Individual Believers Research Articles

Interreligious Ethics in the Chinese Context: A Comparative Study of the Ten Commandments and the Five Precepts

Religious laws are an important manifestation of religious ethics, maintaining and integrating the community of believers while providing behavioral guidelines for individual believers. This article explores the differences in laws between Judaism and Buddhism through textual analysis of the Ten Commandments in the Bible and the Five Precepts in Buddhism. The article argues that the overlapping content between the two represents the expression of a shared natural law tradition in different religious cultures. However, there are also significant differences. The Ten Commandments were issued for the entire Israelite community, emphasizing the sacred relationship between humans and God and reflecting the characteristics of the Israelite nation as a community of faith. The Five Precepts of Buddhism which originally served as behavioral guidelines for the monastic order later expanded to include all Buddhist followers, focusing on the intentions and thoughts behind speech and actions. Due to the diverse cultural contexts Buddhism encounters, violations of precepts do not entail judicial punishment but are emphasized for their obstructive role in spiritual practice.

Institutions and Countercultures: Christianity’s Impact on South Korean Modernization

The relationship between modernization and religion is contested, with the literature differing in how and in what ways religion helps or hinders countries’ social, economic, and political development. This paper draws upon the history of Christianity in South Korea to critically explore the links between religion and modernization. It makes two arguments. First, discussions of the link between religion and modernization frequently employ static definitions of religion, but Christianity is characterized by oscillations between worldly (institutionalizing) and unworldly (countercultural) impulses that theoretically make very different contributions to social, economic, and political development. Second, in the case of South Korea, it is shown that both impulses have made vital contributions to the country’s modernization at different times. This suggests that the dynamic tug-of-war between the institutional and countercultural facets of Korean Christianity, although problematic for individual believers and religious leaders, helped it become an important contributor to the country’s success story. However, this paper concludes on a cautionary note by warning that extreme instances of these impulses have caused cleavages between Christianity and the Korean state and society and could undermine its future contributions. This suggests that diversity and toleration—a hallmark of Korean Christianity—will continue to be the best pathway forward.

Social Group Moral Encroachment

AbstractAccording to moral encroachers, the moral stakes of a belief partly determine how much evidence we need for the belief to count as knowledge. This view concerns the beliefs of individual believers. In this paper, I argue for a social group version of moral encroachment: dominant groups, such as white people or men, need to have more evidence than the marginalised in order for some of their beliefs to constitute knowledge. I argue for this claim in three steps. First, I spell out the group moral stakes involved – the harms dominant knowers cause the marginalised and the knowledge economy. Second, I show off the theoretical benefits of having the notion of social group moral encroachment at our disposal: it can be an invaluable tool for decolonial and feminist epistemologists if they want to avoid the relativistic ring to their views (a ring that tends to put off many well-wishers). Finally, I start on a positive account of social group moral encroachment by addressing a potential puzzle and responding to objections.

Practicing Islam among a Double Minority in Dobruja (Romania): The Turkish Muslim Roma in Medgidia ( Mecidiye )

The aim of this article is to explore religiosity in an urban Turkish Muslim Roma community from the Dobruja region of Romania. The article is based on fieldwork research consisting of semi-structured interviews, life histories, and participant observation in the post-socialist town of Medgidia. The research is an emic study which seeks to describe the representations of Turkish Muslim Roma in Medgidia and the way they understand, negotiate, and practice Islam. I draw on Arolda Elbasani and Olivier Roy’s definition of religiosity as the way an individual believer experiences his or her relationship to religion and faith. Considering Islam an essentially emotional category, I investigate what Turkish Muslim Roma in Medgidia feel it means to be Muslims, the dynamics of their agencies within their environment, and the emotional elements of their personal narratives. I observe how they perform identity to maintain a certain coherence between their autobiographical selves and the environment in which they live.

