Religious Awakening Research Articles

Catastrophe vs. Tragedy

Annette Becker. © Philippe Mesnard. Let’s begin by discussing your background. How did Annette Becker become an historian of the Great War, with a very specific focus that differentiates her from her colleagues? Annette Becker: In fact, I’m an historian of the Great War by default. I started with a doctoral thesis in history on the American religious awakenings of the 18th century. Religion, faith. I’ve always been interested not in church institutions, be they Protestant or Catholic, but in...

From Ethnography to Theology ― Religious Communities in Contemporary Shanghai and the Tasks of East Asian Theology ―

Theology must remain alert to the perpetual novelty of God, expressed throughout believers’ lived experiences and communal inventiveness. The ethnographer’s sensitivity to the way religious communities take shape and evolve can help the theologian to reflect anew on the way God’s revelation unfurls itself in the contexts and languages of our time. This article illustrates such approach by highlighting some aspects of an ongoing research on Shanghai’s religious communities. Not only does it reflect upon Christian churches’ growth and maturation but it also considers the religious diversity of Chinese megacities as a way to re-think Christian identity. It argues that China’s religious awakening is not to be considered as a special case or a mere opportunity for Christian mission but as a field for theological critical thinking.

Baptizing Nazism: An Analysis of the Religious Roots of American Neo-Nazism

The years following the Second World War saw American religious leaders making fervent attempts to bridge the denominational gap and encourage peaceful cooperation among America’s three leading faiths: Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. While the religious revival movement was largely successful, it was not as complete as historians have previously suggested. Scholars of the postwar religious awakening have neglected the darker, conflictual, and even violent strains of religious revival which developed alongside the optimistic, cooperative, and harmonious efforts that have taken center stage. Simply put, the development and propagation of Christian Identity, as propelled by Dr. Wesley Albert Swift, provided a ready-made system of values and organizational tenets to the various white power and neo-Nazi organizations that emerged across America after World War II ended. This article seeks to bring scholarly attention to this national movement that emerged in direct opposition to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in so doing, highlight the evolution of the American Neo-Nazi movement as a theologically-based movement that is starkly different from and considerably more malleable than modern American Nazism (which is often referred to as neo-Nazism, albeit, incorrectly).

Religious Revival and the Political Activity of Religious Communities in Estonia During the Process of Liberation and the Collapse of the Soviet Union 1985–1991

ABSTRACTThis article examines the activity of Estonian religious communities in the period of perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1991 the Republic of Estonia regained its independence. This coincided with an upsurge in churchgoing and church activity in society, often referred to as a national and religious awakening. This article, based on archival material, focuses on the changes in church–state relations, on the growing influence of religion and the activity of representatives of religious organisations, and on the development of and attitudes towards new religious movements which emerged in Estonian society in the period from 1985 to 1991. We view these developments in a wider context of social changes in the Soviet Union, with a special emphasis on Estonia, to describe the role that religious communities played in the Estonian liberation process.

The Role of Conflict in Producing Alternative Social Imaginations of the Future

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivatives 3.0 License.

Liberalism and Revivalism. A Comparative Case Study of Liberal Ideology, Individualism, and Revivalism in Schleswig-Holstein and Värmland, ca. 1860–1920

Only rarely have the non-secular roots of modern political individualism been subject to study. In this article I forward the hypothesis that modern political individualism, as expressed by 19th-century liberalism, was a result of individualistic, low Church and nonconformist revivals to the same extent that it was a product of secular rationalism. The hypothesis is probed in a comparative case study of rural liberalism in two north European regions, Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) and Värmland (Sweden). I address three key requirements of the hypothesis: that the nonconformist revival movements in 18th and 19th-century northern Europe promoted an individualistic outlook among their followers; that individuality rooted in religious awakenings was congenial to liberal ideology; and that traits of non-secular individualism were incorporated with everyday liberal political discourse and practice.

