The Quests for the Historical Jesus resulted in a move "back to the Jewish roots!" Jewish Jesus research positioned Jewry within a dominantly Christian culture and permitted Jews to feel more at ease ...with Jesus the Jew. Christians are challenged to respond now with a new Christology.
The years from 1852 to 1890 marked a controversial period in Mormonism, when the church's official embrace of polygamy put it at odds with wider American culture. In this study, Christine Talbot ...explores the controversial era, discussing how plural marriage generated decades of cultural and political conflict over competing definitions of legitimate marriage, family structure, and American identity. In particular, Talbot examines "the Mormon question" with attention to how it constructed ideas about American citizenship around the presumed separation of the public and private spheres. Contrary to the prevailing notion of man as political actor, woman as domestic keeper, and religious conscience as entirely private, Mormons enfranchised women and framed religious practice as a political act. The way Mormonism undermined the public/private divide led white, middle-class Americans to respond by attacking not just Mormon sexual and marital norms but also Mormons' very fitness as American citizens.
In the nineteenth century, white Americans contrasted the perceived
purity of white, middle-class women with the perceived eroticism of
women of color and the working classes. The Latter-day Saint
...practice of polygamy challenged this separation, encouraging white
women to participate in an institution that many people associated
with the streets of Calcutta or Turkish palaces. At the same time,
Latter-day Saints participated in American settler colonialism.
After their expulsion from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, Latter-day
Saints dispossessed Ute and Shoshone communities in an attempt to
build their American Zion. Their missionary work abroad also helped
to solidify American influence in the Pacific Islands as the church
became a participant in American expansion. Imperial Zions
explores the importance of the body in Latter-day Saint theology
with the faith's attempts to spread its gospel as a "civilizing"
force in the American West and the Pacific. By highlighting the
intertwining of Latter-day Saint theology and American ideas about
race, sexuality, and the nature of colonialism, Imperial
Zions argues that Latter-day Saints created their
understandings of polygamy at the same time they tried to change
the domestic practices of Native Americans and other Indigenous
peoples. Amanda Hendrix-Komoto tracks the work of missionaries as
they moved through different imperial spaces to analyze the
experiences of the American Indians and Native Hawaiians who became
a part of white Latter-day Saint families. Imperial Zions
is a foundational contribution that places Latter-day Saint
discourses about race and peoplehood in the context of its ideas
about sexuality, gender, and the family.
Jesus in Asia Sugirtharajah, R. S
2018, 2018-02-19
eBook
Reconstructions of Jesus occurred in Asia long before the Western search for the historical Jesus began in earnest. This enterprise sprang up in seventh- century China and seventeenth-century India, ...encouraged by the patronage and openness of the Chinese and Indian imperial courts. While the Western quest was largely a Protestant preoccupation, in Asia the search was marked by its diversity: participants included Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Catholics, and members of the Church of the East.During the age of European colonialism, Jesus was first seen by many Asians as a tribal god of the farangis, or white Europeans. But as his story circulated, Asians remade Jesus, at times appreciatively and at other times critically. R. S. Sugirtharajah demonstrates how Buddhist and Taoist thought, combined with Christian insights, led to the creation of the Chinese Jesus Sutras of late antiquity, and explains the importance of a biography of Jesus composed in the sixteenth-century court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. He also brings to the fore the reconstructions of Jesus during the Chinese Taiping revolution, the Korean Minjung uprising, and the Indian and Sri Lankan anti-colonial movements.In Jesus in Asia, Sugirtharajah situates the historical Jesus beyond the narrow confines of the West and offers an eye-opening new chapter in the story of global Christianity.
Revising Eternity Welker, Holly; Mason, Patrick Q; Barnwell, Kevin ...
05/2022
eBook
Marriage's central role in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints distinguishes the faith while simultaneously reflecting
widespread American beliefs. But what does Latter-day Saint
marriage ...mean for men? Holly Welker presents a collection of essays
exploring this question. The essayists provide insight into
challenges involving sexuality, physical and emotional illness,
addiction, loss of faith, infidelity, sexual orientation, and other
topics. Conversational and heartfelt, the writings reveal the
varied experiences of Latter-day Saint marriage against the
backdrop of a society transformed by everything from economic
issues affecting marriage to evolving ideas about gender.
