Family Prayers Research Articles

Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of Three of Charles Dickens’s Serialized Novels

Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of Three of Charles Dickens’s Serialized Novels Zhu Yuanyuan (bio) Charles Dickens’s allusive and thematic use of the Bible in his novels and other writings has caught critical attention over the past four decades, resulting in studies that either explore his personal belief and his attitude towards religious and theological issues,1 or interpret his texts’ themes, characters, or narratives by examining their connections with biblical counterparts.2 Most recently, Jennifer Gribble’s Dickens and the Bible: “What Providence Meant” (2021) has explored how Dickens engages the Judeo-Christian grand narrative in his novels in dialogue with other contemporary narratives. However, critical examination of biblical allusion in Dickens’s novels has overlooked the aspect of serial publication that shaped how his contemporary readers would have approached and read his works. Each of the three novels under consideration in this article was serialized either in Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words (Hard Times) or in separate monthly instalments (Bleak House and Little Dorrit). This article aims to theorize both explicit and implicit use of biblical allusion and its workings in the opening numbers of these three novels as structural and thematic tools that help organize oppositional stances embodied in characters and institutions and that foster active reading by drawing upon the reader’s familiarity with the Bible.3 [End Page 155] My analysis of biblical allusion in the opening numbers of these serialized novels is based on the assumption that Dickens’s contemporary readers were indeed familiar with the Bible, in spite of the fact that the nineteenth century witnessed the process of secularization, with the status of the Bible being challenged by a number of factors, including the Higher Criticism and the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species.4 In fact, by the mid-eighteenth century, communal and individual readings of the Bible together with Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton’s Paradise Lost had become common in many families. In the nineteenth century, in addition to the practice of family prayers, daily Bible study, and exegesis in family circles, Bible readings became part of the curriculum in grammar schools.5 Therefore, we may assume that Dickens and his readers shared a biblical literacy that was the prerequisite for the novelist to incorporate biblical allusions and stimulate the reader’s participation in the process of interpretation. An “imagined community,” to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term (46),6 can be thought of as existing between the novelist and his readers, as well as among the readers themselves, because of the cultural resonance realized by reading and sharing common cultural discourses.7 Each instance of allusion to the Bible engages the reader’s judgment through their efforts in recognition and interpretation. The aesthetic appreciation of an allusion involves an effective “exchange” and forges “intimacy and community” between the novelist and his reader, to use William Irwin’s terms (530). The use of biblical allusions in the opening numbers of serial fiction intensifies such cultural experience. My analysis has also been informed by the concept of biblical typology, defined by George P. Landow as “a Christian form of scriptural interpretation [End Page 156] that claims to discover divinely intended anticipations of Christ and His dispensation in the laws, events, and people of the Old Testament” (3). As Landow shows how the Victorians transfer “habits of mind derived from interpreting the Bible” to “contemporary politics, literary characterization […] and other areas of thought apparently far distant from theological studies” (15), my article will show such typological habits of mind are also transferred to Dickens’s literary production. I shall argue that in the opening numbers of Hard Times, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit, novels about contemporary social problems, Dickens draws on biblical allusions to construct “types” that foreshadow and prefigure certain aspects; or, put differently, “types” that the novels will fulfil. Dickens’s novels of the 1850s critique social problems and individual failings, and suggest their connection. The criticism of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House and of utilitarian educational theories in Hard Times set up these novels’ moral stance in opposition to idolatrous practices, similar to Little Dorrit’s...

Catechizing at Home, 1740–1870: Instruction, Communication and Denomination

Catechizing played an important part in domestic religious education in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as in the better documented early modern period. However, its significance has been neglected in comparison with family prayers (often deemed to be an expression of patriarchy), Sunday observance or even private prayers. This article analyses the incidence of catechizing across religious denominations in Britain from 1740 to 1870, and within selected overseas missionary families. Drawing on a wide range of personal memoirs, the article analyses the range of contexts and relationships within which catechizing could occur. These included not only household worship (which could be conducted by women) but also relationships between siblings. It demonstrates that catechizing could provide opportunities for asking questions and spending ‘quality time’ with parents and / or children, rather than embodying an alienating form of rote-learning. The article therefore challenges many stereotypes relating to family domestic education, relating to themes such as patriarchy, denominational difference and adult-child interaction.

Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture Rediscovered and Its Implications for Contemporary Christian Education - The Case of Susan and Her Son Ji-Hun -

The purpose of this article is to explore constructive implications in which Christian nurture of Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) values practical, educational retrieval. Bushnell’s educational approach to Christian nurture has called our attention to the idea that Christian parents have a responsibility to nurture their children to grow up as Christians. In this sense, drawing on an educational incident in the life of a Christian mother, Susan, this article describes a brief overview of Susan’s case and her growing educational concern related to the life of her son, Ji-Hun, in the process of nurture. It also explores central elements of Bushnell’s nurture approach to Christian education, such as nurture, organic connection, educational principles, and church, which are relevant and attainable for Susan’s story. Searching for the application and relevance of Bushnell’s notion of Christian nurture in Susan’s context, it offers five constructive suggestions that help her and her family practice Christian nurture both inside and outside of the home: organic relationship, environment, family rituals of worship and prayer, family prayers, and participation in membership, fellowship, and leadership of the church. Bushnell’s nurture theory provides not only Christian parents but also Christian educators and pastors with an educational way of fostering the faith formation of their children as Christians in Christian education.

The Spiritual Home of W. E. Gladstone: Anne Gladstone’s Bible

‘Popery is the religion of Cathedrals’, wrote J.W. Cunningham, the evangelical vicar of Harrow in his novel The Velvet Cushion (1815), ‘– Protestantism of houses’. It is a commonplace in the secondary literature that the household was the citadel of the evangelical version of Protestantism in nineteenth-century England. ‘Evangelicalism’, according to a representative comment by Ian Bradley, ‘was above all else the religion of the home.’ The head of the household conducting family prayers was the embodiment of the evangelical spirit. It is not the purpose of this essay to question that received image, but it does suggest that a clearer picture of the religious atmosphere of the evangelical home can be obtained from sources other than the manuals published for the paterfamilias to read to the assembled household. The books of family prayers tell us what was prescribed; but alternative sources show us what was practised. Spiritual journals, reflective meditations and candid correspondence can often be more revealing. Nowhere, however, is the kernel of household piety more evident than in the Bibles that some zealous believers annotated for their own benefit. The study of the Bible, as Edward Bickersteth, a leading evangelical divine, put it in his book A Scripture Help (1816), was ‘a great and important duty’. When members of evangelical families retired to the privacy of their own rooms, they might spend time in devotional reading of the Scriptures and leave a record of their reflections in the margins. Such Bibles, one of which is to be examined here, are treasuries of authentic domestic spirituality. They show something of the heartbeat of evangelical religion.

