American Spirituality Research Articles

African-American Adolescent Spirituality: Implications for School Counseling

The authors encourage secondary school counselors, as appropriate, to ethically explore with African American students the value of spirituality as a developmental resource. To broadly contextualize the discussion, spirituality and religiousness are first defined within the African American culture. Research on the spiritual development of African American adolescents as well as the interconnections among the positive psychology, resiliency, and African American spirituality literature are summarized. Implications for high school counseling are considered. In particular, the importance of spirituality education and training for preservice and inservice counselors are discussed, including meaningful approaches to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the spiritual resources and other developmental assets of adolescents. Sample methods to nurture healthy spirituality in Black youth through individual and group counseling, mentoring and modeling, service learning, and spiritual education are reviewed.

The rise of liberal religion: book culture and American spirituality in the twentieth century

Introduction Chapter 1: Enlarging the Faith: Books and the Marketing of Liberal Religion in a Consumer Culture Chapter 2: The Religious Book Club: Middlebrow Culture and Liberal Protestant Seeker Spirituality Chapter 3: Publishing for Seekers: Eugene Exman and the Religious Bestsellers of Harper & Brothers Chapter 4: Religious Reading Mobilized: The Book Programs of World War II Chapter 5: Inventing Interfaith: The Wartime Reading Campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews Chapter 6: Religious Reading in the Wake of War: American Spirituality in the 1940s Conclusion Archival Collections Notes Index

The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century by Matthew S. Hedstrom (review)

Reviewed by: The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century by Matthew S. Hedstrom Matthew Avery Sutton (bio) The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century. By Matthew S. Hedstrom. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 218. cloth $55.00) For the last thirty years, historians, sociologists, and scholars of religion have drawn on church membership and attendance numbers to document the decline of liberal Protestantism in the United States. Matthew Hedstrom will have none of it. His smart, innovative, and fascinating book, The Rise of Liberal Religion, demonstrates that, in fact, liberal religion thrived across the twentieth century. However, he argues, liberal religion has had its greatest success not between pulpit and pews, but engaging with the public through reading. The Rise of Liberal Religion tells the story of books. Hedstrom focuses on the “religious and commercial interests” that shaped the “religious and reading revolution in the twentieth century” in tandem with the “increasing integration of American religion and the print [End Page 265] marketplace” (pp. 4–5). In the interwar years, liberal Protestant leaders, executives of the American publishing industry, and other influential leaders collaborated on a series of ventures to promote the buying and reading of religious books. “They believed that a common set of widely accepted religious ideas, practices, and presuppositions would hold together a fragmenting culture, expand existing markets for books, and maintain their privileged status in American religious discourse” (p. 7). Their actions formed the basis of a thriving religious reading culture that remained central to American cultural and religious life through much of the century. But the culture they created through their books was not necessarily what they anticipated. “This story,” Hedstrom argues, “is an ironic tale of initial resistance yet ultimate complicity in the transformation of American religious culture from Protestant dominance . . . to a much more open, democratic, even chaotic spiritual environment.” “The psychologically and mystically rooted cosmopolitanism,” he continued, “that came to characterize much of American religion and spirituality after World War II first emerged as a popular reality from the liberal Protestantism and book-buying consumerism of the interwar years—but ultimately took on a life all its own” (p. 11). To tell this story, Hedstrom traces the rise of a “middlebrow” book-reading culture, which publishers and religious leaders tapped into after World War I. No one was better at reaching Americans’ growing appetite for religious books than Eugene Exman of Harpers & Brothers. He published materials that upheld religion but were not sectarian, and he promoted books on cosmopolitan spirituality informed as much by metaphysical traditions as by Protestant Christianity. Booksellers promoted Exman’s books as well as those from other major publishers through a variety of venues. Their first substantial effort was “religious book week” launched in 1921, a joint effort between publishers and bookstores to encourage Americans to read religious books. They followed this annual effort by promoting book clubs, which grew and evolved thoughout the 1920s and 1930s. During World War II, publishers sensed yet another opportunity, and [End Page 266] they began publishing and marketing books to soldiers. To reach as broad a market as possible, they invented “interfaith” reading that drew from multiple traditions, which led Americans further down the road from sectarian isolationism to the spiritual-not-religious world of modern religious liberalism. Furthermore, in turning millions of enlisted men into readers, they discovered new consumers whose loyalty would last long after the war was over. “The liberal ambition to find common religious ground,” Hedstrom writes, “flourished as never before, as mystical and psychological spirituality, consumer reading practices, and the political demands of the war enabled a burgeoning religious cosmopolitism” that was inflected with Jewish and Catholic voices as well as Protestant ideals (p. 171). Hedstrom tells a compelling story. He masterfully blends important theoretical insights with an engaging narrative. What we do not learn from The Rise of Liberal Religion, however, is how the reading revolution that shaped liberal religion may have simultaneously served to bolster conservative Christianity. In the interwar period, fundamentalists were building thriving publishing houses and training their audiences to read in new ways as well...

