Professor Of Religion Research Articles

The African American Personalist Perspective on Person as Embodied in the life and thought of Martin Luther King Jr.

American Personalist Perspective on Person as Embodied in the Life and Thought of Martin Luther King Jr. Lawrence Edward Carter Sr. My philosophy of religion professor, the late Peter Anthony Bertocci, who also taught Martin Luther King Jr. the philosophies of Hegel and Kant, defines a person as "a unique, telic, indivisible, but complex self-identifying unity of activity-potentials best characterized in consciousness as sensing, feeling, desiring, remembering, imagining, thinking, willing, oughting, allotting, anticipating, and appreciating, and the activities we distinguish as aesthetic and religious that is able to develop reason and values" (1988, 9). "These activities" says Bertocci, "enable a person to know an external world, to plan and will the satisfaction of his wants in the light of those social, moral, esthetic, [theoretical, economic, political,] and religious ideals to which he comes to feel obligation" ([unpublished manuscript], 1). It was this understanding of the person that was the foundation in Martin Luther King Jr.'s philosophical conception of the person as a sacred personality. According to King, not only is the person what Bertocci would later refer to as a "unitas multiplex," but what Walter George Muelder would call "a center of autonomous value" worthy of unconditional love. For King, the person's structure is shaped, at least in part, by the value conferred upon it. Thus, there is no separation between the structure, or how the person is defined, and the value, or how the person might be viewed in light of that definition. Bertocci defines personality as something that is "learned as a person interacts with other persons." "More exactly," says Bertocci, "a person's personality is his more or less systematic mode of response to himself, to others, and to his total environment in the light of what he believes them to be, and what they actually are." King demonstrated the significance of understanding persons with capacities for and strivings toward authentic identity in an unprecedented philosophical personalist activism through the Civil and Human Rights Nonviolent Movement (Bertocci 1970, 95). [End Page 219] In his book, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism, James J. Farrell deals with Catholic worker personalism, which he saw demonstrated in the beat of personalism, civil rights personalism, liberated personalism, student personalism, the Vietnamization of personalism, and counter-cultural personalism. He does not, however, deal with theistic personalistic idealism, teleological personalism, communitarian personalism or dynamic interpersonalism. A quick glance at the Personalist Forum and the Internet, however, will convince you of how many variations of philosophical personalism exist. In studying the Gandhian nonviolent method of nonviolent resistance, King discovered in his philosophically based activism a consistency between the principles of personalism and the inherent respect for the person in the method of nonviolence as a strategy and a way of life. Thus, King thought nonviolent direct action was reasonable, practical, and moral in its regards for persons. Nonviolent personalism operated on the following fourteen assumptions, which bring into view King's conception of the person: 1. Nonviolent personalism stressed the sacred dignity of persons. 2. Nonviolent personalism focused especially on the centrality of the oppressed and poor persons, using their conditions as an index of the health and justice of their society. 3. Nonviolent personalism was suspicious of systems, the market economy, and the government, because they were not ultimately focused on the inviolable dignity of persons. 4. Nonviolent personalists believed in the inner revolution and the personal reformation that comes from the personal reflection and practice of ethical principles or the science of ideals. 5. Nonviolent personalists believed that awakening the power of the person's individual potential through conscious evolution and changes in conscience-ness could realize the power of our social potential. 6. Nonviolent personalists did not stop with the conversion of the individual: they understood the importance of negotiating through institutions; hence, they acted politically for social and structural change. 7. Nonviolent personalists believed that people in community could govern themselves and their needs to reduce the conflicts caused by competitive individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and corporate liberalism. 8. Nonviolent personalists assumed the essential harmony of personal and political life, that virtues like compassion and cooperation could and should be applied to...