Storytelling and Identity

Africa provided a fertile ground for Christianity during its first few centuries, and a case could be made that early Christian texts from Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia, and North Africa are the first instances of written African literature. Under Roman rule, most of North Africa was Christian until well into the seventh century, and its literary output included gnostic treatises, the theological texts of the Alexandrian church fathers, and a series of influential saints' lives, including the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas (203 AD) and Athanasius' Life of Anthony (360 AD). Augustine of Hippo's seminal Confessions (397 AD) was, in some senses, an African text and, in a curiously circular manner that we will trace, eventually played its part in the formation of modern African literature. Christianity in Ethiopia dates from the first century, with one tradition citing the Apostle Philip's conversion of the Ethiopian traveler in Acts 8, and another holding that St. Matthew travelled to Ethiopia to preach the gospel. Regardless of the origins, Christianity was declared a state religion in Ethiopia in 330 AD, and Athanasius consecrated Frumentius as its first bishop. The first version of Ethiopia's national religious epic, the Kebra Nagast (The Glory of Kings), appeared in the sixth century and is a mythic account of the origins of Ethiopian Christianity traced to King Menelik I, the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The epic recounts how on a visit to Solomon's court, Menelik I moved the Ark of the Covenant from Jerusalem to Aksum and established the Ethiopians as God's new chosen people. (1) This may be the first instance of a typological reading of African history, a reading that other African writers, most notably the South African Afrikaners, would employ in the future. Before these written texts, the African continent teemed with multitudinous forms of orature that provided entertainment at communal gatherings, celebrated great rulers and warriors, instructed children and youth, preserved history and lineages, and formed cultural identity. While Western generic categories are not strictly applicable to orature (when a text is not written down and is performed by a variety of presenters, there is no clear distinction between prose and poetry), African orature contained a strong tradition of narrative. The representation of events with a beginning, a middle, and an end--narrative--is one of the most basic elements of human expression, (2) and oral storytelling played a central role in African culture from earliest human life to the present day. Many prominent twentieth-century African writers recount soaking up the magic of language and the power of narrative from a childhood immersion in nightly participatory story-telling around the fire in the family compound, and both thematic and formal influences from folk tales, myths and legends, historical chronicles, and epics continue to permeate African writing. (3) The return of Christianity to Africa during the colonial period and the impact of the nineteenth-century missionary movement had a tremendous effect on the written production of African literature. The contested legacy of the missionary movement includes the creation of indigenous language orthographies, the encouragement of literary education, and the establishment of printing presses. Consequently, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress had been published in numerous African languages. All had a strong effect on the early writing of the continent as numerous African writers attest, and the narrative form of the Bible and Bunyan's allegory were especially influential. For example, the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe was raised as a Christian, attending mission schools, hearing twice-daily Bible readings during family prayers, and participating in church services, and the rhythms, images, and narratives of the Bible are prominent threads in the tapestry of his fiction. …

The Home Environments of Christian College Freshmen: Behind Closed Doors

This study provides a descriptive snapshot of high school students’ home lives from their perspective as first-year college students as they attended a Bible college or Christian liberal arts college. The sample of over 2,300 surveys was collected annually for 14 years through selected freshmen courses, and the data reports on the frequencies of particular practices found in the home environment, such as illegal drugs, tobacco products, the frequency of attending religious services, and family prayers. A data comparison is made from other research, particularly the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) and the National Study of Youth and Religions (NSYR). Implications for church workers and faculty at Bible colleges, Christian liberal arts colleges, and seminaries are also discussed.

Family Prayers, 1956

Family Prayers, 1956 Jan Montefiore Jan Montefiore Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Literary Imagination, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2008, Page 225, https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imm075 Published: 26 May 2007

Tapes and Tables Mixed Methods Research on Family Religion

The authors show how qualitative and quantitative methods can be combined in a 'mixed methods' research model to provide a multifaceted view of family religion and rituals. Results from a Swiss research project on bedtime rituals are reported and methodological issues connected with this approach are discussed. In this project case studies, qualitative content analysis and a family survey (N=1344) were combined to explore the 'patterned creativity' of today's families in their ritual and religious practices. Qualitative methods elucidate the families' unique capacity to shape their ritual and religious microcosms. Families vary in the selection, combination and staging of the ritual elements they incorporate in their evening rituals with children. Quantitative methods help to identify motives and types of evening rituals and to position these types in a societal context. Together the complementary approaches also broaden the scope of the study of family prayers.

Living Wet: Baptismal Remembrance and Life at the Edge of Dawn

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies (New York: Author Books, 1999), 231, 232. 2. Book of Common Worship (Louisville, KY: Westminister John Knox Press, 1993). 3. Holy Baptism and Related Rites (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002). 4. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, vol. 3, On Baptism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978), 669. 5. See my book, All Through the Day, All Through the Year: Family Prayers and Celebrations (Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 2000). Additional informationNotes on contributorsDavid B. BatchelderDavid B. Batchelder is pastor of West Plano Presbyterian Church in Plano, Texas, and is the author of All Through the Day, All Through the Year: Family Prayers and Celebrations (Minneapolis: Augsburg Books, 2000).