The Development of Digital Da'wah at The Indonesian Ulema Council of South Sulawesi Province

Digital da'wah is a response to the dynamics of technological development in the lives of Muslim communities. The proselytizers are transforming and adapting from the phenomenon of conventional da'wah to digital da'wah. This research aimed to reveal the response of the Indonesian Ulema Council (IUC) of South Sulawesi Province to the development of digital da'wah construction amidst changes in the transformation of da'wah with its various dynamics and problems. This qualitative research was conducted at the IUC of South Sulawesi Province located in Makassar. The approach in this research was interdisciplinary by looking at the phenomenon of society and proselytizers conveying their da'wah via digital. The data source was obtained from the IUC of South Sulawesi Province website at https://muisulsel.or.id/ and the researcher conducted interviews with core administrators such as the general chairman, secretary general, commission for da'wah and Islamic community development, and communications and informatics commission at the IUC of South Sulawesi Province. The finding of this research revealed that the IUC of South Sulawesi Province has innovated in responding to technology through digital da'wah. The progress of digital da'wah allowed the IUC of South Sulawesi Province to explain Islamic messages to individual believers and groups so that they reminded each other and connected in accessing digital da'wah. The digital da'wah phenomenon at IUC of South Sulawesi Province referred to the use of digital technology and online platforms to spread religious messages and Islamic da'wah. The IUC of South Sulawesi Province was developing digital da'wah. The digital da'wah developed by the IUC of South Sulawesi Province consisted of six forms, including social media, podcasts and streaming video, da'wah communication websites, live streaming, social campaigns and activism, as well as e-books and digital publications. The idea of developing digital da'wah carried out by the IUC of South Sulawesi Province raised the hope that the proselytizers would be able to reach all groups in spreading divine and prophetic messages. The perfection of digital da'wah also needed to be developed as ideally as possible, such as by adding aspects of Islamic media applications, da'wah applications, and online Islamic learning platforms.

Islamic Headscarves: The Other-Religion Effect and Religious Literacy at the European Court of Human Rights

ABSTRACT Islamic headscarves continue to be one of the most controversial issues concerning Muslims across Europe. In order to analyse how the headscarf is evaluated through the prism of human rights values and moral principles in Europe, this article revisits some headscarf cases heard at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The weaknesses in the rulings have been widely examined but this article will focus on the religious individual, her agency, and the link between her and her associated group, which have been less discussed in the literature. The article highlights that the modern socio-political structure of the Council of Europe countries is strikingly different from that of their pre-modern counterparts. Thus, the contours of religious groups, the link between an individual and her associated group, and the positioning of various religious groups vis-a-vis the state require a set of approaches to a religious claim centred on the individual believer. This can be clearly observed in the theoretical underpinnings of the European Convention on Human Rights, which, however, are not pursued adequately in practice because the actual rulings not only involve logic but also include perception.

Architettura per la liturgia nelle chiese dell’occidente. Appunti di un liturgista

Virtually all religions have their spaces of worship. In fact, the very term “temple” derives from the Greek verb temno, “to cut off,” which points to a space that is cut off from the whole and dedicated to a deity. Likewise, after Christ’s resurrection, Christians would need a venue for ritual worship that would become a place of encounter with God the Trinity. That place would not be an equivalent of the Jewish or pagan temples, which were determined by the presence of a deity and considered sacred and sanctifying on account of that presence. A place of Christian worship would be identified mainly by action, that is, by the celebration of the misterium with Christ at its center. Here, Jesus in present by the power of His word. The faithful gather in His name when they are called to remember Him: “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) and “For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matthew 18:20). In a temple, a meeting of the faithful was due to chance, whereas in a Christian place of worship, the meeting is integral to the sacred place itself. The individual believers are its living building stones, and the Holy Spirit is the unifying force that binds them together. In other words, for a Christian, there is no material place where God lives, and no place can contain Him. Over the years, the noun denoting a congregation of Christians, that is, ecclesia (“church”) was adopted to describe the place in which the congregation is taking place.

Knowledge of the Heart: Notes on the Definition of the Sensus Fidei in the Personal Life of the Believer

AbstractThe sensus fidei is a crucial concept which has assumed growing importance during recent years of theological enquiry, however, it is not so easily defined. This article examines a section of the document. Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church. (ITC, 2014, Chapter 2, no. 48-65) and explores the underlying anthropological-epistemological assumptions which seem to be inherently shaping the idea of the sensus fidei fidelis (the sense of faith of the individual believer). What is the site of such a sense of faith in the personal life of the believer? Is there an adequate theological anthropological framework for imagining the operation of this special ‘faculty’? After commenting on the various definitions of the concept, I focus on the four classical theological key elements the document draws on in articulating a modern account: the Thomistic understanding of faith, virtue, connaturality and instinct. The third section of the article highlights inherent tensions between the traditional Thomistic scheme and a post-Enlightenment, anti-rationalist agenda which call for a more systematic elaboration of an adequate current anthropology of the human person.