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The Papacy of Benedict XVI

DialogVolume 44, Issue 3 p. 290-291 The Papacy of Benedict XVI By Thomas A. Shannon, By Thomas A. ShannonSearch for more papers by this author By Thomas A. Shannon, By Thomas A. ShannonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 11 August 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0012-2033.2005.00270.x Thomas A. Shannon is Emeritus Professor of Religion and Social Ethics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA. His recent works include Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries And Interpretations(Georgetown University Press, 2005), The New Genetic Medicine: Theological and Ethical Reflections(Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Genetic Engineering: The Documentary History(Greenwood Press, 1999) and Made in Whose Image? Genetic Engineering and Christian Ethics(Humanity Books, 1999). AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume44, Issue3September 2005Pages 290-291 RelatedInformation

Presumption against War or Presumption against Injustice?: The Just War Tradition Reconsidered

Journal Article Presumption against War or Presumption against Injustice?: The Just War Tradition Reconsidered Get access J. Daryl Charles J. Daryl Charles associate professor of religion and ethics Union University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 47, Issue 2, Spring 2005, Pages 335–369, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/47.2.335 Published: 01 March 2005

Response to Sayler on Homosexuality

DialogVolume 44, Issue 1 p. 95-97 Response to Sayler on Homosexuality Peter T. Nash, Peter T. NashSearch for more papers by this author Peter T. Nash, Peter T. NashSearch for more papers by this author First published: 16 February 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0012-2033.2005.00244.xCitations: 1 Peter T. Nash is Visiting Professor of Religion at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. He is the co-editor of Negras Histórias no Rio Grande do Sul(2002) and author of Reading Race, Reading the Bible(Fortress, 2003). Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume44, Issue1March 2005Pages 95-97 RelatedInformation

Response to Review of Rethinking Childhood

Children, Youth and Environments 15(2), 2005 Response to Review of Rethinking Childhood Peter B. Pufall Richard Unsworth Khan Liberal Arts Institute, Smith College Northampton, Massachusetts Citation: Pufall, Peter B. and Richard Unsworth. “Response to Review of Rethinking Childhood.” Children, Youth and Environments 15(2), 2005. We are delighted with CYE’s thoughtful and enthusiastic review of Rethinking Childhood. The reviewer’s closing evaluation of the book as “present(ing) an outline for a radical new paradigm and methodology for studying and working with young people” captures our guiding theme and goal of the collected contributors. In stark contrast, Jan Qvortrup, reviewing our book in Science and Society, states that “it is misleading to launch (our book) as presenting a new paradigm.” Curiously both views are valid, but only if within the context of contemporary European scholarship. Qvortrup’s intellectual roots are in Europe where what we call the new paradigm of Childhood Study was born and now flourishes among European scholars representing a variety of behavioral and social science disciplines. This emerging European tradition provides guidance for the future of child study in the U.S., and we urge readers to view Alison James’ contribution to our book as an introduction to that emerging tradition. The new paradigm is still gestating—or at best neonatal—in the U.S., and, where it is developing, it was born in and remains attached to a single academic discipline, namely, applied developmental psychology or cultural psychology. Although these fledgling US efforts share the interdisciplinary ambitions of the European tradition, these ambitions are only beginning to be realized. In our view, the new paradigm will yield a new understanding of children and an ethical relation between socialbehavioral science and society only if it is interdisciplinary. In short, the intellectual transformation of individual scholars is not enough; that transformation has to be coupled with a social-intellectual restructuring of academies. Neither of these goals is easy. Moreover, the conceptual facets of new paradigms are difficult to absorb as a whole; typically, when first encountered, one facet attracts more attention than others. The present CYE reviewer focuses on the proposition that children are agents. What they do has consequences for their own growth and the organization of the immediate social world within which they are 424 developing. Further, they have a unique voice, i.e., their views of the world are not always coincident with those embodied in adult beliefs and institutions. Being charmed by the words of children is not new; however, by insisting that we listen to what children say and making them part of our human dialogue, we abandon the cannons of science. When we listen to children, we enter their world. We are accepting that childhood is not simply a social construct into which children fit or by which they are guided. Rather, it is something that they mutually construct. If we are to listen and to respect their agency, we must realize that the methodology of the new paradigm means we are engaged in social experimentation. The latter is the most challenging facet of the new paradigm, and, in our view, even European scholars are only beginning to understand the implications of being simultaneously scholars and activists. This does not mean we are not without a systematic example: Richard Lerner’s Liberty: Thriving and Civic Engagement Among America’s Youth offers a thoughtful and well-structured introduction. There is less ambitious guidance within our book. Several chapters speak directly to how education and legal institutions constrain agency and voice. These writers suggest ways in which social institutions should be reconstituted so that children’s agency and voice are utilized in the mutual construction of their childhood. Peter B. Pufall is an emeritus professor of psychology and a senior fellow of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College. He is co-editor with Harry Beilin of Piaget's Theory: Prospects and Possibilities. Richard P. Unsworth is a senior fellow of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College where he was dean of the chapel and a professor of religion. ...

