Religious Voice Research Articles

“You Know, the Church Has Never Agreed on Everything”: Analyzing the Prophetic and Pragmatic Voice in Clergy Sermons

Abstract Clergy have regular opportunities to take a prophetic stance on social issues in their weekly sermons, but they are also responsible for maintaining organizational stability. How do they respond to controversial denominational decisions? We collected sermons from the United Methodist Church (UMC) clergy following the 2019 UMC decision to maintain their prohibition against same sex marriage and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) ordination. Our qualitative analysis of a sample of 447 sermons reveals three strategies clergy use to respond to the UMC decision: prophetic engagement, unifying discussion, and detached acknowledgment. Further, we show that different strategies are likely tied to the pastor’s perception of the attitudes of their attendees. Some clergy are willing to use a constrained prophetic voice in support of LGBTQ people, but most balance their comments with pragmatic efforts to minimize conflict. As a result, a more inclusive religious voice is present, but it may be muted by congregational concerns.

Rehearing modernity: the black religious voice across media landscapes

Rehearing modernity: the black religious voice across media landscapes

Religious institutionalism: a feminist response

People who are committed to religious freedom are generally also committed to protecting the conditions for the cultivation of religious life. Because of the deep linkages between religious belief and practice and religious institutions, it can seem natural and straightforward to move from championing religious freedom to championing religious freedom for religious institutions themselves. Members of the Supreme Court of Canada indicated their readiness to make this move in a 2015 case involving a Catholic secondary school in Quebec. In this article, I challenge the idea that according religious institutions section 2(a) protection in their own right is either a natural or a straightforward consequence of a commitment to collective religious freedom. I describe the intellectual history and characteristics of religious institutionalism and summarize the claims of its principal Canadian proponent. I then outline several ways in which religious institutionalism clashes with our basic constitutional commitments. Finally, I develop several prongs of a feminist response to religious institutionalism. I highlight the normative character of questions about the constitutional status of religious institutions, the gendered nature of the relationship between religious institutions and individual rights-holders, and the organic and dynamic features of religious institutions. I argue that we must approach institutional religious freedom claims cautiously and resist any interpretation of section 2(a) that would entrench and shield from internal resistance a singular, institutional religious voice.

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison

Reviewed by: Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison Pearl J. Young (bio) Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South. By Elizabeth L. Jemison. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 242. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $29.95.) Many scholars have considered the reluctance of white southerners to come to terms with emancipation and the efforts by freedpeople to exercise political and social power after the Civil War. Few, however, have considered the shadow of proslavery theology and the extent to which southerners, both Black and white, continued to wrestle over the theological assumptions at the heart of American slavery in the postemancipation era. In Christian Citizens, Elizabeth Jemison argues that the mind-set of proslavery theology—particularly its outlooks on patriotism, the past, and the norms surrounding family, gender, and sex—played a significant role in the trajectory of racial hierarchy and segregation in the postemancipation South. Using published political and denominational records together with sermon notes, curated narratives, and private writings, Jemison offers compelling evidence that Black and white Protestants in the lower Mississippi valley embraced Christian citizenship in their political and social endeavors after emancipation, eventually creating two distinct communities in conversation and debate with one another. Jemison argues for ideological continuity between the antebellum southern world of slavery and the postemancipation reality of violence and racial suppression, a continuity often discounted by scholars focused on the Civil War as a turning point rather than a point of inflection. If the proslavery mind-set endured beyond 1865, then the narrative that abolition triumphed through the Civil War is less meaningful. Additionally, its endurance suggests that proslavery Christianity was about much more than defending slavery, something scholars, such as Charles Irons and [End Page 589] Mitchell Snay, have suggested. What distinguishes the postemancipation era is that Black Christians had a political and religious voice in debates over belonging and power and challenged the fundamental assumptions of white southerners and their theology. As a result, the white "Redemption" of the South, a project to restore the racial status quo of the antebellum era, focused on suppressing the voices of Black men, convincing white northerners to abandon their support of freedpeople, and returning the control of politics, society, and narratives of the past to white southern men. Importantly, Jemison's study restores Black Christians as equal players in the postbellum world and demonstrates repeatedly that, as much as white southern Christians promoted paternalism and the dependent status of freedpeople, they were forced to debate and engage with Black Christians who challenged them by advocating for their own self-interests. Jemison, in particular, prompts historians of American religion to confront their assumptions of evangelicalism and Christian behavior by subtly suggesting that these norms are themselves grounded in assumptions of white supremacy. For example, she juxtaposes white southern Christians, who argued for the separation of religion and politics and the place of men in public debates, with Black Christians, who argued that Christian piety qualified them for citizenship and eventually celebrated women who fought against lynching. To interpret Black Christians as departing from orthodoxy erases the fact that both sides used religion to justify their political action and that legal disenfranchisement and extralegal violence impeded Black men in their activism against racial injustice. Furthermore, Jemison challenges the narrative of the Black church fighting an uphill battle toward legitimacy; she highlights Black citizens' accomplishments following the Civil War and the systemic efforts of white southern Christians to unseat their fellow Christians and erase their voices and actions from the narrative. In her introduction, Jemison makes an unusual comment about the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, stating, "I argue against an accepted reading of CME Church history as complicit amid white supremacy" (7). The notion that a Black denomination sponsored by the white southern Methodist church endorsed white paternalism seems so obvious as to be tedious, particularly in contrast to the Black-founded, abolitionist-leaning African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. While seemingly significant only to those mired in the minutia of denominational histories, this methodological choice demonstrates Jemison's willingness to reject traditional interpretations of the...