Grundtvig og Brorson

Grundtvig and Brorson By Jørgen Sørensen Grundtvig’s evaluation of Br.’s hymns from 1828 remained unchanged. In Psalme-Blade, the collection which was to hold what was strictly necessary to meet the want, Gr. included only two by Br., although he knew him to be very popular in the “religious assemblies” and should have included more to be in agreement with his own view of the problem of the empty churches and the “religious assemblies” . In the “Prøvehefte” the number of hymns by Br. Was raised to seven, but judging from Fest-Psalmer Gr. finds himself able to recognize only three of them as real and important church hymns. Finally, when with Fest-Psalmer Gr. had the opportunity to organize all by himself what might eventually be called a complete hymn-book, there was room for only ten hymns by Br. out of a total number of 330. These collections of hymns are church hymn-books in the sense conveyed by Gr. in the following quotation, which is an answer to the complaint that the “Prøvehefte” was not also intended for family prayers: “Our remark in the preface about a church hymn-book has been completely misunderstood. We do not mean a book which could not be used outside the stone church, far from it; rather we have in mind a songbook aiming alone at what links us together in religious life and should be common to all who share the same faith and hope, so it was not an extrinsic but an intrinsic distinction we made between what belongs to the church and what to the home, as between what is objective and subjective in religiousness” . Thus, although the SV was not meant to be a church hymn-book in the ordinary sense, it was definitely a church hymn-book in Gr.’s sense as expressed above. It is to be regretted, then, that Gr. did not find occasion to work out the collection of hymns for private devotions which he had in mind in 1810-20 and which he also mentions to Fenger when devotional matter was left out of Psalme-Blade, because this would have given a more varied impression of Gr.’s evaluation of Br. But Gr.’s main interest definitely lay with the church, and the hymns in question— as he often points out— were easily accessible in many collections and older hymn-books. That is probably why he never did make the selection.

Book Review: Walking with Christ: A Little Book of Family Prayers

Book Review: Walking with Christ: A Little Book of Family Prayers

A Book of Family Prayers. By Hubert McEvoy, S. J. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1956. 5s. net.

A Book of Family Prayers. By Hubert McEvoy, S. J. Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1956. 5s. net.

Parents' Associations in England

Strictly, there is no such body as the Catholic Parents’ Association. The various parochial units may be linked with a central council, and, as in some dioceses, with a diocesan council, but in general each local association is self-contained, and has its parochial or district denomination. There is divergence in constitution and even in title, and that absolute uniformity is undesirable is evidenced by the declaration of the Bishops of England and Wales on 24th August last that ‘The Hierarchy have given full approval to the formation of Parochial and Diocesan Associations of Catholic Parents under the direction of the Bishops of the various dioceses. But they do not approve the formation of the National Federation of Catholic Parents’ Associations, nor of its appeal for funds.’The Constitution approved for one English Archdiocese details the purpose of the Association thus:(a) To learn and teach the duties and rights of parents.(b) To promote and safeguard Catholic educational interests and the care of Catholic youth.(c) To encourage representation of Catholic parents on public educational bodies.(d) To encourage the practice of family prayers in every Catholic household of the parish.This is a fourfold aim whose effectiveness will be in the efficient carrying out of the primary provision. The average Catholic, even if he or she has remembered the catechism teaching of younger days, is not so deeply versed in Catholic doctrine as to have clear notions on parental duties and rights in education. How many Catholics could answer correctly three elementary questions on them? The fact of State education, moreover, has familiarised nearly everybody with an almost Communistic conception of the State as the universal parent. It is the old story of an antiCatholic idea fraudulently winning assent as a principle through popular acceptance.

Family prayers

Family prayers

Family prayers

Family prayers Get access M. M. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume CLXVII, Issue nov17, 17 November 1934, Page 358, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/CLXVII.nov17.358a Published: 17 November 1934

Family prayers

Family prayers Get access H. I. A. H. I. A. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume CLXVII, Issue oct20, 20 October 1934, Page 284, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/CLXVII.oct20.284a Published: 20 October 1934

Family prayers

Family prayers

Family prayers

Family prayers

Family prayers

Family prayers

Book Review: I. Practical Theology: The Twentieth Century Adult Class at Work, Family Prayers from the Book of Common Worship, Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for the Year 1911, American Baptist Year Book, 1912

Book Review: I. Practical Theology: The Twentieth Century Adult Class at Work, Family Prayers from the Book of Common Worship, Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for the Year 1911, American Baptist Year Book, 1912