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Item Review of Carole Blackburn’s Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650(MIT Press, 2001) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsBlackburn proposes a new reading of the encounter between Jesuit and Indian in seventeenth-century New France. A work of historical anthropology driven by the insights and agenda of colonial discourse studies, Harvest of Souls sets out to show how the Jesuit missionary reports (transcribed, translated, and published between 1896 and 1901 by Reu-ben G. Thwaites as The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents) were implicated in the practice of colonialism. Her method is to “examine the intent, effect, and meaning of the texts in their entirety” (as opposed to more narrowly focused ethnographic or historical readings), searching for and exposing the “sedimented meanings that inhabit the Jesuit texts” in order to “situate these meanings in relation to the politics of colonial-ism and conversion” (8, 11). The Relations were not “just the byproducts of a political process,” they were “a more integral component of the politics of colonialism, because they expressed the themes, ideas and ideologies that served domination and justified the colonial endeavor.”Item Women and Christian practice in a Mahican village(University of California Press, 2003) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsThis 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.Item Review of Craig Atwood's Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem(The University of Chicago Press, 2004) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsColonial Moravians are far more popular today than they ever were in the eighteenth century. Then, Moravians were suspected of being “papists” on account of their liturgical practices, mistrusted because of their close relations with Indians and slaves, and thought more than a little odd in their communal living arrangements. These qualities, combined with their prodigious record keeping, have proven enticing to sociologists, historians, and ethnohistorians alike, studying everything from the life course of religious movements (Gillian Lindt Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds [New York, 1968], and Beverly Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem [Philadelphia, 1988]) to interracial religious communities (Jon Sensbach, A Separate Canaan [Chapel Hill, NC, 1998]) to the dynamics of ethnic identity in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania (Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads [Chapel Hill, NC, 2003]). All of the studies cited above treat Moravian belief and practice to a greater or lesser extent, but none goes so far as Craig Atwood’s new work in taking seriously the distinctive religiosity of the Moravian Bru¨dergemeine. Community of the Cross is a dual biography of the colorful Saxon Count, Ludwig von Zinzendorf (the main force behind the growth of the Moravian movement in the eighteenth century) and of the community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which Atwood treats as the incarnation of Zinzendorf’s theology.Item Review of Jane T. Merritt's At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier(MIT Press, 2004) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsIt has been more than a decade since White published The Middle Ground,a monumental study of the shared world of colonists and Indians in the Great Lakes region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1The middle ground, argued White, was called into existence by the mutual dependence of Indians and colonists. So long as Britain and France contested control of North America, a pragmatic accommodation prevailed. The persuasiveness and significance of White’s work is reflected by the abundance of middle grounds that scholars have since brought to light. Among the most recent contributions is Merritt’s At the Crossroads,which weds the middle ground to the transatlantic world of empires and subjects. Drawing largely on the wealth of sources in the Moravian mission archives, Merritt’s study provides a richly detailed look into the complex relations of Indian and white individuals and communities on the mid-Atlantic frontier from 1700 to 1763. At the Crossroads is one of a string of recent works—starting with Jon Sensbach ,A Seperate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840(Williamsburg, 1998)—that draws on the vast but virtually untapped sources of the relatively obscure Moravian communities to explore issues of race, culture, and religion in colonial and revolutionary America.Item Review of A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America. By Nancy Shoemaker (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004) 211 pp.(MIT Press, 2005) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsShoemaker’s A Strange Likeness is the latest contribution to a growing field of study devoted to tracing the development of racially oriented identities (in this case, “red” and “white” rather than “black” and “white”) in early America. This short and eminently readable book surveys the landscape of the British colonies during the eighteenth century, exploring how Lenape, Iroquois, Creek, and many others all came to be “red” and the English, Irish, German, etc., came to be “white.” Shoemaker’s main task is to demonstrate how cultural differences perceived by American native inhabitants and European newcomers gradually came to be understood as symbolic or representative of essential differences. By the end of the eighteenth century, “white” and “red” people were presumed to be shaped and motivated by essential characteristics of their “race.”Item Lessons from Stockbridge: Jonathan Edwards and the Stockbridge Indians(University Press of America, 2005) Wheeler, RachelItem Review of Jonathan Edwards, A Life. George Marsden. New Haven; London : Yale Univ Pr, 2003.(De Gruyter, 2006) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsBy now, it would seem there is not much left to be said about George Marsden’s commanding biography of Jonathan Edwards. It has been awarded prizes too numerous to list, (but including the Bancroft, the Merle Curti, and the Grawemeyer). It has been praised as a “magisterial synthesis,” and the “best book ever written about America’s … greatest theologian” (comments by Edmund Morgan and Sam Logan from dust jacket.) It is, indeed, a much-needed book. The first major biography of Edwards in over half a century, it is arguably the first biography ever to attempt to take the measure of the whole man. Marsden’s signal contribution is in creating a cogent, compelling synthesis of the rapidly expanding field of Edwards scholarship. In a tightly wrought narrative that clocks in at just over 500 pages, Marsden elegantly braids together this new scholarship with the raw materials that have only recently been made more widely accessible through the efforts of Harry Stout, Kenneth Minkema and the others at the Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale who carry on the work started by Perry Miller. A look at the newly launched website of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale (http://edwards.vale.edu/) quickly makes apparent the magnitude of Marsden’s achievement and why such a biography could only have been written recently. The website will soon make available all 26 volumes of the published Works of Jonathan Edwards series, representing about 25,000 manuscript pages of Edward’s writings. An additional 25,000 pages will be added over the next few years.Item Review of Daniel R. Mandell's Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880(MIT Press, 2009) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsVirtually every nineteenth-century local history of a New England town begins with a chapter about the last “red man” to have lived there. The tone is generally somber but optimistic—marking the sad but inevitable passing away of a noble race, thus allowing for the rise of true civilization. Scholarship of the last decade or so has been chipping away at this trope, but none has done so as comprehensively as Mandell. Studies of New England Indian history are rich, though heavily weighted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the larger field of Indian history, the Old Northwest garners most attention in the era of the early Republic, before shifting to the Southeast in the era of Removal, and the West in the latter half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Item 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, RachelThis 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.Item The Kennedy Myth: American Civil Religion in The Sixties(2010-09-17T17:56:30Z) Wolfe, James SnowAmericans 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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