Religious Tone Research Articles

A Tale of Two Wars: The Other Story of America's Role in the Philippines

As the impact of September u continues to ripple through American society, its after shocks are not only determining the future but also reshaping the past. Not since the Vietnam War have external affairs so influenced the direction of U.S. historiog raphy. Whereas that debacle generated crit ical introspection, however, the operations in Afghanistan appear to have restored confidence in the efficacy of foreign mili tary intervention. This is the backdrop for the recent rediscovery of the Philippine American War, a trend represented well by Max Boot's book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars andAmerican Power and Thomas Donnelly's review of it in these pages (The Past as Prologue, July/August 2002). Reappraising the past to shed light on the present is generally to be welcomed. But seen from abroad, this particular discussion seems marked by a disturbingly narrow and America-centric perspective. Boot's broad study, written largely before the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon but completed after ward, charts the rise of the United States from commercial power to superpower. What intrigue him are the low-intensity military engagements-what he calls small wars-waged to establish and then police America's growing global interests. Ranging from the Barbary Coast in 1804 to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo in the l990s, Boot spins a narra tive of no mean interest and considerable literary skill. He reminds the reader that the projection of U.S. power overseas has a long pedigree and that America's much-vaunted isolationism prior to World War II extended only to Europe. There is a moral, at times almost religious tone to Boot's prose when he concludes that the United States has a mission to place its awesome military machine at

Born Again? The Ethics and Efficacy of the Conversion Experience in Contemporary Management Development

This article notes how a religious tone has seeped into the discourse of contemporary management development. This religious analogy is explored through the evangelical Christian notion of ‘conversion’ and radical personal change. The expansion of such a mind‐set into contemporary management thinking is related to the revival of the charismatic form of authority, in the writing of popular management gurus, such as Tom Peters. The search for new forms of ethical and social cohesion is considered. Next, this framework is applied to management development, with particular reference to one fairly mainstream, if intensive, programme. Through quotes from the managers involved, we illustrate how this programme employed emotional experience to remould individual personality and hence corporate culture in a way that mimics the religious conversion process. Finally, we question both whether a largely involuntary business organization has an ethical right to claim the ‘souls’ of its managers, and whether this is likely to be a realizable goal, in any case.

The Dream of a Common Poetry

Fictions of Form in Poetry By Stephen Cushman Princeton University Press, 1993 Among the many prose passages that William Carlos Williams incorporated in Paterson is the following brief statement: American poetry is a very easy subject to discuss for the simple reason that it does not exist (140). Taken from a review of several Americans by the British poet-critic George Barker, the statement seems to epitomize the contempt for America's native materials that Williams associated with European culture and its exponents, notably Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Yet by placing this statement within his own text Williams appears to give it a grudging endorsement; the only emendation suggested by his framing of Barker's remark is the addition of an unvoiced yet at the end of the sentence. This implied revision is entirely in keeping with the proleptic tenor of much discourse on poetry. Far more than in other cultures with older histories, the idea of poetry possesses a utopian resonance that clashes with the merely empirical status of poems. The search for poetry, or for some persuasive means of identifying it, has therefore always been more than historical and philological, and indeed has frequently taken on a nearly religious tone. To discuss poetry means to talk as much about apocalyptic transformations of language and vision as about particular poets and poems. In the almost 50 years since Paterson first appeared, poetry has assuredly existed, not least as an academic field generating reams of critical prose annually. But the question raised by Barker and ambivalently echoed by Williams persists, albeit in a different register: Does poetry as such exist? Does it, in other words, have a recognizable character of its own, or must it be seen as an accidental conglomeration of miscellaneous figures and works? This problem has only become more acute as our sense of what should count as poetry expands to include the work of previously neglected women poets, ethnic minorities, experimental writers, political activists, popular lyricists, and oral performers. Given the many sectors of poetic culture, the vastly different audiences and func-

