Great Awakening Research Articles

The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. By Linford D.Fisher. Oxford University Press. 2012. xii + 296pp. $34.95.

HistoryVolume 100, Issue 339 p. 158-159 Reviews and Short Notices The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. By Fisher, Linford D.. Oxford University Press. 2012. xii + 296pp. $34.95. Kathryn N. Gray, Kathryn N. Gray Plymouth UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Kathryn N. Gray, Kathryn N. Gray Plymouth UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 January 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.12103_28Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume100, Issue339January 2015Pages 158-159 RelatedInformation

Religion Around Emily Dickinson by W. Clark Gilpin (review)

Reviewed by: Religion Around Emily Dickinson by W. Clark Gilpin Shira Wolosky (bio) Gilpin, W. Clark. Religion Around Emily Dickinson. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2014. $34. Through the various waves of twentieth-century criticism of Dickinson, religion has been mainly lacking. New Critical explication studied her work in its formal iconicity, independent of social history. The assumption was that Dickinson’s poems, like other literary works, were about the powers and forms of the imagination as they illuminated themselves: artifacts about art, language constructing language. Gender criticism opened the door to social history, but only as wide as women’s literary performances. In an odd way this increased Dickinson’s isolation, together with women contemporary to her. As madwomen in the attic — with Dickinson an exemplar in her reclusion – women writers continued to be seen as cut off from public events. Their restricted, constrained domesticity became the very subject of their work, expressed as an anxious tension between their double roles of women and poet. Cultural Studies linked this gendered positioning to other cultural subjections, making a trinity of race, class, and gender. On one level this broadened discussion into wider social fields. On another, it narrowed analysis to questions of power, of domination and oppression as the ultimate measure or mode of analysis. The literary text became a record of oppression and resistance, which it is the critic’s role to track. [End Page 103] Religion was a cultural arena that these approaches generally ignored. Most critics displayed a kind of metalepsis: the secularism they assumed for themselves, they extended backwards into the nineteenth century. But religion has erupted in the twenty-first century, a return of the repressed with a vengeance, horrifyingly destructive but also as an insistent aspect of human experience and efforts to make sense of it. To omit attention to religion in a century like the nineteenth is to occlude fundamental aspects of the formation of self, the constitution of society, and many aesthetic practices of literature derived from, reflecting, or transforming religious practices. Emily Dickinson’s world was religious. Amherst, and the entire Connecticut River valley, was Jonathan Edwards’s country. The Second Great Awakening stretched from the start of the nineteenth century to the Civil War, and it was experienced by Dickinson directly through conversion waves, including those that swept up her father and the missionary-inclined Mount Holyoke Seminary Dickinson attended. The period leading up to the Civil War and the War itself, the historical maelstrom during which Dickinson composed half her poems, was represented in theological terms that profoundly shaped the conflict. That Dickinson herself resisted formal religion, while also composing poems almost ecstatic in ways structured according to religious modes, only ties her work more firmly to the religious contexts in which she lived and wrote. This religious world of Dickinson’s engagement (and disengagement) is the subject of Religion Around Emily Dickinson. To some extent the material Gilpin assembles is familiar. The basic touchstones of American literary history and Dickinson studies, such as Jonathan Edwards and Emerson, are duly treated. Gilpin extends beyond these to topics of recent interest, as well as contemporary methods: domesticity and the market, sentimentality, and the profession of authorship. He addresses a broad range of social practices through a variety of fields, for example examining domestic architecture and its representations as newly spatialized genderings of middle-class life. William Ellery Channing’s call to “self-culture,” reading practices and dissemination, bereavement practices, landscaped cemeteries, keepsakes and public memorials, spiritualism, letter-writing, consolation literature, and gendered boundaries as they were elaborated and enforced in the nineteenth century weave a cultural-social fabric in which Gilpin frames Dickinson’s own texts. Religion is the thread basting together the varieties of social topics the book reviews. Nineteenth-century domesticity, as a religious site, takes on new and specific forms, such as the “parlor piety” of Phoebe Palmer. Examined as a domestic space gendered female and crossing private with public activity, the [End Page 104] parlor offered a social locus where religious attitudes conjoined with emergent American ideologies such as “self-improvement.” The outpouring of religious publications points inward to religious experience while also penetrating public...