Interreligious Dialogue as a Response to Processes of Secularization

Abstract This article proposes secularization theory as a tool to better understand the rationale of IRD-activities. To make this point, it starts with a review of present-day secularisation theories. On this basis, the article presents an analysis of the concept of the secular used in the context of the so-called ‘1893 – World’s Parliament of Religions’. In a final step, the author argues that IRD-activities have to be understood on the basis of an implicit juxtaposition of ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. They try to present a ‘religious voice’ as a response to a context perceived as being secular.

Cold War and New Sacred Poetry

Contrary to what one might expect, many poets who engage with the Cold War adopt not primarily a political but rather a religious voice. Indeed, poets such as Li-Young Lee, Suji Kwock Kim, and Kathleen Ossip examine the Cold War in light of theological questions. Their poems bear witness not to personal suffering inflicted by political and societal circumstances but instead to human resilience bolstered by faith in the face of traumatic experience. Their writings are not best captured by the frequently invoked "Poetry of Witness," understood as witness to injustice, but rather "new sacred poetry": colored by individual experience of trauma, their poetry serves as a vehicle for expressing spiritual and mystical experience. They thereby innovate not only poetry but also contemporary theology. The Cold War becomes the backdrop for the struggle between faith and suffering brought about by political, societal, and personal circumstances.

Liberal Churches and Social Justice Movements: Analyzing the Limits of Inclusivity

AbstractConservative Protestants have been successful in communicating their religious voice in the public sphere, while liberal Protestants have struggled to articulate a distinctly liberal, religious voice. In this article, I show that a major component of liberal Protestant identity—inclusivity—itself constitutes a fundamental barrier to developing that voice. Drawing on 26 interviews and a year of participant observation at a liberal Protestant congregation in the southeast, I first show that congregants construct their identity of inclusivity in response to cultural associations of Christianity with conservatism and exclusivism. I then analyze three discursive strategies that congregants use to make sense of individuals’ involvement in Moral Mondays, a left‐leaning local social movement. By connecting Moral Mondays to social justice, to religious beliefs, and to individual commitments, congregants depoliticize involvement in Moral Mondays and maintain their commitment to inclusivity. I argue that inclusivity does not limit their participation, but rather limits their ability to connect that participation to their liberal religious voice. This research has important implications for understanding barriers to liberal Protestants’ articulation of a distinctly liberal and religious voice in the public sphere.

‘It’s Not Just about Faith’: Narratives of Transformation When Moving Out of Islam in the Netherlands and Britain

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the narratives of people with Islamic backgrounds in the Netherlands and Britain who have moved out of Islam. Rather than focusing primarily on ‘leaving faith’ (i.e. a predominantly negative and religiously centred approach), it will present four types of thematic trajectories that consider the broader life-worlds and experiences of the interlocutors. These themes will illustrate the relative weight of the religious voice in trajectories, rather than presupposing the centrality of religion in one’s (former) identity or trajectory. It will thereby display a broader understanding of the interlocutors’ experiences as being in a negative relation to religion alone: not only religious, but also political, social, ethnic and gender boundaries provided the contexts in which people moved out of Islam. The themes (‘religious break’, ‘social break-away’, ‘the entrance’ and ‘unconscious secularization’) will be illustrated by four case studies. A fifth case will be presented to illustrate the potency of the intertwinement of the themes.