Breaking the Spirit of Poverty in African Pentecostal Christianity

Abstract Poverty is one of Africa’s most intractable problems. Decades of deliberate and strategic socioeconomic policies have not yielded considerable concrete results to eradicate it. Upon succeeding the brutal colonial administration, the burgeoning African governments promised their citizens material well-being through socioeconomic development. A half century later the continent is perpetually witnessing a blatant betrayal of dreams. Just like the African governments that succeeded colonial governments, religious organizations continue to promise poverty eradication by divine means to their adherents, whose numbers keep exploding across the continent. The Pentecostal variant of African Christianity is particularly renowned for its promises of wealth, health, and prosperity through supernatural divine power: in the Bible, God has promised to deliver immense material goods to those who believe in Jesus Christ. The expediency of these promises to alleviate poverty and bring about social transformation is debatable. Some scholars argue that African Pentecostalism is an elaborately complex increase in religious activities devoid of social structural transformation, while others opine that it contributes positively to development. In asking whether African Pentecostal Christianity is a move toward or a distraction from development, this article broadly explores discourses on Pentecostalism and development in Africa. Arguably, in the endeavor to preach and live out the experiential power of the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal Christianity in Africa inadvertently plays a role in the broader ongoing development discourse. Although they do not view themselves as ‘religious’ or ‘religion’, Pentecostal churches’ attempts to make the teachings of Jesus Christ relevant to the mundane help individual believers cope with life’s stresses and vulnerabilities. However, it does not transform the social conditions that create problems for individuals. The liberating hope of African Pentecostal Christianity lies in theologically nuancing its discourses to meaningfully engage in global development discourses.

Greek Catholics in Prague (1918–1950)

Before the establishment of Czechoslovakia, a small community of Greek Catholics lived in Prague. Mostly they were soldiers, but after the First World War, Greek Catholic believers from the east of the republic began to move to the new metropolis and their numbers grew both in the city and in the Czech lands. Belonging to a religious denomination motivated them to associate and form a Greek Catholic parish as an offi cial branch of the church. The small community added to the colourful mosaic of the religious and cultural life of the town. This study examines the eff orts to formalize the parish and presents the involvement of local church members in religious, cultural and charitable areas. The positive development taking place between 1918 and 1938 was disrupted by political changes in the Central European area. The consequences of the rise of Nazism and Communism, which marked the lives of both priests and individual believers, are illustrated through the example of a small community. Their fates are intertwined with those of the Czechoslovak Republic and the Greek Catholic Church.

Blasphemy and Violence during the Russian Revolution and the Early Years of the Soviet Union

This article analyzes incidents of blasphemy that occurred both during and in the period immediately following the Russian Revolution. The debate on blasphemy in revolutionary Russia was initially tied to the political system and ecclesiastical structure of the Romanov Empire. One possible explanation for this anomaly is the political discourse of a “victorious revolution”, according to which revolutionary turmoil had birthed a modern, progressive and secular society. A reconstruction of debates on blasphemy, and of sacrilege too, do not fit this narrative. The Soviet state used a rhetoric that would historically have been seen as blasphemous as well as actions that would have been dubbed sacrilegious to push its agenda for modernization, for the redistribution of material resources, the de-legitimization of imperial institutions and the neutralization of political opponents. Violence was a steady companion here. It could take the form of repression by removing relics and liturgical vessels that were venerated by individual believers. It could be cleansing whereby the relic of a saint would be destroyed. Violence also emerged in the physical exchanges between State officials and believers resisting the unsealing of relics and usage of liturgical vessels outside of worship or mass as well as countering the expulsion of church valuables. Finally, a form of symbolic violence could be found in the way in which the faithful were forced to attend the display of relics in public exhibition hall or in the photographic coverage of sacrilegious acts. This was a deliberate move to confront and hurt the feelings of individual believers. This was a deliberate move to confront and hurt the feelings of individual believers.

