scholarly journals Suggestive Therapeutics: New Thought's Relationship to Modern Yoga

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Singleton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Positive Thinking ◽  
Personal Power ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Yoga ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Universe

Modern, transnational yoga in the early twentieth century often defined itself in terms and ideologies borrowed from the popular current of esoteric American Protestantism known as New Thought. Like its forebear Transcendentalism, the New Thought movement was itself receptive to Indian ideas, albeit radically reworked to fit the doctrine of divinised self-hood and cosmic healing that it purveyed. Such adaptations were dialectically reabsorbed by exponents of the yoga renaissance, in a mutually reinforcing, cross-cultural rewriting of the theoretical bases and practices of yoga. New Thought provided a convenient and familiar spiritual lexicon with which to convey the arcane truths of yoga to Europeans, Americans and (increasingly) modern Hindus. The result was a new understanding of yoga in terms of the cult of positive thinking, personal power and affluence, and health through perfect harmony with the universe.

The Creative Advance Must Be Defended: Miscegenation, Metaphysics, and Race War in Jan Smuts’s Vision of the League of Nations

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
JACOB KRIPP
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
International Order ◽  
League Of Nations ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Mandate System ◽  
Race War ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Indirect Rule

This paper argues that the idea of global peace in early twentieth-century liberal international order was sutured together by the threat of race war. This understanding of racial peace was institutionalized in the League of Nations mandate system through its philosophical architect: Jan Smuts. I argue that the League figured in Smuts’s thought as the culmination of the creative advance of the universe: white internationalist unification and settler colonialism was the cosmological destiny of humanity that enabled a racial peace. In Smuts’s imaginary, the twin prospect of race war and miscegenation serves as the dark underside that both necessitates and threatens to undo this project. By reframing the problem of race war through his metaphysics, Smuts resolves the challenge posed by race war by institutionalizing indirect rule and segregation as a project of pacification that ensured that settlement and the creative advance of the cosmos could proceed.

The Beauty of the Lilies: Femininity, Innocence, and the Sweet Gospel of Uldine Utley

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
The Press ◽  
Conservative Protestantism ◽  
Biblical Literalism ◽  
Blue Eyes ◽  
Feminine Persona ◽  
Twentieth Century America

AbstractIn the 1920s, a child evangelist by the name of Uldine Utley toured the United States, attracting large crowds and captivating the press. She enjoyed the support of ministers from a wide variety of denominations, though her most ardent proponent was the famous fundamentalist preacher John Roach Straton. In many ways, Utley's success seems to counter existing narratives of early-twentieth-century religious history. Her revivalist ministry developed in an era that saw the decline of revivalism, and she rose to prominence during the height of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Claiming to adhere to biblical “literalism,” she nonetheless affirmed the appropriateness of female preaching. And, in the wake of efforts to masculinize American Protestantism and rediscover a “muscular” Christianity, Utley was known and celebrated for her femininity and beauty.Utley's femininity was, in fact, central to her appeal. She preached a “sweet and kindly gospel” and fashioned an elaborate feminine persona. Her diminutive size, her blond hair and blue eyes, and her white attire seemed to give her an “angelic” appearance, and her persistent association with flowers, both allegorical and real, further contributed to her aura of femininity. In the context of shifting gender arrangements and changing constructions of sexuality and morality in early-twentieth-century America, Utley's femininity and innocence provided a soothing alternative to the uncertain times. But the model of femininity Utley displayed was fraught with ambivalence and proved difficult to maintain as she matured from child to young woman. In addition to illuminating a frequently overlooked strand of conservative Protestantism during this time, attention to Utley's life and ministry also reveals a powerful yet ambivalent script that remains available to modern Protestant women to this day.

“God’s Spirit Lives in Me”

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-33
Author(s):  
Vaughn A. Booker
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Daily Practice ◽  
Positive Thinking ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Financial Wealth

This article explores the work of the Rev. Charleszetta “Mother” Waddles (1912–2001), an independent African American Christian minister who operated the Perpetual Mission for Saving Souls of All Nations in Detroit, Michigan. It argues that Mother Waddles sought to reshape and repurpose the spiritual rhetoric of New Thought theology—especially the concept of “positive thinking”—for her daily practice as a home missionary and for others living in similar circumstances. Mother Waddles was distinct from other twentieth-century, African American New Thought messengers because she sought to speak to and change the lives and mindsets of other impoverished African Americans without making a theological case for their divine entitlement to material prosperity or by encouraging their desire for financial wealth. Her undated, self-published book, Attributes and Attitudes, offered twelve divine virtues that every potential home (urban) missionary worker should embody—as well as twelve negative attitudes they must reject—in order to serve others.

“Spectacles in Color”: The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 798-816 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam See
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Down Low ◽  
Gender Differentiation ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Universe

The chapter “Spectacles in Color” in Langston Hughes's first autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), envisions modernist Harlem culture as a drag performance and offers a useful rubric for understanding Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), a lyric history of that culture whose poems characteristically cross gender, sexual, racial, and even formal lines. The Weary Blues employs a low-down, or nature-based, and down-low, or queer, aesthetic of racial and gender crossing that I term “primitive drag,” an aesthetic that ironically coincides with the stereotypes of African Americans and queers that were propagated by early-twentieth-century sexological science and degeneration theory: namely, that blacks and queers were unnatural and degenerate because they, unlike whites and heterosexuals, exhibited a lack of racial and gender differentiation. Disidentifying with those stereotypes, the primitive drag in The Weary Blues depicts queer feeling as natural and nature as queer, thus offering a productive paradox for rethinking literary histories of modernism and theories of sexuality by the rather Darwinian notion that “the nature of the universe,” as Hughes calls it, is always subject to change, or queering.