Islamic Investing Goes Mainstream: A SWOT Analysis

Islamic finance is a fast growing segment of the global financial industry, with Islamic assets recently estimated to be about USD 1 trillion. This article reviews the asset management sector of the industry with a focus on Islamic mutual funds. Islamic investments are well positioned and have been steadily increasing their presence and gaining a larger market share globally. This is due mainly to surplus liquidity in some oil and gas-rich Muslim countries as well as rising religious awakening among Muslims worldwide, which has attracted the attention of many western financial institutions. At about USD 60 billion, the Islamic mutual fund industry represents 6 percent of total assets in the Islamic finance industry, with a potential growth to $500 billion. A review of the main types of Islamic investment funds is followed by a SWOT analysis and recommendations for future progress. <b>TOPICS:</b>ESG investing, mutual fund performance, global

La poétique romanesque de Joris-Karl Huysmans par Stéphanie Guérin-Marmigère

de Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Des comics et des hommes: une histoire culturelle des comics américains (2005). Cet ouvrage a été traduit en anglais par Bart Beaty, lui-même auteur d’une étude (Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, 2007) qui attend son traducteur français pour compléter l’utile va-etvient critique entre les États-Unis et le monde francophone. University of Alberta (Canada) Chris Reyns-Chikuma GUÉRIN-MARMIGÈRE, STÉPHANIE. La poétique romanesque de Joris-Karl Huysmans. Paris: Champion, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7453-1992-0. Pp. 530. 105 a. Although the centennial of the death of Huysmans (1848–1907) sparked renewed interest in his works—which had in fact been growing since their republication in the 1970s—he is still widely seen as a secondary writer. Traditionally, critics have offered biographical readings, describing his books as a series of radical aesthetic and spiritual conversions (naturalist, decadent, mystical, Catholic) corresponding more or less to his departure from the naturalist school and eventual religious awakening. For Guérin-Marmigère, however, this “périodisation systématique” (10) of Huysmans’s life and career has caused us to overlook the coherence of his work, to ignore him as a daring innovator, and to cast him mistakenly as writer of eccentric, isolated novels. She thus attempts to place him where he rightfully belongs—at the forefront of the major crisis in the French novel at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Huysmans’s novelistic poetics provide a snapshot of this vital period of transition, while at the same time testifying to the literary specificity of his works. This exhaustive yet highly readable study proposes to liberate Huysmansian criticism from biographical interpretations, thereby leading us to the discovery of an important novelist who was careful to preserve his originality, hostile to formulas , and open to experimentation. By examining the techniques used in nine novels and other texts, Guérin-Marmigère analyzes the inner workings of Huysmansian narrative in light of major categories such as architecture, plot, character, chronology, and discourse, revealing a textual universe in which the very notion of literary genre is constantly challenged. Dividing her book into five parts comprised of three or four chapters each, she begins with a study of Huysmans as a theoretician of the novel, positing that, although he always worked under the aesthetic banners of stylistic singularity and novelty, he never really abandoned naturalism—if only in his life-long commitment to research and documentation. Part two examines how Huysmans subverted novelistic conventions of the adventure, quest, romantic, and naturalist genres in order to broaden the possibilities of plot. Her pages on parody as a means of dismantling the romantic idyll, her insights on the preference of repetition and circularity over linearity, and her assertions about micro-narratives and fragmentation all provide fascinating reading. Part three sees complexity, indecision, artistic insurgence , and “héroïsme cognitif” (269) as leitmotifs of Huysmans’s characters. In this sense, they are symbols for the crisis in the novel itself. Part four studies notions of space and time, revealing how Huysmans created new narrative structures imitating the movements of human conscience, thereby allowing him to go beyond the surface of the real and introduce into the novelistic genre an invisible reality close to what André Breton called “surréalité” (375). Finally, part five asserts 182 FRENCH REVIEW 86.1 that, paradoxically, it is in its polyphonic nature, multiple fluctuations, and conspicuous heterogeneity that the Huysmansian narrative finds its unity. This book argues convincingly that Huysmans’s poetics cannot be reduced to a succession of isolated tendencies, but rather must be understood as a complex process of evolution. Perhaps most importantly, it shows that by turning the novelistic adventure inward to the exploration of the mind, memory, dreams, psychic pathologies, mysticism, Satanism, conversion, and faith, Huysmans was ahead of his time in opening the universe of the novel to the unconscious and to spirituality. Hence, though he was keenly interested in reevaluating the past, he was above all strikingly modern. This well-organized, meticulously researched volume is of great worth to all students of the French novel and is...

