Love Feast Research Articles

Auden, Carnival and “The Love Feast”

Auden, Carnival and “The Love Feast”

Equiano's African Methodist Appetite: Feasting and Purification Rituals as Community and Resistance

Abstract: This article draws on food studies, religious history, and research on Equiano's religious orientation to argue that Equiano's Interesting Narrative describes a creolized African and Methodist asceticism in relation to food and ritual practice. His introduction to the Moravian-Methodist love feast before his conversion resonates with his earlier textual recollections of commensality and feasting practices in his eastern Nigerian homeland. Equiano's early textual descriptions of feasting rituals suggest that he was attracted to Methodism because of his experiences through the Middle Passage and his memories of feasting practices, purification rites, and sacrifices and offerings from his childhood in Igboland. Equiano's experiences of sacrifice and his portrayals of hunger and hunger strikes as a form of resistance on the slave ships mark his choice of religious and ascetic orientation. His reclamation of the ocean as a free Black sailor, an Atlantic Creole, contributes to his interest to a temperate Methodist orientation and inner-worldly asceticism.

Eucontamination: Enacting a Centered-Set Theology in a Multicultural World

This article addresses ways that the logic of disgust has left the church vulnerable to colonialism, western ethnocentrism, and racism. The authors present the concept of eucontamination as an inversion of contamination logic, wherein the impure is made pure through contact with the Divine rather than the pure needing to be kept separate. Purity metaphors in the Bible have often been read by the white, western church in such a way that the pure is experienced as fragile and kept apart from the contaminating, powerful impure. Eucontamination, however, upends this power balance in such a way that the dirty is left fragile and the clean robust. This, then, facilitates the enactment of centered-set theology by removing fear and disgust, which unconsciously reinforce the boundaries of an exclusionary, bounded-set theology. In this way, eucontamination is presented as a corrective lens through which the church can reimagine its role in the world. By addressing the psychological impact of disgust and the way in which the gospel of Christ inverts the controlling purity metaphors, this article posits a more embodied faith that embraces the other. Eucontamination thus allows for Christians to address their own internalized systems of oppression and confront the ways in which disgust has allowed ethnocentrism and racism to reign over their imagination of the gospel. The authors explore practical applications of liturgies of eucontamination like the Eucharist, foot washing, and the love feast as basic formational practices for Christians to begin to deconstruct their own disgust reactions.

TEXTUAL ACCOUNT OF THE CUSTOMARY ORIKO LOVE FEAST AND REUNIFICATION RITES PERFORMED IN OGBAKIRI CLAN OF EMOHUA LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA OF RIVERS STATE, NIGERIA; MAY, 2002

This study applied the reflective observation method on the video documentary of the customary Oriko- love feast and reunification rites of Ogbakiri to identify segments of the critical customary activities that reconciled and reunited the people of Ogbakiri after a period of four years conflict. A review of the interactions during critical customary activities served to identify particular customary peace revival activities and the performers while the interviews provided the perceptions of the people of Ogbakiri- Wezina concerning their new found peace. The study concludes that the customary Oriko- love feast is a cogent tool of conflict resolution and the enthronement of permanent peace in Ikwerre community or society.

The Lord's Supper Revisited

The Lord’s Supper is probably one of the most vital elements in Christianity. However, churches nowadays witness two extreme attitudes in approaching the Lord’s Supper: one that over-sacralizes the ceremony as something mystical or magical while the other simply takes it as a ritual or memorial. While both notions are not wrong in some sense, the ceremony in fact falls somewhere in the middle. Eucharist involved two important dimensions: it is a meal, and it is a “sacrificial” meal. The ordinary and the religious aspects both exist within the eucharist.
 In the records of the Last Supper, Jesus ate the Passover “meal” with His disciples and reinstituted it. From then on, the early church celebrated the Lord’s Supper, gathering and breaking bread in houses, which was then known as agape—a love feast. However, what we witness in today’s Lord’s Supper is nowhere close to the original Last Supper or the early Christian agape feast. It becomes a ceremony without a meal; a celebration without a feast. It is ironic that the so-called “supper” only involves a wafer-like bread and a really small cup of wine. It is the absence of a “meal” that this ceremony becomes more and more detached. The Lord’s Supper becomes difficult to understand because of the emphasis on its sacredness. The ceremony remains a ritual as the “sacred” is separated from the “secular”.
 It is the contention of this study that the separation of the love feast from the ceremony of the Lord’s Supper that render it meaningless. This study aims to uncover the context and history of the Lord’s Supper, especially the significance of a feast or meal in the eucharist, and how it was lost in the course of history. We will see that it is in the context of a meal that the early church celebrates the eucharist, a thanksgiving in the form of a love feast. It is in the context of a meal that Jesus introduced His body and blood in the Last Supper. It is in the context of a meal that God commanded the Israelites to observe the Passover. When we approach the Lord’s Table without a proper meal, the eating of the “bread” and “wine” without context becomes a ritual without reality.
 Finally, suggestions are given to better approach the Lord’s Table, and hopefully regain the meaning and spirit of the ceremony.