Centering Asian Americans in Social Scientific Research on Religious Communities

Social scientific research on American Christianity typically centers the experiences and practices of White American Christians and predominantly white Christian communities or churches. Asian American Christians remain more invisible than other racial minority Christians and their churches, especially in quantitative analyses. Researchers who aim to center Asian American Christianity face several challenges in developing a comprehensive quantitative empirical study of individual believers and churches. Practically, Asian American Christian surveys require multiple language translations and a wide array of outreach techniques to obtain a reasonably representative oversample. Substantively, survey questions on American Christianity often presume White American Christian categories, concepts, and frames—applying these without reflection could result in analytic findings that merely demonstrate how similar Asian American Christians are to their white counterparts. Asian American Christians diverge from the experiences of other American Christians drawing from diverse transnational resources, and the specific ways in which Asian Americans as a whole are positioned in the contemporary American racial order. Advancing an Asian American Christian—centered social scientific research program requires overcoming the present methodological obstacles and incorporating theoretical and theological insights from Asian Americanist scholars. This in turn will produce a new and unique body of research that should prove valuable for the continuance of Asian American Christian communities as well as other American Christian churches facing similar challenges.

ФОРУМ: МАТЕРИАЛЬНЫЙ ПОВОРОТ И АНТРОПОЛОГИЯ РЕЛИГИИ

“Material religion” as a research program is a relatively new development in the study of religion in the social sciences and humanities. Though this approach has its own forerunners and predecessors, one can argue that it took shape in the wake of an epistemological critique of social and cultural anthropology which treated religion as embedded in the cognitive and psychological experiences of a human being. Accordingly, the material manifestation of religion used to be treated as secondary, optional, and even superfluous. Criticism of this understanding of the nature of religion and of the methods of its studying focuses on the cultural and historical specificity of this approach originating from the use of Protestantism as a model for any religion. The material turn, in contrast, argues that spiritual experience is or at least can be studied as a derivation of bodily practices and experiences caused by the communication of a human with things, substances, images, sounds, fragrances, and flavours. Taken as integral parts of religious infrastructure, they constitute both the mundane and devotional life of an individual believer and of a religious community. This trend in social research remains unnoticed in Russian social science and humanities. The forum aims to assess the state of art in the field of material religion and discuss perspectives of its development. Participants in the discussion highlight the role of the materiality of things and substances, bodies, and mechanisms in their own research and what heuristic perspectives this material turn opens for them. A separate line of discussion concerns the prospects of grafting material religion to the classic models of social research, such as Marxist sociology.

Ian Y. S. Jew. Paul’s Emotional Regime: The Social Function of Emotion in Philippians and 1 Thessalonians

This revised Durham University 2017 dissertation by Ian Jew, under the supervision of John Barclay, examines the social function of emotion in Philippians and 1 Thessalonians. Taking joy in Philippians and grief in 1 Thessalonians as representative emotions, it argues that “emotions are intrinsic to the proper formation and stabilizing of identity and community, because they emerge from and encode structures of belief, and also influence patterns of sociality” (p. 182). This work’s primary contribution is the application of Ole Riis and Linda Woohead’s sociological concept of an “emotional regime” (A Sociology of Religious Emotions [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010]) as a tool to understand the social function of emotion in the Pauline congregations.This study consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 surveys the state of NT research regarding emotions. It also includes a brief account of the nature and terminology of emotion from different disciplines. Chapter 2 sets forth the Stoic understanding of emotion and its therapy, supplemented with further discussion on how Seneca and Epictetus view grief and joy. Chapters 3 and 4 investigate joy in Philippians and grief in 1 Thessalonians, respectively. Both chapters begin with introductory remarks concerning the literary integrity, purpose, and motif of suffering in each letter. Each chapter then exegetes pertinent passages, concluding with an analysis of the basis and function of joy and grief, respectively. Chapter 5 is the most interesting chapter. Jew first explains the concept of a religious emotional regime. It is an “ordering of emotion, closely bound up with the social world of which it is a part and informed by the system of religious symbols to which it is intricately connected, that simultaneously structures and regulates the emotional responses of its members in accordance with the reality framework that is deemed as normative for them” (p. 139). He then explores how Paul institutes his own emotional regime through the use of symbols, instructions, exemplars, and rituals. The purpose of such a regime is to structure the emotional life of his readers so that the tripartite interrelationships between the individual believer, the church, and God may accord rightly with the truths of the gospel. Jew then concludes the study with a comparison between Pauline and Stoic emotional regimes.Jew’s dissertation is significant in three ways. First, it is a welcome contribution to the small number of monographs on emotions within the NT. Indeed, his work is the first full-length exploration of emotion in a Pauline letter. Second, it utilizes both ancient and modern theories of emotion. Jew shows us how ancient Stoicism’s understanding of emotion and modern sociological theories of religious emotions can help us come to a better grasp of how Paul hopes “to instill feeling patterns that legitimate [the Christian] ordering of life” (p. 154). Third, while earlier studies examine the rhetorical use of emotional appeal or note how emotion is related to cognition and evaluation, Jew focuses on the social function of emotions. Emotions can bring about social integration and differentiation. They not only have the potential to integrate individuals into the shared experiences and belief structures of a community, they also have the power to differentiate that community from those outside.Jew’s prose is clear and lucid. His exegetical discussion is compelling, and it is refreshing to see him take a stance on an interpretation that is different from that of his Doktorvater (see p. 118). His comparison of Pauline and Stoic understandings of joy could be further enriched, if it was also seen through the lens of friendship. This frame might then help us appreciate how mutual affection and genuine joy may be possible among friends, without compromising the self-sufficiency of the individual. Despite this comment, Jew’s work is highly commendable. I will be incorporating his insights into my future research.