"BÓG UMARŁ" - ALLAH ŻYJE

Islam is increasingly present in the world of European culture. This situation raises questions about the future shape of Europe as a result of the religious culture of Islam’s confrontation with the secular culture of the Old Continent. The Roman Catholic Church is in favour of conducting a dialogue with Islam and cooperation for the development and defence of values which are important to both great religions. In the era of the "death of God" the fidelity and zeal of religious Muslims can be a special inspiration of religious awakening among Christians today. The return of Europe to her religious roots is a prerequisite for the duration of her cultural identity.

Inculcate Tehran: Opening a Dialogue of Civilizations in the Shadow of God and the Alborz

This essay discusses the establishment of Alborz College by American Presbyterian missionaries. Alborz's early years, before its 1940 nationalization by Iran, were shaped by the vision of its first president, Samuel Jordan, a liberal, athletic, pragmatic Christian reformer who led by example, a practitioner of what we now call “social work” and an encourager of female empowerment. Alborz and the Presbyterian mission which gave it birth grew in the context of American social history, including the religious awakening of the early nineteenth century, American doctrines of freedom and universal education, as well as the contradictory impulses of ethnocentricity and ecumenicism. The essay is based on private and governmental archival sources and the experience of the author as a high school student in Tehran. This history needs to be told. —Yahya Armajani1 1This is a paraphrase of a remark made to me by Alborz alumnus and history professor Yahya Armajani in November 1988 at the MESA banquet in Los Angeles, following our panel on Presbyterian education in interwar Iran. All writing is autobiographical. —Donald Murray2 2Donald Murray was a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer, subsequently a writing teacher at the University of New Hampshire and a columnist for the Boston Globe. This phrase appears repeatedly in his books about writing. This essay discusses the origins of Alborz College as an effort by private Americans to share with Iran the blessings of their own culture. This they did for decades, cooperating with the Tehran government, without involving Washington. Remarkably, Alborz survived Reza Shah's assault on foreign schools during the 1930s, and it flourished after nationalization as a premier Iranian institution preparing secondary students for modern university studies. It continues as such today.3 3Not all sources appear in footnotes; the most important archive is that of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, Philadelphia; other archives consulted include those of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, Paris; the Archbishop of Canterbury's Mission to the Church of the East, London; the Church Missionary Society, Birmingham; the Archives Lazaristes, Paris; and the US and UK diplomatic archives.

