personal contacts with Asian Buddhist and Hindu missionaries. In addition to D. T. Suzuki, who helped to spark American interest in Japanese Zen, other important early missionaries were Anagarika Dharmapāla, a Sri Lankan Buddhist and Theosophist, and Swami Vivekenanda, an Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order who launched the Vedanta Society in North America. New Thought leaders, Theosophists, and Asian missionaries met in person at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions and continued to develop relationships for more than a decade, particularly at the Greenacre conferences in Eliot, Maine. This chapter reveals the transnational nature of New Thought, which is typically considered to be an American metaphysical religious movement.

New Thought and the Inner Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-352
Author(s):  
Anne Stiles
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Positive Thinking ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
True Self ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Frances Hodgson Burnett ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Inner Child ◽  
Popular Psychology

Anne Stiles, “New Thought and the Inner Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy” (pp. 326–352) In twenty-first-century popular psychology and self-help literature, the “inner child” refers to an original or true self that serves as a repository of wisdom and creativity for its adult counterpart. This essay traces the modern inner child back to the nineteenth-century new religious movement known as New Thought, which emphasized positive thinking as a means to health and prosperity. Emma Curtis Hopkins, the leading New Thought teacher of the 1880s and 1890s, described an idealized “Man Child” within each adult woman who could lead her to spiritual serenity and worldly success. Frances Hodgson Burnett fictionalized this figure in her blockbuster novel Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), whose eponymous child hero helps his mother achieve undreamed-of wealth and status. He also serves as her proxy outside of the domestic sphere, allowing her to reach personal goals without appearing selfish or inappropriately ambitious. The novel’s enormous popularity may have had something to do with this symbiotic relationship between mother and son. Then as now, the inner child helped women reconcile social pressures to be selfless and giving with career pursuits and self-indulgent behavior. The persistence of the inner child suggests that contemporary feminism still has work to do in enabling women to embrace opportunities without guilt.

“Links to the Frontier; Jesuit Supply of its Moxos Missions, 1683-1767.”

1980 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Block
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
North American ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Religious Order ◽  
American Interest ◽  
Thematic Approach ◽  
Missionary Church

Our view of the Spanish missionary Church results from the convergence of two streams of historical writing. The first uses the activities of a particular religious order or its most illustrious members to frame the foundation and growth of a missionary enterprise. The second pursues a thematic approach, emphasizing the importance of the missions as foci of Spanish culture in a native world. Within this second stream falls the particularly North American interest in the frontier with its stress on the mission stations as the vanguard of Iberian religious, political, and social institutions.Though widely divergent in organization and emphasis, both streams present a picture of isolation. Solitary missions existed as self-contained theocracies on the very edge of the viceroyalty. The missionaries themselves constantly stressed this view. Their correspondence cites the difficulties of operating stations at great remove from the seats of Spanish power in America. Professional historians, following the diaries and letters of the missionary fathers, have placed priests, neophytes, and — in North America — presidial soldiers beyond the aid or control of metropolitan authority touched only by an occasional visita or supply train.

Territoriality and the Technics of Drylands Science in Palestine and North America

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 570-573 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omar Imseeh Tesdell
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Agricultural Research ◽  
Agricultural Practices ◽  
Ecological Zone ◽  
American Interest ◽  
Rainfed Farming ◽  
Zionist Movement ◽  
Manuscript Project ◽  
History Of

At the turn of the 20th century, agricultural experts in several countries assembled a new agro-scientific field: dryland farming. Their agricultural research practices concomitantly fashioned a new agro-ecological zone—the drylands—as the site of agronomic intervention. As part of this effort, American scientists worked in concert with colleagues in the emerging Zionist movement to investigate agricultural practices and crops in Palestine and neighboring regions, where nonirrigated or rainfed agriculture had long been practiced. In my larger manuscript project, I consider how the reorganization of rainfed farming as dryfarming is central to the history of both the Middle East and North America, where it was closely related to modern forms of power, sovereignty, and territoriality. I suggest that American interest in dryfarming science emerged out of a practical need to propel and sustain colonization of the Great Plains, but later became a joint effort of researchers from several emerging settler enterprises, including Australia, Canada, and the Zionist movement. In contrast to a naturally ocurring bioregion, I argue that the drylands spatiality was engineered through, rather than outside, the territorialization of modern power.