Poetry, the Sleeping King, and Creative Doubt

Poetry, the Sleeping King, and Creative Doubt Jeff Gundy “Great doubt: great awakening. Little doubt: little awakening. No doubt: no awakening.” ‐Zen Buddhist saying “Doubt… gets a lot done.” ‐Jennifer Hecht, Doubt: A History The (Possibly) Sleeping King As the old tales have it, a mighty king sleeps somewhere beneath the Untersberg, the massive mountain whose northern peak looms over Salzburg and whose long ridge runs south into Germany. The Grimm brothers report that Emperor Karl der Grosse—Charlemagne, in the history books I read in school—sits in a trance somewhere within that massive mountain, whose northern peak looms over Salzburg and whose long ridge trails many miles south into Germany. The great king bears a “keen and profound look,” “friendly and sociable toward all of his subjects who walk back and forth with him across a beautiful meadow. No one knows why he is there and what he intends to do. These remain mysteries of God” (Aschliman). But perhaps, they say, it is not Karl der Grosse at all, but the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa, who drowned crossing a river in his armor in 1190 during his third crusade. His ravens circle the mountain and his beard has grown into the table, or until his ravens wake him, and when he awakens he will not wander peaceably in the meadow but bring the apocalypse. He did have an appetite for shedding blood in the name of God, after all. Who is under the mountain? Is he dwelling easily there, with no need to return, or gathering strength for a savage awakening? Could he really bring a kingdom of justice and equality, or would his emergence just lead to more misery and destruction? Should we go looking for him? Would the pleasure of knowing be worth the chance that we might find only horror under the mountain? What things are best not known? And what happens if we add “about God” to that question? Like most good stories, this one seizes us with drama, teases us with hope, and ends in mystery. Doubt is built into it, inseparable—if we knew it were true, our lives would have to change. But while it is possible, however unlikely, we can allow ourselves the pleasure and promise that lie in its being merely potential. Freed by our doubts about its “reality,” we can read it as metaphor, as allegory, as pageant, as whatever we will. Think about the origin of the story. How did it come about? Someone, or ones, thinking about how dim and awful their days were, no doubt, dreaming of how they might be otherwise. Someone asking for a story—a child perhaps, or one of those gathered at the hearth, or in the tavern. Doubting the official story that all is well and will be well, if only we trust and obey. What if the great king were still alive? What if he waits under the mountain? What does he do there? Will he return? Once the first question is asked, that great meadow under the mountain opens out, filled with possibility. Of course that potential remains only as long as it remains imagined rather than actual. I propose to examine and even to celebrate doubt—not as a failing or a weakness but as a creative, positive, and hopeful practice, one born out of the obvious gaps and lapses of our knowledge and wisdom, the everyday imperfections of our lives, and a necessary belief that revelation is not yet complete. Yet I hasten to add that all doubt is not created equal. Enervating cynicism, mere disbelief, easy scorn, mindless relativism; all these are of no use. No, the doubt I have in mind is more closely allied to a flexible skepticism (sometimes cheerful, sometimes desperate), to brisk refusal of horned dilemmas and totalitarian claims, and to a humility both modest and bold. To question, often if not always, is the first step toward making something new. This seems strange, wrong, incomplete… what if, instead or also… ? The lesser sorts of doubt are big, these days, with conservatives doubting science and (it seems) any information that threatens their dogmas, with reports of declining church attendance in...

The Great Awakening? The Belfast Flag Protests and Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist Counter-memory in Northern Ireland

This article examines the protest movement that surfaced as a result of the decision taken by Belfast City Council to remove the Union flag from Belfast City Hall in December 2012. This article examines why the issue conflagrated as it did and led to a mobilisation within working-class Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist (PUL) communities on the issue. Examining the flag protests within the context of more general PUL disaffection with the Good Friday Agreement and its associated peace process, this article looks at the flag protests as an avenue for disaffected PUL communities to assert a new counter-memory that challenges not only the ‘other’ but also those within the leadership of political Unionism who are said to have used PUL communities during the conflict only to abandon them in the post-conflict transition. This article concludes by examining the future potential of the new political movement born out of the flag protests and the avenues open to it to challenge the hegemonic position of traditional Unionism that has left PUL communities behind as Northern Ireland progresses in transition out of political conflict.

In Search of “Fellow Pilgrims”: Radical Protestants and Transconfessional Exchanges in Europe and the British Atlantic, c. 1670–1730

The mobility and literacy of many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dissenters allowed for the circulation of people and ideas throughout Europe, the British Isles, and colonial North America. This article focuses on the interactions of dissenting groups who flourished in the half century between the Restoration and the Great Awakening, such as English Philadelphians, French Prophets, radical German Pietists, Quakers, Bourignonians, and Labadists. It considers how a push for further reforms, particularly those arising from the context of late seventeenth-century millenarianism, served as a catalyst for radical Protestants to seek out other dissenters with the goal of uniting communities of reformers across linguistic, confessional, and geographic boundaries. Dissenters facilitated their endeavors through the development of new sites of sociability, a reliance on implicit codes of expected behavior, and the circulation of manuscript and printed texts. By relying on mechanisms of the public sphere, they carried out esoteric conversations and critical debates about radical Protestantism.