Profound Encounters: The Love Feast and the Old German Baptist Brethren

The author uses an autoethnographic and narrative approach, based in a postpositivist research framework, to describe and explore the love feast as it is observed among the Old German Baptist Brethren. The "love feast occasion" constitutes a site of prime spiritual and communal significance for members of the group, who represent the largest Plain or Old Order expression of the Schwarzenau Brethren. The occasion, taking place over a full weekend of services, communal meals, informal time for fellowship and "Youngfolks" activities is hosted annually by each district or congregation (as well as being held at the group's Annual Meeting at Pentecost). Its essential feature is a lengthy service held on the Saturday evening that reenacts the central events of Jesus's last meal with his disciples in Jerusalem, prior to His betrayal and death. Discrete but interlinked elements of this highly ritualized service involve preparation, footwashing, a communal fellowship meal, an exchange of the holy kiss and sharing in the bread and wine of Communion. The deeply symbolic and highly ritualized event constitutes an occurrence in which members see themselves as renewing their connection with God, their mystical relationship with fellow members and with the central emphases of Brethren teaching.

Singing in Paul’s Cult of the Possessed by Jesus’ Spirit

In the article the authors are dealing with Paul’s cult of the possessed by the spirit of the late magician Jesus, as well as with the place and the meaning of singing in its two main rituals: ritual meal and ritual conjuring of Jesus’ spirit. The conclusion of the analysis is that both rituals had the same two-part structure. Ritual meal consisted of love feast (agape), where the members of the cult were supposed to sing appropriate songs together, and Eucharist, where each member „sung in his heart“ only. On the other side, ritual conjuring of Jesus’ spirit was divided in worship and séance of communication with Jesus. In the first part the whole community recited psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, while in the second part the chosen medium delivered Jesus’ messages through the „wordless groans“.

