Nineteenth-century Revival Research Articles

How the Nineteenth-century Evangelical Revival Strengthened Faith and Undermined Christendom

This article deals with the paradoxical relationship between the nineteenth-century Evangelical Revival and secularization. It is argued here that the revival and its worldview played a role in increasing pluralism and choice in the nineteenth century – a process often related to secularization. The Evangelical movement both attempted to oppose modernity and rationalism and emphasized religious freedom, voluntarism, and individualism. It therefore induced and popularized self-reflection, doubt, and deconversion. It also favoured religious democracy in opposition to a state-imposed religious monopoly (at least in northern Europe). Furthermore, by dividing people into believers and nonbelievers, it emphasized religious polarization. This contributed to an undermining of established religious structures, fragmenting and pluralizing the religious landscape and giving people the option to abstain completely from religious commitment. The Swedish confessional (inner mission) revivalist denomination Evangeliska Fosterlands-Stiftelsen (EFS – approx. the Swedish Evangelical Mission Society), founded in 1856, is used as a case. The popular literature they published and distributed manifested an evangelical worldview. In this article four themes, based on the popular literature, are used to study empirically the changing role of religion in relation to nineteenth-century revivalism: ‘the dualistic worldview’; ‘conversion’; ‘activism’; and ‘self-reflection’.

Образ Українського Козацтва в Брошурі Пантелеймона Куліша «Крашанка Русинам і Полякам на Великдень 1882 Року»

In 1882, one of the most famous figures of the Ukrainian nation’s nineteenth-century revival, Panteleimon Kulish, published a work entitled ‘A Painted Egg for the Ruthenians and the Poles at Easter 1882’. In his work, he called on Poles and Ukrainians to establish dialogue and reconciliation, a prerequisite for which should be a critical rethinking of the well-established historical views of both peoples. To this end, Kulish devoted considerable space to the Cossacks and haidamakas. This article analyses the image of the Cossacks on painted Easter eggs. It also examines the evolution of Kulish’s historical views and the circumstances under which they took place, traces how they were manifested in his scientific works and considers the circumstances of the publication of his work. His strong criticism of the Cossacks and haidamakas corresponded to his views on Ukraine’s history at that time, although the decision to express it publicly was made for political reasons, to reconcile the Ukrainians with the Poles. To convince readers of his views, Kulish critically reinterpreted sources from the Cossack era and criticised both the Cossacks generally and specific historical figures, as well as some events of the early modern era. Kulish’s position was criticised by other representatives of the Ukrainian national movement. The reaction of the Polish political elite and intellectuals also failed to meet his expectations. As a result, disappointed by the ineffectiveness of his political manifesto, the Ukrainian intellectual gave up his efforts to strengthen Polish-Ukrainian dialogue.

“Space Formed by Building” Part 1: Reading the Rotherham House through Its Materiality

ABSTRACT Group Architects are New Zealand’s best-known practitioners of regional modernism. They are associated with the search for New Zealandness in architecture, even as international interests are acknowledged. In 2003, Group member Bruce Rotherham (1926–2004) distanced himself from much of this commentary, emphasising his own early focus on “space formed by building”, not New Zealandness. Of interest here is his privileging of building, that is, the assemblage and attributes of building materials. The article explores the materiality of Rotherham’s best-known New Zealand building, the Rotherham House in Stanley Bay, Auckland (1951). It interrogates each of the four main materials used in the house: wood, stone, brick and glass. It asks, what is the history of each material, and what does the way it was used reveal about Rotherham’s interests and influences? The article suggests that for Rotherham, Auckland’s nineteenth-century Gothic Revival timber churches were a likely New Zealand source of influence. It then goes further than previous scholarship on the Group by suggesting specific overseas buildings that Rotherham is likely to have known and that anticipate the material palette of the Rotherham House. Reference to the 1930s and 40s work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto is recurrent.