Fisher, Linford D. The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 312 pp. $34.95 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewFisher, Linford D. The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 312 pp. $34.95 (cloth).Rachel M. WheelerRachel M. WheelerIndiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 94, Number 3July 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/677712 Views: 141Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Women and Welfare in the United States

Women and Welfare in the United States Miriam Cohen (bio) Gunja SenGupta. From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840–1918. New York: New York University Press, 2009. xiv + 333 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8147-4061-3 (cl); 978-0-8147-4107-8 (pb). Lisa Levenstein. A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvi + 300 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8078-3272-1 (cl); 978-0-8078-7164-5 (pb). Marisa Chappell. The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty and Politics in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. xi + 345 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8122-4204-1 (cl); 978-0-8122-2154-1 (pb). Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer. Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom of the Low-Wage Labor Market. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xiii + 219 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-2261-1405-7 (cl); 978-0-2261-1406-4 (pb). Sixteen years after President Bill Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWOA), which ended “welfare as we know it,” scholars can better understand the history that led to the law’s enactment as well as its effects. The books under review in this essay reaffirm both the importance of a feminist perspective for understanding the history of American welfare and the importance of race to understanding this feminist history. These studies also provide ample evidence that social justice in the twenty-first century requires public policy support for all citizens, as workers and as caregivers. Beginning in antebellum New York City, Gunja SenGupta focuses on five institutions that exemplify the “range of charitable and reform institutions that constituted New York’s interlocking network of private benevolence and public relief” (3). By 1840, New York was a bustling city of commerce and manufacturing which boasted great wealth, a growing middle class, and, in lower Manhattan, plebian neighborhoods of immigrants and African Americans. The panic of 1837 and subsequent depression encouraged “respectable” society to confront growing poverty. Faith in the free market and the Second Great Awakening, with its emphasis on free [End Page 180] will and perfectibility, contributed to the zeal with which reformers sought to rehabilitate the poor. If poverty was the result of character flaws and not lack of jobs, reformers argued, the reformation of paupers required their institutionalization rather than direct relief. The New York Alms House added a Work House on Blackwell’s Island to employ able-bodied paupers, now segregated from the aged and infirm who were considered worthy of relief. In the vanguard of the scientific charity movement, volunteers from the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor set up an elaborate system for investigating applications for aid, separating the deserving from the undeserving, and sending them to appropriate agencies. For antebellum New Yorkers, the problem of pauperism was intertwined with the “immigration problem” and, in particular, the large number of poor Irish. While nativists portrayed the Irish as a threat to the white republic, a more optimistic view won out among New York’s elite. By promoting work discipline and temperance, reformers believed they could help the Irish become capable of self-governance and, hence, full citizens of the republic. African Americans were perceived differently than impoverished whites. This was expressed in the 1855 census, which used the term “color” to categorize blacks and mulattos while the Irish were described as white, like all people of European origin. According to this logic, African Americans were inherently different from whites and thus neither acculturation nor the attainment of citizenship rights was possible. Reformers’ attitude about difference, SenGupta shows, was critical to understanding the social service practices of public and private institutions throughout the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1840s, the Alms House segregated poor blacks from native-born and immigrant whites. Black adults were placed in the privately run Colored Home and black orphans in the Colored Orphan Asylum. The wealthy white women supervising the Colored Home approached their work on behalf of indigent blacks with great sympathy. Like many activists from “respectable” society, these...

Black Catholicism

Black Catholicism

American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War by Eran Shalev (review)

Reviewed by: American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War by Eran Shalev Glenn Moots (bio) American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. By Eran Shalev. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. x, 239. $40.00 cloth; $40.00 ebook) American Zion investigates what Eran Shalev calls “biblicism” or “Old Testamentism” from the American Revolution to the Civil War. It is a consequential and worthwhile study but not without its errors and omissions, including the lack of a geographical or denominational landscape of his subject. Some familiar tropes about American religion are retained (e.g., chosenness was a source of anxiety). Others have been mercifully discarded (e.g., Exodus and eschatology as overarching interpretations). Despite any shortcomings, however, the essays herein are thoughtful and both general readers and academics will find it a valuable resource. The virtues of American Zion lie in its treatment of both familiar and unfamiliar subjects. Shalev ably demonstrates that ministers and others were not only “Israelizing America,” they were also “Americanizing Israel.” The ancient Hebrew polities were not merely rhetorical or metaphorical; they often provided literal direction for America. Shalev convincingly demonstrates that the “Hebrew Republic” became a model for American politics, though he overstates the importance of recent scholarship and does not satisfactorily connect Hebraic republicanism [End Page 122] in Britain and Europe to its use in America. Shalev also provides an enlightening overview of Americans wrestling with the possible identity of Indians as lost Israelites. He tells a fascinating story of how American popular histories written between 1740 and 1850, in the style of the King James Bible (“pseudobiblicism”), prepared the way for the Book of Mormon. He convincingly demonstrates how antislavery arguments distanced America from ancient Israel and made the comparison less appealing. There are entertaining narratives about Mordecai Manuel Noah’s failed attempt to establish a biblical government on Grand Island near Niagara Falls, though what this says about American “Old Testamentism” in general is unclear. Along with these virtues are evident shortcomings, however. Shalev relies too heavily on secondary sources in his characterization of the religious development of America. He argues that Americans turned to the New Testament in a substantial way only after 1820. How did he miss numerous, if not ubiquitous, citations of Romans 13, I Peter 2, Galatians 5, or Matthew 5—some of the most cited texts in political sermons between 1763 and 1800? If anything, the increased usage of the New Testament in the early nineteenth century that Shalev notes was not simply due to “multitudes” becoming attuned to the message of redemption (p. 151). While there was certainly a lot of gospeling on the expanding frontier, spending any time with sermons prior to 1820 will disabuse one of the notion that the New Testament ever played second chair to the Old in private or public Christianity in America. What Shalev overlooks is that Americans since the Second Great Awakening were increasingly willing to stretch the Gospel in social directions as evangelicalism matured and seeds were sown for religiously motivated progressivism. As for the New Testament being used in Lincoln’s eulogies more than Washington’s (p. 157), it was obviously much easier to make the martyred Lincoln a national Christ figure who bore the sins of slavery and war. Shalev’s treatment of classical republicanism in America is also disappointing. He returns to the theme of his earlier monograph, Rome Reborn on Western Shores (2009), which demonstrated the influence [End Page 123] of Rome on early America. While it is true that Americans blended the Bible with classical republicanism in their political thinking, they were hardly the first Protestants, or Christians, to do so. What Shalev never precisely addresses is what the enduring legacy of that intersection is (given that classical republicanism faded in the early nineteenth century) or whether the Bible can stand on its own conceptually as a political source. Was America really only “Rome reborn” all along, or was it, indeed, as he argues here, a new Zion? This distinction needs a much more precise treatment. Sometimes Shalev seems to argue that...