Ecumenical & Interreligious Perspectives: Globalization in Theological Education

This collection, first published by the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry in 1992, contains eleven articles on the extensive effects of ecumenism on theological education. Given that perspectives are included from historians, theologians, missiologists, Christian educators, and ecumenists, the scope of the articles is unsurprisingly broad and ranges from critical engagement with definitions of ecumenism, the nature of global inclusiveness, and the question of what cultural assumptions can be said to be implicit in interreligious dialogue.The essays were the fruit of a consultation held in 1990 in Yahara, Wisconsin, under the auspices of a number of different connectional boards and agencies of The United Methodist Church (UMC), and their republication raises the question of continued relevance twenty-eight years later. However, the volume's preface (x) underlines the continuing significance of the challenges of plurality both in society and in the Church: Another test of neighborliness is division within the church, particularly between the evangelical and liberal wings of the denomination. Volatile issues like abortion and sexuality surface quite deep fissures. And beyond the religious family are neighbors in need, the claims put by poverty, injustice, hunger, war … We face diversity. What unity and/or comity can we establish amid diversity? How will we structure our relationship to the world? That said, the addition of an addendum revisiting some of the issues raised by the articles would have been helpful in a number of areas. For example, Russell E. Richey's use of the family meal, Holy Communion, and love feast as three metaphors for holding a fractured Methodism together is creative and still resonant, but it would be even more so if the contemporary situation was reviewed in its light. Have the divisions between liberals and evangelicals worsened or lessened in the time elapsed since the original article was penned, and can Richey's approach still bear the weight it needs to? With regard to sexuality, a key fault line in Methodism on both sides of the Atlantic, some commentators in the UMC such as David N. Field in Our Purpose Is Love (2018) have argued for the continuing unity that Richey contends for, whereas others like Rob Renfroe and Walter Fenton, authors of Are We Really Better Together? (2018), believe that this may no longer be possible. Similarly, John Deschner's article on United Methodism's ecumenical policy would have benefited from a review of the ecumenical scene in the United States within which that policy has operated since his original paper was written. What impact, for example, has the emerging church movement had on UMC ecumenism?Although the primary focus is on the UMC and on American ecumenism, readers in other cultural contexts will find much of interest and stimulation in the volume. Some of that interest and stimulation comes from discerning the ways in which changes in ecumenism, globalization, and especially internal church politics shine favourable or unfavourable light on the writers' judgements over two decades later, and where continuities point to a lack of progress and development in ways hoped for at the beginning of the 1990s. Few in the mainline Christian denominations would dare to argue now against the desire of the late Jane Cary Peck in her personal reflection on pedagogy, ‘Teaching for Ecumenism’, to create in theological education an environment where ‘we can intentionally work on developing and practicing the values of an ecumenical community’(77), but the question of in what ways such a priority for ecumenism is shared more widely throughout the sponsoring denominations of such institutions is an open one. These issues are crystalized in Ridgeway F. Shinn Jr and Norman E. Dewire's article ‘Implications of the Yahara Papers for Seminaries and for Theological Education’. The challenge they offer continues to resonate today: ‘Have United Methodists outgrown ecumenism? Do United Methodists worry more about denominational survival and declining membership than they do about the dividedness of the church?’ (130) Sadly, within the UMC and elsewhere, the dividedness of the Church as an issue has ceased since 1992 to be purely an ecumenical matter, whilst its relatedness to denominational survival and declining membership has grown ever stronger.

The Financing of John Wesley's Methodism c.1740–1800

The Financing of John Wesley's Methodism c.1740–1800

Snow Hill: In the Shadows of Ephrata Cloister

As a native of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, I read Denise Seachrist's Snow Hill with great interest. I was surprised to discover a part of my home county's history that I had never known. Snow Hill combines two fascinating stories: the history of the Snow Hill Cloister and congregation and the narrative of the author's research and fieldwork at the Snow Hill site during the 1990s.Snow Hill provides a general overview of the history and music of the Snow Hill Cloister and congregation throughout the nineteenth century, particularly during its peak period in the early part of the century. Seachrist demonstrates the ways in which Snow Hill served as a branch of the more famous Ephrata Cloister in nearby Lancaster County while illuminating the differences between the two cloisters as well. While the brothers and sisters of Snow Hill shared doctrines, particularly the insistence on adult baptism, foot washing, and the Love Feast, and even ministers with Ephrata, they also focused more on economic activities, adopted a less rigid organization, and remained more isolated from the outside world than their counterparts at Ephrata. Most important, Snow Hill continued the unique tradition of music and harmony begun by Georg Beissel at Ephrata in the eighteenth century, although the main composer at Snow Hill, Obed Snowberger, added a few distinctive touches of his own. Finally, Seachrist documents the tragedy of Snow Hill's gradual demise during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as its membership dwindled and the remaining members became embroiled in legal battles over the cloister's property.Interspersed with this history of Snow Hill, Seachrist tells a more poignant story of the professional and personal friendships she formed with the people who have preserved the history and beliefs of Snow Hill into the twenty-first century. The author is the first scholar to gain access to the grounds, buildings, and manuscript archives of the Snow Hill Cloister. In a series of vignettes, the reader meets a cast of fascinating characters who for the past several decades have struggled to keep the legacy of Snow Hill alive. The most moving story is the development of the friendship between the author and George Wingert, the caretaker and protector of the Snow Hill property. The description of the growing friendship between the young, urban academic from Kent State and the elderly recluse from rural Franklin County is the thread that ties the book together. As the person who grants and oversees Seachrist's access to the cloister's records, Wingert symbolizes the author's link to Snow Hill's past; at the same time, Seachrist's conversations with Wingert while conducting her research reveal the devotion and sincerity of the congregants in the present day. Unfortunately, the more recent stories also end in misfortune, as the author describes the squabbles among the remaining small group of dedicated Snow Hill congregants that led to the auctioning off of the cloister's material possessions in 1997 and Wingert's removal as caretaker of the grounds two years later.Snow Hill is not intended to be an exhaustive examination of the cloister's place in nineteenth-century American history. Instead, the book is designed to tell the story of Snow Hill—the people and the place—then and now. Scholars seeking a deep analysis of the beliefs and actions of the congregation in the context of other early nineteenth-century utopian and religious communities will have to await future studies of Snow Hill. Readers searching for a heartwarming yet heartbreaking story of the people who have struggled to preserve the ideals and legacy of Snow Hill for two centuries, however, will be richly rewarded. What the book lacks in analysis, it more than makes up for in narrative and warmth. Seachrist has successfully combined an introduction to Snow Hill's history and music with a fascinating human drama filled with engaging characters and emotions set in both the past and the present. Indeed, the author's realization of the importance of the human dimension of history, both in the past itself and in the efforts of people in the present to preserve the legacy of the past, could be a model for other young scholars in many academic disciplines.In the end, Seachrist's greatest contribution is more than simply introducing the world to a little-known segment of Pennsylvania's history. She has helped to preserve the written and musical records of Snow Hill by facilitating their placement in the Special Collections Archive at Juniata College, and she has preserved the memory of George Wingert and others who have cared for Snow Hill for so long. Through Seachrist's efforts, the legacy of Snow Hill and George Wingert will live on.