African Art and the Shape of Time

ion that anchors his ongoing exploration of the meanings of “tradition” and “heritage.” According to Wosene, “the letters are vehicles for reimagining history and memory, they are a chain from the past to the future.” here recollections of listening to jazz and African American spirituals are merged with those of hymns and the recitation of sacred poetry experienced during childhood visits to church in ethiopia. the letters are not always legible and do not form words; they evoke instead the way memories flicker in and out view, their meanings

Forged in the fiery furnace: African American spirituality

Forged in the fiery furnace: African American spirituality

Hedstrom, Matthew S. 2012.The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century

Reviewed by: The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century by Matthew S. Hedstrom Emily Suzanne Clark Hedstrom, Matthew S. 2012. The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-1953-7449-0. Pp. 288. $55.00(cloth). In The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century, Matthew Hedstrom offers a new narrative of twentieth-century liberal religion and of American religious history more broadly by focusing on book culture. Examining the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, he argues that the “popularization of religious liberalism happened largely in and through books” (4). While many recent projects on religion in the twentieth century focus on the rise of religious conservatism, Hedstrom provides a new narrative that identifies how the publication and reading of religious books propagated liberal ideas in both overt and less obvious ways and infused liberalism into middle-brow culture. Similar to how Amanda Porterfield tracks “the persistence of this Protestant-based fusion of spiritual idealism and pragmatic concern” (2001, 5) in the late-twentieth century, Hedstrom’s examination of book culture demonstrates how “religious liberalism flourished beyond the bounds of churches, making this a story of rise rather than of decline” (6). Hedstrom analyzes what he calls book culture—all cultural processes related to the publishing, advertising, selling, and consumption of books—to identify how ideals of liberal religiosity traveled beyond the walls of institutional religious life. In particular, liberal religion’s “claims of universal truth”, often found in the fields of mysticism, mind cure, and psychology, were translated into books (16). These three understandings of human experiences helped liberals cope with the rise of modernism by bridging gaps between religion and science, illustrated most notably by the popularity and influence of Williams James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and other authors’ attempts to make James more accessible to middle-class readers. Later authors and editors like Rufus Jones, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Emmet Fox, Dr. Henry Seidel Canby, Rabbi Joshua Loth Leibman, Thomas Merton, and Frank Laubach are also influential in the narrative. As the country urbanized and Americans became more educated, religious books emerged as a strategy to provide “a spiritual center in a divided and diversifying country” (35). To transcend sectarian divides, religious books would need to “speak plainly to higher, universal truths” (36) and thus “serve as guides to troubled moderns” (41). Books could redeem modern America, provided that Americans would read them and do so with pencil in hand. As long as a reader was engaged with the text, “proper reading [End Page 137] would lead to self-improvement” (56). Religious Book Weeks and the publication of recommended book lists, like the Religious Books Round Table, embedded religious books into middle-brow culture and provided reading programs in liberal religion for Americans across the country. Book clubs would structure readers and guide them through these lists, thus allowing for liberal ideas to further develop in the home. Though scattered across the country, book lists helped cultivate and unify a liberal religious culture and guided Americans on the path to “personal betterment in matters of psyche and spirit” (71). Additionally, books on mind cure, mystical spirituality, spiritualism, and inspirational psychology indicate liberal book culture’s appeal to spiritual seekers and its ability to bring outsiders closer to the liberal center. Books on the mind, personality, science, and even religions outside Euro-American Protestantism (such as Hindu meditation as taught by the Vedanta Society) fostered spiritual, practical, and intellectual improvement. What bound these books together was an interest in the essence of religion, which often centered on authentic experience, the sacredness of all humans, and divine beauty. The New Thought movement was brought into the mainstream through books on prayer and bodily health and the affirmation of positive thinking. The success of sales of books like this and their publishers’ survival through the Great Depression attest to their popularity and demand. The Council on Books in Wartime continued the fight for liberal spirituality during World War II, and the war would lead to “the mass reading environment of the postwar decade...

