The Bible Speaks to Labor

This chapter focuses on religious resources that the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) utilized to offer an alternative to Christian free enterprise and bring collective bargaining to the South. In the summer of 1946, the citizens of Danville, Virginia rallied behind a local minister and the local of the Textile Workers Union of America to create a Citizens' Committee to fight for economic justice and defy charges that they were led by outsiders “with Communistic leanings.” There were also allies in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, at Highlander Folk School, and in the industrial department of the YWCA who sought to fuse Protestantism's social message to the organization of southern workers. These pointed to a reservoir of prophetic Christianity upon which the CIO could draw when it mobilized for its crusade to organize Dixie. Perhaps most important, the CIO had a cadre of men and women with ties to Protestant churches whom it could send to build favorable community relations.

An Eighteenth-Century Ecology of Knowledge: Patronage and Natural History

This article analyses the construction and dissemination of natural-history knowledge in the eighteenth century. It takes the mapping and narration of Orkney as a case study, focusing on the local minister and amateur natural-historian George Low and his network of patron-client relationships with such prominent natural historians as Joseph Banks and Thomas Pennant. It focuses too on Low‘s network of informants and assistants among local island farmers, and argues that canonical natural-history texts were the products of collaborative and interdependent processes that included a large number of actors from all strata of society. To conceptualise how natural-history knowledge was created in this period, the article applies the metaphoric description ‘an ecology of knowledge’. This approach enables a focus on a large number of actors, their collaboration and influence on each other, while also paying attention to asymmetrical power relationships in which competition and appropriation took place.

Die Antwort der Debrecener neuen Orthodoxie auf den theologischen Liberalismus in Ungarn

The Response of Debrecen New Orthodoxy to Liberal Theology in Hungary. The Reformed Church of Hungary was not exempt from the impact of various theological schools of Western Europe during the nineteenth century. The historical theological school of Tübingen, the Swiss liberal and moderate theology and the Dutch ‘moderne theologie’ held a great sway on Hungarian Protestantism in particularly Reformed Theology. Parallel to this development another and distinct trend appeared as a response to the challenges posed by liberal theology, which preferred traditional theological stances. In consequence not only liberal theology but also orthodox, evangelical, and pietist theologies were transferred from England, Scotland, Switzerland, Germany and France to Hungary. While Germany experienced already in the 1840s and 1850 serious theological debates, Hungarian Protestantism was late to encounter a similar debate due to the political-historical situation. It is only after the Ausgleich (1867), the Agreement between Austrian and Hungarian aristocracy that in the era of political and national freedom theological debates surfaced and became really intense. The fiercest theological debate unfolded between the liberal theologians led by Mór Ballagi, a professor in Budapest, and the neo-orthodoxy of Debrecen Reformed University where Imre Révész sen., a local minister and Ferenc Balogh, professor of Dogma and Church History became the leading voices. This pioneering study seeks to demonstrate how the response of Debrecen neo-orthodoxy came into being in response to extremely liberal form of theology, which was organised and promoted by Mór Ballagi (Moritz Bloch), a convert from Judaism to Christianity

“Our Militancy is in Our Openness”: Gay Employment Rights Activism in California and the Question of Sexual Orientation in Sex Equality Law

On Good Friday of 1973, members of San Francisco's homosexual community staged a public demonstration amidst the skyscrapers in the business district. Shen Hayes, described as a “frail nineteen-year-old,” claimed to embody the suffering of the city's gay population. Hayes dragged a telephone pole “cross” on his back while throngs of protesters cheered and chanted. The local minister leading the action likened gays’ lack of rights to murder, and the caption accompanying Hayes’ photo in the newspaper claimed that he and other gay Californians had been “crucified.” Despite, despite the protest's religious intensity, its objective was secular. Activists had convened to oppose discrimination against those workers whom Pacific Telephone & Telegraph (PT&T) had labeled “manifest homosexuals”: employees and job applicants who either claimed or seemed to be gay.

A Death and a Community: Case Conference

Case of a dying teen-age girl is presented. The reactions of the hospital chaplain, the local minister, the girl's family, and the home community are critiqued by four experts in pastoral care and counseling.