Histories of Heterodoxy: Shifting Approaches to a Millenarian Tradition in Modern Church History

2013 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 377-388
Author(s):  
Philip Lockley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
North America ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Psychology Of Religion ◽  
Church History ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

In 1956, the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge published a work chronicling a subject billed as ‘an unrecorded chapter of Church history’. The author was an elderly Anglican clergyman, George Balleine. The book was Past Finding Out: The Tragic Story of Joanna Southcott and her Successors.Before Balleine, the early nineteenth-century figure of Joanna Southcott, and her eventually global religious movement, had garnered scant mainstream attention. The most extensive work was Ronald Matthews’s rudimentary analysis of Southcott and five other ‘English Messiahs’ in a 1936 contribution to the psychology of religion. Southcott had not, in fact, claimed to be a messiah herself; rather, she was the prophet of a coming messiah named ‘Shiloh’. Southcott’s followers (variously labelled ‘Southcottians’, ‘Christian Israelites’ ‘Jezreelites’, among other names) believed that she and certain later figures were inspired by God to signal the imminence of the Christian millennium. Claimants to be the actual Shiloh messiah occasionally featured within this particular tradition of biblical interpretation, inspiration and theodicy. The splinter-prone movement spread through Britain, Australia, New Zealand and North America, and retained a few thousand members in the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Conditions for the spread of the Peyote cult in North America

1975 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 70-83
Author(s):  
Åke Hultkrantz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Rio Grande ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
The North ◽  
North American Indian ◽  
Native North America ◽  
Modern Form ◽  
New Facilities

As is well known large parts of native North America with the Prairies and Plains in the middle of the continent as the centre of diffusion have constituted, since the end of the last century, the scene of a nativistic Indian movement, the so-called peyote cult. The peyote cult—or, as it should have been called, the peyote religion — is named after its central cultic action, the consumption (by eating, drinking or smoking) of the spineless cactus peyote (Lophophora williamsii). This cactus that may be found growing wild along the Rio Grande and in the country south of this river contains several alkaloids, among them the morphine-like, hallucinogeneous mescaline. In pre-Columbian days peyote was used in connection with certain public ceremonies among the Indians of Mexico, for instance, at the annual thanksgiving ceremonies. In its modern form the peyote ritual constitutes a religious complex of its own, considered to promote health, happiness and welfare among its adepts. The two major questions are: what were the conditions for the diffusion of the peyote cult? What particular factors accounted for the spread of the cult to just those areas that were mentioned above, and for its obstruction in other areas?  The change in the North American Indian situation at the end of the nineteenth century supplied new facilities for religious innovations and for the introduction of a foreign religious movement, the peyote cult.

Saving the Overlooked Continent. American Protestant Missions in Western Europe 1940-1975 Hans Krabbendam

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 237-240
Author(s):  
Frank Hinkelmann
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
World Council Of Churches ◽  
Content Type ◽  
American Interest ◽  
P Content ◽  
The World ◽  
World Council ◽  
History Of ◽  
Further Development

<p content-type="flush left">Summary <p content-type="flush left">This book presents research into North-American evangelical missionary initiatives in Europe between 1940 and 1975. It investigates the motives and aims of the American interest in Europe and describes the further development of the American-European relationship among evangelicals. Regarding the first decades, the author deals with the competition within the conservative American camp between traditional fundamentalists and evangelicals for influence in Europe (which the fundamentalists lost) and contrasts developments in the evangelical space with those of traditional inter-church relations in the context of the World Council of Churches between North America and Europe. Krabbendam makes an important contribution to the history of the evangelical movement in Europe and the influence of North America. <p content-type="flush left">Zusammenfassung <p content-type="flush left">Dieses Buch präsentiert nordamerikanische evangelikale Missionsinitiativen in Europa in den Jahren zwischen 1940 und 1975. Es erarbeitet Motive und Ziele des amerikanischen Missionsinteresses an Europa und schildert die verschiedenen Phasen der weiteren Entwicklung des amerikanisch-europäischen Verhältnisses unter Evangelikalen. Dabei geht der Autor hinsichtlich der ersten Jahrzehnte auf den Wettstreit innerhalb des konservativen US-amerikanischen Lagers zwischen traditionellen Fundamentalisten und Evangelikalen um Einfluss in Europa ein (den das fundamentalistische Lager verlor) und stellt die Entwicklungen im evangelikalen Raum denen traditioneller zwischenkirchlicher Beziehungen im Umfeld des Weltkirchenrates zwischen Nordamerika und Europa gegenüber. Krabbendam legt einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Geschichte der evangelikalen Bewegung in Europa und des Einflusses Nordamerikas in diesen Jahrzehnten vor. <p content-type="flush left">Résumé <p content-type="flush left">Ce livre traite des initiatives missionnaires évangéliques nord-américaines en Europe entre 1940 et 1975. Il examine les motifs et les objectifs de l’intérêt américain pour l’Europe et décrit le développement de la relation américano-européenne dans la sphère évangélique. S’intéressant aux premières décennies, l’auteur étudie la compétition opposant, au sein même du camp américain conservateur, fondamentalistes traditionnels et évangéliques pour le gain d’une influence prépondérante en Europe (compétition perdue par les fondamentalistes) et compare les développements perceptibles dans l’espace évangélique à ceux des relations inter-Églises traditionnelles dans le cadre du Conseil Œcuménique des Églises entre l’Amérique et l’Europe. Krabbendam apporte une contribution importante à l’histoire du mouvement évangélique en Europe et de l’influence nord-américaine.

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