Recovered or Perfected: The Discourse of Chemistry in the Nineteenth-Century Revival of Stained Glass in Britain and France

The science of chemistry revitalized the art of stained glass in nineteenth-century Europe, recovering old techniques, developing new materials, and discovering new artistic methods. However, rather than examining the vital technical function science served, this article considers the role chemistry played in the discourse surrounding the revival. Close analysis of a variety of texts reveals that chemistry was a critical means by which stained glass practitioners and commentators positioned the revived art in the broader artistic culture. This article first considers the ways in which different parties across France and Britain employed chemistry to mediate modern stained glass’s relationship with its medieval past. The second half of the article charts the diverging responses to this intertwining of art and science and demonstrates that as the century progressed the contribution of chemistry to the medium was disavowed in France and embraced in Britain.<br>

Pentecost Past or Present

Abstract Charismatic elements were suppressed among colonial Australian Churches of Christ (Disciples) only to re-emerge a century later. Understandings of the work of the Holy Spirit were contested in Churches of Christ in Australia, Britain, and America, as the denomination struggled to account for the work of the Holy Spirit in contemporary times due to its foundational opposition to creeds, distrust of experientialism, and insistence on a rational common sense reading of the New Testament. This article examines Australian Churches of Christ responses to charismatic phenomena via several previously unexamined texts against the background of nineteenth-century revivalism, twentieth-century Pentecostalism, and the charismatic movement of the 1960s and ’70s. It finds that a church that once suppressed the story of an advocate of Holy Spirit baptism came to accommodate the language of renewal.

Muses, Heroines, and Virtuous Wives in Nineteenth-Century Italy: Erminia Fuà Fusinato’s and Matilde Serao’s Literary Portrayals of the New Italian Woman

ABSTRACTThe nineteenth-century revival of Dante brought renewed fame to his characters Beatrice and Francesca, who became the inspiration for a multitude of poems, tragedies, paintings, drawings, and musical compositions. The poet Erminia Fuà Fusinato (1834–1876) and novelist Matilde Serao (1856–1927) rejected the idealized characterization of Dante’s muses and proposed instead the concreteness of everyday women’s life, considered more relevant to their times and to their poetics, which were infused with civil commitment and social engagement. The female figures developed by Fuà Fusinato and Serao were portrayed as the heroines and antiheroines of modern Italy, defying any abstract or symbolic personification of womanhood and providing female readers with characters, such as the virtuous wife, which they could easily relate to their life and identify with experiences. Partly idealistic, and partly realistic, these literary portrayals sought to define new social and gender identities, in line with the national project of cultural formation, and to respond in narrative terms to the reforms (such as the Pisanelli Family Law) enacted by Italy in the aftermath of its political unification.

Theologies of the American Revivalists: From Whitefield to Finney

In this closely argued study, Robert Caldwell III, Associate Professor of Church History at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, provides a comprehensive overview of the major theologians who shaped the First and Second Great Awakenings, which did so much to shape the religious landscape of America.Caldwell begins by exploring the Moderate Calvinist theology of early New Light revivalists like George Whitefield that inspired the First Awakening, notable for its protracted conversion process inherited from English Puritanism. Such an inheritance came under fire from Congregationalist Andrew Croswell, who contended instead that salvation was available immediately ‘in right and grant’ to all who believe (48). Although closer to New Light orthodoxy, Jonathan Edwards developed a somewhat convoluted understanding of free will wherein humans had a moral inability to choose Christ apart from the Spirit's work, but a natural ability to repent and believe. An Edwardsian ‘New Divinity School’ of theologians, including John Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, and John Edwards Jr, subsequently built on Edwards's foundations.Further variations on Edwardsian theology were behind many of the developments in revivalist theology outlined by Caldwell, from developments amongst Congregationalists and Presbyterians during the Second Awakening through to one of the most famous revivalists of all, Charles Finney. Finney's espousal of ‘new measures’, including protracted meetings and ‘the anxious bench’, were controversial and remain so, but Caldwell is keen to show that behind his showmanship, Finney was deeply influenced by the New Divinity School and had an Edwardsian framework undergirding his revival theology, albeit one that affirmed that the sinner has moral ability to repent and believe.Caldwell concludes his study by looking at two sceptical responses to revivalism. The Princeton Old Light Calvinism of Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge saw a return to an earlier Calvinist orthodoxy, while Restorationists like Alexander Campbell and Walter Scott offered a biblicist critique of revivalism that espoused a purely cerebral reductionist view of faith as ‘the notional affirmation of the simple facts of the Christian gospel’ (219).The varieties of revivalist theologies espoused by autonomous Baptist congregations are covered in a separate chapter, and the impact of the Arminian theology of Methodism during the Second Awakening is also explored. Allowing for their own bias, Wesleyan readers may here be struck by the relative uncomplicatedness of the treatment of themes of free will and sovereignty in their theological tradition in comparison to some seeming ‘forest of fallacies’ (134) produced by Edwardsian attempts to differentiate moral and natural ability in repentance. Caldwell's perfectly justifiable decision to end his study of revivalism in the 1840s does regrettably preclude the exploration of perfectionist developments in the Wesleyan tradition leading to holiness revivalism. The subsequent career of Phoebe Palmer (1807–74) as a revivalist and theologian might be reasonably appended to Caldwell's description of Finney's writings as ‘one of the last major expressions of revival theology to appear in America’ (163), and her inclusion would have brought gender variety to an understandably male history. Palmer's theology and praxis, arising as it did from her own experience of holiness rather than from any academic training, offers a challenge to Caldwell's concluding theory that revival theology failed to continue to develop after the 1840s due to the effect of deleterious liberal theology in Edwardsian seminaries.Caldwell's thorough scholarship covers a wide variety of disputed theological themes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revivalism, including the nature of conversion, conviction of sin, the bondage and freedom of the will, and sanctification. The men whose ideas Caldwell explores were principally pastors preaching for conversions, and so the essential relationship between their theology and revivalist praxis is explored, particularly in the case of the Baptists and Finney. The book is a helpful counterpoint to any who would argue that revivalism is historically short on theological underpinning, and deserves to be widely read and carefully studied.

