Religious Revolution Research Articles

"There Won't Be Any Rich People in Heaven": The Black Christ, White Hypocrisy, and the Gospel According to W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois despised white supremacy, economic exploitation, and European and American colonialism. The pillaging and partitioning of Africa angered him no end, especially since they were legitimated by the erasure of Africa and its peoples from the authorized histories of the world. M[T]here has been consistent effort, he wrote in The World and Africa in 1946, to rationalize Negro slavery by omitting Africa from world history. Fundamental this historical amnesia was the neglect of Africa's crucial role in the development of modern religions. White Europeans and Americans, Du Bois insisted, whitened their religious faiths in order justify the oppression and dehumanization of people of color. This was nowhere more apparent than in whites' conceptions of Jesus of Nazareth. Roughly two millennia ago, Du Bois observed, there was born in the Egypto-Syrian area, with its Mongoloid and Negroid elements, a social reformer called Jesus Christ. Hypocritical white Europeans and Americans, however, refused acknowledge that he was anything but white. As Du Bois maintained, Nordics who have never accepted his doctrine of submission evil, repudiation of riches, and love for mankind, have usually limned him as Caucasoid. Of course, the biblical Jesus was not white. He was a Syrian Jew, one whom Du Bois described as perhaps bearing a hooked nose and curled hair. Christ may have even inherited Ethiopian blood. Du Bois, in short, seemed think that if the association of whiteness with godliness provided a rationale for racial oppression, then recognizing the blackness of Christ, or at least his nonwhiteness, might equip African Americans with another set of tools counter exploitation and hatred.1 Du Bois's attack upon the Caucasoid Christ and his consideration of a nonwhite Jesus in The World and Africa and in a host of poems and short stories presaged a theological and religious revolution that occurred in the United States during the late 1960s. As champions of civil rights and Black Power assaulted the citadels of white supremacy during the second half of the

Book Review: Spiritual but Not Religious: A Call to Religious Revolution in America

Book Review: Spiritual but Not Religious: A Call to Religious Revolution in America

Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction before the Council of Trent (review)

538 BOOK REVIEWS of chaplains resulted in bequests; some chaplains chose to be buried in the Greyfriars, reflecting patterns elsewhere in the English province. The loss of the English province’s once rich libraries and archives during the religious revolution of the sixteenth century generally reduces historians to a reliance on a range of external sources, such as the papal records, the episcopal registers, the probate registers, the wardrobe accounts, chronicles and miscelleaneous sources. Despite these limitations, Dr Röhrkasten has assembled a vast amount of material and is to be warmly commended on his reconstruction of aspects of the friars’ lives, ministry and economy. This monograph teems with many and varied illustrations of the friars’ lives in the capital city. The varied sources are interpreted judiciously and explained with clarity. The study, which is enriched by its awareness of patterns among the different mendicant communities, is to be allocated a place among the best monographs regarding the mendicants and should be ranked alongside Dr Andrew Little’s The Grey Friars in Oxford. St Edmund’s College, Cambridge MICHAEL ROBSON, OFM CONV. Bert Roest. Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction before the Council of Trent. (Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, 117) Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2004. Pages: XXI + 673. Some scholars have a particular talent to synthesize large amounts of information and provide amazing research tools for others. Bert Roest is among those. In 2000, he published A History of Franciscan Education (c.1210-1517) as the eleventh volume of the series Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill, 2000. Pages: X + 405). Four years later, Bert Roest has given us a volume of some seven hundred pages on the literature of religious instruction in the Franciscan Order from the early thirteenth century to the Council of Trent (1545-1563). It is sufficient to look at the 62 pages of bibliography of secondary sources, the 24 pages of index of authors, and the 27 pages of index of works to note that the documentation covered in this book is quite impressive. BOOK REVIEWS 539 In his own words, the author intends “to present a more comprehensive overview of late medieval and Renaissance texts of religious instruction” (p. XIV), considering that this book comes somewhat as a supplement to his history of Franciscan education, which was intentionally limited to education in the classroom. With the “massive amount of material” (p. XV) presented in his new publication, Bert Roest hopes “to provide scholars with another tool to develop a more sensitive interpretative template for the religious transitions between the medieval and the early modern period” (p. XX). Even though experts may and probably will find lacunas or outdated information in some particular field, one cannot deny that the author has achieved his goal of suscitating new studies by offering historians of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance a new instrumentum laboris. The material of the book is organized in eight chapters. Chapter One (p. 1-119) takes a look at Franciscan preaching, viewed as religious instruction, from the beginning of the Franciscan movement in the thirteenth century to the contributions of the Observants , the Conventuals and the Capuchins. Chapter Two (p. 120-205) examines the rules, rule commentaries, and constitutions (local, provincial and general) of the Franciscan orders : Friars Minor, Poor Clares and Tertiaries. Chapter Three (p. 206-29) studies the development of regulations and treatises for the initial formation of novices. Although this chapter is relatively short, it is worth noting how the Capuchin Order, from its beginnings, dedicated much attention and regulations to the religious instruction of postulants and novices. Chapter Four (p. 230-313) turns to the pastoral ministry of the Franciscan friars, focusing on works of religious instruction par excellence , Franciscan catechisms. It also includes a look at a tradition initiated by Francis of Assisi himself and continued by others: religious poetry – the laude – as religious instruction. Chapter Five (p. 314-55) addresses another part of the Friars’ pastoral ministry and studies the confession handbooks or manuals to help confessors in the practice of their ministry and the repentant sinners in the preparation of their confession. Chapter Six (p. 356-73...