Five African American spirituals and Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time

The orchestral and choral compositions of Michael Tippett often displayed his commitment to themes of social justice and political emancipation. What is little understood about his masterwork, A Child of Our Time, is its origin in the assassination of an obscure German diplomat by a German Jewish émigré in Paris in 1938, which also marked the beginning of Kristallnacht and so on to the final solution of the ‘Jewish problem’. Struggling with motifs to exemplify his commitment to a universal emancipated humanity, he discovered, for the first time, a set of African American spirituals which, in their very essence, pointed the path to liberation both artistically and also practically. Incorporating the spirituals into his work in the ‘midnight of the century’ of the Holocaust created perhaps the greatest avant-garde political/musical statement of the twentieth century.

The Wizard of Oil: Abraham James, the Harmonial Wells, and the Psychometric History of the Oil Industry

American spiritualism and the oil industry developed around the same time and in relatively close geographic proximity. Both nineteenth-century phenomena were invested in a belief in the unseen, whether in the form of deceased loved ones or of underground oil reserves. Spiritualists such as Abraham James turned to the oil industry because of its lucrative financial opportunities and because of its potential to demonstrate the “practical” applications of spiritualism and Harmonial philosophy. Spiritualism offered an alternative to evangelical Christian and classical republican conceptions of industry, and a vibrant communication network through which events in the oil fields could be related to the general public. Reading accounts of James's work as an “oil wizard” reveals the industrial aspirations of spiritualism and the psychometric aspects of the oil industry, both of which have been largely erased in twentieth-century historiography. Spiritualist publications, newspapers, technical manuals, and popular accounts of the oil industry throughout the nineteenth century produced James as a new kind of male medium, capable of meeting the exigencies of the oil fields. He proved infinitely reproducible as an agent of “practical spiritualism” and was discussed alongside the other drillers, operators, laborers, teamsters, and investors at work in the oil region. As petroleum geology began to establish itself as a discipline in the early twentieth century, accounts of the early oil industry reframed James, along with other practitioners of divination, as an amusing, if somewhat embarrassing, anomaly in an attempt to distinguish the modern “scientific” oil industry from its chaotic and superstitious beginnings. While later historians have offered a more sympathetic reading of divination's role in the oil fields, James and his Harmonial wells have largely disappeared from the historical record. Yet, despite scientific innovation and revisionist history, the oil industry still bears traces of its psychometric past and must contend with the ways in which its future is dependent on successfully channeling the unseen.

The Making of a Black Liturgy: Pentecostal Worship and Spirituality from African Slave Narratives to American Cityscapes

Despite persistent claims that Pentecostalism is characterized by a Black, oral liturgy, little research has been done on its origin, character, or development. This article suggests that a Black liturgy is an adequate description for the contributions of Pentecostal communities to a uniquely American liturgy, one that is characterized both by its sensitivities to existing liturgical traditions and rejection of established ritual structures, as well as by its exposure to certain key events that have shaped the religious history of modern America. The argument expands on the hypothesis that from the plantation prayer grounds of African slaves and the camp meetings of the American South, an African American spirituality was carried to the urban centers of the American heartland. In this new location it was shaped by the social, cultural, and religious conditions of the new environment and emerged as a new liturgical form labeled "Pentecostal," which in its sensitivities was uniquely American. The critical impact of a Black liturgy in and beyond this American context, therefore, has to be reevaluated.

Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (review)