Conscientious Children and Authoritative Fathers: Two Clashes of Religious Liberty and Parental Rights in 1840s Pennsylvania

The Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century significantly undermined established religious and social practices in the United States. The revivalist preaching, especially in its later manifestations, underscored the individual sinner's ability to choose God and initiate personal conversion. Democratized religion, with its consequent theological shift that elevated human agency over divine sovereignty for obtaining salvation, better fit with the individualistic ethos of the early republic. The evangelistic fervor permeated all levels of society, and by the 1820s many revivalists directed their energies to reaching children—starting Sunday schools, publishing tracts and magazines aimed for young readers, and actively seeking to convert youngsters before sin and vice had scarred their lives. As free moral agents increasingly able to discern right from wrong as they matured, children needed their spiritual sensibilities cultivated as much as adults. Although individualistic religion placed great value in children, it furthered the decline of patriarchy and absolute patriarchal authority, which had been challenged during the revolutionary era and seemed ill-suited for republican society. Puritan fathers of the seventeenth century may have possessed unquestioned control over their families, but many nineteenth-century Americans, although not completely denying a father's prerogative in many situations, had accepted a more moderate position that refused to acknowledge unlimited paternal authority.1

The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers: A Shifting Story. By Lisa Smith. New York: Lexington, 2012. 185 pp. $80.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The First Great Awakening in Colonial American Newspapers: A Shifting Story . By Lisa Smith . New York : Lexington , 2012. 185 pp. $80.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesMuch of the material in this volume deals with George Whitefield (1714-1770), English preacher and revivalist. As a student at Oxford, he associated with those who formed the Holy Club, who would later be known as the first Methodists. Whitefield was becoming recognized as unusual because of his preaching abilities, and Martin Benson, bishop of Gloucester, determined to ordain Whitefield at the age of twenty-one, despite his prior decision to ordain no one before twenty-three. Whitefield's preaching created revivals in London, Bristol, and Bath. British newspapers picked up the story, and among their readers was Benjamin Franklin, who reprinted the story in his Pennsylvania Gazette . These papers had already reprinted more than eighty items concerning Whitefield and the revival in England.When Whitefield first came to Philadelphia, in November 1739, Franklin reported it and it was reprinted a week later by three Boston papers. Lisa Smith's research in extant newspapers shows that much of the revival-related notices in papers from Boston to Charleston were reprints. Since colonial newspapers did not have reporters in the modern sense, the printer got his news from letters, eye-witnesses, and other papers. Reporting on the awakening was overwhelmingly positive in the early years of the 1740s; it not only reported on Whitefield but also stressed the extensiveness of the movement. When Presbyterian pastor Gilbert Tennent went to New England in December 1740, the papers published seventeen items concerning his preaching, only two being negative. In his Pennsylvania Gazette , Franklin was especially positive, writing on June 12, 1740, The alteration in the Face of Religion here is altogether surprising . . . . All which, under God, is owing to the successful labors of the Rev. Mr. Whitefield.Whitefield realized that he needed various types of assistance in the New World if he was going to be successful, and one of his chief needs was for a printer. On November 5, he found a print shop near the tall and impressive steeple of Philadelphia's Christ Church, and he entered the front door and asked for the printer. He was introduced to Ben Franklin, and they began a discussion. Yes, Franklin could take on a new client, one who would supply him with a steady round of materials to print--his sermons and tracts. Then, this was no ordinary preacher, Franklin found, and he had reported on this Englishman; he was an international traveler with extensive background. Franklin was astounded when Whitefield told him of his plan for an orphanage in faraway Georgia--and that this man was planning to travel there, even though roads to Georgia were nearly nonexistent, and he knew nothing of the obstacles. As they talked, Franklin framed an opinion of the man. He became greatly impressed with the amount of experience Whitefield had behind him, despite his youth. Franklin's caution began to fade. Whitefield seemed so transparent and sincere, so concerned about the spiritual welfare of total strangers, and at the same time so visionary and driven to achieve.Franklin had read in the London papers of Whitefield's powerful voice, and this too made him curious. He asked the Englishman where he would be speaking next, and was told he was to gather a crowd around the Court House steps that afternoon. Don't you prefer speaking in a church, from a pulpit? I haven't heard of anyone speaking out of doors, with all the street noises drowning you! …