Rediscovering Jewish Infrastructure: Showcasing Surviving Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Synagogues

Rediscovering Jewish Infrastructure: Showcasing Surviving Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Synagogues Mark W. Gordon (bio) This photographic essay illuminates a few of the ninety-seven buildings that were originally erected as synagogues in the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and still stand today. Calling attention to these structures illustrates how American Jews have maintained and preserved their houses of worship, while also showing how synagogues have been used for alternative purposes in changing urban landscapes. Often following trends in secular and ecclesiastical architecture, the look of US synagogues evolved over the decades. The Touro Synagogue, the only eighteenth-century Jewish house of worship still standing today, was designed in the Georgian style by noted Colonial architect Peter Harrison (figure 1). Beth Israel in Honesdale, PA is an example of the Greek Revival style, fashionable for houses of worship in the 1840s and early 1850s (figure 2). Romanesque Revival synagogues with round-arched windows became popular for several decades beginning in the 1850s as illustrated in Goldsboro, NC (figure 3) and Salt Lake City (figure 4), with Gothic Revival and Victorian styles in Leadville, CO (figure 5) and Charlottesville, VA (figure 6) becoming more common beginning in the 1870s and 1880s. Moorish Revival was used heavily for synagogues—but not much in secular architecture—from the 1860s to 1890s. Moorish synagogues often contained onion-shaped domes or minarets, horseshoe arches, and polychromatic decoration. One theory for their ubiquity is the nineteenth-century revival of Jewish popular and scholarly interest in the history of the Sephardic diaspora, including their Golden Age in Spain and Northern Africa.1 Additionally, congregations built Moorish buildings in part to differentiate them from Victorian-style churches.2 Examples of Moorish synagogues are those in Denver (figure 7) and Newark (figure 8). [End Page 563] At the turn of the century, synagogue architecture returned to the American architectural mainstream with a heavy emphasis on Classical Revival styles. The change is attributable to the interest in classical design at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and also to archeological discoveries of Galilean synagogues built during Roman times.3 This style was adopted by New York City’s Shearith Israel (figure 9). The small number of remaining nineteenth-century structures underscores the transitions that have taken place in Jewish life over the past 150 years. As Jews migrated out of small towns to large cities, and out of cities to suburbs, the religious spaces that they built have been purchased by new owners and used for new purposes. Historical preservationists, however, have built community support both within and outside the Jewish community in order to maintain these synagogues as emblems of the Jewish past. Those interested in learning more about nineteenth-century synagogues may consult the expanded web version of this article, its accompanying table, and a list of sources linked here (www.ajhs.org/rediscovering-jewish-infrastructure). The web table documents the location, style, and current use of all ninety-seven buildings originally erected as synagogues in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which are still standing. They are located in thirty-one states and the District of Columbia. This essay and the expanded web article are successors to articles published in American Jewish History in 1986 and 1996 (Volume 75, no. 3 and Volume 84, no. 1), which described ongoing efforts to identify and showcase these buildings. [End Page 564] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jeshuat Israel’s Touro Synagogue of Newport, RI was built from 1759 to 1763 in the Georgian style. One of the oldest extant Jewish houses of worship in the Western Hemisphere, the synagogue was closed during much of the nineteenth century as the local economy declined and the Jewish community dispersed to other cities. It reopened in the 1880s. Photo by Mark W. Gordon. [End Page 565] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Beth Israel in Honesdale, PA completed its Greek Revival synagogue in 1856. Unusual for a purpose-built Jewish house of worship, the roofline features a steeple, which municipal officials required to grant approval of a building permit. Photo by Mark W. Gordon. [End Page 566] Click for larger view View full resolution...

