American Clergyman Research Articles

The Symmetry of Life: The Sermonic Insights of Phillips Brooks

This article focuses on the sermon “The Symmetry of Life” by Phillips Brooks (1881), a late-18th-century American clergyman who was known for the depth and inspirational quality of his sermons. To set the context for consideration of the sermon, I discuss the religious journey of young men as presented in Striking Out (Capps 2011b) and my related article on Ernest Thayer (Capps 2015b); my psychobiographical study of young clergymen (Capps 2005) and employment of Levinson’s (1978) life structure model in my interpretation of Brooks’s young adulthood; the implications of preaching and the sermon structure for pastoral counseling (Capps 1980); and William James’s (1987) positive view of Brooks. Following brief commentaries on Brooks’s preaching style (Scarlett 1950) and a presentation of the sermon itself, I note several parallels between the implicit developmental model presented in the sermon and Levinson’s developmental model. I conclude with a brief discussion of Benjamin Franklin’s (1964) empirical study of the potential impact of George Whitefield’s preaching and the methodological implications of this study for pastoral theology.

Taking Agency, Constituting Community: The Activist Rhetoric of Richard Allen

Abstract This study features the activist rhetoric of early African American clergyman Richard Allen. Through chronological analyses of four late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts, we explore how Allen establishes individual and corporate agency and furthers an African American community consciousness. Allen's rhetoric, we argue, demonstrates the ways material and rhetorical opportunities affect textual production that, in turn, enables freedom and community to emerge. Paying particular attention to the strategy of the narrative account, we demonstrate how Allen's advocacy, which both works within and challenges the limitations imposed by white society, reflects and develops his identity as a black community leader.

‘Who are You Gentle Reader?’: John Updike—A Month of Sundays (1975)** Paper presented at the Conference of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture, October 2004, in Uppsala, Sweden.

This essay revisits a novel that became a locus classicus for interdisciplinary study of literature and theology in the late twentieth century. In 1975, Updike anticipated readers who would recognise references to both The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne's nineteenth-century analysis of America's Puritan inheritance, and Paul Tillich's life and theology. The witty, blasphemous and sad, Doubting Thomas cleric, whose story this is, claims that 'bodies are us', and ventures the view that adultery represents the superabundant work of grace. How can a novel that, for reasons of topical satire, represented women as voiceless sexual objects, be read in 2005? 'Who are you gentle reader?' is a question posed in the first chapter of John Updike's A Month of Sundays1 by the priapic Rev. Tom Marshfxeld, who, finds himself, at his bishop's behest, on a desert retreat in a sanatorium for variously dysfunctional White Protestant American clergymen. For 'sole therapy' he has the prospect of 'sullying' the blank sheets left in his motel room. The puns, innuendos and theological jokes that gush from his pen announce a highly self-conscious writer, turning this way and that before the literary mirror of his 'gentle reader' so as to achieve his desired effects. The address to the 'gentle reader' is itself one of these writerly tricks: it hovers between being an arch reference to one of prose fiction's oldest narrative conventions and an insinuation that the unknown reader for whom he postures will be of the 'gentler' sex. But behind Marsh stands John Updike, a writer equally self-consciously adept in composing the clues aimed at flattering and seducing his following into recognizing his position in the great American tradition. The averagely educated reader will swiftly pick up the more obvious * Paper presented at the Conference of the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture, October 2004, in Uppsala, Sweden. Literature & Theology © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: joumals.permissions@oxfordjoumals.org I The Author 200 j. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.156 on Sat, 10 Sep 2016 05:40:54 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Conjure and Christianity in the Nineteenth Century: Religious Elements in African American Magic

Shortly before the turn of the nineteenth Century, an amateur collector of Negro Spirituals and folklore recounted a conversation that she had had with an unidentified African American clergyman. According to the collector, the clergyman, “one of the most scholarly and noted ministers of the colored race,” admitted that, even as a professed Christian, he found himself “under the influences of voodooism” and other African occult practices. He explained that, as a young pastor, he had grown “completely discouraged” after numerous unsuccessful attempts to attract new worshipers into his congregation until one day an unexpected visitor happened his way:I was in my study praying when the door opened and a little Conjure man came in and said softly: “You don't understand de people. You must get you a hand as a friend to draw 'em. Ef you will let me fix you a luck charm, you'll git 'em.”