Sterne as Editor: The "Abuses of Conscience" Sermon

Sterne as Editor: The “Abuses of Conscience” Sermon MELVYN NEW The sermon read by Corporal Trim in the middle of the second volume of Tristram Shandy was first preached by Laurence Sterne ten years earlier in the York Minster (July 29, 1750), at the close of the summer assizes in York. It appeared as a six-penny pamphlet less than two weeks later. In fitting the actual sermon to the fictional situation of the Shandy parlor, Sterne was not required to make a single signifi­ cant alteration; indeed, the foremost pleasure in comparing the two versions is to observe the manner in which his wit was able to capitalize so brilliantly on such an innocuous passage in the original as “sits there invulnerable, fortified with Cases and Reports so strongly on all Sides.”1 In Tristram Shandy, Toby immediately breaks in: “Aye, —aye, Trim! quoth my uncle Toby, shaking his head, —these are but sorry fortifications, Trim, ” and the two are mounted and galloping on their hobby-horse.2 Again, in the original, Sterne innocently wrote, “I know the banker I deal with, or the Physician I usually call in” (p. 17); in Tristram, the word “physician” awakens Dr. Slop: “There is no need, cried Dr. Slop (waking) to call in any physician in this case” (p. 135). It is precisely Sterne’s faithfulness to the original, however, that adds interest to the almost ninety substantive variants between the 243 244 / MELVYNNEW two versions. To be sure, a few new readings correct obvious errors in the 1750 version, including one long sentence fragment (pp. 113-14; see section 1 in the Appendix). Several others may be the result of compositorial error (or interference) or copyist error; from the evi­ dence of other borrowed materials in Tristram Shandy I have suggested elsewhere that Sterne was not a precise copier, though in this in­ stance, considering the length of the self-borrowing—3,700 words— he did very well indeed.3 When we have discounted these possible sources for the variants between the 1750 and 1760 versions, we still have remaining many interesting alterations in which the author’s hand is evident. To­ gether, they provide an indication of the subtlety of Sterne’s prose, the care with which he sought the right word, the right phrase, even the right pointing. In rewriting his sermon for Tristram Shandy, Sterne knew that the humor of his endeavor resided in his capacity to incor­ porate into his comic world a sermon actually preached from England’s second most important pulpit; he could not resist, however, the op­ portunity to polish and refine his effort ten years after composition— to act, that is, as his own editor. The most interesting changes, perhaps, are Sterne’s second thoughts about particular words. Sterne makes over thirty such changes, often for reasons not altogether apparent. In a few instances, the changes might suggest a careful modification of Sterne’s theologi­ cal position—or at least of his tone. These examples are listed in the Appendix under section 2. For example, “so great a Virtue, as moral Honesty” (p. 17) becomes “so amiable a virtue as moral honesty” (p. 134); amiable is a word we associate with the religion of sensibil­ ity. Similarly, Sterne’s description of Catholicism as a “Religion without Morality” (p. 23) becomes “religion without mercy” (p. 146), a more telling word in view of the tortures just described, and perhaps an even stronger condemnation in Sterne’s eyes. Again, he alters the phrase “Instrumental Duties of Religion” (p. 20) to “instru­ mental parts of religion” (p. 138), a phrase he apparently liked, for he uses it again in Volume 8 ofTristram (chapter 31) and inA Sentimental Journey (Stout ed., p. 101). It may be worth noting that in one of the two major excisions, Sterne removed a passage from the original Sterne as Editor I 245 which twice speaks of duties (pp. 19-20).4 This softening of religious tone is perhaps also evident in the change of “that BEING, before whom thou art finally to give an Account” (p. 14) to “that Being, to whom thou art finally to give an account” (p. 128...

Pediatrics in art: hydrocephalus.

About 30 years ago Ruhrah published in this journal a number of articles depicting disease states in the models artists used for the infant in their paintings of the Madonna and Child. Among the afflictions discovered by Ruhrah in these models were infantile edema, 1 rickets and exophthalmos, 2 cretinism or mongolism, 3 and muscular hypertrophy. 4 This illustration showing the Madonna and Child, Saints and Angels by Pietro Perugino (1445-1523), the original of which is part of the W. A. Clark Collection at the with the exception of the head, are excellent; this would lead one to suspect that Perugino's model must have been hydrocephalic. Pietro Perugino was the beloved teacher of Raphael and next to his student he was the greatest representative of the Umbrian School. It is interesting to read in Vasari's Lives of the Artists that Perugino, in spite of the religious tone of his paintings,

Status, Residence, and Fundamentalist Religious Beliefs in the Southern Appalachians