Globalizing the sacred: religion across the Americas

Globalizing the Sacred breaks new ground in our understanding of the transnational role of religion. Based on case studies in the Americas, this book challenges modernist assumptions about the ways Christians communicate and interact in an increasingly global world. Vasquez and Marquardt demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of transnational theory as they engage debates related to hybrid identities, the transformative impact of the Internet, and the increasing flow of migrants across national borders. --Donald E. Miller, executive director, Center for Religion and Civic Culture, University of Southern California A magnificent exploration of the multiple ways local religion shapes and is shaped by its institutional, regional, and global contexts. Locating their analysis at the crossroads between religious studies and emerging literature on globalization, Vasquez and Marquardt masterfully interweave theory and case studies to provide essential insights for understanding religion and social change in the twenty-first century. --Timothy Matovina, director, Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, University of Notre Dame Drawing on case studies in the United States and Latin America, Manuel A. Vasquez and Marie Friedmann Marquardt explore the evolving roles of religion in the Americas in the face of globalization, transnational migration, the rapid growth of culture industries, the rise of computer mediated technologies, and the crisis of modernity. Combining ethnographic research in local congregations, studies of material culture and sacred space, textual analyses, and approaches to mass and electronic media, the authors challenge dominant paradigms in the sociology of religion. Manuel A. Vasquez is an associate professor of religion at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is the author of The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity and is coeditor of Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas (Rutgers University Press). Marie Friedmann Marquardt is a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology of religion at Emory University.

The Co‐Existence of Violence and Non‐violence in Hinduism

The Ecumenical ReviewVolume 55, Issue 2 p. 115-121 The Co-Existence of Violence and Non-violence in Hinduism Anantanand Rambachan, Anantanand Rambachan Anantanand Rambachan is professor of religion and philosophy at Saint Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota. USA.Search for more papers by this author Anantanand Rambachan, Anantanand Rambachan Anantanand Rambachan is professor of religion and philosophy at Saint Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota. USA.Search for more papers by this author First published: 26 March 2009 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-6623.2003.tb00186.xCitations: 2 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume55, Issue2April 2003Pages 115-121 RelatedInformation

The quest for the Cuban Christ: a historical search

A sweeping and stunning interpretation of Cuban religion and culture, from the religious fervor that surrounded the recent Elian Gonzalez saga in Miami to a religious view from the underside of Cuban history.--Luis Daniel Leon, Arizona State UniversityA fascinating [and] controversial interpretation of Cuban history and religions that should be read by anyone interested in understanding North American Latino religions and culture.--Gaston Espinosa, University of California, Santa BarbaraIn The Quest for the Cuban Christ, Miguel A. De La Torre examines symbols enriching the Cuban experience through a highly creative historical and cultural framework. He argues that for all Cubans, Christ must be understood through the historical analysis of the Cuban culture and that God saves Cubans in a quintessentially Cuban way.De La Torre juxtaposes two disciplines long considered mutually exclusive--liberation theology and postmodernity--to test the relationship between the faith of marginalized Cuban groups and the overall Cuban identity. His approach challenges the Latino academic religious community to seriously consider and acknowledge how vastly the Cuban religious experience differs from that of other traditions. He also confronts the proposition that Christ can be understood through a general Latino social location.De La Torre analyzes key figures, groups, and periods in Cuban history as well as the ways Christ is being depicted in Cuban art today. His focus centers on the art created by marginalized segments of Cuban society, both in Cuba and the United States, to illuminate points of view from those previously silenced throughout Cuban history. His argument moves beyond a purely spiritual reading to explore how Christ is created by those who were and are oppressed by the Cuban culture, a theme that he uses to debunk the Christ of the powerful and privileged who until recently have been the sole arbiters of the Cuban identity.Miguel A. De La Torre, assistant professor of religion at Hope College, is the author of Reading the Bible from the Margins and co-author of Introducing Latino/a Theology with Edwin Aponte.