Reviewed by: Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality Timothy Hessel-Robinson (bio) Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality. By Belden C. Lane. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 304 pp. $29.95. Belden Lane has spent much of his career interpreting the relationship between nature and Christian spirituality. In an earlier book, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (1988, revised and expanded in 2001), he examined the characteristics of sacred place. In that work he drew on cultural geography and phenomenology to offer a descriptive account of the experience of place and the sacred in such diverse communities as the Lakota Sioux, New England’s Puritans, the Shakers, and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker House. In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (1998) he explored desert and mountain imagery in Christian apophatic mysticism, interweaving historical scholarship with reflections on his experience with his mother as she journeyed toward death in a nursing home. In both works, Lane demonstrated how to integrate rigorous scholarship, insightful theological reflection, and contemplative attention to personal experience in the development of a theme. His latest book follows the same pattern as he attempts to interpret the relationship between spirituality and nature in the Reformed tradition. Lane identifies the themes of beauty—nature’s and God’s—and desire running through the history of Reformed piety, and these themes hold the book together. As John Calvin, many Puritans, and Jonathan Edwards attest, the beauty of the earth mirrors the beauty and grandeur of God. Such beauty has the capacity to awaken desire in the human heart. When disciplined properly, desire mirrors the heart’s deep longing for God, our true desire, and leads to enjoyment of God. God allures us through the radiant splendor of creation, stimulates our desires, draws us toward God, and “ravishes” the soul with beauty. For Lane, this aesthetic-spiritual logic is the foundation of a Reformed ecological ethic. Calvin, the Puritans, and Jonathan Edwards are, as the author admits, not the first place most people look to find either a robust ecological spirituality or resources on beauty and sensuality. Calvin has long been caricatured as a severe, dry, humorless, polemical figure whose primary contribution to Christian history was a theory of predestination that consigns from birth most of the human race to eternal torment. This may be a distorting picture of Calvin, but it is not without some basis in his writings and from what we know of his life. The Genevan reformer could, as Lane notes, be ruthless in conflict and unbending when convinced he was right. Unfortunately, many of Calvin’s heirs have developed and emphasized some of the less savory aspects of Calvin’s thought. The harsh Calvin was the one Lane was introduced to as a boy growing up in a fundamentalist, Calvinist community in Florida, and he admits to having a long-standing “love-hate relationship with John Calvin” (45). However, Lane knows another Calvin—and another kind of Calvinism. Lane eagerly introduces us to a dimension of Calvin’s life and thought that is often neglected. Calvin delighted in the beauty of the world, and he employed great rhetorical flair when speaking of creation: to Calvin the world is a “mirror” of God’s beauty, a lovely garment by which God self-reveals, a “painting representing in stunning strokes the divine splendor” (47). Lane takes the title for his chapter on Calvin from the Reformer’s metaphor of the world as a “theater of God’s glory” in which God invites humanity into a shared communion of longing and performance [End Page 141] of praise through beauty. This chapter introduces the reader to the Calvin whom Lane loves: the one who experiences the glory of God in “undomesticated wildness” (45). This legacy finds its root in Jonathan Edward’s and Calvin’s seventeenth century Puritan heirs, who similarly have been misrepresented as suspicious of beauty, reluctant to indulge in pleasure, and fearful of sensuality. The Puritans experienced their desire for God in erotic desires and relationships, as well as in nature. Thus, desire for nature’s beauty and desire for conjugal love paralleled one another in...

Black Women's Labor and the Melodrama of Class Mobility in Sutton Griggs's Overshadowed