Monopolizing violence before and after 1984

The events of 1984 have had world-wide repercussions for Sikhs, not only across the globe but across time. Twenty-six years of impunity for the government officials implicated in organizing the systematic massacre of thousands of Sikhs in India demonstrates the obdurate nature of state power to silence a people's history/suffering. Rather than simply reiterate the trauma of 1984, this paper situates the events within a broader canvas of (modern/colonial) state terrorism and its alienating force. To do this it is necessary to chart not only the historical legacy of colonial violence (i.e. the conversion to modernity and the rule of law), but also the political strategies employed by power in the theatrical manufacture of 1984. This paper argues that the theatrical nature of power, which monopolizes violence through the imposition of law, is markedly different from the dramatic response drawn from the people's protest, and this crucial difference is elaborated through a number of troubling dichotomies. The aporia between the voice of law and the cry of justice, for example, reveals how a finite calculation for compensation is never able to silence the incalculable suffering that the call for justice emerges from. In the economy of law that has to respond to the call for justice in a finite way, a certain slippage therefore becomes unavoidable, such that law may speak over and even against justice. This aporetic slippage discloses how the law betrays the ethical responsibility of a just response to such an extent, that those oppressed speak about the injustice of the law: twenty six years of impunity through the law. A related dichotomy between religion and violence reveals a modern/colonial disciplining of religion as merely a subjective matter. This disciplining is at the same time a de-politicization: religion as interior and non-violent means that only the state can be public and violent. Thus the moral assumption that all social protest movements should be nonviolent is another way of acceding to the state's monopoly of violence. This reduction to the subjective delegitimizes religion's public voice and role even when it arises out of a struggle for justice. Through a re-understanding of martyrdom and religious awakening, a second transition in subjectivity is acknowledged, beyond the first transition of entering into language or the symbolic order. Pain offers a possible route to a re-orientation in subjectivity – and it is here that a spirit of resistance can be located, beyond the ideological posturing of those for and against violence. It is argued that the subjective register, or political love, of the ‘saintly’ is not pre-determined, but one that is open to any response. This paper thus argues that we must refigure how we remember 1984: by recognizing that the oppressed may have a resource in the very injustice that imprisons them, there may be a certain legitimacy to religious violence that the secular state has failed to acknowledge let alone engage with.

What Is Improvement?

What Is Improvement?The title of John Fea's The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and Rural Enlightenment in Early America (Pennsylvania, 2008) calls to mind Raymond Williams's critique of improvement in rural England. Williams identifies two primary meanings of which were materially linked in consolidation of rural class structure during eighteenth century but could be morally dissociated.' Agricultural improvement, getting of more value from land through a program of enclosure, drainage, manuring, crop selection and rotation, and other yield-boosting technologies, supported social improvement manifested in a culture valuing taste and refinement. Cultivation bore a similar double sense, whose material connection has since become increasingly less visible as rural economy has all but disappeared from sight. Indeed, as Williams argues, moral claims of social improvement were turned against material structure of economic improvement, beginning in late eighteenth century with writings of William Cobbett and continuing through Victorian era. In United States, that critique was famously taken up by Henry David Thoreau, especially in Waiden, following a long England tradition of concern for improvement.Fea tells eighteenth-century American story of Philip Fithian's intellectual and social improvement not in order to examine its connection to and detachment from material improvement - taking these for granted much as Fithian himself seems to have done - but rather to illustrate some other large claims about nature of Enlightenment in continental North America. Fea's primary claim is that the Enlightenment was about self-improvement (5). This gives an entirely different focus from those studies of rural American Enlightenment that address question of modernity through agricultural improvement.2 Fea's focus on bourgeois social identity contrasts moreover with work that understands Enlightenment in terms of politics, literature, science, and public culture.3Philip Fithian lived in an American milieu in which material improvement supported substantial social improvement. Philip's great-grandfathers had migrated from England (one by way of Long Island) to take lands on Cohansey River, Jersey, in late seventeenth century. His grandfathers established themselves as gentleman famers: landowners who used laborers, sometimes including slaves, to work their lands. Philip's uncle Samuel Fithian, a first son, inherited largest portion of family estate to become one of wealthiest men in region, with holdings valued at over £1500. Philip's father Joseph, a third son, was a middling farmer who did not work his own lands but employed laborers as well as his sons. In this family culture, Philip had to work hard as a boy but aspired to status of gentleman. Improvement of land was especially evident in Cohansey in reclamation of salt marshes along Cohansey River through a system of banks and sluices. In addition to other seasonal farm work, Philip spent summers hauling mud and stones via canoe and wheelbarrow to .repair and extend banks, suffering mosquitoes and the ague. By age of twenty, and perhaps earlier, Philip was keeping a work journal in which he recorded weather and daily activities.As a first son, Philip stood to inherit his father's farm and with it his status as a gentleman. However, as Fea shows, a further path of social improvement opened to him within religious culture of Cohansey. Led by ministers of four local Presbyterian churches, Cohansey experienced something of a religious awakening during 1760s, whose sources Fea traces to a denominational reinvigoration following reconciliation in 1758 of Great Awakening split between New Side evangelicals and Old Side conservatives. Experiencing a conversion in 1766, Philip felt he might be called to ministry and, although reluctant to leave family estate and Cohansey community, he set about persuading his father to send him to College of Jersey (which would soon become Princeton University). …