Encouraging Active Citizen Voices on International Policy? The Record of U.S. Faith-based NGOs

How do faith-based NGOs educate and mobilize their US constituencies, beyond appealing for donations? I examine ten diverse faith-based NGOs’ presentation of advocacy on their websites, along with budget and staffing data, finding great variation in the extent of advocacy and its prominence and urgency in agencies’ websites. Some of the most extensive mobilization is done by small Christian sects with historic commitment to social justice, non-Christian minority faiths in the US, and independent NGOs that specialize in advocacy. The religious voice on these matters is modest, with faith-based NGOs giving priority to securing financial support for material aid.

John Donne’s and George Herbert’s Employment of Secular Language and Images in Their Religious Poetry

Recent studies in Herbert and Donne show that most critics focus on the study of theological or biblical aspects of Herbert’s and Donne’s poetry. This argument is more accurate as far as Herbert is concerned because he inspires the reader’s mind as he approaches spiritual life by means of pure simplicity of language and thought. But when it comes to Donne, this argument becomes less accurate, or needs a bit more investigation. Before he decides to write religious poetry, Donne wrote many secular poems mainly about love, yet secular images do not disappear completely in his religious poetry, but rather create a very controversial poet who struggles between his secular and religious character. However, Herbert uses many images, devices, and metaphors of popular love poetry. Herbert’s intermingling of secular love images with his serious divine theme does not affect his religious voice in his religious poetry. Rather, this excellent technique of intermingling helps express Herbert’s divine themes very effectively. The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of secular love images and devices in the religious poetry of Herbert and Donne. This should help us to decide whose poetry reveals a more religious view of life and more faith than the other.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI'S GHOSTS, SOUL-SLEEP, AND VICTORIAN DEATH CULTURE

Ghosts haunt Christina Rossetti's poetry.Amidst the lyrics, devotional poems, and children's verse, poems about ghosts and hauntings recur as material evidence of Rossetti's fascination with spectral presences. That fascination poses a particular interpretive puzzle in light of her religious convictions and piety. We might be tempted to identify the recurring ghosts as just another nineteenth-century flirtation with spiritualism – the spiritualism by which her brothers William and Gabriel were intrigued, attending séances and testing the validity of communications from the dead. Rossetti, however, clearly dismissed spiritualism as false belief and a means to sin. We might also be tempted to divide Rossetti's poetry into the secular and the sacred and to categorize the ghost poems as the former, yet much recent criticism on Rossetti has argued successfully for the pervasiveness of her religious voice even in works that seem not to be religious. Finally, in seeking to hear a religious resonance, we might be tempted to interpret her ghosts as representative of the Holy Ghost, yet that interpretation could only be asserted at the expense of the poems themselves; as narrative poems, most of them involve ghosts of dead lovers, desired by the living for themselves – not as experiences of God's presence. Rossetti's use of ghosts within short narrative or dialogic poems of the late 1850s and 60s concerning human desire for lost love invites closer inspection, especially when such poems overtly treat her religious beliefs.

Isaac Olsens kopibok som kulturuttrykk på tidlig 1700-tall

Isaac Olsen's Copy Book as a Cultural Expression of the Early Eighteenth Century.This article deals with a copy book written by Isaac Olsen, dating from the early eighteenth century. Isaac Olsen was a teacher and catechist working among the Sami people in the region of Finnmark, Northern Norway. He was a predecessor of the Sami missionary Thomas von Westen. Isaac Olsen left a handwritten copy book of nearly 1000 pages, today preserved in The Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway. The copy book is a compilation of documents related to Isaac Olsen’s work and person. Most of the documents are written in his own hand, but the book also contains documents written by governmental officials such as regional governors and provosts, and even the king in Copenhagen. The article focuses on the voices that may be heard in the texts contained in Isaac Olsen’s copy book: the pedagogical voice, the religious voice, the voice of popular culture, the voices of state officials. Attention is also paid to the contemporary practice of writing and the practice of professional copying. Isaac Olsen’s copy book, which dates from the early 1700s, is seen as a valuable historical source that may give insight into the mental horizon of an individual as well as knowledge about the society in which he lived.