Food & Faith in Christian Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Food & Faith in Christian Culture Raymond A. Mentzer Food & Faith in Christian Culture. Edited by Ken Albala and Trudy Eden. [Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 2011. Pp. viii, 265. $79.50 clothbound; $26.50 paperback; $20.99 e-book. ISBN 978-0-231-14996-9 clothbound; 978-0-231-14997-6 paperback; 978-0-231-52079-9 e-book.) Food & Faith in Christian Culture explores the straightforward notion that food has occupied a significant, though underappreciated role in Christian tradition. Although the editors’ assertion of scholarly neglect may be exaggerated, the eleven essays that they have assembled provide an illuminating inquiry into the manipulation of food for religious purposes. They investigate practices across a broad geographic expanse stretching from Europe to the Americas and far beyond to New Zealand. The chronological range is no less impressive; the studies span more than a half-millennium from the late Middle Ages to the present. Still, the principal value of this collection rests on its imaginative themes and innovative approaches. [End Page 770] Some subjects are familiar, even as the authors offer fresh insight. Thus, analyses focusing on the monastic experience bookend the volume. The opening chapter by Salvatore D. S. Musumeci surveys the dietary habits—both conventional and exceptional—among a group of fourteenth-century Florentine monks. Their account books indicate purchases typical of most Florentine households, but the monks consumed these foodstuffs in keeping with the Rule of St. Benedict. In the book’s final chapter, Richard D. G. Irvine probes the enduring significance of eating in silence for contemporary English Benedictines. Simply put, how does sharing a meal foster corporate piety? The volume’s coeditor, Ken Albala, fastens on another key issue—the Reformation’s reconsideration of fasting—and concludes that fasting remained important for both Catholics and Protestants, although they refashioned its character considerably. A closely related aspect of the “reformation” of food and drink was sumptuary legislation. According to Johanna B. Moyer, French regulations, whether Catholic or Protestant, emphasized food discipline as a vehicle for reinforcing community. Antonia-Leda Matalas, Eleni Tourlouki, and Chyrstalleni Lazarou note a similar stress on the disciplinary dynamics of fasting in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Sydney Watts’s study of Lenten observances in France during the Enlightenment takes a slightly different tack. How did theology and new understandings in medical science converge to alter perceptions and practices surrounding Lent? Turning to the recent American past, Heidi Oberholtzer Lee inquires into the ways that the Brethren in Christ promoted the love feast, a collective ritual with physical and spiritual dimensions, as a means to heal divisions and affirm communal harmony. The book’s other coeditor, Trudy Eden, discusses a related topic in American religious history—vegetarianism as a force for spiritual regeneration. She focuses on Charles and Myrtle Fillmore—founders of Unity, a church within the New Thought movement. The ongoing American preoccupation with health, beauty, body, and religion comes together in a delightful essay by Samantha Kwan and Christine Sheikh on Christian weight-loss programs. Equally engaging and revealing are the chapters that treat Amerindian and Maori associations with and attitudes toward bread, that most basic of European foods. In one case, Heather Martel reflects upon a sixteenth-century Italian adventurer in New Spain who expressed disgust for the way in which indigenous women prepared maize bread and wine. His reaction was part of an attempt to avoid contamination of European Christian identity, here encapsulated in foods commonly associated with the Eucharistic meal. According to Hazel Petrie, missionaries in New Zealand discovered that the indigenous people welcomed the introduction of European wheat bread. Less understood perhaps was the manner by which the Maori incorporated the new staple into a precolonial religious matrix. [End Page 771] Altogether, the essays are topical, well written, and stimulating. They nicely capture the diversity, nuance, and complexity surrounding the place and role of dietary practices in Christian culture. Raymond A. Mentzer University of Iowa Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