Sounds of Sympathy: William Wells Brown’s Anti-Slavery Harp , Abolition, and the Culture of Early and Antebellum American Song

In “Sounds of Sympathy,” I contextualize William Wells Brown’s Anti-Slavery Harp (1848) within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American hymnodic reforms, the ecstatic singing of the Second Great Awakening, minstrelsy, the rise of the Hutchinson Family Singers, and the culture of antislavery song more generally. Ultimately, I argue that Brown’s songbook—which included two of his own compositions—was Brown’s effort to harness sound as a tool to aid abolition.

Note about the 'anxious bench'

[MWS 14.1 (2014) 97-101] ISSN 1470-8078 Note about the 'anxious bench' Mariana Magalhäes Pinto Côrtes In the section dedicated to Methodism in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber briefly mentions a strange and unprecedented conversion technique practised during the move ment of the 'Second Great Awakening'. This technique was called the 'anxious bench'. Weber doesn't use the original English term, probably—although there is no certainty on this point—because he only knew about the technique from the German translation of the book written by the theologian and educator John Williamson Nevin called The Anxious Bench-A Tract for the Times, published in 1843.1 1. In the famous translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Talcott Parsons, the 'anxious bench' was referred to only indirectly. To quote the Par sons' translation: The attainment of repentance under certain circumstances involved an emotional struggle of such intensity as to lead to the most terrible ecstasies, which in America often took place in a public meeting. This formed the basis of a belief in the undeserved possession of divine grace and at the same time of an immediate consciousness of justifica tion and forgiveness (Weber 1930:140). 'In a public meeting' stands in for the 'Angstbank'. The German reads: Ein unter Umständen bis zu den fürchterlichsten Ekstasen gesteiger ter Busskampf, in Amerika mit Vorliebe auf der "Angstbank" vollzo gen, führte zum Glauben an Gottes unverdiente Gnade und zugleich damit unmittelbar zum Be wusstein der Rechtfertigung und Versöh nung (Weber 1920:146). My thanks to Sam Whimster who pointed this out to me during a conference on Weber and Foucault in Säo Paulo, May 2013. On this issue of Weber's sources, the anonymous referee for this Note informs us that the German translation of The Anxious Bench appeared in 1844 from the second and enlarged English edition and was accomplished probably by Nevin himself since he was one of the founding fathers of the so-called Mercersburg Theology, a German-American theological movement in the mid-19th century.© Max Weber Studies 2014, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP. 98 Max Weber Studies The 'anxious bench' was a conversion r Great Awakening', an evangelist reviva the United States in the nineteenth c revivalist movement constituted an innovative re-elaboration of cer tain practices employed by the Methodism in the eighteenth cen tury which, in turn, could be closely related to German pietism at the end of the seventeenth century. In the field of Protestant move ments derived straightforwardly from the Reformation, German pietism introduces, according to Weber, the sentiment factor, which was not part of the original Calvinist theology of predestination. Instead of projecting all rational conduct in this world to the pur suit of salvation in the Other World, German pietism intended to provide its followers full communion with God and his blessedness in this present world. Although this communion is mediated by the search for everyday asceticism, German pietism could result in a religiosity of a markedly hysterical character, by alternating frantic ecstasy and nervous lethargy, as Weber has pointed out. By rejecting the Calvinist presupposition of the particularism of grace, German pietism postulated that grace is universally distributed; its conces sion, however, is given to each man only once. If the moment of concession is passed by, grace would be lost forever and the follower would be in the same condition of those condemned by the arbi trary Calvinist predestination. As the decisive moment of receiving grace was undefined, German pietists invented a method for bring ing it about. Known as 'penitential battle', the method consisted of a devotional exercise in which sinners were encouraged to engage in a war against themselves and to regret their sins, a necessary condition to allow them to regenerate the heart and to receive the intended grace. Aimed at mass conversion, Methodism transforms the 'penitential battle' practice in an efficient mechanism to incite a sentimental experience of conversion. In North America, especially among Methodist sects and under revivalist movements of religious effervescence, the 'penitential battle' gains a particular and curious reconfiguration in...

