The Distinctiveness of American Denominationalism: A Case Study of the 1846 Evangelical Alliance

1976 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernest R. Sandeen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
European History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Characteristic Shape ◽  
American Protestantism

The Chicago school in American religious historiography, especially its two most distinguished representatives, W. W. Sweet and Sidney E. Mead, has emphasized the growth of religious liberty as a crucial factor in accounting for the characteristic shape of American Protestantism in the early nineteenth century. The effect of this interpretative hypothesis has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of American religious history while focusing attention so intensely upon American phenomena that evidence from European history which might have served to qualify that hypothesis has not yet received adequate attention.

Bunyan and America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel D.S. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Key Features

This chapter surveys the reception and appropriation of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; 1684) in American religious history and literary culture, arguing that, through a series of politically, theologically, and artistically motivated realignments, American adaptations of John Bunyan’s classic shaped key features of American Protestantism and of a distinctively American literary tradition. In the eighteenth century, The Pilgrim’s Progress was evoked to reconceive ‘progress’ along lines more commercial and technological than spiritual. In the nineteenth century, modernized spin-offs became important touchstones in the hotly contested debates over theological liberalism and conservatism. In the increasingly secular twentieth century, it was often either ‘emptied of religion’ and recast as ‘road literature’, or appropriated dialectically as a means for coming to terms with the perceived absurdity of the human condition. In sum, to quote Jean Bethke Elshtain, ‘the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress tells us a good bit about the American story’.

Introduction

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 699-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grant Wacker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century

From the early nineteenth century through the middle twentieth century, foreign and domestic missionaries ranked among the most conspicuous figures of American religious history. In many quarters they still do. “Don't apologize,” one academic quipped at a conference in India. “All Americans are missionaries.”

The living conditions of Gypsy slaves in early nineteenth-century Wallachia

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-55
Author(s):  
DAVID GAUNT ◽  
JULIETA ROTARU
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Household Size ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Majority Population ◽  
Ethnic Attitudes

Very little research has been done specifically on the condition of the Gypsy slaves in Wallachia. Most general histories ignore them, and few contemporary observers studied them. This is just one more sign of their discrimination and neglect. This study draws on the exhaustive nominal lists of the Romani population from the database MapRom which draws on the first preserved count of the population of Danubian principalities (1838). Many aspects of the rob-slave condition have been analysed, the household size, the socio-professional and juridical categories and the Gypsy owners, the degree to which the Gypsies in Wallachia were integrated into the majority population and the ethnic attitudes of the surrounding population, and a case study of formation of a Gypsy settlement.

Abandoned Quarries

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-136
Author(s):  
Seth Perry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Early National ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Period

This concluding chapter discusses the consequences of biblicism in the early national period for subsequent American religious history. It considers bible culture in the later nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on how the corporatization of religious printing amplifed the Bible's status as an abstract commodity. Responding to the arguments put forward by W. P. Strickland in his 1849 History of the American Bible Society, the chapter argues that attaching the Bible's importance to American national identity could not leave the Bible unchanged, because that is not how scripturalization works. It also explains how the Bible's availability for citation and re-citation fundamentally changed the desire, effectiveness, and circumstances of its citation. Finally, it uses the abandoned quarry—empty because it has flled other places—as a figure for the themes of citation, performance, and identity explored in this book.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Perry Mueller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Construction Sites ◽  
European Descent ◽  
Book Of Mormon ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Religious Writings

This chapter introduces the book’s main argument: that the three original American races, “black,” “red,” and, “white,” were constructed first in the written archive before they were read onto human bodies. It argues that because of America’s uniquely religious history, the racial construction sites of Americans of Native, African, and European descent were religious archives. The Mormon people’s relationship with race serves as a case unto itself and a case study of the larger relationship between religious writings and race. During the nineteenth century early Mormons taught a theology of “white universalism,” which held that even non-whites, whom the Bible and the Book of Mormon taught were cursed with dark skin because of their ancestors’ sin against their families, could become “white” through dedication to the restored Mormon gospel. But Mormons eventually abandoned this “white universalism,” and instead taught and practiced a theology of white supremacy.