The Pleasure of Food, and the Spiritual: Eat, Pray, Love and Babette's Feast

Summary This article explores the significance of the enjoyment of food in relation to spirituality, as (re)presented in two texts -Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (2007) and the cinematic version of Karen Blixen's novel Babette's Feast (1987). It is argued that the pleasure derived from food occupies a crucial position in both texts, firstly in its own “hedonistic” right, but secondly also as far asit functions allegorically (Babette's Feast), or temporally (Eat, Pray, Love) regarding the (re)presentation of spiritually significant experience. That is, the enjoyment of food is (re)presented as a means of repeating (and perhaps anticipating) spiritually meaningful culinary experience (Babette's Feast). In Eat, Pray, Love, the spiritual awakening of the protagonist, in the “dark night of her soul”, is succeeded by a kind of “carnival”, followed by something resembling the Lent of the Christian tradition. Hence, her journey through space and time takes her from sensuous (though celibate) pleasure in food (Eat) to spiritual sacrifice (Pray) and eventually romantic love (Love). The narrative logic of this sequence, it is argued, consists in sensuous, culinary enjoyment preparing her for the meaning of sacrifice through spiritual commitment. These two phases of her journey, or existential quest, become intertwined (their complex interlacement being constituted by a kind of interpenetration of pleasure and sacrifice through commitment).

“Turn Her Desperate Longing to Love”: W. H. Auden, Denis De Rougemont, and Lyric Love Poetry

It is widely acknowledged that W. H. Auden's poetry underwent significant during and after his return to Christianity in 1940, though both Edward Mendelson and Alan Jacobs have done much to explain exactly how changed after his conversion and to show that those were not as abrupt or drastic as earlier critics had supposed. both Mendelson and Jacobs reveal, many of Auden's post-conversion changes are traceable to his pre-conversion concerns, and Mendelson in particular traces the ways in which Auden's views on history and religion continued to develop in the thirty years following his return to the Anglican communion. But many critics are still sympathetic to Philip Larkin's famous complaint that the young, quasi-Marxist based his poetry on experience while the older, Christian based his poetry on books (125). statement is too broad to be accurate--Auden's poetry had always been based at least partly on books, whether his early readers realized it or not--but Larkin is right to imply inadvertently that a reader of Auden's poems benefits from knowing which books thought important when he wrote each poem. read several important books shortly before and during his return to Christianity, including Charles Williams' Descent of the Dove, Charles Norris Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture, Augustine's Confessions, and the works of Pascal and Kierkegaard (see Auden, Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose 2: 248; and Mendelson, Later 124-27), and the influence of several of these books on has been ably traced by Mendelson, John Fuller, and others. However, not even Mendelson has sufficiently explored Auden's heavy reliance on Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World in the lyric love poetry he wrote in the 1940s; and while Rougemont's influence on waned in the 1950s, Rougemont was in large part responsible for showing that the tension between erotic and altruistic loves might possibly be resolved. this article I wish to examine the ways in which used Rougemont's ideas about love in his poems and to explain why, after about 1950, largely stopped referring to Rougemont and wrote comparatively fewer love poems than he had written in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of Auden's best-known poems are love poems. From his first major poetic efforts in his 1928 verse play Paid on Both Sides, which involves a struggle between family loyalty and marital love, to his lyrics of the late 1930s such as Lullaby and As I Walked Out One Evening, to post-conversion poems like In Praise of Limestone and The Love Feast, Auden's poetry repeatedly returns to the conflicts between different kinds of love. His early poetry is often concerned with the troubled relationship between friendship and sex, and after his return to Christianity, the question of how God relates to them both vexes and energizes his poetry. From the beginning, did implicitly recognize a difference between the selfish love epitomized by sexual desire and the altruistic love epitomized in friendship between equals, and his poetry from the 1930s exhibits continual regret that the two forms of love never manage to coexist permanently. Monroe Spears plausibly argues that Auden's post-conversion views on love changed significantly in the 1940s, during which time shifts from this initial tendency to regard Eros and Agape as wholly distinct (in the manner of Kierkegaard, Barth, Nygren, and extreme Protestants in general) to the view that they are conjoinable in the Catholic concept of Caritas Divine Comedy of W. H. Auden 60). Spears had also claimed in an earlier work that The classic Protestant exposition of the radical distinction between Agape and Eros is Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros... the Roman Catholic position is that the two are united in Caritas.... Auden's attitude has always been Protestant in this respect (The Poetry of W. H. 164n). …