Book Review: C. S. Lewis Then and Now

By Wesley A. Kort. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-19-514342-6. Pp. 194. $25.00. If Doris T. Myers' fine book C. S. Context (1994) offers readers an understanding of public context of language when wrote his best fiction 1940s and 1950s, Wesley A. Kort's C. S. Then and Now attempts to place Lewis's context of twenty-first-century America. Kort, Professor of Religion at Duke University, has written a thoughtful, penetrating book. While he could have focused narrowly on sociology of religious ideas Lewis's work, Kort avoids this pitfall; instead, he takes readers into what I think of as most useful aspects of Lewis's for people [particularly university students] attempting to articulate `world and life views' that are both relevant to our current location and informed by religious (9). Although Kort admits that is dated he nonetheless argues that in his there are strategies, critical moves and insights, and large bits of construction worth imitating and using. In particular, Kort finds much to admire Lewis's avoidance of two errors characteristic of contemporary American Christianity: viewing modern culture as and irremediable and believing that can be self-enclosed (5). Accordingly, Kort's goal is to take insights of then--roughly his writings of 1940s and 1950s--and try to apply to contemporary American culture now In his first chapter, Retrieval Kort notes that literary have moved away from formalism and disciplinary orthodoxy and toward interdisciplinary as well as matters of theory and practice that engaged Lewis--education and curricula, value theory, continuities between high and popular culture, relation of power and ideology to beliefs and ideas, and moral consequences of intellectual and technological imperialism. As a result, the combination of literary with historical, theoretical, cultural, critical, and moral/religious ingredients normalizes Lewis's current literary studies (13). Much of rest of chapter considers how Lewis's goes a long way toward retrieving and reconstructing a relation between religious belief and English culture. The next chapter, Reenchantment explores how Lewis believes that religion can be rightly understood only by people who live a world that is at least to some degree (33). In addition to providing an historical review of how world came to be disenchanted for most people, Kort refers to Lewis's The Abolition of Man as primary text which analyzes and critiques this disenchantment. In large measure Kort argues that sees human relationships as ail-important; however, since cultural movement has been toward more and more isolation and individuation, disenchantment bas been inevitable result. He summarizes what we can learn from Lewis: For world once again to be enchanted [...] we must recognize (1) that we have a cultural location, (2) that our characteristic methods of analysis are partial and strategic, (3) that larger world has a real or potential value and meaning which must be recognized, and (4) that as individuals and groups we have value not primarily isolation from or opposition to others but relationships with them (49). The third chapter, Houses considers the place of spatial language Lewis's work (53). Citing examples from works as varied as Surprised by Joy, The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, That Hideous Strength, Till We Have Faces, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters, Kort shows how uses housing as a metaphor for an adequate sense of world and of one's relations to and within it (65). The core of book is Culture both literal middle chapter of seven and longest one book. …

Paradise Park (review)

