Department of Religious Studies

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    The Kennedy Myth: American Civil Religion in The Sixties
    (2010-09-17T17:56:30Z) Wolfe, James Snow
    Americans have always had a special regard for their nation and its presidents, and presidential assassination has regularly caused consternation in the populace. President Kennedy was clothed in myth during his candidacy and presidency and even more after his death. The time has come not simply to accept or dismiss the Kennedy myth but to refine it. After defending myth as an indispensable means for conveying deeper meanings, to be deciphered by sociological analysis and evaluated by theological criticism, the Introduction sets forth three types of civil religion: archaic religion, which regards the state as divine; historic civil religion, which looks to a transcendent God to guide the judge the nation; and modern civil religion, which dispenses the divinity. Drawing on Paul Tillich's scheme of heteronomy, autonomy, and theonomy, my thesis is that the Kennedy myth exhibits a dangerous mix of predominate heteronomous archaism and moderate autonomous modernism with minimal theonomous historic civil religion to counterbalance it. Part I deals with Kennedy's accession to the presidency. As a candidate, his archaic cult of toughness and his modern intelligence are highlighted together with his lack of historic convictions, despite the so-called "religious issue" which focused on Kennedy's Catholic affiliation but overlooked the detachment from historic religion, Having been invested as a king with the charisma of office--including symbolic roles as high priest, representative, father, and imperator--through inauguration, Kennedy had a new authority as he repeated his archaic call to defend freedom" and to sacrifice the self to the state in his Inaugural Address.

    Part II deals with Kennedy's presidency. In a restoration of Camelot, the Kennedy White House became the center of and adorable family life, of arts and culture, and of intellectuals, whose modern "pragmatic" bracketing of moral questions made them ready tools of archaic purposes. As "Contemporer," Kennedy proclaimed a new era of adventure, movement, and hope, which led to misadventures, inertia, and despair. As Cosmocrator, Kennedy battled the chaos dragon in the Berlin crisis, the steel dispute, and twice over Cuba, but, finally convinced of the folly of brinkmanship, he launched historic drives for a test ban treaty and for civil rights legislation, only to remain in Vietnam for archaic reasons. Part III deals with protest, disorganization, reorganization, memorialization, and succession phases of response to the Kennedy assassination, The archaic loss of a sacred king was tremendous blow tot the social order, which led to rich ceremonialization in a funeral dominated by the religion of war and remembered sacrementally, transfiguring Kennedy into a hero and martyr, Caesar and Christ, Lincoln and light. Drawing on Kennedy's mythic charisma in posthumous obedience, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy battled for succession to his throne, one on the basis of institutional legitimacy, the other through personal ties. Inspired by an idealized view of his brother, Robert Kennedy pulled away from him in an historic identification with poor and blacks and an historic search for peace in Vietnam, only to be reunited with John Kennedy in death. Unwilling merely to accept the largely archaic American civil religion expressed in the Kennedy myth but finding a modern dismissal of it ineffective, the conclusion espouses a mediating historic American civil religion, which unites feeling and reason, embraces tragedy without being overwhelmed by it, acknowledges a mixture of good and evil in everyone, and affirms and judges presidents as limit kings in the light of transcendent ideals. The thesis leaves Kennedy himself not as an exemplary president but as one through whom we committed ourselves to ideals better than he knew, not a hero but a representative, not a myth but a man.

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    On an Eighteenth-Century Trail of Tears The Travel Diary of Johann Jacob Schmick of the Moravian Indian Congregation’s Journey to the Susquehanna, 1765
    (2015) Wheeler, Rachel; Hahn-Bruckart, Thomas; Department of Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    This piece is a translation of a travel journal kept by missionary Johann Jacob Schmick as he traveled with the Moravian Indian congregation from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna in 1765. The community of mostly Delaware and Mohican Indians had been living under armed guard at the Philadelphia Barracks following the violence instigated by Pontiac’s Revolt and the Paxton Boys uprising. The community’s settlement on the Susquehanna marked a new model of Moravian mission and serves as an early example of Indian removal, particularly noteworthy in this instance because the community was composed of Christian Indians.