May the work I've done for me , May the work I've done for me , When I'm resting in my grave, there is nothing that can be said , May the work I've done for me . --African American spiritual (1) For the past two decades, scholarship in class studies has traced the literary representation of work in Gilded Age America. (2) As scholars note, struggles over the modes and compensations of labor often emerged through the pages of late nineteenth-century newspapers, religious tracts, and novels, as writers vied for cultural influence to shape readers' sentiments toward work and class. Yet studies seldom have examined how African American writers contributed to these literary mediations of work. As Carla Peterson has observed, this inattention to black labor reflects scholars' privileging of certain interpretive paradigms to the exclusion of others. as well as a narrow focus on only the most canonical postbellum black texts (104). (3) For example, well-known authors Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles W. Chesnutt all wrote about the relation between labor conditions and black advancement in their lesser-known fiction, speeches and essays; however, these authors' most frequently studied novels--Iola Leroy (1892), Contending Forces (1900), and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), respectively--belie the writers' fuller engagement with labor issues. (4) In order to recover the discourse of labor in African American literary history, this essay builds upon Peterson's observations by examining a little-studied black narrative whose focus is on work, Sutton E. Griggs's second novel, Overshadowed (1901). The novel's title has unintentionally prophesied its critical neglect. Even as scholars including Arlene Elder, Wilson Jeremiah Moses, and Finnie Coleman have aimed to restore attention to the author's oeuvre, Griggs's second novel is overshadowed by critical attention to his first, Imperium in Imperio (1899). (5) In each of his five novels, published between 1899 and 1908, as well as his nonfiction social theory, Griggs (1872-1933) highlights how African Americans pursue and interpret their work, particularly within racially proscribed labor markets. (6) Yet Overshadowed places work at its center by following Erma and John Wysong, siblings who must forego their life of relative comfort to seek self-sustaining work after their parents' death. Focusing primarily on Erma's precarious work conditions as a black female laborer, the novel features African Americans performing a range of domestic service, self-employment, homemaking, industrial work, imprisoned labor, and professional occupations. As African Americans determine the extent to which their labor can speak for them in shaping their identities, the novel refutes the stigma of physical labor (industrial, service, and manual) to further affirm the work ethic. Yet the text ultimately notes how white prejudice and black intraracial class tensions often inhibit advancement by even the most diligent black workers. Though Griggs's melodramatic novels often have been dismissed as artistically flawed, I argue that in Overshadowed, melodramatic form productively aligns with the novel's thematic focus on labor and class mobility. (7) Characterized by stark changes in characters' social positions, emotional excess and trauma, and life-altering moral choices, melodrama demonstrates the extreme possibilities of an individual's fate. As such, melodrama's multiclimactic narrative structure simulates the serial, sudden reversals of fortune that may occur for workers in an unstable job market, especially for African American female workers facing hiring discrimination, sexual vulnerability, and other unfavorable conditions related to employment. In elucidating how melodrama conveys the exigencies of black women's labor, I draw on Peter Brooks's analysis of the genre as primarily concerned with establishing virtue through trials: The reward of virtue . …

Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance

Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance

Demons, Saints, & Patriots: Catholic Visions of Native America through The Indian Sentinel (1902–1962) (review)

Reviewed by: Demons, Saints, & Patriots: Catholic Visions of Native America through The Indian Sentinel (1902–1962) Ross Enochs Demons, Saints, & Patriots: Catholic Visions of Native America through The Indian Sentinel (1902–1962). By Mark Clatterbuck. [Marquette Studies in Theology, No. 69.] (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. 2009. Pp. 288. $29.00 paperback. ISBN 978-0-874-62746-6.) In his book Demons, Saints, & Patriots Mark Clatterbuck provides an excellent analysis of the history and cultural conflicts of the U. S. Catholic missions to the Native Americans. He focuses his discussion of mission history on the Indian Sentinel, a journal produced by the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions to promote, defend, and seek funding for the missions. By careful interpretation of the Sentinel, Clatterbuck shows the perspectives, ideologies, and purposes of the various authors featured in the Sentinel who recount their firsthand experiences in the missions from 1902 to 1962. In the introduction, Clatterbuck notes that there have been many accounts of the missions that have either portrayed the missionaries as unselfish heroes or [End Page 393] have launched scathing attacks on the missionaries; Clatterbuck successfully avoids either extreme. Rather, he shows how the missionaries viewed the Native Americans and their culture during different periods on the missions. Clatterbuck also is interested in explaining the mind-set of the missionaries, many of whom were Europeans immigrants, and their adaptation to the American political and cultural landscape. Clatterbuck provides a concise and accurate account of the controversies surrounding the federal funding of the mission schools prior to 1900. Here he explains the reasons for the founding of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, and he describes the hostile political climate toward the Catholic mission schools. The anti-Catholic climate of the time fostered a defensive attitude at the Sentinel; its writers consistently argued that the Catholic missionaries were promoting the best ideals of American patriotism in the missions. In succeeding chapters, Clatterbuck argues that the authors of the Sentinel, particularly from 1900 until 1920, often portrayed certain groups of Native Americans in the missions as devotees of demonic, superstitious religions. Yet Clatterbuck provides evidence of the opposite in which priests describe other tribes with glowing praise as very religious, happy, charitable, and peaceful. However, Clatterbuck does not attribute the positive or negative reactions of the missionaries to the differences in Native American religions or cultures; rather, he attributes these divergent descriptions to the difficulties of the missionaries in expressing their attitudes about cultures unlike their own. He provides examples of missionaries accepting certain Native American practices and dances and rejecting others; however, he does not provide a clear explanation as to why they rejected certain practices. In his evaluation of the attitudes of the missionaries toward the Native Americans, Clatterbuck does acknowledge the Jesuit theology before the Second Vatican Council that emphasizes missionary adaptation and natural law: a tradition that looks for evidence of the presence of virtue in non-Christian cultures. He shows that this strain of thought was also at work in the writing of some of the contributors to the Sentinel. Clatterbuck then describes the ending of the publication of the Sentinel in 1962 and the Church’s increasing acceptance of Native American spirituality. By this time, he notes the Sentinel no longer portrayed Native Americans as a people with a foreign culture but rather as a group that had been converted and were patriotic American citizens. He then provides many examples of the new openness in the Church in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council to inculturation and the inclusion of Native American culture and spirituality in Catholic practice. In his work, Clatterbuck provides a good resource for understanding the Catholic missions and the missionaries’ viewpoints. His account is balanced, [End Page 394] and he emphasizes that the missionaries, far from having a single monolithic approach, had a variety of perspectives on the different Native cultures. Ross Enochs Marist College Poughkeepsie, NY Copyright © 2011 The Catholic University of America Press

