The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America

The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America is designed to address a noticeable void in resources focused on analyzing the Bible in America in specific historical moments and in relationship to specific institutions and cultural expressions. Paying attention to the Bible from its earliest appearance in seventeenth-century New England up through its presence and usage in twenty-first century America, this handbook takes seriously the fact that the Bible is both a physical object that has exercised considerable totemic power, as well as a text with a powerful intellectual design that has inspired a wide range of cultural rituals, social policies, and artistic expression. This Handbook brings together a number of established scholars, as well as younger scholars on the rise, to provide insightful overviews and rich bibliographic resources to those interested in the Bible’s role in the history of American cultural formation. Topics addressed in the Handbook include—but are not limited to—the Bible’s production, translation, distribution, and interpretation in the United States, the Bible’s usage and relationship to a host of American religious traditions and social movements, as well the Bible’s linkage to such things as American cinema, literature, art, music, amusement parks, environmentalism, theories of gender and race, education, and politics.

Author(s):  
Amanda J. Baugh

American environmentalism historically has been associated with the interests of white elites. Yet religious leaders in the twenty-first century have helped instill concern about the earth among groups diverse in religion, race, ethnicity, and class. How did that happen and what are the implications? Building on scholarship that provides theological and ethical resources to support the “greening” of religion, God and the Green Divide examines religious environmentalism as it actually happens in the daily lives of urban Americans. Baugh argues that the spread of religious environmentalism in the United States has relied not simply on the “ecological dimensions” of scriptures, theology, and religious traditions, but also on latent assumptions about race, ethnicity, and class. By carefully examining negotiations of racial and ethnic identities as central to the history of religious environmentalism, this work complicates assumptions that religious environmentalism is a direct expression of theology, ethics, or religious beliefs.


Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 76 (5) ◽  
pp. 741-749
Author(s):  
Thomas B. Newman

To investigate the recent 150% increase in the reported incidence of ventricular septal defects (VSDs) in the United States, the epidemiology of ventricular septal defects was examined. The apparent incidence of VSDs is highly dependent on case finding methods, and more complete diagnosis and reporting probably account for the increase in reported incidence. Variations in case ascertainment also account for the small differences in incidence in studies from different places. The several known risk factors for VSD, including a family history of congenital heart disease and exposure to certain drugs, infectious agents, and maternal metabolic disturbances, explain few cases. Incidence rates are similar in different races and seasons and are unrelated to maternal age, birth order, sex, and socioeconomic status. VSDs occur naturally in a wide range of mammals and in birds, which also have four-chambered hearts. Despite identical genes and similar prenatal environments, the concordance rate in identical twins is only about 10%. The consistency of incidence among individuals with widely differing genes and environments and the frequency of discordance in identical twins suggest that VSDs often occur as random errors in development, at a frequency largely determined by the complexity of normal cardiac morphogenesis. This hypothesis has two major implications: many VSDs are not preventable and parents need not feel responsible for VSDs in their children.


M. Fabius Quintilianus was a prominent orator, declaimer, and teacher of eloquence in the first century ce. After his retirement he wrote the Institutio oratoria, a unique treatise in Antiquity because it is a handbook of rhetoric and an educational treatise in one. Quintilian’s fame and influence are not only based on the Institutio, but also on the two collections of Declamations which were attributed to him in late Antiquity. The Oxford Handbook of Quintilian aims to present Quintilian’s Institutio as a key treatise in the history of Graeco-Roman rhetoric and its influence on the theory and practice of rhetoric and education, from late Antiquity until the present day. It contains chapters on Quintilian’s educational programme, his concepts and classifications of rhetoric, his discussion of the five canons of rhetoric, his style, his views on literary criticism, declamation, and the relationship between rhetoric and law, and the importance of the visual and performing arts in his work. His huge legacy is presented in successive chapters devoted to Quintilian in late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, Northern Europe during the Renaissance, Europe from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, and the United States of America. There are also chapters devoted to the biographical tradition, the history of printed editions, and modern assessments of Quintilian. The twenty-one authors of the chapters represent a wide range of expertise and scholarly traditions and thus offer a unique mixture of current approaches to Quintilian from a multidisciplinary perspective.


Author(s):  
W. Andrew Collins ◽  
Willard W. Hartup

This chapter summarizes the emergence and prominent features of a science of psychological development. Pioneering researchers established laboratories in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century to examine the significance of successive changes in the organism with the passage of time. American psychologists, many of whom had studied in the European laboratories, subsequently inaugurated similar efforts in the United States. Scientific theories and methods in the fledgling field were fostered by developments in experimental psychology, but also in physiology, embryology, ethology, and sociology. Moreover, organized efforts to provide information about development to parents, educators, and public policy specialists further propagated support for developmental science. The evolution of the field in its first century has provided a substantial platform for future developmental research.


2021 ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Weiyun Mа

The article reviews research on Chinese Eastern Railway in China. The research on Chinese Eastern Railway in China began in the early 20th century, has a history of more than 100 years. The existing research results mainly focus on the construction of Chinese Eastern Railway and Tsarist Russia's expansion policy, negotiation between China and Russia (Soviet Union) on the railway issue, the contradictions and struggles of Japan and the United States around the railway problem and so on. These documents cover a wide range of issues which almost involve the political, diplomacy, economy and trade, culture and other fields of international relations in the Far East from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of 20th century, provide a broad vision for the study of Chinese Eastern Railway. But there are problems in the research. Although there are many works on Chinese Eastern Railway, but most discussions are limited to a certain stage, there are few works on the whole history of Chinese Eastern Railway. Not only should we pay attention to the study of the early 20th century in other words the period of the Qing Empire, moreover, we should strengthen the research in the period of the Republic of China and the new China period, this is of great significance to the study of the whole history of Sino — Soviet relations. In addition due to specific historical conditions, part of the Russian data of Chinese Eastern Railway in China was lost, in addition, there is no detailed and authoritative reference book for Russian archives of Chinese Eastern Railway, this situation makes the cited materials in Chinese works appear too old the materials cited in the book seem too old. The authors thank for proofreading and examining the translation A.I. Kobzev, Ph.D. (Philosophy), professor, director of China Department, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, director of TSC of Humanities and Social Sciences and director of Philosophy Department of MIPT (SRI), director of TSC «Oriental Philosophy» of RSUH, Chief researcher of Russian language, literature and culture research center of Heilongjiang University.