Conjure and Christianity in the Nineteenth Century: Religious Elements in African American Magic

Shortly before the turn of the nineteenth Century, an amateur collector of Negro Spirituals and folklore recounted a conversation that she had had with an unidentified African American clergyman. According to the collector, the clergyman, “one of the most scholarly and noted ministers of the colored race,” admitted that, even as a professed Christian, he found himself “under the influences ofvoodooism” and other African occult practices. He explained that, as a young pastor, he had grown “completely discouraged” after numerous unsuccessful attempts to attract new worshipers into his congregation until one day an unexpected visitor happened his way:I was in my study praying when the door opened and a little Conjure man came in and said softly: “You don't understand de people. You must get you ahandas a friend to draw 'em. Ef you will let me fix you a luck charm, you'll git 'em.”

In Defense of the Gallows: Justifications of Capital Punishment in New England Execution Sermons, 1674-1825

LIKE FAST-DAYS, ORDINATIONS, AND FUNERALS, PUBLIC HANGINGS WERE extraordinary communal events addressed by early New England ministers.1 Sermons dealing with capital cases were typically delivered on the Sunday preceding an execution and on the day of the hanging itself. They were generally directed both to the condemned prisoner and to a wider audience.2 Since few civic occasions seem to have aroused as much popular interest in New England as public hangings, these events provided clergymen with ideal opportunities to speak both to their own congregations and to the broader community. Indeed, judged strictly in terms of attendance, criminal executions were almost certainly the preeminent public events on the regional calendar. Crowds at New England's gallows reportedly numbered well into the thousands, even during the seventeenth century.3 Contemporary accounts further suggest that early execution sermons were almost as well attended as the hangings themselves.4 In addition to the throngs that listened in person, many such sermons reached a still wider audience through their subsequent appearance in print. While discourses to condemned prisoners were frequently delivered in seventeenthand eighteenth-century England, the execution sermon as an autonomous literary genre seems to have been an invention of the New England Puritans.' In contrast to the barely reputable prison chaplains who typically delivered gallows sermons in England, the authors of New England execution discourses included the most prominent and influential of American clergymen, among them such notables as Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Colman, and Charles Chauncy.6 The first execution discourse published in the region was probably Samuel Danforth's The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into

Clergy skills in family-planning education and counseling

During the decade 1962-1971, the proportion of married seminary students who planned to contribute actively to family-planning counseling resources in American communities rose from six out of 10 to eight out of 10. During that same period, however, follow-up data indicate that the actual participa tion level in premarital birth-control counseling by clergymen increased only half as much as expected from 1962 data. The evidence offered below suggests that this gap is in part a result of a lack of counseling preparation: recently graduated American clergymen who plan to offer premarital family planning counseling are as poorly prepared to do so as were their predeces sors 10 years ago, due to a continuing lack of adequate training in this area provided by the seminaries.

Black Power in the Church

greater force for good in our society exists than those who have chosen to dedicate their lives as stewards of God. As modern day apostles, the clergy are intimately woven into the fabric of man's life, his struggles to overcome evil and his eternal quest for true brotherhood. The clergy, in their role as carriers of the message of Christ, must whether they like it or not involve themselves both in bringing this message to the people and constantly working out ways and means to make it a reality. We often pray, kingdom come, they will be done . Thy will be done when? How? Tomorrow? Next year? Thy will be done how saith the Lord and it is His will we must seek to pattern our lives after. Many American clergymen have remained aloof from social issues, preferring to preach a gentle, wrist-tapping form of antiseptic Christianity that runs around today's problems instead of confronting them. For years, the clergy in America refused to speak out against labor injustices, racial injustices and the exploitation of the poor. Iťs only a very recent phenomenon to see the clergy walking picket lines for civil rights causes. I walked picket lines 30 years ago in Harlem and have walked almost as many picket lines as I have preached sermons not picket lines only to protest racial segregation, but picket lines to help a union organize employees, or raise the poverty-level wages in an institution. But to many American clergymen, Selma, Alabama was their first awakening to social injustice. Clergy today must totally involve themselves, their church and their parishioners in the black freedom struggle. The forces for evil, for the status quo, and against progress have been far more active than the clergy which still has not broken its chains of silence and inaction on civil rights, despite an occasional march here and an incidental picket there.