Data obtained from a sample of 1,466 Southern Appalachian households show that different components of religious fundamentalism vary in their relationships to urbanism, educational level, and socioeconomic status. Current functional theory does not adequately account for the observed patterns of religious beliefs, particularly those of the middle social classes. T HE PURPOSE of this paper is threefold: (1) to present some data pertaining to major aspects of religious belief in the Southern Appalachian region; (2) to discuss some of the implications of the data for current theory in the sociology of religion; and (3) to point out some specific inadequacies in this theory for explaining certain observed relationships between religious beliefs and social characteristics of those who profess them. The data presented here were obtained through a sample survey conducted for Southern Appalachians Studies by the Survey Operations Unit of the University of North Carolina. Southern Appalachian Studies is an organization established in 1957 for the purpose of surveying changes in social, cultural, and economic conditions of the Southern Appalachian region.' The attitude survey, from which the data reported here are drawn, was part of the more comprehensive research project. The Southern Appalachian region, as delineated for purposes of the project, consists of 190 mountainarea counties in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Because of the great influence that religion exercises on almost all aspects of life in the region, a considerable portion of the research effort was devoted to the study of religious beliefs and practices and changes which have occurred in them. It was hoped that by means of an attitude survey a clearer understanding could be gained of the relationships between religious beliefs and such factors as degree of urbanization, income, occupation, education, age, and other characteristics of the survey respondents. This paper presents an analysis of a few of these relationships. Specifically considered are the associations between religious fundamentalism and place of residence, sociocconomic status, and schooling level of respondents, all of which will be defined later. SECTARIAN BACKGROUND OF SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN PROTESTANTISM An adequate discussion of the nature of religion in the Southern Highlands would require much greater knowledge of its historical origins than can be presented here, but some of the highlights of its development may be sketched.2 In the middle of the eighteenth century, when the movement into the region was just getting under way, the Presbyterian church was the most important religious body, measured both by number of members and influence, on what was then the western frontier. The great Baptist movement did not gain strength until the latter part of that century, when the sectarian appeal of the Separate Baptists began to win numerous converts in the Piedmont region. It was also in the latter part of this same century that American Methodism began its expansion under the dynamic leadership of Bishop Asbury. So, although some of the settlers who moved into the Appalachians prior to the turn of the nineteenth century were already Baptists or Methodists, the greater majority of them were not. The basic religious tone or temperament of the * Read before the twenty-third annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, April 9, 1960. 1 Headquarters of Southern Appalachian Studies is located at Berea College, Kentucky. Research operations of the organization were financed by a grant from the Ford Foundation supplemented by donations from various religious bodies. 2The interested reader is referred to the various volumes of William Warren Sweet in his on the American Frontier series and to his article Religion and the American Frontier, Twentiethv Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1955). The historical materials presented here have been largely abstracted from Sweet's publications. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.85 on Sat, 28 May 2016 05:32:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Desired Haven

A seafaring people gifted with a lively imagination will not fail to enrich its language with figures suggested by the moods of the sea and by the hardships and dangers of the sailor's calling. Hence it is a commonplace to say that the literature of Greece abounds in brilliant and memorable similes and metaphors drawn from this inexhaustible source, as also in well-worn expressions whose marine origin is only dimly felt. Because of a religious coloring that it gradually acquired, one of these figures may be appropriately discussed here; the more so because as we examine its history, it may be possible to correct a certain tendency to derive this religious tone from proximate rather than ultimate sources.

The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania Series A: Cuneiform Texts

ONE of the most interesting peoples of the ancient world was the Sumerian race, which founded the great civilisation of Babylonia. The cuneiform writing of western Asia was their invention, and the religious system of Babylon, which had so great an influence upon the Hebrew cult from which Christianity sprang, was originally theirs. Among the spoils of the American expedition to Nippur, in southern Babylonia, which are now being published under the editorship of Prof. Hilprecht, were a large number of the usual clay tablets inscribed with Sumerian hymns to the god Ninib. These are now translated and described by Herr Hugo Radau. That he has done his work well there can be no question, though we may not agree with all the conclusions he draws from his material. The non-Semitic Sumerian language, entirely different from the tongue of the Semitic Babylonians who borrowed the culture, including the script and religion, of the Sumerians, offers peculiar difficulties to the translator, and others may not always agree with the interpretation which Herr Radau gives to individual words and phrases of his texts; but the general sense of the originals is clear enough. Of the religious tone of these hymns, the best idea is to be derived from a perusal of them. We scarcely agree with the exaggerated estimates which their translator, perhaps pardonably, is often led into with regard to them, and his “macrocosmology” and “microcosmology” seem far-fetched. But of the main facts as expounded by him there is no doubt.