Reviewed by: Paradise Park Daryn Glassbrook Paradise Park, by Allegra Goodman. New York: The Dial Press, 2001. 360 pp. $24.95. Paradise Park, Allegra Goodman’s second novel, is a darker, more panoramic rewrite of her story “Onionskin,” which was included in the 1998 Delta paperback edition of her first story collection, Total Immersion. In “Onionskin,” Goodman had abandoned the present-tense, third-person omniscient narration of her other stories for a double- voiced epistolary mode. “Onionskin” purports to be a letter from Sharon, a continuing ed. student at the University of Hawaii, addressed to her comparative religion professor. In trying to explain why she stormed out of Dr. Friedell’s ponderous lecture on Augustine, Sharon tells him of her lifelong personal journey in search of spiritual enlightenment; she hopes that Friedell will accept the letter as her final research paper. [End Page 166] Sharon’s narrative voice was a funny, fresh-sounding middle-class vernacular that allowed Goodman the freedom to comment indirectly on the metaphysical crisis of postmodern MultiAmerica. Though Goodman identifies herself as a Jewish American writer, her comic fictions are more broadly concerned with the lingering traces of religiosity and cultural memory in our secular, distracted era. For Paradise Park, Goodman once again narrates in Sharon’s voice. The first half of the novel recasts the major scenes of Sharon’s adult life leading up to the confrontation with Dr. Friedell. In 1974, as a twenty-year-old college dropout, she meets an older graduate student named Gary while folk dancing with a club at MIT. She follows Gary to Hawaii, where he plans to save indigenous bird species from extinction. But Gary’s wanderlust is too strong, and he abandons her. Left to her own resources, Sharon struggles through a series of failed relationships, service jobs, and religious conversions, until she is prompted by a friend to return to college. At about the same time, she receives a postcard from Gary, postmarked from Jerusalem, expressing his wish for a reconciliation. Sharon begins corresponding with him and learns that he has become a born-again Jew and is studying at the Torah Or Institute. Through their letters, Sharon is persuaded that the newly spiritual Gary is her bashert; she leaves UH in the middle of her second semester with the intention of joining him at Torah Or. But Gary’s orthodoxy and the mundane reality of Israel disillusion her. When she learns via telegram that the cat she has left with her roommates in Hawaii has contracted feline AIDS, Sharon decides to return home. This is the point at which she drafts her letter to Friedell, which she submits as the final paper for his course (a variant text of the “Onionskin” letter appears in chapter 14). Unfortunately, her submission earns her an F. “This is not a research paper,” Friedell calmly explains. Sharon’s encounters in the second half of Paradise Park seem to follow much the same pattern: surprise reunions, failed relationships, and transient conversions follow one after the other. However, we gradually realize that Sharon has matured, and that her choices seem more determined. Sharon has accumulated strong habits of meditation, atonement, and transcendental vision from her various religious excursions. With new resolve, she faces down the narcissistic parents from whom she had been estranged since adolescence (in “Onionskin,” Sharon’s father is dead). She elopes with a scandalized ex-Hasidic pianist named Mikhail, a mensch with a gentle and poetic nature; by the end of the novel, Sharon bears witness to her redemption, with a new baby, a new career, and a new home. Benign readers of Goodman will recognize the terse lyricism, unobtrusive erudition, and incisive satire that are the trademarks of her fiction (the description of the electroplated roach business in Hawaii is a delight). And as she did with Elizabeth Shulman and Renée Melish in Kaaterskill Falls, Goodman emphasizes Sharon’s curiosity and pleasure in her body and physical surroundings. This is a shrewd [End Page 167] rhetorical move, considering the frequent neglect, suspicion, and punishment of the female in canonical Jewish literature and liturgy. Yet Goodman breaks new ground with Paradise Park; it is the most sexually...

Bodies, Choices, Globalizing Neocolonial Enchantments

Research Article| March 01 2002 Bodies, Choices, Globalizing Neocolonial Enchantments: African Matriarchs and Mammy Water Ifi Amadiume Ifi Amadiume ifi amadiume is Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. Educated in Nigeria and Britain, she has written several books with a special focus on gender analysis. Her latest book is Daughters of the Goddess, Daughters of Imperialism: African Women, Culture, Power and Democracy (Zed Books, 2000). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Meridians (2002) 2 (2): 41–66. https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-2.2.41 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ifi Amadiume; Bodies, Choices, Globalizing Neocolonial Enchantments: African Matriarchs and Mammy Water. Meridians 1 March 2002; 2 (2): 41–66. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15366936-2.2.41 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsMeridians Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2002 by Wesleyan University Press2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essay You do not currently have access to this content.

Books Received

Books Received Mark I. West Behind the Veil of Familiarity: C. S. Lewis (1898-1998). Eds. Margarita Carretero González and Encarnación Hidalgo Tenorio. New York: Lang, 2001. Apparently C. S. Lewis has attracted a considerable following in Spain, for this book's editors, as well as most of the contributors, are Spaniards. Although this collection of original essays covers the full range of Lewis' writings, there are several essays that focus on Lewis' books for children. Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture. By Ellen Pifer. Charlottesville, VA: U P of Virginia, 2000. Pifer examines the various portrayals of children in several novels, including The Turn of the Screw, Beloved, and Lolita. She argues that these novels reveal a deep ambivalence in Americans' responses to children. She does not cover any children's books, but her central argument would likely be of interest to children's literature specialists. Evil Children in Religion, Literature, and Art. By Eric Ziolkowski. New York: Palgrave, 2001. In his career as a professor of religion, Ziolkowski has taken a particular interest in the role that children play in Christian theology. This book focuses on the portrayal of "evil" children in various stories and works of art. Ziolkowski thoughtfully explores the theological implications that such children present to Christians. In his final two chapters, he touches on several children's books, such as Pinocchio and Peter Pan. Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking about Difficult Stories. By Loren Niemi and Elizabeth Ellis. Little Rock, AR: August House, 2001. Like most books published by August House, Inviting the Wolf In is intended for storytellers, but this book should be of interest to a much broader audience. Niemi and Ellis argue that children should not be sheltered from stories that deal with difficult subjects, such as evil, loss, sorrow, and grief. Literary Pathways: Selecting Books to Support New Readers. By Barbara Peterson. Westport, CT: Heinemann, 2001. Peterson provides lots of practical suggestions on how to select books that would appeal to emergent readers. She also recommends numerous titles that she has used when teaching reading to young children. Literature for Children: A Short Introduction, 4th ed. By David Russell. New York: Longman, 2001. Russell's textbook, which first came out in 1991, is now in its fourth edition. In this new edition, Russell has significantly expanded the chapter that deals with the history of children's literature. He has also updated his booklists and added new suggestions on how to use children's literature in the classroom. A Rainbow in the Desert: An Anthology of Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Children's Literature. Ed. and trans. by Yukie Ohta. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001. In this book, Ohta provides North American readers with a taste of Japanese children's literature from the first half of the twentieth century. The eleven stories and five poems in this book appear in English for the first time. [End Page 151] Copyright © 2001 Children's Literature Association