Early Translations of English Fiction into Arabic: The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe

This essay examines the translations into Arabic of The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, two of the first works of modern prose fiction to be translated into Arabic in the nineteenth century. Both are didactic and allegorical narratives that belong to the prehistory of the European realist novel; they were originally written in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, and by the early nineteenth century had become among the most popular fictional works in Europe, both in their original languages and in translation. They were translated into Arabic at various stages of the nineteenth-century revival (nahḍa). The translations of each work are dealt with separately, but demonstrate certain shared issues and problems of translation in this period. These include the negotiation of different levels of language within Arabic, as suitable local equivalents for the translated work are found; the vital role of individual effort, and the placing of this within a wider educational and patriotic project; the awareness of European and local structures of power; and most importantly of all, perhaps, a shared didactic impulse. The two translations of The Pilgrim's Progress provide evidence of a shift of approach towards translation within the missionary project. The first translation (1834) belongs largely to an Evangelical mode of universal translatability, which tends to ignore distinctions between languages and between levels and registers within a language, in an attempt to proselytize as many people as possible. The second translation was made only ten years later for the American missionaries by the Protestant convert Buṭrus al-Bustānī. It belongs to a more sensitive mode of free translation into a literary idiom influenced by adab norms, and aimed at an educated readership. The two translations also — despite evidence of their appeal to at least fairly wide Christian audiences — seem to have been especially relevant to Syrian Protestant converts, for whom the radically solitary experience of Bunyan's protagonist Christian corresponded to their own experiences of personal conversion. Robinson Crusoe was also translated twice — by missionaries in an abridged version in 1835, and in a full version, outside the missionary framework, in 1861. This second translation was made by Buṭrus al-Bustānī, after his period of close collaboration with the missionaries had ended and he had moved to more ecumenical educational and patriotic projects. His translation demonstrates both continuity with and breaks away from the earlier missionary translations of both The Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe. His version of Robinson Crusoe is still presented as a didactic and exemplary narrative, more than a realist novel; an emphasis on the individual struggle and suffering of the protagonist is preserved, as are markers of the work's Christian and Puritan provenance. This personal effort is now, however, placed within a larger, patriotic and educational, framework.

Bridging Divides: Verdi's Requiem in Post-Unification Italy

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the early Italian reception of Verdi's Messa da Requiem (1874), premièred in Milan on the first anniversary of the death of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni. Previous literature has focused on issues of musical genre and the work's political implications (particularly its connections with Manzoni and with late nineteenth-century Italian revivals of ‘old’ sacred music). The article examines, instead, the curiously pluralistic concerns of contemporary critics, as well as certain aspects of Verdi's vocal writing, with the aim of destabilizing traditional dichotomies such as old/new, sacred/operatic, vocal/instrumental and progress/crisis. It argues for more broad-ranging political resonances of Verdi's work, suggesting that the negotiation of a variety of boundaries both in Verdi's music and in its contemporary discussion made the Requiem dovetail with wider cultural attempts to define Italian identity.

Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain ed. by Martin V. Clarke (review)

Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Edited by Martin V. Clarke. (Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain.) Farnham, Surrey, Eng.; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. [xvii, 262 p. ISBN 9781409409892. $114.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.A new title in Ashgate's Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series, this publi- cation lives up to the series' interdiscipli- nary ambitions by presenting eleven essays by thirteen authors working in a wide range of fields, including historical musicology, theology, hymnology, English literature, communications media, and church music history. The result is an eclectic collection of essays that explores topics as diverse as the changing repertory of the Anglican choral anthem, the role of British hymnody in the colonization of Madagascar, and the impact of Darwinian thought on nineteenth- century theories about music's spiritual ba- sis. The topics examined and approaches taken are as varied as the authors involved, and while this leads to a certain unsteadi- ness of method and approach, the richness and novelty of the contributions make the book well worth it. Not that everything here is new. The relationship between music and theology may well be a burgeoning subject, as the editor Martin Clarke asserts (p. 1), but it is one that has long exercised hymnologists, who are well represented in the book. A number of contributors are, in fact, well-known writers on hymnody and congregational song; their essays trace fa- miliar themes while still offering fresh in- sights and perspectives. Mel Wilhoit's dis- cussion of American gospel hymnody ably recounts the story of Ira David Sankey and Dwight Lyman Moody's impact on British evangelicalism in the 1870s and 1880s while also examining them within the context of nineteenth-century revivalism in general. He suggests that the general softening of hard-line Calvinism during the period, the shift towards a more reassuring and senti- mental theology, had much to do with their success. Martin Clarke's comparison of two early Victorian hymnbooks, one Evangeli- cal, the other Anglo-Catholic, investigates how the two groups positioned themselves in response to the Church of England's growing acceptance of hymn-singing (as opposed to psalm-singing, which had long been permitted) in church services. Evan- gelicals welcomed new texts and tunes so long as they were scripturally based or per- sonal in tone, while Anglo-Catholics stressed the revival of ancient texts and tunes that reinforced Catholic liturgies and traditions of communal worship. Again, the argument is not exactly new, but it is well presented, and ends with a striking observa- tion about hymns as markers of theologi- cal identity (p. 34) for each of the differ- ent factions of the nineteenth-century Anglican Church. Similar conclusions in- form Ian Bradley's efforts to pin down the character of a wide range of hymns and hymntunes, though his expansion of the field of inquiry to include High Church and Broad Church groups as well, breaks down in an overzealous need to prove his case. Each of the four main parties within the Established Church clearly had a unique cast, but they over- lapped in subtle ways that Bradley's analy- sis, for all its sensitivity on the subject, sometimes ignores.Questions of theological identity also inform C. Michael Hawn and June Hadden Hobbs's study of hymn texts authored by British and American women, though their injection of feminist criticism puts the dis- cussion onto a different plane altogether. Here, the personal imagery of Evangelical hymns, explored in other essays, is linked to the language of intimacy and the poetics of small things (pp. 61, 69) by which many Victorian women, confined by increasingly strict gender roles, found an outlet for self- expression. The essay explores connections between religious devotion and sexual sub- limation, and suggests that the identifica- tion of women and the domestic sphere with passion and spirituality-a cliche of nineteenth-century Anglophone culture- was partly a consequence of the popularity of Evangelical hymns. …

The nostalgic moment and the sense of history

This essay analyzes acute, individual nostalgia recorded in three examples of nineteenth-century medievalisms. As each example shows, the nostalgic moment involves primary (rather than secondary) and affective (rather than cognitive) memory – a memory of motor-sensory reception. A comparison of the nostalgia in Ann Radcliffe's tour of Hardwick Castle in 1794 and Thomas Carlyle's medieval interlude in Past and Present (1843) reveals the distinctive mnemonic component of depathologized nostalgia and shows why manifestations of it could entail such different affects and emotions. The discourse surrounding the nineteenth-century Gothic revival in architecture led by A.W.N. Pugin and later by Charles Eastlake shows, further, that Radcliffe's proved the more exemplary form of medievalism. Instead of a symbology laden with specific religious content meant to engineer a nostalgic reversion, the gothic revival in Eastlake's history developed into a formalistic mode that would engage an appreciation for a concocted Middle Ages based in primary memory.

The impact of evangelical revivals on global mission: The case of North American evangelicals in Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

The aim of the current article is to show that an important element behind the establishment of evangelical missions to Brazil � particularly during the pioneering stages � was evangelical revival, especially that which occurred in North America during the nineteenth century. Following a brief introduction to the general relationship between eighteenth- and nineteenth century revivals and evangelical missions, I shall endeavour to support historically the commonly accepted, yet often unsubstantiated, correlation between such movements of revival and mission. Firstly, I will show the significant paradigm shift in missional thinking, which took place in the nineteenth century, as North American evangelicals began to regard Roman Catholic countries in Latin America as mission fields. Secondly, I shall argue that the influence of nineteenth-century revivalist evangelicalism (particularly that sourced in North America) on missions to Brazil and Latin America can best be observed in the Brazilian evangelical identity that emerged in the twentieth century, which has, in turn, propelled the Brazilian evangelical church into its own significant involvement in global missions (Noll 2009:10).