Religion and Politics in Britain

Small incidents and anecdotes often reveal more about political misapprehensions than whole volumes could do. Two such concerning the nature of church-state relations in England stand out in the writer's mind. A few years before the war of 1939-45 an American clergyman who frequently visited England and the continent pointed out to him that the then dictators attached great importance to the utterances of the Archbishop of Canterbury because, knowing that he and other Anglican prelates were nominated by the prime minister, they assumed that what they said was governmentally inspired and represented what the British cabinet would like to say but preferred to have said indirectly. Hence their fury at Dr Cosmo Lang's attacks upon fascist and nazi policy. He added that even in the United States the same idea tended to prevail, so that when the Dean of Canterbury, Dr Hewlett Johnson, visited Canada and spoke in support of social credit, of which he was then an advocate, many Americans were bewildered by this apparent evidence that the British government was about to follow this policy. The second incident concerns the same period and is even more revealing. An Anglican priest who had worked in the Corean Mission stated that, because of two very simplified reports which reached the Japanese authorities almost simultaneously, the Roman Catholic missions received relatively favourable treatment, whilst the Anglican came under the close scrutiny of the police. What they had learned was that Pope Pius xi had denounced communism, whereas the Archbishop of Canterbury had denounced Japanese policy in China. It was known that the Corean Mission (which was not in any Anglican ecclesiastical province) came under the direct jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who nominated its bishop. And the Japanese believed that Dr Lang,

Book Review: Words to Change Lives, by 58 leading American clergymen; Religious Living, by Georgia Harkness; The Life of Christ in Poetry, compiled by Hazel Davis Clark; A Short Primer for Protestants, by James Hastings Nichols; What Christianity Says about Sex, Love and Marriage, by Roland H. Bainton; Basic Christian Writings, edited by Stanley I. Stuber. The Association Press, New

Book Review: <i>Words to Change Lives</i>, by 58 leading American clergymen; <i>Religious Living</i>, by <scp>Georgia Harkness</scp>; <i>The Life of Christ in Poetry</i>, compiled by <scp>Hazel Davis Clark</scp>; A <i>Short Primer for Protestants</i>, by <scp>James Hastings Nichols</scp>; <i>What Christianity Says about Sex, Love and Marriage</i>, by <scp>Roland H. Bainton</scp>; <i>Basic Christian Writings</i>, edited by <scp>Stanley I. Stuber</scp>. The Association Press, New

Mazzini on American Intervention in European Affairs

Previous articleNext article No AccessDocumentsMazzini on American Intervention in European AffairsHoward R. MarraroHoward R. Marraro Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 21, Number 2Jun., 1949 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/237255 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1949 The University of Chicago PressPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Autobiography of an American ClergymanLife's Adventure: The Story of a Varied Career. Elwood Worcester

Previous articleNext article No AccessCritical ReviewsAutobiography of an American Clergyman Life's Adventure: The Story of a Varied Career. Elwood Worcester William Warren SweetWilliam Warren Sweet Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 13, Number 2Apr., 1933 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/481308 Views: 5Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Psychology and Organised Religion

THE Journal of Social Psychology (vol. 2, No. 4) has an article by Prof. Raymond Pearl discussing some points of psychological interest arising out of the American Census of Religious Bodies, 1926. His aim is to see if any evidence, other than that of general opinion, exists to support the view that there has been for some time past a gradual decay of religious influence in European civilisation. He quotes from an eminent man of science, a Wesleyan minister, a Church of England vicar, and a young American clergyman, all of whom maintain that there is increased indifference to organised religion.