Jesus two thousand years later

This latest volume in the Faith and Scholarship Colloquies series examines the history and impact of historical Jesus research. Weaver and Charlesworth have gathered an impressive array of voices in this engaging collection. John Dominic Crossan (Emeritus, DePaul) provides a fascinating tour of the development of historical Jesus research, exploring the debate that such research has sparked in the community of faith and offering his own proposals about the future of these studies. E.P. Sanders (Duke) lucidly discusses the methods scholars use to determine how we know what we know about Jesus. Jewish scholar Amy-Jill Levine (Vanderbilt) engages in a lively consideration of the difficulties of applying the results of historical Jesus research to contemporary lives. Finally, James Charlesworth (Princeton) examines the sources and methods involved in Jesus research and offers a provocative outline of the results of such research. James H. Charlesworth teaches at Princeton Seminary and is the author of several books, including The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament (Trinity). Walter P. Weaver, Emeritus Professor of Religion at Florida Southern College, is the author of The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century, 1900-1950 (Trinity). For: Clergy; seminarians; undergraduate religious studies majors>

The career and orthopaedic injuries of Joshua L. Chamberlain. The hero of Little Roundtop.

Joshua L. Chamberlain, a professor of religion and oratory at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine was commissioned Lieutenant Colonel of the 20th Maine Volunteer Regiment in August 1862. He commanded the 20th Maine Volunteer Regiment in the historic defense of Little Roundtop against overwhelming odds and circumstances during the pivotal battle of Gettysburg. In June 1864 while leading a charge at the battle of Petersburg, he sustained what was thought to be a mortal wound when he was struck by a minié ball that entered just below and anterior to his right greater trochanter, injuring vessels, the urinary bladder and urethra, and fracturing his pelvis. Surgery was done in the field hospital, and after 5 months of recuperation, Chamberlain returned to lead his troops in combat. After the war he was elected Governor of Maine for four terms and subsequently served as President of his alma mater, Bowdoin College, for 12 years. Despite the fact that he had chronic lower abdominal pain, wound drainage, and a persistent urethral fistula, he lived a very productive life for 50 years after he was wounded at Petersburg. Included in the current paper are commentaries on the state of the art of surgery during the Civil War.

A Conversation with Reverend Theodore Hesburgh: Building a World Class University

Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. is the President Emeritus of the University of Notre Dame stepping down in 1987, after 35 years at the helm. Father Hesburgh served the University of Notre Dame well, building the academic quality of the university from a modest position to one of a national reputation in scholarship and quality of instruction. At 82 years of age, he still is active throughout the world in striving for world peace and justice. He is also active at Notre Dame in serving as an inspiration providing counsel and religious strength to the community of faculty and students. Father Hesburgh was born in Syracuse, New York on May 25, 1917. He attended the University of Notre Dame from 1934-1937. He then attended Gregorian University in Rome from 1937-1940, where he received a bachelor of philosophy degree. He was ordained a priest in the Congregation of Holy Cross College in 1943. Following his ordination, Father Hesburgh continued his study of scared theology at the Catholic University of America receiving a Doctor of Theology in 1945. Father Hesburgh was an assistant professor of religion at Notre Dame from 1945-1948, and was the chairman of the department from 1948-1949. In 1949, he became the executive vice president of Notre Dame until 1952, when he became the 15th President of the University. He held that position until 1987. He has held 15 presidential appointments over the years most recently for the United States Institute for Peace. At the same time, he remained a national leader in the field of education, serving on many commissions and study groups. As chairman of the International Federation of Catholic Universities from 1963-1970, Father Hesburgh led a movement to redefine the nature and mission of the contemporary Catholic university. His stature as an elder statesman in American higher education is reflected in his 141 honorary degrees, the most ever awarded to a single person. Highlighting a lengthy list of awards to Father Hesburgh is the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, bestowed on him by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and on the 10th of July, 2000, he will receive the Congressional Gold Medal. Father Hesburgh has served as the first Catholic Priest to serve as a director of the Chase Manhattan Bank and a trustee (later chairman) of the Rockefeller Foundation. His appointment as ambassador to the 1979 United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development was the first time a priest had served in a formal diplomatic role for the United States government. He was the first priest elected to the Board of Overseers at Harvard University being chosen as President in 1994 and 1995. In 1990-1996, he co-chaired the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, studying the need for reform of college sports. I served under Father Hesburgh from 1977-1984 and was very impressed with the quality of leadership he displayed. It is an honor to spend time with a legend and get a better understanding how he worked to improve the academic quality of the University of Notre Dame and worked to promote social justice and world peace. I hope this interview will provide you some insights into a man that has typified quality leadership over four decades. K.T.: Father Hesburgh, how would you describe your leadership philosophy? FATHER HESBURGH: My leadership philosophy is that leadership is more than just management. A person can come to a company or a university and manage it very well for 10 years. And when your 10 years are up, the organization has gone 10 years with no revolutions and no big failures of any kind, but no greatness either. It seems to me that the first thing a leader needs more than anything else is vision. He has to know let's say, where this institution is to go. He wants to know what it is to be. I gave a talk, I remember, at the beginning of being President and I said we had a mediocre faculty, we had a criminal budget given what we were purporting to do (like $7 million a year). …

Godly Women: Fundamentalism and Female Power

Fundamentalist women are often depicted as dedicated to furthering the goals and ideas of fundamentalist men and thus of ancillary importance to the movement as a whole. Godly Women, Brenda Brasher's groundbreaking ethnographic study, reveals the paradox that fundamentalist women can be powerful people in a religious cosmos generally understood to be organized around their disempowerment. Brasher spent six months as an active participant in two Christian fundamentalist congregations to study firsthand the power of fundamentalist women. In addition to the narrow set of religious beliefs that constitute each congregation, she discovered that gender functions as a sacred partition which literally divides the congregation in two, establishing parallel religious worlds. The first of these worlds is led by men and encompasses overall congregational life; the second is a world composed of and led solely by women. Brasher explores how and why women become involved in this highly gendered religious world by examining women's ministries, Bible study groups, and conversion narratives. She discovers that women-only activities create and sustain a parallel symbolic world within and among congregations, which improves women's ability to direct the course of their lives and empowers them in their relationships with others. The women develop intimate social networks that act as a resource for those in distress and provide the basis for political coalition when women wish to alter the patterns of congregational life. Brasher's study sheds new light on the ideas and faith experiences of fundamentalist women, revealing that the religiosity they develop is not as disempowering as one might think. Brenda Brasher is an assistant professor of religion at Mount Union College.

Godly women: fundamentalism and female power

Fundamentalist women are often depicted as dedicated to furthering the goals and ideas of fundamentalist men and thus of ancillary importance to the movement as a whole. Godly Women, Brenda Brasher's groundbreaking ethnographic study, reveals the paradox that fundamentalist women can be powerful people in a religious cosmos generally understood to be organized around their disempowerment. Brasher spent six months as an active participant in two Christian fundamentalist congregations to study firsthand the power of fundamentalist women. In addition to the narrow set of religious beliefs that constitute each congregation, she discovered that gender functions as a sacred partition which literally divides the congregation in two, establishing parallel religious worlds. The first of these worlds is led by men and encompasses overall congregational life; the second is a world composed of and led solely by women. Brasher explores how and why women become involved in this highly gendered religious world by examining women's ministries, Bible study groups, and conversion narratives. She discovers that women-only activities create and sustain a parallel symbolic world within and among congregations, which improves women's ability to direct the course of their lives and empowers them in their relationships with others. The women develop intimate social networks that act as a resource for those in distress and provide the basis for political coalition when women wish to alter the patterns of congregational life. Brasher's study sheds new light on the ideas and faith experiences of fundamentalist women, revealing that the religiosity they develop is not as disempowering as one might think. Brenda Brasher is an assistant professor of religion at Mount Union College.