WHAT WERE COMMONWEALTH PRINCIPLES?

The historiography of English republicanism is dominated by the concept of classical republicanism. Its greatest shortcoming has been neglect of that subject's religious dimension. The consequent need is not simply to recover the radical protestant republican religious agenda. It is to explain why, when classical republicanism came to England, it did so in the moral service of a religious revolution. One context for the answer lay in Christian humanism. Another was the reformation, both magisterial and radical. Both informed the practical identity of the republican experiment as an attempted reformation of manners. So did the rational Greek moral philosophy, as indebted to Plato as to Aristotle, common to certain humanist and Christian political languages. In addition many of the themes of republican writing reflect the struggle by a traditional society to respond to unsettling forces, not only of political and religious, but also social and economic, change. Drawing upon all of these contexts, republican writers attempted to oppose not only private interest politics, embodied by monarchy or tyranny, on behalf of the public interested virtues of a self-governing civic community. This was part of a more general critique of private interest society; a republican attempt, from pride, greed, poverty, and inequality, to go beyond the word ‘commonwealth’ and reconstitute what Milton called ‘the solid thing’.

Ytsyat mtsryM [The Exodus from Egypt: Reality or Illusion (Exodus 1-15)

Galpaz-Feller, both an Egyptologist and a biblioist by training, addresses the Egyptian background of Exod 1-15. Although a number of scholars have illuminated the Egyptian coloration of the exodus story before, Galpaz-Feller's work stands out because she offers a greater integration of Egyptology and biblical studies in a series of short essays that constitute a running commentary on Exod 15. Galpaz-Feller's analysis of the plague narratives shows her intellectual integrity. She examines and then dismisses the theory that each plague was directed against a particular Egyptian deity, showing that a number of plagues, such as lice, wild animals, and boils, cannot be linked to any Egyptian god. Rather, in Galpaz-Feller's analysis, the plagues are generated from the undoing of creation according to the biblical account of it. However, the special emphasis devoted to the plague of locusts reflects the special valence of locusts in Egyptian culture, and the biblical author's use of heavy and rigid verbs to characterize the pharaoh's heart portrays his guiltiness in the context of Egyptian death religion's emphasis on the lightness of an innocent heart. Galpaz-Feller's discussion of the origins of Israelite monotheism also exemplifies her reluctance to engage in Egypto-parallelomania. She argues that Israelite monotheism was influenced by many theological/cultic concepts of the religions of the ancient world, one of which happened to be Egyptian. The true name of the Egyptian god Ra is a secret, and Galpaz-Feller offers the suggestion that the secrecy of the true name of a deity might be reflected in the name YHWH. She asks whether the revealing of the name YHWH is a true revelation of the deity's name or whether the name YHWH lacks specificity and therefore should be linked to the concept of the secrecy of the true name of a deity. Galpaz-Feller also demonstrates that Akhenaten's religious revolution, worshiping the sun-disk via the king, died with Akhenaten and that certain fundamental aspects of his religion are contradicted hy the contours of Israelite religion in the Bible. Creation, for example, was not an issue for Akhenaten's monotheism, but was certainly a major facet of biblical religion. Galpaz-Feller argues that beyond the Egyptian coloration of the exodus narrative, there are elements that have historical value. Beyond the details that reflect ancient Egyptian culture as it was generally practiced throughout Egyptian history, there are elements that reflect Egyptian culture and history only in the time of Raamses II and the Nineteenth Dynasty. The particular cities that the Hebrew Bible records as having been built by the Israelites were attributed in Egyptian texts to Raamses II. A city in the Nile Delta, Pi-Raamses, not Memphis or Thebes, was the capital during the reign of Raamses, and the brevity of the journeys that Moses and Aaron undertook to visit the pharaoh implies that the capital was near the Israelites in the Nile Delta. …