I belong to South Carolina: South Carolina slave narratives

This title includes rare firsthand accounts of slavery from across the Palmetto State collected together for the first time. Out of the hundreds of published slave narratives, only a handful exist specific to South Carolina, and most of these are not readily available to modern readers. Edited by Susanna Ashton, this collection restores to print seven slave narratives documenting the lived realities of slavery as it existed across the Palmetto State's upcountry, midlands, and lowcountry, from plantation culture to urban servitude. First published between the late eighteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth, these richly detailed firsthand accounts present a representative cross section of slave experiences, from religious awakenings and artisan apprenticeships to sexual exploitations and harrowing escapes. In their distinctive individual voices, narrators celebrate and mourn the lives of fellow slaves, contemplate the meaning of freedom, and share insights into the social patterns and cultural controls exercised during a turbulent period in American history. Each narrative is preceded by an introduction to place its content and publication history in historical context. The volume also features an afterword surveying other significant slave narratives and related historical documents on South Carolina. I Belong to South Carolina reinserts a chorus of powerful voices of the dispossessed into South Carolina's public history, reminding us of the cruelties of the past and the need for vigilant guardianship of liberty in the present and future.

Sociétés chorales et Renaissance de la musique anglaise, 1840-1910

The great English choral tradition as we know it today was born along with the Industrial Revolution with the development of choral societies like the oldest, the Halifax Choral Society in 1817, while the Birmingham Choral Society, founded in 1843, was to provide a chorus for the town’s Triennial Music Festival. Those societies were fostered so as to tame, civilise and educate the potentially unruly new unskilled labour force who manned “the dark Satanic mills” of the expanding northern industrial cities and to lead them away from drink or the profanities of the nascent music-halls. Their favourite repertoire was the English oratorios of Handel and Mendelssohn, a genre which flourished all century long in the wake of the great religious awakening of the late eighteenth century and provided English and foreign composers with work in an opera-shy kingdom. Various social reformers, like John Curwen of Tonic Sol-Fa fame, developed methods to teach the untrained choristers how to read music, thus permitting their exposure to high-brow culture, to which the policy of the music publisher Novello greatly contributed. Paradoxically, the Renaissance of English music in the late 19th century benefited from the craze for choral singing but also somehow triggered its demise when native composers, who had assimilated the lessons of their foreign competitors and raised their standards of composition, required more from their amateur choristers, gradually forced to give up in favour of professionals, increasing the gap between popular and high brow culture.

Illustrating the Mind: “Faulty Memory” Setsuwa and the Decorative Sutras of Late Classical and Early Medieval Japan