The Awakening Coast: An Anthology of Moravian Writings from Mosquitia and Eastern Nicaragua, 1849-1899 by Karl Offen and Terry Rugeley (review)

Reviewed by: The Awakening Coast: An Anthology of Moravian Writings from Mosquitia and Eastern Nicaragua, 1849-1899 by Karl Offen and Terry Rugeley Andrew Hilburn The Awakening Coast: An Anthology of Moravian Writings from Mosquitia and Eastern Nicaragua, 1849-1899. Karl Offen and Terry Rugeley. University of Nebraska Press. xi + 430 pp., maps, figures, tables, notes, selected bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth. (ISBN: 978-0-8032-4896-0). For Central Americanist geographers and those familiar with the region, the Moravian Church is known as a key institution in the regional identity of eastern Honduras and the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. So much so that today, it is taken as a given and does not appear strange at all to them or even this region’s residents that what began as a small German-Czech Hussite social-religious experiment now defines religious life amid a broader region dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. Yet how it came to be this way, and more importantly how this was experienced and recorded by the Moravian missionaries [End Page 245] themselves, has until now been confined to short excerpts amid larger tomes and elusive archival shelves. Thankfully, geographer, Mosquitia-expert, and CLAGista Karl Offen and Latin Americanist historian Terry Rugeley have brought to life the seminal moments of the Moravian Church in Mosquitia from 1849 to 1900 with their annotated anthology, The Awakening Coast. More importantly, the careful passage selection, annotation, and contextualization by the authors serve to create a wonderfully readable cultural-historical geography of the Nicaraguan Mosquitia. Unlike the mid-19th century Moravian missionaries who were dropped off unaware into unfamiliar villages amid the lagoons, pine savannas, and rainforests, the reader is introduced to the Nicaraguan Mosquitia with a thorough introduction chapter by Offen. In fact, this chapter is a considerable scholarly contribution in itself and provides the overarching narrative that the excerpted vignettes flesh out with their lived experiences and observations. As a whole, this keystone chapter contextualizes the time and geographic setting during which the featured writings took place. In it, Offen begins by situating the importance of the Moravian Church in the regional identity of the Nicaraguan Mosquitia while pointing to the “Great Awakening” of the 1880s there as the moment of synthesis between the two. The majority of the essay, though, is an excellent summary on the social, cultural, political, and economic changes that swept the region in the latter half of the 19th Century through the experiences of its Moravian, Miskitu, Rama, Mayangna, and Creole residents. In this sense, Offen’s chapter and the book in total succeed in the same way Bernard Nietschmann’s and Charles Hale’s work show the effects of globalization on the Nicaraguan Mosquitia, the only difference being Offen and Rugeley’s focus on the second half of the 1800s from archival sources. While the introductory chapter works as a stand-alone essay, it is also valuable as an annotated index for the selected writings by the Moravians. For readers interested in specific thematic aspects of the anthology, such as boom towns, disease, Miskitu cosmology, healing, or buried poisons, among many others, Offen provides useful parenthetical “tags” on these subjects by noting the chapter numbers of the selected writings that reference those themes. This small, but significant detail adds to the book’s lasting contribution as an anthology of difficult-to-access writings. Most of the 31 entries written by the Moravian missionaries are very brief, usually 3-7 pages, but some more substantive chaptered entries could qualify as monographs, with one exceeding 50 pages. Some are accounts of actual events, such as the description of events related to the religious “awakening” of 1879 in Karata, but others are general histories of places (“Changes in Dakura”) or descriptions of economic activity or cultural practices (“Trade among the Miskito Indians”; Sorcery at Kukalaya”). While many of the entries have the overly religious, ethnocentric discourse expected from mid-19th Century Protestant missionaries, this does not make them uninteresting or useless as vistas into the past. If the reader can tune out the dated language and religious qualifiers, the observations of some writers, especially those of Heinrich Ziock, at least read like...