Juxtaposition as literary feature in Psalm 116

Identifying literary devices used in the (Hebrew) Old Testament serves as an aid to the understanding of a particular passage. In this contribution, juxtaposition as a literary device in Psalm 116 was investigated. A brief overview of the main problems in the research history of the Psalm is given, highlighting the date and composition, as well as the enigmatic verse 15. Drawing on other definitions of the term juxtaposition, the term was defined as a literary device used to imply comparison and especially contrast. In the rest of the article, juxtaposition as a literary device in this Psalm was investigated and eight different modes of juxtaposition were identified. It is argued that juxtaposition is the dominating and most prominent literary device that occurs in the Psalm. Finally, the contribution that the identification of juxtaposition as literary device makes to the understanding of this Psalm, was briefly discussed. Methodologically, the literary feature of juxtaposition was demonstrated through a careful reading of the text of Psalm 116. Once that was done, it became apparent that juxtaposition plays an important part in this psalm. The juxtaposition is of death versus life: it is an experience of the absence of YHWH in a Sheol-like situation in juxtapposition to the presence of YHWH in the temple; the temporal shift between present and past and the juxtaposition between the individual believer vis-à-vis the community of believers, all adds up to the conclusion that the Psalm displays a coherent unity, exactly because of the literary device of juxtaposition. Reading Scripture with a sensitivity to the literary devices that may be detected in passages of Scripture, is a rewarding exercise. It opens new possibilities to explore the meaning(s) these ancient texts have also for modern-day readers of the Bible.Contribution: Although juxtaposition as literary device has been pointed out in previous research publications on Psalm 116, the specific contribution of this article is to demonstrate that juxtaposition is the dominating literary device in the psalm. Psalm 116 has been seen in the past as a disunity made up of incoherent parts. The frequent occurrence of juxtaposition throughout the psalm adds to the unity of the psalm. Recognising juxtaposition as the dominating literary device adds new light on the theological meaning of the psalm and this fits in well with the focus of In die Skriflig to come to a better understanding of the Bible.

‘We have sick souls when God’s physic works not’: Samuel Rutherford’s pastoral letters as a form of literary cure

ABSTRACT Samuel Rutherford’s letters draw on biblical imagery and idiomatic metaphors, including contemporary discourses of illness and medicine, to diagnose and promote the spiritual and physical health of individual believers and the Scottish Kirk. This essay examines how Rutherford used language to care for his correspondents enacting a form of literary cure through the letter as a communication technology. Interrogating Rutherford’s use of language theologically, politically, and practically to negotiate God’s providential care for his people, the traumatic splintering of the church and state in England and Scotland, and caregiving within covenanting communities, reveals how his epistolary practice expands knowledge of the church’s historical provision of care, and the intersection of religious and medical caregiving in early modern Scotland. Rutherford’s lexical and metaphorical creativity, rendering complex theological concepts emotionally intelligible and rhetorically effective, ensured his letters provided comfort to covenanted godly communities and underwrote their posthumous publication as a devotional and literary classic.