The Mexican Revolution

Adolfo Gilly is a native of Argentina who became a political prisoner in 1966 at Lecumberri Prison and remained there until the Mexican Supreme Court revoked his conviction for “subversion” six years later. While detained, Gilly wrote the Spanish language edition of this book, which became a legendary hit after its 1971 release, eventually reaching an eighth edition by January 1977. Like a breath of fresh air after the harsh repression of Tlatelolco, and responding to widespread disgust with the ruling system, Gilly’s book passionately disputed the official history of the revolution in a leftist and even postmodern framework. The new edition, a smooth page-turner, retains its strong Marxist analysis of the 1910 – 20 civil war and benefits from a fine translation by Patrick Camiller as well as a foreword by Friedrich Katz. Gilly makes several solid conclusions, such as pointing out that U.S. influence did not become the decisive factor in determining the outcome of the revolution. Although he criticizes Venustiano Carranza consistently, Gilly reiterates frequently the powerful appeal of carrancista nationalism in terms of its strident international policy. The author points out correctly that Carranza opposed the Pershing Expedition “from the very beginning” (p. 224). The chapter on Mexico City in 1914 is the most interesting portion of this book because of Gilly’s illuminating discussion concerning the decline of the Convention government. Although he favors Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa throughout his study, Gilly is not reluctant to point out their errors as well as castigate their bureaucratic supporters in the muddled Convention experiment.Despite the author’s determination to analyze the outcome of the revolution, his lack of interest in current or past scholarship leads him to state such mistakes as asserting that once Porfirio Díaz consolidated his power in 1884, “it became the norm to repress any form of labor organization”(p. 35). It is a shame that Gilly did not read the late David Walker’s study of labor organizations during the Porfiriato, but Gilly is not much of a researcher. There are few endnotes, a great many of which are devoted to Katz or John Womack, and no bibliography. There are frequent factual errors, such as stating that the Madero family came from San Luis Potosí and that a revolution broke out in Portugal in 1909 (actually 1910), and that Morelos was the most modern industrial region in Mexico by 1910 when, as Bill Meyers has shown, the Laguna region actually enjoyed that honor. Furthermore, Gilly states that Zapata controlled the southern portion of Mexico, overlooking the southeast. Despite Gilly’s assertion that Carranza never ceased labeling Zapata as a bandit, there is not a single reference to such a statement in the Carranza archive. Gilly also makes it appear that there was a love feast between the northern masses and Villa’s army, when in fact commoners often feared Villa. Despite what Gilly claims, Villa did not oppose the U.S. invasion of Veracruz. Gilly’s discussion of the 1914 Carranza-Zapata negotiations is muddled; the Carranza land reform decree of January 6, 1915, did not reflect the disastrous Ley Lerdo legislation that the juaristas unveiled earlier.Several modifications could have improved this study. The author overuses the term peasant, which should have been defined carefully. To characterize Villa’s army as a peasant force is an oversimplification; Gilly does not seem to understand that many rural inhabitants wanted to own their own land rather than work ejidos (communally owned lands). He should have developed the rise to power of the CROM (Confeder-ación Regional Obrero Mexicana) labor organization instead of constantly emphasizing the Casa del Obrero Mundial. Although Carranza eventually repressed the Casa, Gilly should have put into context Carranza’s opposition to their general strike when the Carrizal battle with the Pershing forces took place only a month earlier. His discussion of the 1917 constitution does not mention Pastor Rouaix and other individuals who were key in formulating Article 27. The role of women during the revolution is virually ignored. Finally, I doubt that Carranza exterminated half the population of Morelos, as Gilly claims.In summary, Gilly’s book fails to contribute much to the history of the Mexican Revolution because of its weak documentary foundation. Although Gilly claims that his new periodization is a fresh approach, emphasizing the 1914 alliance of Villa and Zapata in Mexico City, others have actually done the same thing.