Laudato Si and the Role of Religion in Shaping Humanity's Response to Climate Change

There are many ways in which people have sought to make climate change personally salient and actionable through self-interest, such as national security and human health. But the Pope’s recent encyclical letter, Laudato Si’ has elevated the importance of religious morality as a motivator. It’s a bold appeal to reevaluate our worldviews, values and spiritual beliefs and elevate climate change and the broad sweep of environmental issues beyond that of strictly an “environmental issue,” a label that has ghettoized the issue as one that is associated with a liberal environmental movement. When people hear the message to address climate change and protect the environment from the church, mosque, synagogue or temple, it will have far more power to motivate action than a regulatory or economic message ever will. Religion, unlike any other institutional force in society, has the power to directly influence our values and beliefs. And at this particular moment in our human existence on earth – the epoch of the Anthropocene – this religious voice is all the more important. A proper response to the Anthropocene Era calls for a new set of values and beliefs about our relationship with the environment, with each other and for many, with God.

Book Review: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Public Theology in a Post-Secular Age

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Theology in a Age. By Elaine Graham. London: SCM Press, 2013. xxvii + 266 pp. $88.00 (paper).One of the great challenges facing Christians today is have our say in the public sphere now we no longer hold the positions of power and privilege we once did. One could argue this is less of an issue for Anglicans in England, given the Church of England is still established and several of its bishops are in the House of Lords-of course it has a voice in the public square! Yet, even there, Christianity does not have the same place of privilege, the same societal cache it once did. Even in religious America, where the faith of presidential candidates is a major issue, Christians need rethink their participation in public discourse.For those faithful, thoughtful, politically moderate Christians wondering one might go about being a Christian voice in the public square, Graham s work provides much food for thought. Graham weighs in substantively on a controversial and challenging topic. At least in America, strongly conservative Christian voices get lots of airtime, and so the question of those who do not hold the political ideals of the Tea Party might weigh into the debate is a real one. If readers want a quick answer the how to question, they can skip right Grahams last chapter. However, doing so means they would miss out on a thorough and thought-provoking survey of the field and we got here.Grahams text is divided into three parts: Post-Secular Society, PostSecular Theology, and Public Theology as Christian Apologetics. The text sets out find the path between the 'rock' of religious resurgence and the 'hard place' of institutional decline and secularism (p. xxvii). Graham succeeds in meeting this goal, and along the way she does an excellent job of mapping out the landscape. Early on, she has tables of statistics, and then throughout her text she has notable anecdotes paint the intriguing picture of the ways in which religion is declining and growing. Graham notes Christendom's decline makes the religious voice just one of many in the public square-but one has a right be there. It is not clear, she observes, that non-theological reasoning is any the less subjective or partial than any other form of public discourse (p. 65). Particularly in chapter 5, with her survey of recent events and court cases, Graham highlights the growing place of religion in public life and the question of what constitutes appropriate public theology. …

Youth Finding and Claiming Religious Voice: Coming Out Religiously in an Interreligious Multivalent World

Voice is critical to youth; yet discerning and claiming a public religious voice is complicated, especially as youth encounter values that include or exclude them based on personality, ethnicity, religion, gender identification, ability, social class, or sexual orientation. Drawing from interviews, we analyze influences on youth to discover and speak their religious voices in public spaces, and to claim religious motivations for their public personas and actions. The study uncovers complex relationships among young people's religious awareness, social contexts, inner dynamics, and public religious expressions. These relationships suggest directions for religious education in faith communities, schools, and other public spaces.

Religion, Spirituality and State-Funded Schooling

Habermas recommends that post-secular societies re-examine their relationship with religion to give religious and spiritual voice a place in the public sphere, a place denied by secularism. This article re-examines one aspect of that broader field, the relationship between religion or spirituality and publicly funded education. Recent interest in faith schools, particularly in the UK and USA, has raised questions about whether the secular, or common, school continues to be the best model for publicly funded education. Meanwhile, anxiety about religion, and concern to develop religious, spiritual and cultural understanding, have raised international awareness of the potential value of religious and spiritual education which, in some countries, is not permitted in publicly funded schools. This article draws on the work of Habermas to argue that post-secular liberal democracies should revisit and rework the relationship between religion and publicly funded schools and aim to include the religious and spiritual without undermining core liberal democratic principles. The article discusses both the role of religious or spiritual education in the post-secular common school, and post-secular liberal democracy’s relationship with faith schools, that is schools which are motivated by a spiritual worldview. The argument is framed by secular liberal democratic principles put forward in the 1980s by Terence McLaughlin and concludes that, in post-secular liberal democracies, publicly funded schools should subscribe to a revised form of McLaughlin’s principles.