An insightful exploration of the gap between human realities and
engrained ideals, Revising Eternity sheds light on how
Latter-day Saint men view and experience marriage today.
Taylor G. Petrey's trenchant history takes a landmark step forward in documenting and theorizing about Latter-day Saints (LDS) teachings on gender, sexual difference, and marriage. Drawing on deep ...archival research, Petrey situates LDS doctrines in gender theory and American religious history since World War II. His challenging conclusion is that Mormonism is conflicted between ontologies of gender essentialism and gender fluidity, illustrating a broader tension in the history of sexuality in modernity itself. As Petrey details, LDS leaders have embraced the idea of fixed identities representing a natural and divine order, but their teachings also acknowledge that sexual difference is persistently contingent and unstable. While queer theorists have built an ethics and politics based on celebrating such sexual fluidity, LDS leaders view it as a source of anxiety and a tool for the shaping of a heterosexual social order. Through public preaching and teaching, the deployment of psychological approaches to "cure" homosexuality, and political activism against equal rights for women and same-sex marriage, Mormon leaders hoped to manage sexuality and faith for those who have strayed from heteronormativity.
In the nineteenth century, a fascination with the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints made Mormons and Mormonism a common
trope in French journalism, art, literature, politics, and popular
...culture. Heather Belnap, Corry Cropper, and Daryl Lee bring to
light French representations of Mormonism from the 1830s to 1914,
arguing that these portrayals often critiqued and parodied French
society. Mormonism became a pretext for reconsidering issues such
as gender, colonialism, the family, and church-state relations
while providing artists and authors with a means for working
through the possibilities of their own evolving national identity.
Surprising and innovative, Marianne Meets the Mormons
looks at how nineteenth-century French observers engaged with the
idea of Mormonism in order to reframe their own cultural
preoccupations.
Though the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion, it does not specify what counts as a religion. From its founding in the 1830s, Mormonism, a homegrown American faith, drew ...thousands of converts but far more critics. In"A Peculiar People", J. Spencer Fluhman offers a comprehensive history of anti-Mormon thought and the associated passionate debates about religious authenticity in nineteenth-century America. He argues that understanding anti-Mormonism provides critical insight into the American psyche because Mormonism became a potent symbol around which ideas about religion and the state took shape.Fluhman documents how Mormonism was defamed, with attacks often aimed at polygamy, and shows how the new faith supplied a social enemy for a public agitated by the popular press and wracked with social and economic instability. Taking the story to the turn of the century, Fluhman demonstrates how Mormonism's own transformations, the result of both choice and outside force, sapped the strength of the worst anti-Mormon vitriol, triggering the acceptance of Utah into the Union in 1896 and also paving the way for the dramatic, yet still grudging, acceptance of Mormonism as an American religion.
The Mystical Presence of Christ
investigates the connections between exceptional
experiences of Christ's presence and ordinary devotion to Christ in
the late medieval West. Unsettling the notion that
...experiences of seeing Christ's figure or hearing Christ speak are
simply exceptional events that happen at singular moments, Richard
Kieckhefer reveals the entanglements between these experiences and
those that occur through the imagery, language, and rituals of
ordinary, everyday devotional culture.
Kieckhefer begins his book by reconsidering the "who" and the
"how" of Christ's mystical presence. He argues that Christ's
humanity and divinity were equally important preconditions for
encounters, both exceptional and ordinary, which Kieckhefer
proposes as existing on a spectrum of experience that moves from
presupposition to intuition and finally to perception. Kieckhefer
then examines various contexts of Christ manifestations-during
prayer, meditation, and liturgy, for example-with attention to
gender dynamics and the relationship between saintly individuals
and their hagiographers. Through penetrating discussions of a
diverse set of texts and figures across the long fourteenth century
(Angela of Foligno, the nuns of Helfta, Margery Kempe, Dorothea of
Montau, Meister Eckhart, Henry Suso, and Walter Hilton, among
others), Kieckhefer shows that seemingly exceptional manifestations
of Christ were also embedded in ordinary religious experience.
Wide-ranging in scope and groundbreaking in methodology, The
Mystical Presence of Christ is a magisterial work that
rethinks the interplay between the exceptional and the ordinary in
the workings of late medieval religion.
