Abstract
ABSTRACTReformation Protestants’ detestation of Catholic sacra, holy objects, and sacred sites is well documented. To probe the later history of this contempt, this essay observes two nineteenth-century Protestants in Palestine. Both, as might be anticipated, exhibit disgust at those physical phenomena revered by other Christianities. But surprisingly, both also obsessively collect alternative things that are associated with the Holy Land. Contemporary theory—namely Bill Brown's Thing Theory—is brought to bear on the preoccupation with things represented by this substitution of safe objects for abhorrent ones. However, instead of providing an explanatory frame for this behavior, Thing Theory seems to reproduce it. The essay concludes by suggesting that a primal Protestant anxiety about powerful things continues to haunt contemporary Western scholarship.
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