Does religious belief enable positive interpretation of auditory hallucinations? A comparison of religious voice hearers with and without psychosis

Introduction. Hearing voices occurs in people without psychosis. Why hearing voices is such a key pathological feature of psychosis whilst remaining a manageable experience in nonpsychotic people is yet to be understood. We hypothesised that religious voice hearers would interpret voices in accordance with their beliefs and therefore experience less distress. Methods. Three voice hearing groups, which comprised: 20 mentally healthy Christians, 15 Christian patients with psychosis, and 14 nonreligious patients with psychosis. All completed (1) questionnaires with rating scales measuring the perceptual and emotional aspects of hallucinated voices, and (2) a semistructured interview to explore whether religious belief is used to make sense of the voice hearing experience. Results. The three groups had perceptually similar experiences when hearing the voices. Mentally healthy Christians appeared to assimilate the experience with their religious beliefs (schematic processing) resulting in positive interpretations. Christian patients tended not to assimilate the experience with their religious beliefs, frequently reporting nonreligious interpretations that were predominantly negative. Nearly all participants experienced voices as powerful, but mentally healthy Christians reported the power of voices positively. Conclusion. Religious belief appeared to have a profound, beneficial influence on the mentally healthy Christians’ interpretation of hearing voices, but had little or no influence in the case of Christian patients.

A Case for Collective Conscience: Climategate, COP-15 and Climate Justice

This paper argues that given the importance of joining together local and global aspects of climate change, individual conscience needs to be complemented by critical consideration of collective forms of conscience. Evidence for the existence of such collective forms as relevant to climate debates can be found in public reactions to email leaks on climate science, dubbed ‘Climategate’ in the processes leading up to the United Nations Summit on Climate Change, COP-15. In critical engagement with Emile Durkheim’s conscience collective and Bernard Häring’s reciprocal consciences, I argue for collective conscience to be used as a heuristic tool in order to analyse both weaknesses in collective responsibility and appropriate actions of communities at local, national or international levels. I suggest that such an approach critically engages with more general notions such as the role of solidarity in public debate that both develops and critiques Jürgen Habermas’s more recent work opening up a religious voice in the public domain. Using an experiential case study from the Massai tribe, I intend to show just one way in which collective conscience might be expressed when faced with the problems associated with climate change.

Religion and the United Nations—Introduction

Religion and the United Nations—Introduction Matthew Weiner This special issue of CrossCurrents is dedicated to exploring the relationship between religion and the United Nations, with an emphasis on providing positive examples of potential and actual interaction, and making an argument in favor of developing partnerships between the world’s governing body and the world’s religious communities. As importantly, if not more so, we also hope that the articles collected here will provide a platform for further discussion and action among UN staff, scholars of religion, and religious communities themselves. To our knowledge, there has been little documented in terms of this kind of three‐way discussion, much to the disadvantage of all parties involved. This short introduction will explain our basic orientation to the topic of religion at the UN, the thinking behind our designating these primary categories and the article selection within, as well as provide a compass for following the arrangement of the articles that follow. The conclusion will provide a more detailed historical framework and analysis. When the co‐editors first began thinking about this topic, there was relatively little in the way of official initiatives within the UN system to engage religion, and yet paradoxically religion was everywhere in its midst. Indeed, as the UN was conceived, scholars of religion and religious workers advocated for a spiritual and religious voice at the world governing body; there was little in the way of direct and official response. In this way, the official current involvement of many internal UN agencies demonstrates decisively the growing pragmatic awareness of and interest in the role religion can play in fulfilling its mission, however yet still under construction. Although not organized discretely, the articles that follow fall into three broad categories: first is a set of articles authored by scholars of religion who argue for, and in some cases about, the role of religion at the UN. They do so mostly around issues of peace building, and we have chosen this focus to complement other pieces which come from UN program staff that are located in particular agencies that deal more discretely with social and humanitarian problems. Collectively, these articles provide both more abstract perspectives about the moral role of religion in peace building and the place of religion in civil society as it interfaces with the UN. They also provide a variety of particular perspectives that distinct religious traditions have to offer when it comes to peace building through the UN’s auspices. The second set of articles are examples of Religious Non‐Governmental Organizations, more commonly referred to as faith‐based organizations (FBOs), at work with the UN. The world governing body is, of course, a collection of nation states, steered by a collective process among them; it is also a set of connected agencies that address particular urgent human needs. As a kind of federated system, it inherently recognizes the need for diversity, debate, and input from sources other than nation states, including civil society. It does so primarily through NGOs, tens of thousands of which, with very different mission statements, register with the UN, with a goal of influence. What influence is understood, of course varies. While UN agencies seek to reach religious communities to fulfill their work, FBOs serve as a primary way (but not the only way) that religion officially works with, and impacts, the work of the UN. There are thousands of FBOs both locally situated and international, with diverse missions, all of which seek some way to interact with the UN to fulfill their own religious or spiritual mission. The articles in the third section explain some of the ways in which UN agencies have begun to engage religion. These are personal reflections by program staff members at the UN who are, through their work as described here, helping to engineer a posture toward religious non‐governmental entities in ways which help them to better fulfill their particular agency’s objectives. They report on how their agency understands religion, the way engagement can help fulfill their mission, the success they have so far achieved, and an assessment of the potential, and potential pitfalls, of engaging this realm of civil society. Through these...