ENGLISH LETTERS AND INDIAN LITERACIES: READING, WRITING, AND NEW ENGLAND MISSIONARY SCHOOLS, 1750–1830

ENGLISH LETTERS AND INDIAN LITERACIES: READING, WRITING, AND NEW ENGLAND MISSIONARY SCHOOLS, 1750-1830. By Hilary E. Wyss. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. xii + 251 pp. $59.95.Hilary Wyss has emerged as a major force in recovery of early Native American writers. For years, standard anthologies, and a good deal of scholarship, acknowledged only two: seventeenth-century Mohegan missionary Samson Occom and nineteenth-century Pequot minister William Apess. This limiting (abetted by Heath and Norton anthologies' annoying persistence in relegating Native American oral traditions to their pre-literate, pre-1700 sections) helps perpetuate racist myths: that Native Americans vanished; that they had relatively little to contribute to American literature; and that, when they did write, they did so only as tools of colonial order.Alphabetic literacy is certainly a technology of colonial domination, but Wyss's first book, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity and Native Community in Early America (2000), argued that indigenous textual production between and preceding Occom and Apess is much more complicated and much more voluminous, if only we are willing to read archives more deeply. Bearing out her claim, last decade and a half have produced a cascade of new work on early Native authors: Abenaki historian Lisa Brooks's widely cited study, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in Northeast (2008), and Drew Lopenzina's Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up Pen in Colonial Period (2012), as well as brilliant documentary anthology that Wyss coedited with Kristina Bross, Early Native Literacies in New England (2008), and Robert Dale Parker's Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Poetry to 1930 (2010). These volumes, and many more, have assiduously illustrated that Native Americans who embraced alphabetic literacy-and even those who had it thrust upon them-exercised their own agency in writing and articulated complex ideals of self-determination and tribal sovereignty.You cannot understand early Native American literature without understanding early education. As Wyss puts it,Indian education is nexus through which social, political, and cultural differences were played out among Native groups, between colonial and indigenous peoples, and between competing colonial figures invested in idea of Native literacy. . . . And under often intensely difficult conditions Native Americans sustained themselves as people with their own history and culture while accepting material artifacts of English life. (35-36)English Letters and Literacies continues to fill in this history with a sustained examination of Congregationalist boarding schools operating within and outside of New England between two Great Awakenings. Evangelical efforts to educate Indians, and thereby to convert them, began almost as soon as Puritans arrived. These projects ranged from John Eliot's famous praying towns to more diffuse, home- and communitybased reading instruction. In mid-eighteenth century, New England authorities began pinning their hopes on boarding schools-precursors to infamous Carlisle School of later nineteenth century, which removed Native children from their home communities in interests of speedier assimilation. Most of these early experiments were short-lived: [N]one of them were able to sustain good relations for more than a few years with various tribes they claimed to serve . . . [revealing] gap between what Natives wanted from such ventures and what missionaries expected of their students (18). Yet schools also left extensive archives, documents that have much to tell us about colonial ideals of literacy and about Native uses of writing.Wyss characterizes former ideal as the Readerly Indian (one imagined as a passive recipient of European missionary message) and latter as the Writerly Indian, a construct that aims, strategically and purposefully, to recover agency of Indians who picked up pen. …

Defining Engaged Buddhism

Thomas F. Yarnall’s 2003 categories of ‘modernist’ and ‘traditionist’, used to classify accounts of the origins of engaged Buddhism, have proven useful as methodological tools but today need considerable reevaluation. This article investigates two more recent accounts dealing with engaged Buddhism — David Loy’s The Great Awakening and Sallie B. King’s Socially Engaged Buddhism — in order to critique and ultimately to go beyond Yarnall’s categories. It touches on questions concerning the legitimacy and obligations of scholars in defining Buddhism for practitioners and for fellow academics, and makes the case that a significant shift is needed in order to avoid problems of Orientalism at work in some academic accounts of engaged Buddhism.

The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America by Linford D. Fisher (review)

The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America by Linford D. Fisher (review)

Infant Muse: Phillis Wheatley and the Revolutionary Rhetoric of Childhood

Infant MusePhillis Wheatley and the Revolutionary Rhetoric of Childhood Lucia Hodgson (bio) I believe no one would have published the poetry of Black Phillis Wheatley, that grown woman who stayed with her chosen Black man. … America has long been tolerant of Black children, compared to its reception of independent Black men and Black women. —June Jordan, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America or Something like a Sonnet for Phillis Wheatley” Phillis Wheatley’s mastery of popular belletristic conventions, her deployment of Christian evangelical rhetoric, and her manipulation of the colonist-as-slave analogy have all been cited as tactics that enabled her to adopt an intelligible and therefore consumable subjectivity. The strategies outlined above certainly contributed to Wheatley’s phenomenal transatlantic success. What has been less remarked is how all three maneuvers gained additional traction from their specific and direct engagement with Enlightenment conceptions of childhood articulated by John Locke, conceptions that constituted an essential component of the genre of occasional poetry, the ideology of the Great Awakening, and the rhetoric of Revolutionary patriots. Wheatley’s writing and marketing tapped into the eighteenth-century recognition of childhood as a status distinct from adulthood with its own unique set of weaknesses and strengths. The child figure of the early 1770s was simultaneously affiliated with varied and contradictory—yet primarily positive—characteristics, including malleability, obedience, and faith in authority. This constellation of attributes enabled Wheatley’s literary child persona to speak to her social superiors about family, religion, and politics while mitigating the threat associated with her wronged and enslaved African body. The child characters in Wheatley’s poetry have been the focus of much more scholarly analysis than her child authorial persona. Analysis of child [End Page 663] characters is a prominent component of the emerging field of early American childhood studies, which encompasses literature written for children as well as representations of children in literature for adults.1 Anna Mae Duane (Suffering 144–45) and Caroline Levander (40) have both analyzed Wheatley’s verses referencing her kidnapping from Africa in early childhood to make nuanced arguments about the cultural work performed by child figures in the process of American nation building. However, it is mainly contemporary children’s literature that has situated Wheatley as a child author.2 Children’s books like Kathryn Lasky’s A Voice of Her Own: The Story of Phillis Wheatley, Slave Poet (2003) and Kathryn Kilby Borland’s Phillis Wheatley: Young Revolutionary Poet (2005) concentrate their biographies on the fact that Wheatley was not only an enslaved poet but also a child poet. She composed her first extant poem at the age of eleven.3 She published her first poem at about the age of fourteen. She was about sixteen when she achieved international fame with her elegy for the Methodist minister George Whitefield. And she was about nineteen when she traveled to England to participate in and promote the publication of her collection of occasional verse, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). An examination of Wheatley’s self-presentation as a juvenile poet constitutes a third, rarely addressed dimension of early American studies: the child as producer of literature and voice of political critique. Wheatley scholarship, particularly research concerned with recuperating the poet’s agency, has characterized her as an adult woman rather than a girl child. In her incisive article, Joanna Brooks debunks the assertion of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that in 1772 Wheatley underwent an oral examination conducted by eighteen elite white Bostonian men to prove her ability to author her poems. In proposing “an alternative narrative of the making of Wheatley, one that assigns her a commanding role in the early stages of her public career” (5), Brooks transforms Gates’s “young African girl” and “African adolescent” (qtd. in Brooks 1) into a “black woman” (7) and an “enslaved woman poet” (13).4 In another example of scholarly adultification, Betsy Erkkilä argues that the American Revolution furnished “women,” including Wheatley and Abigail Adams, with “the language and metaphors to ‘foment’ further rebellion in their struggle for citizenship, suffrage, and full human rights” (227). Neither Brooks nor Erkkilä considers Wheatley’s youth in relation to her rhetorical...