Who Was ‘The Deluded Follower of Joanna Southcott’? Millenarianism in Early Nineteenth-Century England

2013 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP LOCKLEY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Direct Communication ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Industrial Regions ◽  
New Evidence

This article re-examines a controversial group in English religious history: the millenarian followers of the prophet Joanna Southcott. The identities of many of Southcott's supporters have remained unclear, despite notable academic attention. Their relative social dislocation is most disputed; greater consensus characterises debates over women's attraction to Southcottianism. This article uses a recently-opened archive of Southcottian material, and reinterprets previously-known sources, to revise all existing pictures of who Southcottians were. Southcottian occupations in industrial regions indicate a similar social makeup to contemporary Methodism; Southcottianism had no distinct appeal to women. New evidence of the personal experiences of Southcottians further suggests that they may be best understood as a branch of the ‘heart religion’ of the period, one taking a distinctive view of the ways and means of direct communication between the divine and human worlds.

Enshrined Fortification: A Trialogue on the Rise and Fall of Safed

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-290
Author(s):  
Uri Zvi Shachar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Major Part ◽  
Physical Characteristics ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Military Architecture ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Dialogue ◽  
Ritual Spaces

The study of castles has formed a major part of crusade historiography since its inception in the early nineteenth century. Fortification has been taken to represent the magnificence of the efforts to rule the Holy Land and the battle between Christianity and Islam. Recently, however, scholars have recognised that, inasmuch as castles were celebrated as the epitomes of resilience and hostility, military architecture was far more dialogical than previously noticed. The design of castles involved a highly nuanced familiarity with the culture from which they were intended to defend. This article seeks to show that not only the physical characteristics of castles but also ideas about what made them religiously successful, in their capacity to enact and protect ritual spaces, were shaped through a dynamic inter-religious dialogue. Taking Safed as a case study, this article brings together three narratives—in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew—that share the attempt to laud the castle by drawing a dialectic between its strategic might and the sanctity of the soil upon which it is built. While the three accounts differ radically in their political stakes, the rhetorical strategies they employ in order to contemplate the spiritual efficacy of the castle is profoundly entangled.

The New Divinity and the Origins of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 791-819 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Kling
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
New Divinity

The theological influence of the New Divinity in the formation and character of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) is uncontested among scholars of American religious history and missions. Since the mid nineteenth century, both partisans of missions and nearly all scholarly observers have attributed the origins of the modern American Protestant missionary spirit to the writings of Jonathan Edwards and his self-appointed heirs, those Congregational ministers who came to be called New Divinity men. Edwards proposed a theology of cosmic redemption and supplied the exemplary missionary model in Life of Brainerd (1749), his most popular and most frequently reprinted work. Samuel Hopkins then furnished a theological rationale for missions by revising Edwards' aesthetic concept of “disinterested benevolence” into a practical one of self-denial for the greater glory of God's kingdom and the betterment of humankind.

scholarly journals The Scottish Reformations and the Origin of Religious and Civil Liberty in Britain and Ireland: Presbyterian Interpretations, c.1800-60

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
The North ◽  
Modern Period

This article examines Presbyterian interpretations in Scotland and Ireland of the Scottish Reformations of 1560 and 1638–43. It begins with a discussion of the work of two important Presbyterian historians of the early nineteenth century, the Scotsman, Thomas McCrie, and the Irishman, James Seaton Reid. In their various publications, both laid the template for the nineteenth-century Presbyterian understanding of the Scottish Reformations by emphasizing the historical links between the Scottish and Irish churches in the early-modern period and their common theology and commitment to civil and religious liberty against the ecclesiastical and political tyranny of the Stuarts. The article also examines the commemorations of the National Covenant in 1838, the Solemn League and Covenant in 1843, and the Scottish Reformation in 1860. By doing so, it uncovers important religious and ideological linkages across the North Channel, including Presbyterian evangelicalism, missionary activity, church–state relationships, religious reform and revival, and anti-Catholicism.

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