David D. Hall, ed.
"A fascinating collection that graphically demonstrates how participants become subtle theologians of 'lived religion' in America, from Ojibway hymn-singing to rustic homesteading and the 'Women's Aglow' movement."--John Butler, Yale University
At once historically and theoretically informed, these
essays invite the reader to think of religion dynamically,
reconsidering American religious history in terms of practices
that are linked to specific social contexts. The point of
departure is the concept of "lived religion."
Discussing such topics as gift exchange, cremation, hymn-
singing, and women's spirituality, a group of leading
sociologists and historians of religion explore the many facets
of how people carry out their religious beliefs on a daily basis.
As David Hall notes in his introduction, a history of practices
"encompasses the tensions, the ongoing struggle of
definition, that are constituted within every religious tradition
and that are always present in how people choose to act. Practice
thus suggests that any synthesis
is provisional."
The volume opens with two essays by Robert Orsi and
Danièle Hervieu-Léger that offer an overview of the rapidly
growing study of lived religion, with Hervieu-Léger using the
Catholic charismatic renewal movement in France as a window
through which to explore the coexistence of regulation and
spontaneity within religious practice. Anne S. Brown and David D.
Hall examine family strategies and church membership in early New
England. Leigh Eric Schmidt looks at the complex meanings of
gift-giving in America. Stephen Prothero writes about the
cremation movement in the late nineteenth century. In an essay on
the narrative structure of Mrs. Cowman's Streams in the Desert,
Cheryl Forbes considers the devotional lives of everyday women.
Michael McNally uses the practice of hymn-singing among the
Ojibwa to reexamine the categories of native and Christian
religion. In essays centering on domestic life, Rebecca Kneale
Gould investigates modern homesteading as lived religion while R.
Marie Griffith treats home-oriented spirituality in the Women's
Aglow Fellowship. In
"Golden- Rule Christianity," Nancy Ammerman talks about
lived religion in the American mainstream.
David D. Hall is Professor of American Religious
History at the Harvard Divinity School. His books include Worlds
of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular
Religious Belief in Early New England.
Princeton University Press [1997]
280 p.
Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community on Early African American Women's Writing
Katherine Clay Bassard
The late eighteenth century witnessed an influx of black women to
the slave-trading ports of the American Northeast.
The formation of an early African American community, bound
together by shared experiences and spiritual values,
owed much to these women's voices. The significance of their
writings would be profound for all African Americans'
sense of their own identity as a people.
Katherine Clay Bassard's book is the first detailed account of
pre-Emancipation writings from the period of 1760 to
1863, in light of a developing African American religious culture
and emerging free black communities. Her
study--which examines the relationship among race, culture, and
community--focuses on four women: the poet Phillis
Wheatley and poet and essayist Ann Plato, both
Congregationalists; and the itinerant preacher Jarena Lee, and
Shaker
eldress Rebecca Cox Jackson, who, with Lee, had connections with
African Methodism.
Together, these women drew on what Bassard calls a
"spirituals matrix," which transformed existing
literary genres to
accommodate the spiritual music and sacred rituals tied to the
African diaspora. Bassard's important illumination of
these writers resurrects their path-breaking work. They were
cocreators, with all black women who followed, of
African American intellectual life.
Katherine Clay Bassard is Associate Professor of English at the
University of California, Berkeley. Her articles
have been published in African American Review and Callaloo.
This volume brings to a close Jefferson's increasingly stormy tenure as Secretary of State, documenting, among many things, his epochal duel with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over the conduct of American foreign policy. Against the background of the deadly yellow fever in Philadelphia, he copes with obstreperous French consuls and informs Edmond Charles Genet that the American government has requested his recall. After resuming his work on the definition of U.S. maritime limits, Jefferson prevails upon President Washington to inform Congress not only of Genet's recall but also of the British refusal to carry out the disputed provisions of the Treaty of Paris. In a final effort to implement his policy of commercial retaliation against Great Britain, Jefferson submits to Congress in December his long-awaited Report on Commerce, vividly detailing the various forms of discrimination imposed on American trade by the British. The volume presents the early and final versions of the paper in all their textual complexity. Disappointed by Washington's tepid response to his criticisms of Hamilton's fiscal policies, frustrated by the Treasury Secretary's rising influence over American foreign policy, and eager to enjoy uninterruptedly the pleasures of domestic life, Jefferson retires from office on 31 December 1793, determined never again to suffer the torments of public life.
Volume 27 contains a supplement that covers some 270 documents for the period 1764-93 that have been found or reclassified since the publication of the last supplement in Volume 15.
John Catanzariti is Senior Research Historian in the Department of History at Princeton University.
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James A. Bear, Jr., is Director Emeritus of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (Monticello). Lucia C. Stanton is Senior Research Historian at the Foundation.
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June 1, 2001