The new metaphysicals: spirituality and the American religious imagination

American spirituality - meaning astrology, yoga, and the huge number of other alternative strains of religion pursued by individuals outside of traditional organizations - is usually thought to be a product of the postmodern era. Aromatherapy, crystals, and an interest in one's aura are supposedly relics of the narcissism and iconoclasm of the 1960s. But, as The New Metaphysicals reveals, contemporary American spirituality has deep historic roots in the nineteenth century and a great deal in common with traditional religious movements: it turns out the New Age is getting on in years. To explore the world of contemporary spiritual practitioners, Courtney Bender combines research into the history of the movement with fieldwork in Cambridge, Massachusetts - a key site of alternative religious inquiry from Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James to today. Through her ethnographic analysis, Bender discovers that a focus on the new, on progress, and on the way spiritualist beliefs intersect with science obscures the historical roots of spirituality from its practitioners as well as from the many scholars who have studied it. Perceptive, persuasive, and at times gently humorous, The New Metaphysicals will greatly broaden our understanding of religion in America.

The Gospel According to this Moment: Thoreau, Wildness, and American Nature Religion

AbstractEver since the Sierra Club adopted the slogan, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” the text from which it was drawn—Thoreau’s 1862 essay “Walking”—has been construed as a tribute to wild places. To some extent this reading keeps faith with sentiments expressed in the essay. At the same time, a closer look suggests that the essay as a whole is really more about the life of the spirit than life in the wild. Despite the popular appropriation of “Walking” as a manifesto of environmentalist advocacy, some critics have questioned the usual view of “Walking.” Such observations also have a bearing on Thoreau’s legacy as a progenitor of the literary expression of American nature spirituality. The purpose of this essay is to elucidate a particular experiential orientation to this spiritually-inflected notion of wildness, beginning with Thoreau and extending into the work of three literary exemplars of American nature religion—John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Annie Dillard.

Building <i>Precious Knowledge</i>: An Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Eren Isabel McGinnis