This article explores the overlap between descriptions of sutra devotion that appear in setsuwa narratives and graphic traditions of sutra decoration popular in classical and medieval Japan, particularly from the eleventh century onward. Drawing on material from two Heian-period setsuwa collections, Hokke genki (1040-1044) and Konjaku monogatari shu (ca. 1120), the article focuses on the visual elements of written sutras, especially as elaborated in tales concerning faulty memory. The article considers particular setsuwa as written stories which can be embodied in performance (preaching) and which attempt to activate the visual imaginations of their reader-listeners. Furthermore, the article argues that these setsuwa posit the memory, the page, and the human body as intertwined locales for the inscription of sacred Buddhist text. KEYWORDS: setsuwa-sutra decoration-memory-material culture-reading- preaching (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Setsuwa ... (literally explanatory tales) represent the earliest attempt in Japanese Buddhism to find a popular literary genre capable of expressing complex aspects of abstract doctrine in concrete, sensually verifiable, and compelling narrative terms. Although their subject matter overlaps with that of other genres such as kosoden ... (hagiographies of high priests) and ojoden ... (accounts of rebirth in the Pure Land), Buddhist setsuwa collections differ from these wholly textual enterprises in that they are also linked intimately to performance, to the public and popular venue of the sermon (Fukuda 1981, Ikegami 1984, Hirota 1990). Some collections (Nihon ryoiki ... [ca. 823]) state their desire to act like a preacher, pull[ing] people forward with their words and guiding them onto the Buddhist path (nkbz 10: 245). Others (Sanboe ... [984] and Kankyo no tomo ... [1222]) bring sermon material to recently-tonsured women. Some (Hyakuza hodan kikigakisho ... [1111]) represent the transcription of multi-day sermonizing events, while yet others (Shasekishu ... [1284]) comprise compilations of a preacher's favorite material. While their language of composition and literary quality vary, one commonality that binds Buddhist setsuwa as a recognizable genre is their attempt to engage the popular imagination with the teachings of Buddhism by shaping short narratives that are in turn emotionally gripping, erotically titillating, forcefully violent, and frankly miraculous.1 The word setsuwa, as used to signify a literary genre, is modern scholastic shorthand. The term refers to a diverse body of extremely brief, prosaic stories, compilations of which were particularly popular during the Heian and Kamakura periods. Typically the stories are linked to one another, sometimes tangentially, around a theme (such as religious awakening) or a revolving set of themes (for instance, aristocratic arts and pastimes). Some collections are composed in Japanese, and some in Chinese, and their authors employ a number of quasi-generic terms for them, describing their works as monogatari ... (narrative tales), ki ... (records), shu ... (collections), and even tomo ... (companions). The debate about whether setsuwa comprise a distinct genre is a vibrant one, and I do not wish to wade too deeply into those waters here.2 To state my position briefly, I concentrate on specifically Buddhist collections and I understand them as intimately related to the performance venue of preaching. In a preaching context, setsuwa occur as part of sometimes lengthy sermons which are aimed at elucidating the meaning of sutra passages. In this sense, they act as a bridge, ferrying meaning from classical Chinese to the vernacular and describing a connection between sacred texts and the human body. Setsuwa collections were written and disseminated in such a way that they transcend class boundaries. Though most collections stem from the immediate environs of the aristocratic capital and its elite culture, setsuwa authors nevertheless do attempt to move Buddhism beyond the cloister or villa and into the broader population, and they attempt to move popular audiences of mixed social classes from the streets into the temples. …

The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (review)

