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Item 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-TextItem 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.Item 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.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 Charlottesville, Exodus, and the Politics of Nostalgia(2017-08-22) Wheeler, RachelItem Commentary: Pain, Stigma, and the Politics of Self-Management(Oxford, 2020-05) Jain, Andrea R.; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsItem Daniel Boone and Joshua, the Mohican: American Lives and American Myths(The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021-11) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsThis article compares the life and legend of Daniel Boone (1734–1820) with that of his obscure contemporary, Joshua (1742–1806), a Mohican man whose life unfolded along a remarkably parallel, yet dramatically different course. Both men were born in the East, and moved steadily westward during their lifetimes, on roughly parallel routes. Both men were adept in Native and White ways. Yet Boone died of old age, while Joshua went to a fiery death as an accused witch at the hands of Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet. Boone became a legend during his own lifetime, while Joshua has remained consigned to a few footnotes. This article asks what narratives of America are possible with Joshua's story at the fore.Item Early American Music and the Construction of Race(University of California Press, 2021-12) Barnes, Rhae L.; Goodman, Glenda; Gordon, Bonnie; Ryan, Maria; Bailey, Candace; Garcia, David F.; Ramsey, Guthrie P., Jr.; Marshall, Caitlin; Eyerly, Sarah; Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsItem 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 ArtsThis 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.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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