Eren Isabel McGinnis and Ari Luis Palos (see Figure 1) have been telling distinctive ethnic stories for well over a decade. Partners in the Tucson, Arizona-based film company Dos Vatos Productions (McGinnis produces and does sound; Palos shoots and directs), the two make documentaries and shorts that bring local color, human complexity, and a keen sense of historical context the kind of urgent social issues--immigration, race relations, and public education--that are too often misunderstood or oversimplified in contemporary discourse. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] One of their earliest collaborations, Beyond the Border (2001), movingly chronicles the struggles of four Mexican immigrant brothers make a living in the Kentucky Bluegrass region while coping with cultural barriers, homesickness, alcoholism, and the potential erosion of their Mexican identity. In The Spirituals (2007), Palos and McGinnis examine the history and vitality of African American spirituals through the performances of a choral ensemble whose majestic renditions of slave songs help keep the music alive. Shot in a poetic visual style and rooted in a concrete sense of place--be it Lexington, Oaxaca, or their current home base of Tucson--Dos Vatos's films give voice, as McGinnis puts it, to communities often silenced or stereotyped by mainstream media. In doing so, they affirm the vibrant but unheralded contributions of Latino Americans and African Americans the cultural heritage of the United States. In their rich and varied body of work, their current project--Precious Knowledge, a documentary about the fight save the embattled Ethnic Studies program in Arizona's Tucson Unified School District--may be their most politically urgent film date. Filmed at Tucson High Magnet School during the 2008-09 school year as the controversy over Ethnic Studies began reach a fever pitch, Precious Knowledge details the dramatic efforts of students, teachers, and community activists prevent state legislators from gutting Mexican American (Raza) Studies at Tucson High and shutting down Ethnic Studies across the state. (At this writing, a legal effort is underway challenge House Bill 2281, the legislation that was signed into law last May by Arizona governor Jan Brewer that calls for a ban on K-12 Ethnic Studies classes in the state's public and charter schools.) While much of the public face of the controversy has been dominated by opportunistic politicians who condemn Ethnic Studies as reverse-racist or anti-American without bothering understand its true aims, Precious Knowledge takes us inside classes at Tucson High capture lives transformed by a socially conscious curriculum. We meet flesh-and-blood students whose words and actions testify the role Mexican American Studies has played in helping reduce dropout rates among Chicano high schoolers and equip the students with the personal agency and critical self-awareness become productive citizens in their communities. As McGinnis and Palos neared completion of Precious Knowledge last fall (the film is slated air nationally on PBS in 2011), I interviewed McGinnis about the film and her work. McGinnis earned her BA in Anthropology from San Diego State University and a certificate in film and video theory and production from University College, Dublin. In addition her Dos Vatos projects, she has also made several documentaries as one half of Cafe Sisters Productions, a collaboration with director Christine Fugate that has yielded, among other films, the PBS POV documentary Tobacco Blues (1998). In our interview, conducted over e-mail in October and November 2010, McGinnis reflects on the challenges of making Precious Knowledge; the role that her own Mexican-Irish-American background has played in the movies she makes; and some of the intricacies of telling socially relevant stories through the medium of documentary film. Andrew Sargent: How did you and Ari originally come up with the idea make Precious Knowledge? …

O Cant: Singing the Race Music of Jean Toomer's Cane

Graham considers Jean Toomer's Cane from a musicological perspective and discusses the novel's musical poetics with an ear toward 1920s discussions of African American folk culture, preservationism, and the mediation of song. At the time of Cane's publication, Toomer's poems—modeled on African American spirituals—could be appreciated and sung by readers of various ethnic backgrounds. This essay argues that their musicality and performability were ultimately intended to promote interracial empathy and to elide racial difference. Other topics of the essay include turn-of-the-century American theater, Tin Pan Alley and the music industry, anthropology and ethnography in the southern United States, and Toomer's debts or relations to other writers of the Harlem Renaissance, among them James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes.

Space for Cultural and Spiritual Experiences in Social Work Education and Clinical Training

In general education, European American values stand as the unacknowledged norm and are perceived as being culturally neutral or culture free. By recognizing European American culture and spirituality as one of many diversities, social work students may better identify biased values and expectations inherent in the traditional monocultural and monospiritual approach. By providing space for European American culture and spirituality in social work education, among many others, intersubjective interactions become possible. While recognizing the increasing needs of multicultural/multispiritual heritage populations, in this article, the author reexamines cultural and spiritual competencies, focusing on relational issues that are not currently emphasized enough because of a strong conceptual association of competency with knowledge and skills-based practices.

Deliberating Death

Utilizing a particular case study of a woman attempting to come to terms with her death, this article explores the difficult metaphors of death present within the Christian tradition. Tracing a Christian understanding of death back to the work of Augustine, the case study is utilized to highlight the difficulties presented by past and present theology embracing ideas of punishment within death. Following the trajectory of the case study, alternative understandings of death present in recent Christian theology and within Native American spirituality are presented in an attempt to find room for a fuller meaning of death post-reconciliation, but premortem.

"Mrs. Schlesinger Wields a Facile Pen": Articulations of Spiritualist Feminism in Julia Schlesinger's Carrier Dove

This essay shows how Julia Schlesinger, editor of the spiritualist-feminist Carrier Dove , balanced derivative and original discourse to contribute significantly to multiple communities. Though Schlesinger's periodical most strongly influenced her own local spiritualist community, Schlesinger was aware of the national status of American spiritualism and transatlantic reach of British spiritualism, so she promulgated her spiritualistfeminist perspective as widely as possible, setting up exchanges with editors of other papers as far away as the United Kingdom. Schlesinger encouraged editors to be derivative themselves, reprinting materials from the Carrier Dove so that Schlesinger's original voice might have influence beyond her local community.