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    Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2011-04-08) Goff, Philip; Farnsley II, Arthur E.; Wheeler, Rachel; Thuesen, Peter J.
    The NEH Summer Institute for Teachers will support the studies of twenty-five talented teachers from across the nation as they join with nationally renowned scholars to explore how religion has shaped, and been shaped by, the American experience. The institute directors, Philip Goff, Arthur Farnsley, and Rachel Wheeler, are all noted scholars in their field, whose work encompasses a wide range of subject matter and methodologies. The institute will enable participants from many different fields to develop new materials on American religion that can be incorporated into their current curricula. An English teacher introducing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, will be better prepared to discuss the nexus of religion and race in the context of nineteenth-century America. A civics teacher focusing on the origins of the American government will be able to incorporate discussion about the religion of the founders and the ways in which the First Amendment has shaped American society. The prime goal of The Bible in American Life project is to gain insight for clergy and scholars on Bible-reading as a religious practice. We are particularly interested in how people use the Bible in their personal lives, how religious communities and even the internet shape individuals’ comprehension of scripture, and how individual and communal understandings of scripture influence American public life. Employing both quantitative methods (the General Social Survey and a local survey) and qualitative research (focus-group interviews, historical analysis, and other means), we hope to provide an unprecedented perspective on the Bible’s role outside the context of worship, in the lived religion of a broad cross-section of Americans both now and in the past. Such data will be invaluable to clergy and seminar professors seeking more effective ways to teach and preach scripture in an age saturated with information and technology. The results of the project also will help scholars seeking to understand recent changes in American Christianity.
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    Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture NEH Summer Institute for Teachers July 12-30, 2010
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2010-04-09) Goff, Philip; Farnsley II, Arthur E.; Wheeler, Rachel
    This institute will support the studies of twenty-five talented teachers from across the nation as they join with nationally renowned scholars to explore how religion has shaped, and been shaped by, the American experience. The institute directors, Philip Goff, Arthur Farnsley, and Rachel Wheeler, are all noted scholars in their field, whose work encompasses a wide range of subject matter and methodologies. The institute will enable participants from many different fields to develop new materials on American religion that can be incorporated into their current curricula. An English teacher introducing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, will be better prepared to discuss the nexus of religion and race in the context of nineteenth-century America. A civics teacher focusing on the origins of the American government will be able to incorporate discussion about the religion of the founders and the ways in which the First Amendment has shaped American society.
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    Science and Technology in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam
    (UC Press, 2016-08) Curtis, Edward E., IV; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    This article explores the centrality of science and technology to religious thought and practice in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam from the 1950s through the 1970s. Tracing the dynamic meanings of scientific knowledge in the context of the postwar United States, the article’s central argument is that like other UFO and extraterrestrial religions, the Nation of Islam emphasized scientific, material, and empirical over spiritual and supernatural understandings of religion. It also suggests how members of this new religious movement studied and attempted to live according to the scientific and mathematical principles derived from their prophet’s cosmological, ontological, and eschatological teachings on the nature of God, the origins and destiny of the black race, and the beginning and end of white supremacy.
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    Fatal Convergence in the Kingdom of God: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in American History
    (2017) Gordon, Sarah Barringer; Shipps, Jan; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    This article examines religion, violence, and westward migration in early national and antebellum America. In treating the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, the authors demonstrate how recognition of religion enriches understanding of the event and its roots in culture and geography. Close attention to and careful interpretation of the lives of the leaders of Methodist migrants (who were killed at Mountain Meadows) and the local Mormon militia (who did the killing) yield vitally connected strands of personal and spiritual history. Placing both men in their religious communities and probing their family strategies reveals how much they had in common. These shared beliefs and practices affected Mormons’and Methodists’ understanding of the meaning of migration, as well as the role and nature of the Kingdom of God in American expansion. The approach taken here takes a panoramic view of the fatal convergence in southern Utah, and integrates religious history with scholarship on empire, slavery, patriarchy, Native dispossession, westward migration, and their reverberations in history. In light of these overlapping beliefs and histories, the massacre is revealed as more intimate, a fratricide among white men who imagined that their religious identities were locked in fatal conflict, but many of whose basic assumptions were shared. This article also engages with the challenges presented by an incomplete archive (all records of the train were lost – likely destroyed by the perpetrators), and the rewards as well as perils of using family histories and survivors’ accounts, as well as more traditional archival materials.