Christina Rossetti, John Keble, and the Divine Gaze

Although William Michael claimed that his sister thought nothing of Keble as a poet, marginalia in Christina Rossetti's copy of The Christian Year (1827) show Keble's influence on her developing religious voice and vision. (1) Recent scholarship has examined Rossetti's indebtedness Keble and the Tractarian tradition: Diane D'Amico and David Kent's review, and the Tractarians, (2) traces contributions by Raymond Chapman, G. B. Tennyson, Linda Marshall, Antony Harrison, Mary Arseneau, Lorraine Kooistra, and others who have explored the connections between Rossetti and the Oxford Movement. Nevertheless, in reading Rossetti's poems in tandem with Keble's St. Peter's Day, from The Christian Year, we notice the poetic and theological distinctiveness of Rossetti's devotional poetics. Whereas Keble emphasizes Peter's prerogative and power of apostolic responsibility transmitted from Christ's divine commission, (3) Rossetti emphasizes individual penitence and humility inspired by Peter's denial of knowing Christ, and Christ's movement in subsequently and at him. Rossetti transfigures the Divine Look, which appears in three stanzas in St. Peter's Day, into a moment of sustained encounter: a gaze. (4) She connects her poems through the gesture of and looking, which becomes, in analogical terms, an outward physical sign of an inner spiritual conviction of repentance. Just as Rossetti's gesture of taking her heart in her hand and offering it her Creator in Twice (I take my heart in my hand--/ All that I have I bring [ll. 41, 45]) (5) is powerful in its simplicity, here the elaboration of an ordinary gesture of turning and looking (6) defines the Rossettian theme of penitence, with the recognition of repentance opening up the possibility of spiritual renewal and transformation as demonstrated by a renovation of the heart. Rossetti's sacred poetry offers a sense of renewed possibility for the individual--a sense of affection and comfort that her secular poetry rarely grants. In Rossetti's religious poetics, comfort and hope originate from both gazing upon the Divine and the Divine gaze. Here gazing is different from merely looking. Although the King James Bible (7) translators use to and to interchangeably (look refers the Hebrew ra'ah ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) as in man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart in 1 Samuel 16.7b and also refers the Greek emblepo [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]] as in And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter in Luke 22.61a), in the English language a implies a seeing that is usually less lengthy and intense than a gaze: direct one's attention a subject (look) differs from directing one's attention a subject with studious and fastidious attention (gaze). (8) Rossetti transforms the look that appears in Keble's poem a gaze underscore the relationship between seer and seen. Keble's objective for The Christian Year was assist readers in bringing their thoughts and feelings into more entire unison (9) with those in the Book of Common Prayer. Hence Keble's St. Peter's unsurprisingly derives from passages commemorating Peter's Day in The Book of Common Prayer. The Collect (a short prayer comprising an invocation, petition, and conclusion) begins with a supplication God, who had commanded feed His flock, make ... / all Bishops and Pastors diligently preach thy holy Word, and the people obediently follow the same. (10) The next section, For the Epistle, is taken from the description of being released from prison by an angel in Acts 12. The final section is Matthew 16, which narrates Peter's recognition of Jesus as the Christ and Jesus' giving him the name Simon Peter, the rock upon which He will build His Church and whom He will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven (p. …