“Needing to Summon the Others”: Archival Research as Séance in Susan Howe’s Spontaneous Particulars

Nature is a Haunted House-but Art-a House that tries to be haunted-Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson 554A haze / Blink into aching lost / Only words remain / print is available-Susan Howe, unpublished poem1The only real in writing is writing itself-William Carlos Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge 13.BecAuse she attends to writing as a residual manifestation of a fragmented self, and because of her opaque texts-cut up, taped together, and, at points, overlapping-Susan Howe is often cast as a post-modern Language poet with historicist leanings.2 Spontaneous Particulars, however, emphasizes Howe's indebtedness to modernists such as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and H.D. As does Williams in In American Grain (1939), which Michael Palmer describes as bearing the same relationship to a consciousness of American language and speech as one finds in Howe's creative scholarship, she digs into layers of writing several levels beneath modernism (My Emily Dickinson, back cover). Through archival research, Howe investigates American ground as it appears in writings by Nathanael Hawthorne, Jonathan Edwards, and Noah Webster and reproductions of cloth patches associated with otherwise unacknowledged figure, Susan Edwards.3 The bits of fabric testify to exclusionary, even violent, character of archival memory.4 Howe points out, and dress fragments, a pair of silk (21) represent only material reminder of a gifted, learned woman in vast Edwards archives at Yale's Beinecke, which includes over 1,200 sermons by Susan's brother, Jonathan, New England evangelical preacher credited with helping inaugurate Great Awakening in first half of 18th century. As with Andrei Codrescu's Bibliodeath, which describes gruesome blood and brain matter splattered upon a manuscript by Richard Brautigan, who committed suicide during composition of a novel in 1984, as a critical component of late author's archive held at Bancroft Library in Berkeley, I will be focusing in this essay on Howe's archival research into material culture-for example, embroidery and silk shoes and wedding dress fragments assigned to female members of 18th century Edwards family-as evidence of what William Carlos Williams termed embodiment of knowledge.5 As with Codrescu's punning on relation of corpse and corpus in his analysis of human-stained Brautigan manuscript, Howe perceives archival research as a work of bereavement. In That This (2010), for example, a Howe work inaugurated by unexpected death in 2008 of her second husband, distinguished SUNY Buffalo philosopher of American pragmatism Peter Hare, she describes her researches in terms of mourning: If you looked through my papers until now, you would find a former dead husband at center. We had almost stopped needing to summon others-not quite. Not if you rely on written traces (15 That This). Like That This, Spontaneous Particulars addresses her gnostic disposition and serendipitous relation to archival researches as forms of trance-like summoning of dead that remain as textual spirits: Often by chance, via out-of-the way card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular 'deep' text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at surface of visible, by mystic documentary telepathy. Quickly-precariously-coming as it does from an opposite direction (18). Archival research enables Howe, through luck or fate, to, as it were, read life backwards. She can an uncanny repetition of, not only a textual trace of past, but what she calls an experience [of] a moment before.In In American Grain, Williams reframed early American history through liberal quotations from source texts to convey their impact, in sound and sense, on modern scene. Howe, by contrast, focuses on writerly stylistics, but she also comments upon physical surface of texts. …

War inside the mouth

Declining oral health in younger generation has led to the great awakening of using bacteriocins for maintaining good oral health and treating oral infections. In this review, we present a promising family of antimicrobial proteins, the bacteriocins. Increased attention is necessary due to their powerful but narrow killing activity, stability, low toxicity to humans, and toxicity to bacteria. They are therefore considered as 'designer drugs' that target specific bacterial pathogens. Although only a few clinical trials have been conducted till date, the results suggest the use of bacteriocins, in the treatment of oral infections including dental caries, periodontal diseases and halitosis.