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    The Canonical Black Body: Alternative African American Religions and the Disruptive Politics of Sacrality
    (MDPI, 2018-01-09) Tucker Edmonds, Joseph Lennis; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    “The Canonical Black Body” argues that central to the study of African American religions is a focus on the black body and the production and engagement of canons on the sacred black body within the black public sphere. Furthermore, this essay suggests that, by paying attention to alternative African American religions in the twentieth century, we can better engage the relationship between African American religion and the long history of creating these canons on the black body, debating their relationship to black freedom, and circulating the canons to contest the oppressive, exclusive practices of modern democracy. Through a critical engagement of the fields of Black Theology and New Religious Movements and using the resources offered by Delores Williams’ accounts of variety and experience and Vincent Wimbush’s category of signifying, this essay will argue for how a return to the body provides resources and tools for not only theorizing African American religions but thinking about the production and creation of competing black publics, including the important role of alternative black sacred publics.
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    The Canonical Black Body: Alternative African American Religions and the Disruptive Politics of Sacrality
    (MDPI, 2018-01) Edmonds, Joseph L. Tucker; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    “The Canonical Black Body” argues that central to the study of African American religions is a focus on the black body and the production and engagement of canons on the sacred black body within the black public sphere. Furthermore, this essay suggests that, by paying attention to alternative African American religions in the twentieth century, we can better engage the relationship between African American religion and the long history of creating these canons on the black body, debating their relationship to black freedom, and circulating the canons to contest the oppressive, exclusive practices of modern democracy. Through a critical engagement of the fields of Black Theology and New Religious Movements and using the resources offered by Delores Williams’ accounts of variety and experience and Vincent Wimbush’s category of signifying, this essay will argue for how a return to the body provides resources and tools for not only theorizing African American religions but thinking about the production and creation of competing black publics, including the important role of alternative black sacred publics. View Full-Text
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    Lessons from Stockbridge: Jonathan Edwards and the Stockbridge Indians
    (University Press of America, 2005) Wheeler, Rachel
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    Women and Christian practice in a Mahican village
    (University of California Press, 2003) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    This article explores the development of native Christianity in the mid-eighteenth century at the site of a Moravian mission in the Mahican village of Shekomeko. Two native women, baptized Sarah and Rachel, appear prominently in the vast mission records, providing a unique opportunity to study the gendered meanings of Christian ritual for native women. Combining the techniques and insights of ethnohistory and recent scholarship on "lived religion," this article examines the implications of a century of colonial encounter on Mahican culture and the meanings infused in Christian ritual by native practitioners within this context of dramatic culture change. Focusing on the lives of these two women, this article examines the development of native interpretations of Christianity by exploring the overlap and the divergences between Moravian and Mahican understandings of Christian ritual. It was in the performance of these rituals that many Shekomekoans engaged in the process of forming a new identity that they hoped might carry them through the severe trials of colonization. By exploring the meanings of these rituals for both Moravian and Mahican, this article attempts to enrich and complicate our understanding of the process of cultural and religious negotiation and adaptation undertaken in mission communities. Further, this study offers a ground level perspective on Indian encounters with Christianity that has rarely been possible for this time period. Finally, the often intensely personal and affecting nature of those sources representing Mahican sentiments allows for a more complex and personalized understanding of Indian responses to Christianity.