Aimee Semple McPherson and Her Seriously Exciting Gospel

AbstractAimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944)—charismatic revivalist and founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel—was better known for her spell-binding performances and personal escapades than for her ideas. But, in fact, she was as serious about theology as she was about putting on a good show. McPherson's 'deeper teachings', as she called them, didn't reach the masses because they could not be easily packaged for the tabloid newspapers, radio, or stage. Had McPherson's many detractors read her written works, which are examined in this paper, they would have found a theology that was serious yet lively, complex, comprehensive, and morally demanding. Weaving together elements of nineteenth-century American revivalism, a mix of Arminian and Calvinist doctrine, and her own mystical interpretations of scripture, Aimee Semple McPherson created a distinctive theology for the new Pentecostal movement.

Creating and destroying ‘the man who does not exist’: the peasantry and modernity in Welsh and Irish writing

The literature of both Wales and Ireland in the modern period has used the imagined figure of the peasant to emblematize the nation. Yet the peasant is a contradictory emblem, especially for modernity, since he is associated with the past and with stasis. Consequently, both literary traditions reveal a repeated pattern of creation of an idealized peasantry, followed by its destruction in order to make way for a reinvented form of national identity. To demonstrate this, the early nineteenth-century representations of the Irish peasantry in the work of William Carleton are compared with those of the Welsh peasantry in the work of Anne Beale, followed by a comparison of the constructions of the peasant in the late nineteenth-century Celtic revivals of both countries in the wake of the Blue Books Report in Wales and the Great Famine in Ireland. Finally, the satirical portraits of the peasantry in the twentieth-century short stories of George Moore and Caradoc Evans are considered side by side. Ultimately, the peasant may be seen as embodying the contradictions of nationalism itself in the context of modernity, since the figure contains both residual and emergent cultural formations. Thus, the peasant is continually resurrected in analogous ways by writers in both countries, revealing again the proximity of the Welsh and Irish constructions of cultural nationalism and literary history.

Belfast and the Irish language

This collection of essays explores Belfast’s relationship with the Irish language from its earliest roots through to the cultural pioneers of the nineteenth-century revival, the urban Gaeltacht of the 1960s, the Belfast of the Good Friday Agreement and beyond.Table of ContentsIntroductionBelfast place-names and the Irish languagePat McKayThe Irish language in Belfast before the eighteenth century Aodhan Mac PoilinRobert MacAdam and the Irish language revivalA.J. HughesThe Ulster Gaelic Society and the work of MacAdam’s Irish scribesA.J. HughesThe Fadgies: an ‘Irish-speaking colony’ in nineteenth-century BelfastFionntan de BrunIrish in Belfast, 1892-1960: from the Gaelic League to Cumann Chluain ArdAodhan Mac Poilin Shaw’s Road urban Gaeltacht: its role and impactGabrielle Nig Uidhir Protestants and the Irish language in BelfastGordon McCoyIrish-medium education in BelfastSean Mac CorraidhThe new Gaeltacht Quarter: promoting cultural promiscuity and wealthSean Misteil

"Just a Little Talk with Jesus": Elvis Presley, Religious Music, and Southern Spirituality