The Battery and the Windmill: Two Models of Protestant Devotionalism in Early-Twentieth-Century America

1996 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Ostrander
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Know How ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Daily Prayer ◽  
Christian Century ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Twentieth Century America

In 1912, Andrew Murray, an influential spokesperson for the Keswick theology prevalent in American fundamentalism, decried the sorry state of spirituality among modern Christians. How many there are, he exclaimed, who “say that they have no time and that the heart desire for prayer is lacking; they do not know how to spend half an hour with God! … Day after day, month after month passes, and there is no time to spend one hour with God.” Closing his jeremiad, Murray exclaimed, “How many there are who take only five minutes for prayer!” A few years later, Herbert Willett and Charles Clayton Morrison, editors of The Christian Century, the voice of the emerging liberal movement in American Protestantism, published a daily devotional guide entitled The Daily Altar. Its purpose was to provide Christians with “a few moments of quiet and reflection” in the midst of “short and crowded days” in order to maintain a daily prayer life. To be precise, devotions in The Daily Altar took one and a half minutes to complete.

scholarly journals The Holonic Christ: Catholicity as Individuation and Integration

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9) ◽  
pp. 686
Author(s):  
Robert Nicastro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Depth Psychology ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Psychological Development ◽  
The Self ◽  
New Science ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Theological Discourse ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
The Universe

The paradigm shift ushered in by the new science of the early twentieth century discloses the universe as a dynamic, energetic, and complex web of relationality. In view of this renewed sense of undivided wholeness, this article seeks to advance the growing synthesis of theology and depth psychology by way of a revised meaning of catholicity. Specifically, the article utilizes Carl Jung’s theory of individuation to suggest that catholicity is the conscious movement of the psyche toward wholeness, an outcome that Jung associated with Christ. The article introduces the term “Holonic Christ” to describe Christ as both the regulating principle of wholeness in nature and the co-recipient of the activity of deepening wholeness through the psychological development of the self-reflective individual. In this way, the article contends that catholicity is the process of individuation in its fullest form: a dynamic energy of the psyche that urges us in the direction of a more integrated personality, an ever-expanding community, and an eschatological remediation of divine self-contradiction made possible by human self-actualization. The article concludes with a discussion of the far-reaching religious implications of this study and explains why this new understanding of Christ is valuable to theological discourse.

The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism

2006 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 374-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Lofton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Adaptation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Shared Commitment ◽  
Self Examination ◽  
Modern Era

Scholarship on early-twentieth-century American Protestant modernism appears to have arrived at an impasse. Although scholars continue to explore the biographical contours of modernist individuals, and theologians still review the capacity of modernist theologies, the body of analytical scholarship on the “modernist impulse” has failed to keep apace with the glut of materials addressing its fraternal twin, fundamentalism. Published in 1976, William Hutchison's The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism remains the last significant historical commentary on the cultural and intellectual dynamics of Protestant modernism. In that masterful exegesis, Hutchison supplied the classic definition of this impulse, arguing that despite the diversity of its participants and complexity of their thought, the modernist movement in America could be accurately summarized as a shared commitment to cultural adaptation, God's immanent role in human development, and a postmillennial progressivism. While this tripartite formulation still provides the authoritative elucidation of early-twentieth-century Protestant thought, a reappraisal of the modernist canon reveals that Christian liberals not only were invested in theological overhaul and intellectual malleability, but also persistently specified an elaborate methodological structure for belief. In works such as Minot Savage's Jesus and Modern Life (1898), Margaret Benson's The Venture of Rational Faith (1908), Douglas Clyde Macintosh's Theology as an Empirical Science (1919), J. Macbride Sterrett's Modernism in Religion (1922), and Henry Nelson Wieman's The Wrestle of Religion with Truth (1927), seminarians and ministers offered detailed descriptions of how Protestants should think in the modern era. These were not expansive tracts bent on exploring the fluid boundaries of faith in a plural culture; rather, these were precise, pointed exhortations on the virtue of scrupulous historical research, scriptural comparison, and relentless self-examination. Rather than continue to translate Protestant modernism as cultural acquiescence and enthusiastic historicism, this essay suggests that a recalibrated portrait of this movement is needed.

Henry Moore’s Narayana and Bhataryan: theatre of sacrifice

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-343
Author(s):  
Ragini Mohite
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
Cultural Relevance ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Mother And Child ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early Indication

Henry Moore’s unpublished play Narayana and Bhataryan (c. 1919) was first performed in 1920 at Castleford Secondary School. Moore wrote, performed in and designed the programme for this play. Despite timely theatrical returns to Moore’s only surviving literary creation, this play has not yet been the subject of in-depth critical study. Using archival research, this article engages with the play’s early indication of Moore’s sculptural tendencies. It traces the play’s parallels with another play produced in the early twentieth century: Rabindranath Tagore’s Sacrifice. Doing so highlights the cross-cultural echoes that exist in Narayana and Bhataryan, its relationship to early twentieth-century global modernist movements, the thematic presence of posture, architecture, ritual and trauma, and the emergence of Moore’s lifelong concerns with the mother and child and the human body. This article places Moore’s play in critical relationship to his sculpture and introduces his lone contribution to the fabric of modern drama as having cross-cultural relevance in the 1980s when an exhibition of his work toured India.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document