Fast-Food Love Feast

Fast-Food Love Feast

Stephen Crane and Methodism's Realism: Translating Spiritual Sympathy into Urban Experience

In 1883, three years after Reverend Jonathan Townley Crane died, the widowed Helen Crane moved their family from Port Jervis, New York to Asbury Park, New Jersey--one of the many resort towns that had recently sprung up along the Jersey Coast. This section of the Jersey Shore was familiar territory to the Cranes; almost a decade before making Asbury Park their permanent home, Reverend Crane and his family had begun attending Methodist summer camp meetings in neighboring Ocean Grove. Established in 1869 by members of the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness, Ocean Grove was part of a much larger movement within the Methodist Episcopal Church to revitalize a membership that some felt had lost its prior spiritual zeal and unity. Adherents to the holiness movement advocated a return to turn-of-the-century evangelical preaching styles and to the community-based organizational forms--such as camp meetings and love feasts--that distinguished early Methodism from other Protestant denominations. Full of spontaneous preaching, singing, witnessing, and praying, the frontier-era camp meeting reached its spiritual and peak in the love feast--an event that, as John Wigger explains, traditionally centered upon the eating of a small portion of bread and drinking of a little water in imitation, not of the sacrament, but of the communal fellowship of the early saints, and, most important, unrehearsed individual testimonies of struggles and triumphs in the faith, of what God had done in the lives of those present. (1) Typical of many of Methodism's small-scale liturgical events, the love feast facilitated spiritual uplift through contact. As participants shared the sacred knowledge that they had accumulated through personal experience, they pushed one another to new spiritual heights by strengthening their bonds. At the love feast and class meeting, explained Edmund S. Janes in 1862, Methodists came together not as mere pupils or catechumens, but as fellow-Christians, met for the interchange of religious experience, congratulations, sympathies, and assistances in the way of life. Only through these forms of interactive worship could Methodists realize Christian intimacy, such stated seasons of fellowship, such familiar conversation on religious experience, such spiritual sympathy. Methodism was, Janes explained, an experimental religion that offered its adherents a social means of grace. (2) While modifying the structure of frontier camp meetings, love feasts and other organizational forms in order to accommodate Methodists' changing tastes and leisurely habits, the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness hoped that a return to these liturgical practices in resort towns like Ocean Grove would provide similar spiritual and benefits for late-nineteenth-century campers. (3) Working as a seaside correspondent in Ocean Grove and Asbury Park for the New York Tribune during the summers of the early 1890s, Reverend Crane's youngest son, Stephen, attested to the replication in Ocean Grove of antebellum Methodism's socio-spiritual dynamics. Briefly sketching the activities of the most important day of Ocean Grove's ten-day camp meeting, Crane wrote: usual 9 o'clock meetings were held an hour earlier to-day, as the camp-meeting love feast had the right of way at that hour. At the young people's meeting a number were converted. The Rev. C. H. Yatman, the leader, possesses a strong-personality and magnetism which, with a graphic way of putting things, wins souls to higher things.... Dr. Stokes asked the people to shake hands in token of brotherly love, which they did with shouts and tears. (4) Taking for granted the confluence of religious conversion and interpersonal connection, Dr. Ellwood H. Stokes--first president of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association--encouraged the young campers to consummate their spiritual experience by shaking hands with one another; he thus began instilling within them a pattern that they would regularly reenact at Ocean Grove. …

Enacting Christ's Presence in Communal Performances: A Phenomenological Interpretation of the Sixteenth-Century Anabaptist Love Feast

Enacting Christ's Presence in Communal Performances: A Phenomenological Interpretation of the Sixteenth-Century Anabaptist Love Feast

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition: Evangelicals and the Military Since World War II