In December 1956 Elvis Presley dropped in at Sun Studios in Memphis, as Carl Perkins recording session was ending. Presley was now national star, having transcended earlier that year his previous status as regional rockabilly performer. That special day became known as the Million Dollar Session because of the supposed million dollars worth of talent that included Presley, Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and, briefly, Johnny Cash. An open microphone recorded lively jam session. For the student of southern religious music, it was an especially revealing moment. In addition to improvising with country, blues, and early rock songs, the group sang from the common body of southern religious songs, some of them gospel tunes that dated from nineteenth-century revivals, others African spirituals, others popular gospel-quartet numbers. All of these young performers who had grown up in the countryside near Memphis knew the songs, and when one started singing, the others easily fell into supporting lines. They had all come out of church backgrounds and would have been familiar with Farther Along, God Dips His Love in My Heart, Blessed (Hold My Hand), and As We Travel Along on the Jericho Road. Elvis sang Peace in the Valley, an old classic written by black composer Thomas A. Dorsey and the song he sang on the Ed Sullivan Show to defuse public concerns that he was an immoral renegade destroying America's youth. Between songs the boys talked about the white gospel quartets that were so active around Memphis, an epicenter of white and black gospel traditions. (1) Just Little Talk with was an especially revealing song of southern that day in Sun Studios, two years after the 1954 Brown decision and one year before the Soviet satellite Sputnik, during decade that launched extraordinary cultural changes in the South. Elvis knew the song profoundly, singing lively version and then slowing down the pace to fit the mood of the lyrics. The song's narrator tells the essential evangelical story of one lost in sin but not without hope because Jesus took me in. When that happened, a little light from heaven filled his soul. Redemption is seen in the next lines, which say God made heart in love and He wrote name above. Despite doubts and fears and even though your eyes be filled with tears, my is friend who watches day and night. In the end, just little talk with gonna make it right. (2) The Million Dollar Session is an appropriate introduction to the importance of Elvis Presley in understanding the role that music played in defining distinctive southern and the impact on that relationship of the dramatic changes in the South over the roughly two decades between that day in Sun Studios in 1956 and Presley's death in Memphis in 1977. Charles Wolfe, Peter Guralnick, and other historians and journalists have written about Presley's relationship to the gospel music tradition, but the broader question of how Presley can help open up the unexplored issue of southern has not been explored. Studies of American that stress the distinction between and spirituality have recently appeared. Robert Wuthnow, leading student of concludes that this new scholarly work reflects increasing popular interest in spirituality. People see as somehow more authentic, more personally compelling, an expression of their search for the sacred, whereas religion suggests social arrangement that seems arbitrary, limiting or at best convenient. Despite the new popular and scholarly interest in none of the scholarly works even mentions the South or southerners, and certainly none addresses regional expression of that comes out of the white working-class culture of the South. (3) Neither the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South nor the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture include entries on spirituality, and survey of classic works by historians Samuel Hill, David Edwin Harrell, Wayne Flynt, and others suggest they have seldom dealt directly with spirituality in the context of southern regional religious tradition. …

Mary and Roman Catholicism in Mid Nineteenth-Century England: The Poetry of Edward Caswall

In her article on the nineteenth-century Marian revival, Barbara Corrado Pope examines the significance of Mary in the Roman Catholic confrontation with modernity. ‘As nineteenth-century Catholics increasingly saw themselves in a state of siege against the modern world, they turned to those symbols that promised comfort’, she writes. Inevitably the chief symbol was Mary, whom the ‘patriarchal Catholic theology’ of the time held up as embodying the ‘good’ feminine qualities of chastity, humility, and maternal forgiveness. But there is another side to Mary that emerged as even more important and effective in the struggle against what many Catholics perceived as contemporary errors, and this was the militant figure embodied by the Immaculate Conception. The miraculous medal, an icon of Catherine Laboure’s vision of the Virgin treading on a snake, popularized this concept. The crushing of the snake not only had a connection to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception; it also symbolized victory over sin, particularly the sins of the modern world. ‘Thus while the outstretched arms of the Immaculate Conception promised mercy to the faithful, the iconography of this most widely distributed of Marian images also projected a militant and defiant message that through Mary the Church would defeat its enemies’.

Controversial Concordats: The Vatican’s Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler (review)

Controversial Concordats: The Vatican's Relations with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler. Edited by Frank J. Coppa. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 1999. Pp. viii, 248. $44.95 clothbound; $24.95 paperback.) This study of the concordats concluded between the Holy See and the major dictators of the modern age is an expansion of papers first presented as a panel at a scholarly conference. As such, it is organized like a conference panel, with an introduction by John K. Zeender, substantive essays on France by William Roberts, on Italy by Frank Coppa, and on Germany by Joseph A. Biesinger, and a concluding commentary by Stewart A. Stehlin. An appendix contains the complete texts of the concordats with Napoleon, Mussolini, and Hitler. For over 800 years prior to the 1960's, the Papacy had negotiated concordats with secular states, trading the favor of the Pope for guarantees of the position of the Church and its institutional status within those states. In the early nineteenth century, concordats, on the model of that of 1801 with Napoleon, served to consolidate alliances of throne and altar. They were less used in the latter part of the century as the Vatican was beset by attacks from liberal anticlericals and from the newly created national entities of Germany and Italy. The use of concordats was revived by Pius XI as a means of dealing with a world of secular nationalism in the 1920's. Yet the concordats with Italy (1929) and Germany (1933) raised questions about the morality of pacts with dictators and, with Vatican Council II's intended decentralization of power within the Church, no new concordats have been concluded by the Vatican since the 1950's. William Roberts contends that Napoleon sought agreement with the Church in order to secure popular support for his regime as well as to control what was potentially a dangerous oppositional institution. In the short term, the French concordat of 1801 worked to Napoleon's advantage. Yet, Roberts argues that in the longer term, the concordat was of considerable benefit to the Church, since it brought the French Church under greater papal control than heretofore and it laid the foundation for the nineteenth-century revival of French Catholicism. Within France, the concordat gave great power to the bishops, with the result that the lower clergy became fervently ultramontane, seeing the Pope as their protector against an arbitrary episcopate. Roberts attributes French support for the 1870 doctrine of papal infallibility to this internal tension of the Church. In the same way, Frank Coppa indicates that the Italian concordat of 1929 provided short-term benefits to Mussolini's fascist regime, but, through its protection of Italian Catholic Action, the concordat assisted in the preparation of the post-fascist generation of Italian political leadership. …