Biography, Democracy and Spirit: An Interview with Vincent Harding

Biography, Democracy And Spirit An Interview with Vincent Harding Vincent Harding (bio) and Rachel E. Harding (bio) Vincent Gordon Harding is a historian, writer and activist who, with his wife, Rosemarie Freeney-Harding, has worked as an organizer and consultant in movements for democratic change for over thirty-five years. Harding was born in 1931 in Harlem. He attended the City College of New York, Columbia University, and earned a doctorate in American History at the University of Chicago. Presently, he is professor of Religion and Social Transformation at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. Harding is perhaps best known for his history of African-American resistance in ante-bellum America, There is a River (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981) and his numerous writings on the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He was senior advisor to the acclaimed PBS television series Eyes on the Prize. His most recent books are Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (Orbis, 1996), a collection of essays on the last years of King’s life, and We Changed the World: African Americans, 1945–1970, a textbook history co-authored with Robin Kelley and Earl Lewis for the Oxford University Press African-American history series for young adults (1997). In this conversation, I talk with my father about his childhood and the development of his concern for American democracy, his involvement in the Freedom Movement, the establishment of the Institute of the Black World, his working partnership with my mother, Rosemarie Freeney-Harding, and reflections on his activism and alliances. The interview took place over the course of an afternoon on March 9, 1997. R. HARDING One of your ongoing concerns over the past 30 years or so has been for the development of greater democracy and stronger structures of democracy in American society. How did you come by this concern and where do you find it leading you? V. HARDING I’m not sure that I can speak with great accuracy to that question. One of the background experiences that leads me to an appreciation of democracy, especially for democracy as expressed in the variety of human participants in the American experience, was my own growing-up in New York City. This was at a time when the city still had a public school system that, in some of its parts, was basically very multiracial and multicultural, especially as far as integration of the student body was concerned. More the student body than the faculty. I remember how much I enjoyed and appreciated the variety of people that I was with, the variety of my fellow students. Both while I was living through the experience and [End Page 682] since that time I have reflected on what it meant to be in a setting where I was in constant engagement with people from Italian, Irish, Armenian, Jewish, Portuguese, Puerto Rican as well as African-American and a half-dozen other kinds of racial and ethnic backgrounds. There was something simply very rich and exciting and engaging for me about that. Something lovely about it, to use a better word. And I think that the desire to see a nation develop its capacity to bring that kind of engagement into being was probably part of the concern. The other thing I should say is that part of the background might be called religious or spiritual. One of the things that I am most drawn to, in many religious traditions, is the teaching, the practice that within the human being there is tremendous capacity for greatness, for beauty, for creativity. That kind of religious insight or offering is a very powerful grounding for democratic society. Because if we really believe that there is within us all the capacity for creative work, for remarkable contribution, then that encourages the development of processes and spaces where people can open up and nurture that capacity as we build together new and renewing communities. R. HARDING Does the spiritual or religious grounding within your concern for democracy come from your particular experience of growing up in a black church setting in New York, and from the other forms that spirituality and religiosity have taken in your life...

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East (Prepared Under the Auspices of the American Schools of Oriental Research), edited by Eric M. Meters, Oxford University Press, New York

Like many of the endeavors by The Oxford University Press in the history of archaeology, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East is one of the most important compendium's of information comprising the history of Near Eastern Archaeology in recent time. Eric M. Meyers (Professor of Religion and Archaeology, Duke University), the Editor in Chief of the volume series, has done a masterful job of bringing together of wide variety of site information and biographical synposes of Near Eastern archaeolo­gists into a series of five volumes which are not only "user friendly" but "worth their weight in gold" for scholars and interested readers of the history of Near Eastern Archaeology. The wealth of information at the fingertips of the prospective researcher or interested reader is enormous. Although vast in its scope, the user of the volumes will find it easily accessible and of true value as a research tool.<br /><br />