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition: Evangelicals and the Military since World War II Paul Boyer (bio) Anne C. Loveland. American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military 1942–1993. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. xiv + 356 pp. Notes and index. $55.00. Until fairly recently, the profoundly important role of evangelical religious belief in contemporary American life—in shaping domestic policy, in the foreign-policy arena, and in the military realm—was largely unrecognized by most American historians as well as by the mainstream media. As a result, historians and journalists alike had trouble contextualizing those moments when evangelicalism’s centrality became unavoidably obvious. A case in point is President Reagan’s 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in Orlando, where, to fervent applause, he famously characterized the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” The media reported the address as simply another instance of Reagan’s hyperbole, and the textbooks and general histories of the Reagan era that are beginning to appear usually handle it in the same fashion. In fact, as readers of Anne C. Loveland’s important new book will quickly realize, the love feast in Orlando simply ratified what by the early 1980s had become a powerful and symbiotic link among evangelicals, the military services, and the aggressively militaristic foreign-policy approach that Reagan epitomized, at least during his first term. But at the time, this context went largely unremarked except by close observers of the hermetic world of American evangelicalism. In recent years, however, this situation has begun to change, as American religious history comes of age, and as more books and articles appear exploring many facets of American evangelicalism. 1 Included in this outpouring are numerous works focused on the post-World War II decades, and now Anne Loveland, T. Harry Williams Professor of American History at Louisiana State University, has added another valuable book to this list. Loveland’s thoroughly researched monograph traces the growing role of evangelical and Pentecostal believers in the American military from World [End Page 686] War II through the early 1980s. In the 1940s, most Protestant military chaplains came from the mainstream liberal denominations, as did most military officers. (In 1950, 40 percent of all officers were Episcopalian.) The occasional officer or chaplain from an evangelical or Pentecostal background felt isolated and marginalized. Over the years, however, this situation changed radically. America’s religious profile evolved dramatically in the postwar era, as the mainstream denominations hemorrhaged members and evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic groups grew by leaps and bounds. Inevitably, the military services reflected this shift. Evangelical chaplains became more confident and aggressive. They formed associations and increasingly brought their fervent, evangelistic, dogmatic brand of religion to bear in the military, which they rightly viewed as a prime target of missionary activity. As the bulletin of one evangelical parachurch organization, the Overseas Christian Servicemen’s Centers, discreetly put it (p. 68), loneliness and “the possibility of premature death” rendered military personnel vulnerable to the temptations of alcohol, gambling, and sex—but also to evangelical proselytizing. This shift gained momentum from many organizational sources working toward a common goal. Evangelical denominations such as the giant Southern Baptist Convention and Pentecostal groups such as the burgeoning Assemblies of God Church actively recruited chaplains to serve the religious needs of their members in the military. By 1987, 163 military chaplains came from churches affiliated with the NAE, while the Assemblies of God Church alone boasted 88 military chaplains. Parachurch organizations such as the NAE, the Navigators, an evangelical organization dating from World War II, Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ; and the pentecostalist Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International (FGBFI) focused their energies on carrying the gospel to servicemen and women and on gaining increased influence in the military services. The rapproachement between the military and evangelical Protestantism was significantly advanced by a succession of top military leaders who translated their personal experience as “born again” or “spirit-filled” Christians into the policies they espoused from their positions of power and influence. Loveland devotes separate chapters to several of these individuals. General William K. Harrison, “the...

Fever in the Night

To the Editor. —The academic merger of ophthalmology and optometry (discussed in the February 1991 1 issue of theArchives) stimulated in me a strange fever. Awakened in the night and driven by this fever, I discovered an ancient crystal ball long hidden away. In its depths I read the following letters, emblazoned in fire: NOW THAT WE POSSESS YOUR KNOWLEDGE, WHO CAN DENY US YOUR JOB? Perhaps in a few years Professor Yanoff, the patriarch of this new ophthalmology-optometry love feast, will explicate for us these disturbing phrases.

The National Film Board of Canada: After a Quarter Century

It started with John Grierson. Trumpeters of the Sound Track Band delivered a fanfare. And the grand old man of documentary film entered to open the 25th-anniversary celebration of the National Film Board of Canada. Friends, civil servants, and creative people rose and applauded. The reception was warm and a little reverent. Don't believe the love feast, Grierson said after the speeches gave way to cocktails. They treat me like I was .... I thought at least someone would ask me for an autograph. I feel like Hi denburg; I'd sign anything. The cantankerous, 66-year-old Scot is revered for much more than his part in getting government film operation going in Canada. As he put it years ago: We who were talking simultaneously about