The Neo-Thomists (review)

BOOR REVIEWS 315 There are two essays on Brentano in this work; the first of them (35-6o) is far more important in connection with his legacy. This essay is an overview of the philosophical orientation that Brantano conveyed to his pupils. This orientation is of course psychological in character. The psychology in question is, moreover, one in which "intentionality" becomes the central theme. It is well known that, according to Brentano's early formulation of this notion, the object exists in the act, though there is some dispute about how this is meant. Smith insists that it is "to be taken literally" (42). While it is uncertain how a literal reading could here be contrasted with a metaphorical one, it should be kept in mind that Brentano also warns against construing the inexistent object as something which exists in the proper sense (im eigentlichenSinn). This caveat unfortunately does not receive due attention from Smith. While the same point is again made by Twardowski, Smith hardly takes it into account in his otherwise excellent essay on this crucial figure in the school of Brentano. This book is nonetheless worth reading, for it effectivelybrings home the merits of Brentano's thought and will hopefully generate further interest in Brentano and his school. R. D. ROLLINGER Freiburg University Gerald A. McCool. The Neo-Thomists. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994. Pp. vi + 166. Paper, $2o.oo. In reviewing the different philosophic movements of the twentieth century--logical positivism, analytical philosophy, process philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, hermeneutics--a place will have to be given to the revival of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas 02~5-1274 ). From early in this century until well into the 197os, the required philosophy courses at many Catholic colleges and universities were structured around the philosophy of Aquinas. Now, in retrospect, Thomists note a decline in enthusiasm which began, curiously enough, with Vatican II (1962-65); but the momentum engendered by the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris 0879 ), seems to be sufficient to carry Thomism into the twenty-first century, though not without its own internal controversies and factions. Gerald A. McCool, S.J., professor at Fordham University, has in America been the historian of this revival and to some extent its decline. His Nineteenth-CenturyScholasticism : The Searchfor a Unitary Method (1977; paperback 1989) studied how Catholic intellectual life, wounded by the Enlightenment and the aftermath of the French revolution, struggled to find a metaphysical basis for the teaching of Catholic theology. It is an interesting story how small groups of Italian priests, almost independently of each other, discovered that the works of Aquinas would serve them in their seminary classes. It is the story of how two brothers, Giuseppi and Gioacchino Pecci, became caught up in this movement, and when Gioacchino, Cardinal Archbishop of Perugia, was elected pope in a878, he was in a position to share his enthusiasm, and did so with 3~6 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:2 APRIL ~997 Aeterni Paths, which recommended to the whole church a return to the scholastics of the middle ages, especially the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. McCool continued his research of the revival of Thomism in his 1989 From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism, which, building on the nineteenth-century heritage, studied the twentieth-century work of such Thomists as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson. Though the work of revival was largely carried out by religious, it is noteworthy that the two French scholars were laymen: Maritain, a convert to Catholicism , only discovered Aquinas after this conversion; and Gilson, a born Catholic, came to his study of Thomas after his Sorbonne teacher, Lucien Ldvy-Bruhl, suggested that an interesting research project would be looking into the medieval background of Descartes. In The Neo-Thomists McCool presents us with a most readable and, for the undergraduate teacher, a very handy digest of his earlier research. The nineteenth-century revival is handled in a chapter leading to Aeterni Paths, and then the story continues with the work of Jesuits such as Pierre Rousselot and Dominicans like Ambroise Gardeil, Pierre Mandonnet, M. D. Chenu, and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. The work of revival...