Communion of Saints and Prayer

This article studies the Christian Church as a communion of saints by focusing on the New Testament references to prayer. Because of their content, some prayers are directly and expressly concerned with the communion and unity of Christian believers. But independent of their specific topic or request, all prayers provide worthwhile insights with regard to the communion of saints. The importance (and even necessity) of Christians praying together as well as interceding and giving thanks for each other is stressed. Numerous prayers having been uttered by individual believers in solitude are later reported in letters in order to strengthen the rest of the Church. By taking into account the unfortunate physical fragmentation of churches during the Covid-19 pandemic, the contribution highlights what the Church today, as a physical (and digital) communion of saints, can learn from the New Testament’s teaching on prayer.

Faith and Reason: An Inquiry into the Concept of Faith in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

Faith is often accused of being irrational and considered lower than reason because it is not objective and universal. In other words, at a practical level, believers cannot always obey God’s commands communicated in their inwardness. However, they must always be subject to the demands of a universal and objective reason. This elaboration attempts to counter this assumption departing from the description that Kierkegaard presented in his work, Fear and Trembling. There, Kierkegaard states that a single individual believer is higher than the ethical-rational demands that bind him. In other words, the purpose of this text is to show that faith has its rationality and is not subject to reason. Therefore, through the textual analysis method of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, this paper would like to analyze the constitutive elements of faith, how they work, and why faith is not subject to ratio. The point of view used in this elaboration is Kierkegaardian subjectivity. The analysis finds that the constitutive elements of faith are anxiety, courage, passion, the strength of the absurd, and hope (as components of faith), which need to be carried out with a double movement of faith.

Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen by Volker Leppin

Reviewed by: Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen by Volker Leppin Robert Kolb Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen. By Volker Leppin. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021. x + 272 pp. Volker Leppin recently moved from the University of Tübingen to Yale Divinity School and is shifting his research focus from Reformation studies to the Middle Ages, reversing both the [End Page 196] geographical and thematic journeys of Heiko Oberman (who, of course, left Harvard for Tübingen, then later returned to the U.S.) a generation ago. Leppin has been one of the most sensitive advocates for accenting the continuities of medieval church life and thought with the Reformation while at the same time identifying what made Luther Luther and not just one more late medieval professor. In this volume he lays the groundwork for further assessment of an oft-neglected aspect integral to Luther's understanding of history and time although this study analyzes only late medieval ecclesiastical life. This book focuses on late medieval thought at both the theological and the popular levels. It examines thinking on the relationship of the past and the present within the framework of the presence of the Transcendent in the midst of life on earth. Recent discussions of representation and reenactment provide a fresh angle for the interpretation that Leppin and Berndt Hamm have pursued concerning attempts to bring the distant God of heaven nearer to the daily life of fifteenth-century German believers struggling with the challenges of their world. Various modes of representation of God's past actions transmitted his presence into the lives of the faithful, and reenactment of key elements in the story of salvation drew these believers into God's past actions as those actions affected them in their own day. The relationship between heaven and earth in ancient and in present contexts was mediated and actualized through the dramatic reenactment of Christ's suffering and death in passion plays and through altar pieces and their relics that sought to cross the divide between the historical then of the lives of Christ or the saints and the contemporary now. Pious exercises of many kinds also heightened the sense that the suffering Christ shared the miseries of medieval believers and provided relief. Pilgrimages ushered the faithful into spaces distinct from everyday life and into a variety of sacred realms. Such holy spaces provided ways of remembering the past and appropriating the benefits of holy people gone before. Especially the signs of the sacraments provided liturgical reenactment that aimed to re-present events of the past and abolish the distance between the original event and the contemporary participants who were drawn [End Page 197] into it through this re-presentation. For example, the sacrament of penance associated penitents with the sinners, Adam and Eve, just as these primeval parents embodied the penance performed by the pious of the fifteenth century. Its practice featured ever-increasing use of indulgences; the church responded to its crisis of pastoral care with ever more imaginative presentation and pricing of the satisfactions that delivered relief from purgatory. Above all, the Mass functioned as a reenactment of the crucifixion of Jesus. The allegorical method of biblical interpretation facilitated this bridging of past and present (17–19). Leppin demonstrates that concepts of God's presence in daily life played an essential role in the piety of the period, and he shows how artistic and liturgical vehicles (from altarpieces, relics, and shrines, to sacramental actions) transported believers back to events fifteen hundred years earlier. Such objects and activities conveyed those events into the village church, into the interactions of Christian folk with the sacred places and practices of their own environment and way of life. With incense for the nose, bread for the tongue, liturgical garments and drama for the eye, and the chanting of the liturgy as well as the reading of texts from Scripture and the lives of the saints for the ear, the presence of God invaded the individual believer's consciousness and suspended the actual historical gap of a millennium and a half, drawing Christians into participation in the sacred activities of the Savior and the...

Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher’s Climb to Freedom by Larry Eugene Rivers, and: No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner by Andre E. Johnson

Reviewed by: Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher’s Climb to Freedom by Larry Eugene Rivers, and: No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner by Andre E. Johnson Samuel Graber (bio) Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher’s Climb to Freedom. By Larry Eugene Rivers. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021. Pp. 311. Cloth, $39.95.) No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner. By Andre E. Johnson. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2020. Pp. 204. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $30.00.) Describing “the Black church” as a single entity oversimplifies an immensely diverse arena of religious life. However reductive, the categorization has proved difficult to shake, partly because it seems to honor a people’s common struggle against racist oppression. Rather than merely a change in nomenclature, scholars of nineteenth-century culture require a deeper understanding of Black churches’ religious diversity and the variety of responses to white supremacy that they fostered. While sweeping, general overviews may partially recover the varieties of Black religion, such works will always struggle to find space for the textured idiosyncrasies and complex interconnections of the many faiths that took root under slavery’s long shadow. More sustained scholarly examinations of individual believers, particularly Black church leaders, can bring a depth of detail to bear on misperceptions of a uniform Black church. Recent works by Larry Eugene Rivers and Andre E. Johnson, though different in style and approach, each present a portrait of an outspoken and controversial nineteenth-century minister that should help to diversify knowledge of Black religious life for researchers working in a range of fields. Johnson’s No Future in This Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, which may be of particular interest to students of rhetoric and religion, presents a historically grounded rhetorical analysis of the final stage of a career that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the antebellum, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction eras. Most scholars are aware of Henry McNeal Turner’s advocacy for Black rights, but his understanding of Black Christians’ place in America changed significantly over that time span. His multiva-lent prophetic voice has been misunderstood, Johnson implies, because it has suffered from the same tendencies that have blurred distinctions within African American religious experience generally. Rivers tracks a similarly extensive career in Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher’s Climb to Freedom, the first book-length scholarly biography of its subject and a work that will appeal especially to historians of slavery, religion, and the antebellum South. Beginning his ministry under slavery, Father James Page bolstered the Baptist church throughout the Southeast and [End Page 275] remained a widely revered leader after emancipation. In following Page’s remarkable trajectory, with particular focus on his early history as an enslaved preacher, Rivers reconfigures typical notions of “Afro-Christian religion, black leadership, and the broader black freedom struggle in America” (7). Although the same could be said of Johnson’s study, Henry McNeal Turner was never enslaved. Thus Rivers can more directly address a particularly vexing historiographical problem: accounting for enslaved preachers’ roles in developing Black leadership and identity. Rivers takes exception to the stereotypical view of such clerics as uninformed and compromised religious props for the racist system in which they operated. More specifically, Rivers objects to paternalistic interpretations of slavery, epitomized by Eugene Genovese, which tend to minimize Black agency by portraying Black preachers as easily manipulable instruments of their enslavers. Yet, in combatting this perspective, Rivers must sometimes speculate about motivations the enslaved Page would never have been able to avow, let alone publish. Thus Rivers’s main struggle is not against any particular scholarly perspective, but rather against an underlying absence of information. Despite more sympathetic treatments of enslaved preachers by Albert Raboteau, Bettye Collier-Thomas, and Chanta Haywood, Rivers remains convinced that only more sustained study of individual cases can prevent the proliferation of simplistic renderings, stereotypes, and vilifications of enslaved preachers. Rivers’s careful study of Page, a highly literate bondsman who achieved significant notoriety in his lifetime, seems uniquely suited to correct the record. Its author draws heavily on outside sources...