Reviewed by: The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna Louis Dupré The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna. By David Sorkin. [Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World](Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2008. Pp. xviii, 339. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-691-13502-1.) On the basis of six influential thinkers of the eighteenth century, the author shows how, in contrast to a secularist interpretation, the Enlighten­ment contributed toward a renewal and purgation of religion both in theory and in practice. The Anglican theologian William Warburton was, above all, an apologist of religious tolerance in a country that had been torn apart by reli­gious strife. In following the Enlightenment's ideal of toleration, he unques­tionably promoted the well-being of religion. The Calvinist theologian Jacob Vernet found strong support in the Enlightenment for the Arminian position as it was struggling with the strict predestinarian one. At the same time he tried to reconcile the opposing parties by insisting on the essentially practi­cal nature of Christianity and by arguing that natural religion was an essential part of its doctrine. [End Page 842] The two intellectually most impressive figures in this collection are Siegmund Baumgarten and Moses Mendelssohn. Raised in Pietist theology, Baumgarten eventually came to teach at the University of Halle, where the dominating Pietists were at odds with the Enlightenment philosophy of Wolff and Thomasius on one side and orthodox Lutheran theology on the other. Impressed by Wolff's ideas, Baumgarten concluded that Enlightenment phi­losophy posed no doctrinal obstacle to Pietist theology, of which the essence consisted in the union of the soul with God. Building his own theology on Wolffian principles, he succeeded in reconciling the Pietists with moderate Enlightenment philosophers and theologians. Mendelssohn, influenced by Wolff, Baumgarten, and Lessing, attempted an even more perfect union between religion and the philosophy of the Enlightenment. According to him, the Mosaic revelation had added no theoretical truth to the natural reli­gion of the philosophers. But the Judaic law had been a strong force in pre­serving the moral truths of reason. It thereby occupied a favorable position for reconciling religions with one other. It also implied that Jews were enti­tled to the same rights as others. Joseph Eybel's impact was primarily political. A former seminarian in Austria, he became a teacher of canon law and a close collaborator with the Empress Maria-Theresa and later with her son Joseph II in their attempts to reform Catholicism according to the principles of the Enlightenment. He assisted them in breaking down those prohibitions of the Counter-Reformation that obstructed the Enlightenment concept of public policy. In his Introduction to Church Law(1777) and in a number of pamphlets he argued for restoring the original authority of the bishops and replacing the virtual monarchy of the bishop of Rome. Not surprisingly, his theories were condemned by the Vatican. Adrien Lamourette, a French priest who eventually became a seminary teacher and a bishop, was trained in Jesuit theology, but gradually moved over to a more Jansenist position. Lamourette strongly supported the French Revolution as being essential to a purified Christianity: it would lead to a more equitable distribution of goods and free France from an unchristian despot­ism of clergy, nobility, and king. Together with Mirabeau, he tried to overcome the polarization caused by the Revolution. But few Catholics followed him, particularly after he became a state- appointed bishop of Lyon. In the Terreurof 1794 he was executed. Sorkin's study presents a valuable contribution to the ongoing reassess­ment of the Enlightenment. There unquestionably was a strong religious ele­ment in it, and in [End Page 843]some cases the Enlightenment proved to be a stimulus for a religious awakening, or at least for a tolerant religious attitude. The beauti­fully written essays display an uncommon fairness to each faith and are sup­ported by an admirable historical erudition. Yet I am not altogether clear about the author's precise intention. Does he want to show that a vigorous religious life continued to exist all through the Enlightenment that, at least in some...

Ethno‐Religious Identity and Sectarian Civil Society: A Case from India

AbstractThis paper analyses the role of Rajasthan Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad (RVKP), an ethnic Hindu(tva) organisation, among the tribal populations in south Rajasthan. It argues that the RVKP has been able to enhance its legitimacy and expand its socio‐political support base among the tribals through a well‐articulated and planned process of ‘ethnification’. This process has been carried out in four basic ways: (1) utilising development projects as means to spread the ideology of Hindutva, (2) bringing religious awakening and organising mass re‐conversion programmes, (3) redefining indigenous identity and characterising certain communities as ‘the other’, and (4) with the support of the various state institutions. The paper concludes that by ethnicising indigenous identity, the RVKP has not just created a ‘culture of fear and violence’ in the tribal regions but also threatened the secular democratic ethos of Indian society.

From Religious Revivals to Tariff Rancor: Preaching Free Trade and Protection during the Second American Party System

The religious awakening of the early-nineteenth-century United States opened deep rifts in the generation that overlapped and followed it. The rifts emerged from questions of religious doctrine and evangelical method, then widened to encompass worldly politics and ideologies, including the tariff. Two authors and advocates who represent well the religious influence on the U.S. tariff controversy are the Reverend Joshua Leavitt (1794–1873) and the Reverend Calvin Colton (1789–1857). Both were swept up in the religious revivals of the 1820s, and both became, over the following two decades, leading contributors to the second party system's debates over slavery and the tariff. Their contributions to the tariff debate were to conjoin the arguments for free trade and protection, within and on the periphery of the Whig Party, to their religiously inspired views about the abolition of slavery.