:Power and Protest in England 1525-1640

Between 1525 and 1632 England faced the usual human tragedies of war, epidemic, and food shortages, and the unusual strains of dynastic crises, religious revolutions, and the novelty of constant inflation. The efficiency of government and the cohesion of society were severly tested but, with the occasional disruptions, they were sustained. Unlike many of their neighbours, the English were not an ungovernable people - until the 1640s, that is. How were peace and order maintained across such a turbulent century? Who held power and how was it imposed? How did authority work among the people, in street and alehouse, in manor house and court house? All those who ruled - monarchs, nobles, gentry, parish officers, and town leaders - faced with a difficult task, in a society without professional policing or standing army.

Conclusioni

At the end of a colloquium which had gone far beyond the original range of the paradigm, it was useful to recall the ‘Mazzarinian’ way of understanding the ‘democratisation of culture’, even if Mazzarino himself never provided a definition, any more than he applied it to the full. Influenced by Rostovsteff, but also in reaction against him, the concept expressed Mazzarino’s general interest in the problems of interactions between different cultures, which he identified from their linguistic and ethnic characteristics in close connection with the social frame. When Mazzarino proposed the idea of the ‘democratisation of culture’, it was firstly in order to identify its limits, in particular the disjuncture between culture and politics: neither the perspective of Hippolytus nor that of Bardesanes extended to liberty in the political sense. Another limit was the impossibility of dialogue between classical culture, official and dominant, and the local cultures, represented chiefly by the rural populations. By ‘democratisation of culture’ Mazzarino certainly did not mean that in Late Antiquity classical culture became more ‘democratic’. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that Mazzarino applied his concept principally to the third century, a time when the Severans were attempting to integrate the provincial populations into the life of the State; a time, also, of economic and social experiences connected with the ‘creative minority’constituted by the first Christian society, able to promote a vast cultural revolution with no political or social aims, and able, in preaching, to adapt itself to the various languages and cultures of those provincials who had not been ‘romanised’. With the ‘democratic’ aspects of the third century, key to a reconsideration of the ‘crisis’, Mazzarino contrasted what he called the charismatic outlook of the fourth century, following the ‘religious revolution’of Constantine, who had, in fact, imprisoned democratisation within a hierarchical structure. The two periods differ in ‘style’ – a category which betrays Mazzarino’s debt to the art historians. That is why, when he detected democratised culture in the Ambrosian hymns, detached from any ‘national’ cultures, he was already using the term in a different sense, just as the phenomena differ which can be analysed with this term. This colloquium has demonstrated – although still only partially – how widely it can be applied. It is as difficult to evaluate the impact of Mazzarino’s formula in historiography as to ignore its extensive influence, due to its very flexibility. For example, Peter Brown was able to interpret it as a continuity in the peripheral influences working on the mass of the population independently of central authority (while refusing to accept languages and ethnicity as important elements in division). For Mazzarino, the ‘democratizzazione della cultura’ continues to be a concept for analysing the crisis, while the current trends in the cultural history of Late Antiquity tend to place more emphasis on continuity.

Guy G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy, The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity

Guy G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy, The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity

Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Christianity (review)

Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Christianity (review)

Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity. Guy G. Stroumsa

<i>Barbarian Philosophy: The Religious Revolution of Early Christianity</i>. Guy G. Stroumsa

Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century by Phyllis G. Jestice