Author(s):  
Kanika Kishore Saxena

Mathura is famous for its association with Vāsudeva‒Kṛṣṇa, an important deity of the Hindu pantheon. However, apart from the sanctity attached to this place by Hindus, it has also provided conditions for the nurturing of Buddhist, Jaina, nāga and yakṣa traditions. This book engages in a wide range of epigraphic, archaeological and art historical data from the various sites in the Mathura area and weaves this to present a coherent picture of the variegated religious history of the area from c.600 CE to c.1000 CE, which witnessed various religions/cults/sects competing for attention and patronage. The chapters in this book have been divided according to religious traditions, namely, Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism, along with the Kṛṣṇa, yakṣa, nāga, and mātṛkā cults. It raises many important issues related to Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism as well as older cults of the yakṣas and nāgas. The objects of donation ranged from images, stūpas, temples to tanks and gardens. Donations by monks and nuns; together with laity from different locations within and beyond Mathura, amply reflect on the social mosaic of the time. The role of monastics and laity, the nature of patronage, and the social and political underpinnings of the religious history are also examined, all within a long, diachronic frame. This book reveals the complexity of the religious history of Mathura to provide the reader a taste of its diversity and plurality.


person’s use of the Bible as the most important religious authority was implicitly to devalue the elaborate edifices protecting scriptural interpretation that prevailed in all the historic European churches, Protestant as well as Catholic. The institutions compromised by such logic included established churches defined as authoritative communicators of divine grace through word and sacrament, institutions of higher learning monopolized by the establishment in order to protect intellectual activity from religious as well as rational error, and the monarchy as the primary fount of godly social stabil-ity. British Protestant Dissent moved somewhat more cautiously in this direction. But even after the rise of Methodism and the reinvigoration of the older Dissenting traditions, the strength of evangelicalism among British establishmentarians never permitted the kind of thoroughly voluntaristic ecclesiology that prevailed in the United States. On questions of establishment, post-Revolutionary American evangeli-calism marked a distinct development from the colonial period when the most important evangelical leaders had spoken with opposing voices. Some, like Charles Wesley, whose hymns were being used in America from the 1740s, remained fervent defenders of the status quo. Some, like George Whitefield, gave up establishment in practice but without ever addressing the social implications of such a move and without being troubled by occa-sional relapses into establishmentarian behaviour. Some, like the Baptists in America from the 1750s, renounced establishment with a vengeance and became ardent proponents of disestablishment across the board. Some, like the American Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent, eagerly threw establishment away in the enthusiasm of revival, only later to attempt a partial recovery after enthusiasm cooled. Some, like John Wesley, gave up establishment instincts reluctantly, even while promoting religious practices that others regarded as intensely hostile to establishment. Some, like Francis Asbury, the leader of American Methodists, gave it up without apparent trauma. Many, like Jonathan Edwards and the leading evangelical laymen of the Revolutionary era – John Witherspoon, Patrick Henry and John Jay – never gave up the principle of establishment, even though they came to feel more spiritual kinship with evangelicals who attacked established churches (including their own) than they did with many of their fellow establishmen-tarian Protestant colleagues who did not embrace evangelicalism. By the late 1780s, except in New England, this mixed attitude towards formal church and state ties had been transformed into a nearly unanimous embrace of disestablishment. Even in Connecticut and Massachusetts, where evangelical support of the Congregational establishments could still be found, the tide was running strongly away from mere toleration towards full religious liberty. Methodism was an especially interesting variety of evangelicalism since its connectional system retained characteristics of an establishment (especially the human authority of Wesley, or the bishops who succeeded Wesley). But


Author(s):  
Gregorio Bettiza

The conclusion has two main objectives. The first is to show how the International Religious Freedom, Faith-Based Foreign Aid, Muslim and Islamic Interventions, and Religious Engagement regimes form a broader American foreign policy regime complex on religion. The second objective is to reflect on the book’s wider implications for the study of religion in international relations and highlight areas for further research. This includes assessing the strength of the book’s theoretical framework in light of ongoing developments under the Trump administration; understanding better the changes occurring to the religious traditions and actors that America draws from and intervenes in around the world; investigating further how the American experience with the operationalization of religion in foreign policy relates and compares to similar policy changes taking place elsewhere; and reflecting more broadly on the implications for international order of the growing systematic attempt by the United States to manage and mobilize religion in twenty-first-century world politics.


2019 ◽  
pp. 178-195
Author(s):  
Angela McShane

This chapter argues that drinking things are of central importance to our understanding of the long relationship between humans and alcohol. It explores the history of the English man (and woman’s) pint of beer, as an object, a drink, and a measure, from the late-sixteenth to the twenty-first century, to show how the relationships between objects, drinks, and measures have been socially and culturally constructed over time. Drawing upon a wide range of objects, images, and textual sources, and benefiting from the theoretical lenses of material performativity and praxeology, it argues that material insights not only help us to understand the deeper cultural processes at play in the routines and rituals of convivial drinking, but also help us to understand their wider role in social and political change.


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