Thinking in three dimensions

I have had only few major “eureka” moments in my life. One of them was when I realised the difference between ordinary linear thinking and systems thinking. Since then I...

Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer (review)

Reviewed by: Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer Stephen J. Whitfield Moses Levy of Florida: Jewish Utopian and Antebellum Reformer, by C. S. Monaco. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. 240 pp. $44.95. Students of the American past are increasingly being urged to heed the call of "trans-Atlantic history," to enlarge their subject beyond passport control by letting their own particular sub-fields—whether it be slavery or ideas—lap upon the shores of Africa and Europe. One apt response to this professional appeal has come from an independent scholar rather than an academician. The title of C. S. Monaco's biography of Moses Elias Levy (1782–1854) implies a cramped geographic scope that is belied by the restlessness of a life so extraordinary that reviewers of this book will undoubtedly be compelled to [End Page 176] describe it as "colorful." Moses Levy of Florida begins in Morocco, and then nimbly follows Levy from Gibraltar to the West Indies, from the antebellum South to imperial London, and then back to Florida as it emerged from primitive near-isolation into statehood. Levy is best known for his initiative in establishing a Jewish agricultural colony in Florida called Pilgrimage, the first communitarian settlement in American Jewish history. Pilgrimage lasted thirteen years. But its founder was more than a dimly-remembered body double to Mordecai Manuel Noah (whose "Ararat" was even more of a flame-out). A year before David Walker's fiery Appeal in Four Articles (1829) demanding an end to slavery was published in Boston, Levy's emancipatory Plan for the Abolition of Slavery appeared—anonymously, to be sure, and in London rather than in the U.S. Such radical sentiments did not prevent Levy from owning bondsmen himself (though he apparently treated them humanely). A canny and energetic entrepreneur, he took big risks in the shipping business, operating in St. Thomas, Curaçao, and Cuba. Hoping to grow sugar cane in East Florida, Levy discovered that he had "embarked myself in a wild country peopled with wolves instead of men" (quoted on p. 99). Anyone who wanted to lure his co-religionists into such a territory so as to avoid antisemitism was either a fool or a messianist, and Monaco shows how deeply Levy expected a colony like Pilgrimage to hasten the moment of redemption. He was more a dreamer than a schemer, more attentive to the End of Days than to the bottom line. But success in business did enable Levy to parlay a respectable place in British society into open and vigorous advocacy of Jewish legal rights and civic claims—whether in behalf of English or Russian Jewry. Such political action antedated by over three decades the formation of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860), much less the American Jewish Committee (1906). Prior to the publication of Moses Levy of Florida, anyone interested in this unusual yet admirable career had to start and virtually end with Leon Huhner's article on Levy, which appeared in 1941 in the Florida Historical Quarterly, plus a very few other pieces devoted to Pilgrimage. Monaco's extensive research has been even more impressive, however, having gained access to two dozen archival collections (from St. Augustine to Seville, from Harvard to Havana). Such is his diligence and scrupulousness that this biography won't be superseded. By retracing Levy's versatile and visionary career every step of the way, the author has portrayed an international Jew not exactly aligned with his own time—a little too much of an anticlerical rationalist to be comfortable with the romantic religious awakenings that had buried the Enlightenment, a little too proud of his Jewishness to share his co-religionists' yearning for acceptance in societies that resented "clannishness," a little too philanthropic [End Page 177] to be satisfied, for example, with the acquisitive aspirations of the commercial elite of the Caribbean that welcomed him into its ranks. He was something of a misfit whom Monaco doesn't quite succeed in bringing to life. But if Levy remains a rather elusive figure, that is because the primary sources on which Monaco must draw are so exasperatingly thin. His book is enhanced with six...