Wayward Monks and Religious Revolution of Eleventh Century. By Phyllis G. Jestice. [Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, Volume 76.] (Leiden: Brill. 1997. Pp. x, 309. $115.00.) Dr. Jestice has written a provocative and wide-ranging examination of monastic reform, role of some monastics in Church reform of eleventh century, and emergence within Benedictine monasticism of some new ideas about monastic spirituality and expanded role of monks and ascetics in world. Yet, readers should be warned that rigor and clarity of Ms. Jestice's argumentation waxes and wanes, she often does not cite most current scholarship, and book contains some topographical as well as factual errors. The book contains introduction, a conclusion, and seven chapters, which form body of text. Jestice begins her introduction with a statement of her main argument that the driving force behind monastic reform was issue of monks' active involvement in world: She addresses state of and explains how she intends to provide an on how and why monastic life diversified in eleventh and twelfth For this alternative theory she offers altered orientation, choosing to focus on German empire including Italy during tenth and eleventh centuries. The first three chapters provide a topical overview of worldly and spiritual dimensions of monasticism in tenth century (chap. 1), investigate changing notion of monastic mission and new interpretations of concept of stabilitas (chap. 2), and examine recluses as links between monks, stability, and monastic work in world (chap. 3). While these chapters present essential background of emerging ideas, one has to question how widespread some of them were within broad range of monasticism in empire. Moreover, author underestimates use of monasteries in imperial missionary activity in tenth century (e.g., St. Maurice, Corvey, and probably Memleben) and perhaps overestimates number and impact of recluses on monks. Chapters 4 and 5 address monks and monastic reform in early eleventh century. This reviewer found these chapters to be most uneven and least rigorous in book. The first sections of chapter 4 suffer from over-generalizations and lack of focus, whereas last three sections present interesting ideas and relatively solid scholarship. One senses that Ms. Jestice pushes her hagiographical sources too hard and thus portrays a Benedictinism that was on verge of collapse from number of monks about to stream out doors. Much of this literature indeed does demonstrate a growing diversity of thought and opinions, but author seems to overstate her case. …

The Leslies of Balquhain and the Burial of Bishop Hay

A year after the First Vatican Council of 1870 a five-volume edition of George Hay's works was published, and the opening words of Bishop John Strain's introduction left no doubt as to Hay's significance: ‘Since the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, to no man has the Catholic Church in Scotland been so much indebted as to Bishop Hay. He is preeminently her bishop of the last three hundred years.’ In 1874 James Stothert's Life of Bishop Hay was brought before the public by the Rev. J. F. S. Gordon, who felt moved to comment: ‘It is most dishonourable, not only to the Memory of this great Bishop, but to the Catholic Religion in Scotland, which he may be said to have kept alive during a dismal period, that not so much as a simple Stone marks his grave.’

Print Islam: Media and Religious Revolution in Afghanistan

L'A. considere le role de trois formes de media ecrits dans le developpement de l'ideologie politique radicale islamique et de l'organisation en Afghanistan. A travers l'etude des journaux, des pamphlets et des magazines, il montre la maniere dont les formes textuelles ont complete le contenu ideologique en aidant a produire un militantisme politique islamique et des partis politiques autoritaires

Women's Empowerment Through Feminist Rituals

This article examines the function of ritual in feminist spiritual support groups and describes its therapeutic potential to empower women to make and face transitions. It describes and discusses two ceremonies-reclaiming healing powers after incest and coming out as a lesbian-as examples of individual and collective empowerment. Many women are creating and joining feminist spiritual support groups to develop their sense of their full selves and to gain strength for social change. This feminist religious revolution aims to empower and heal women, communities and the earth. Groups provide participants a safe place in which to pay attention to sources of spiritual strength and to celebrate rituals such as life cycle transitions and healing.

Iran: Religious Revolution or Structural Realignment in State Formation?

Research Article| May 01 1995 Iran: Religious Revolution or Structural Realignment in State Formation? Afshin Matin-Asgari Afshin Matin-Asgari Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (1995) 15 (1): 91–97. https://doi.org/10.1215/07323867-15-1-91 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Afshin Matin-Asgari; Iran: Religious Revolution or Structural Realignment in State Formation?. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 May 1995; 15 (1): 91–97. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07323867-15-1-91 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 1994: South Asia Bulletin1995 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: State & Politics in the Middle East & South Asia You do not currently have access to this content.

Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and beyond, 1700-1990

The first comparative history of one of the most dynamic popular religious movements in recent times, Evangelicalism offers a uniquely comprehensive survey of this complex phenomenon from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century to the present. International in scope, the book includes essays by leading American, Canadian, English, Irish, Scottish, and Australian scholars and compares developments in every major region in the English-speaking world. The contributors examine the many ways that evangelicalism has been shaped by its popular nature, and explore the international networks of communication that have given it much of its distinctive character, from trans-Atlantic publishing networks in the eighteenth century to mass-marketing campaigns in the twentieth, and covering a wide range of other influences and trends, including Methodism, the legacy of George Whitefield, the American Civil War, anti-Catholicism, religious and civil revolution, and Pentecostalism. Based on path-breaking scholarship, this book is vital to students of religion who wish to grasp the breadth and complexity of evangelicalism as a social and political force as well as an irreducibly religious phenomenon.

Simplicity and complexity in games of the intellect

The Opening 1. Sense, Sensibility, and Self: The Peculiar Humanity of Stories 2. Simplifying Religious Revolutions: The Birth of Doctrine 3. The Great Intellectual Playing Field: In Praise of Games 4. Three Dinner Parties 5. A Matter of Taste: Minimalism and the World of Art 6. To Science Is Human: Factual Pleasures 7. Explaining the Whole Universe: Motion, Velocity, and Direction 8. Explaining the Rest of the Universe: Darwinian Insight 9. Virtue and the Simple Life 10. Masters of Reality Closure Notes Acknowledgments Index

The Sujin religious revolution

The Sujin religious revolution

Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns, Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research

Literacy underwent revolutionary growth in northwestern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This revolution coincided with other dramatic changes in European society, such as the industrial, demographic, agricultural, political, and religious revolutions (Deane 1969: 20–84). While the relationships between literacy and these other revolutions are not fully understood, their association is apparent and many potential influences exist (Cipolla 1969; Cremin 1970; Graff 1981: 232–60; 1987a, 1987b; Jensen 1986: 114–28; Maynes 1985: 117–31; Mitch 1984, 1988; Sanderson 1983; West 1978). The transplantation of European society across the Atlantic brought the literacy revolution to the American periphery. While numerous studies have shown that colonial America participated in this expansion of literacy, the common longitudinal patterns of literacy growth across the various regions and populations of colonial America have received less attention.

States and urban revolutions

The structural perspective applied here highlights the features that led to the successful, anti-modern, and backward-looking religious revolution in Iran and the failure of a democratic socialist, worker-oriented movement in Poland. I argue that one can best understand the outcome of modern revolutions by focusing on the state and its relations to the society. By contrasting two countries and two revolutions, I have tried to show that variables such as the structure of the state, the patterns of state-church conflicts, the shifting church-class alliances, and the impact of geopolitics on these domestic factors are essential in explaining why one revolution succeeded while the other failed. The comparative argument can be summarized in the following way. In terms of state structure, the one-man rule in Iran strengthened the absolutist power of the Shah, but weakened the organizational capacity of the various state agencies to deal with political crises. The state bureaucracy and military disintegrated when the leadership lost its authority. In Poland, the existence of powerful and potentially autonomous organizations within the state apparatus made the counterrevolution possible. The party bureaucracy functioned despite chaos at the top and bottom of the hierarchy; and the Polish generals used the united military to seize power by declaring martial laws. The dialectical relation between state and society is equally important to understanding the different revolutionary outcomes. The Iranian state intensified its attacks on the Shiite clergy in the 1970s, emasculating the power of this non-state elite. When popular discontent broke out, the Shiite clerics became the revolutionary vanguard, mobilizing the support of all urban classes and leading the final assault on the monarchy. On the other hand, after a period of repression, the Polish regime made peace with the Roman Catholic church in order to appease the overwhelming Catholic population and to gain legitimacy. Because of the moderation of the state's religious policy, the church played a mediating rather than revolutionary role in the state-class conflict of 1980–81. While the clergy in Iran allied with the urban classes, the Polish church first supported the creation of Solidarity and then broke this alliance; the neutrality of the church thus reduced drastically the capacity of Solidarity to negotiate with the party-state. In these two cases, the participation of the clergy or the withdrawal of its support to urban classes means class capacity or incapacity to fight the regime. In addition, the international contexts had a great impact on the Iranian and Polish conflicts. The Polish state was constrained by its satellite position within the Soviet military empire, and the Polish Catholic church by the Vatican bureaucracy. The Soviet threat of invasion forced the party to choose military repression and convinced the religious elite to adopt a cautious attitude. In contrast, the Iranian state was relatively independent from the United States. The U.S. administration had no policy of military intervention in the Gulf region, and because it was devoid of any constraint, Iran's clergy followed the revolutionary call by a charismatic leader.