American Religious History

Dear Workshop,

On Thursday, May 24, David Mihalyfy, Ph.D. Candidate in History of Christianity will present a chapter from his dissertation:

“…almost all romantic stories have been suggested by some actual circumstance…”:

Tom Paine Confronts Late 18th c. America with the Problem of the Historical Jesus.

Time: 12:00, Thursday, May 24, 2012

Place: Swift Hall, Room 400

Food: Snacks provided, feel free to bring your lunch!

Paper: Copies of the essay are available by emailing changp@uchicago.edu

A short quote from David’s chapter follows:

Before the 18th c. was over, both parts of Tom Paine’s bestselling religious polemic The Age of Reason introduced a large number of Americans to the same intellectual challenges as anti-traditional biblical criticism associated with the academy in his quest to replace Christianity with deism. Anti-traditional biblical criticism would begin reaching small numbers of New England elites in the first decades of the next century, gain adherents among prominent albeit atypical antebellum figures such as Congregationalist minister Theodore Parker, and eventually spark the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy with the start of its institutionalization within the academy after the Civil War. Although religious radicals such as deists are sometimes mentioned as an anticipators of certain critical positions, more impressive but less well known is Paine’s success at fomenting international engagement with its intellectual challenges. Engagement does not necessitate acceptance, however, and since Paine’s dissemination of these ideas did not lead to widespread acceptance, the challenge that he issued greatly abated after the initial years-long burst of his work’s notoriety; although scattered figures such as the deists George Bethune English and Abner Kneeland would gain fame in part by reviving his challenges throughout the first part of the 19th c., none of their works would approximate Paine’s in popularity, leaving the more famous and more lasting intellectual challenge to be made by biblical criticism associated with the academy. In any case, even apart from its deserved place in the standard scholarly narrative of the history of biblical criticism, the controversy around Paine’s Age of Reason deserves examination because of its important synchronic implications: The Age of Reason suggests large-scale unifying features of interpretation of the gospels among forms of late 18th c. Christianity, precisely because it seeks to undermine them and harm Christianity as much as possible.

 

Best,

–Paul

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Paul Chang in advance at changp@uchicago.edu.

Tags: Deism, historical criticism, Tom Paine

Dear Workshop,

On Thursday, May 10, M. Sahm Suh, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology and Sociology of Religion will present a chapter from his dissertation:

“The Conservative Turn of the New Christian Right”

Time: 12:00, Thursday, May 10, 2012

Place: Swift Hall, Room 400

Food: Snacks provided, feel free to bring your lunch!

Paper: Copies of the essay are available by emailing changp@uchicago.edu

A short quote from Sahm’s chapter follows:

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, urban displaced persons and social outcasts thronged into the Chonggye Creek area of Seoul, making temporary homes in tin-roofed shacks. Most of these people left their rural hometowns for the metropolis without a clear prospect of how they would support themselves at a time when the entire nation was undergoing a rapid process of industrialization and urbanization, in line with Park Jung Heefs state-driven modernization project. It was in this part of Seoul that Kim Jin-hong, then a young seminary student, founded the Hwalbin (Invigorating the Poor) Church in 1971. Inspired by American social activist Saul Alinsky and Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, transmitted via Korean Minjung theologians, Kim believed that Christians should strive for social salvation as well as the redemption of individual souls. Therefore, in 1964, Kim participated in student rallies to protest against the restoration of diplomatic relations between Korea and Japan 20 years after the end of the colonialism, and, as a seminary student, went to work in a factory “to become a friend of workers.” In January 1974, he joined a group of young pastors in openly criticizing Park Jung-hee’s issuance of the First Emergency Measure, which restricted freedom of speech, assembly, and association. Kim was subsequently imprisoned for civil disobedience for over a year. When he was accused of being an endogenous, if not pro-North Korean, socialist because of his public challenges to the government, Kim readily admitted that he was a “biblical” socialist.4 In line with this classification, the key motive of Kim’s faith-based social activism was to follow in the footsteps of the prophet Isaiah and the Lukan Jesus, responding to the divine call “to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.”

 

Thirty years later, this Christian liberationist pastor seems to have radically changed his ideological stance, along with several other evangelical leaders who played key roles in the labor and democratization movements in the 1970s and 1980s. In keeping with their left-leaning stance in the past, these pastors remain critical toward the past military dictatorship and blind subscription to Cold War propaganda. Nevertheless, they unequivocally root for (formal) democratization and neoliberal capitalism and strongly oppose socialist policies and antiglobalization ideologies. Over the last decade, these pastors have not only fiercely mounted criticism against their past comrades or the ’80’s student movement generation for being captives of bygone socialist ideologies, but have also proactively participated in reviving and reforming conservatives as an important part of the so-called “New Right.” Since this group of evangelical leaders has always been active in public engagements and recently underwent an ideological conversion from the left to the right, I call them the “New Christian Right” (hereafter, NCR) to contrast them with the OCR group, which has consistently been conservative in ideological orientation.

Best wishes,

–Paul

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Paul Chang in advance at changp@uchicago.edu.

Tags: Christian Right, Korea

Dear Workshop,

On Thursday, May 3rd, we will be having a seminar on “The Craft of Teaching.”

Our special guest is Ann Taves, AM 1979, PhD 1983 (History of Christianity), Virgil Cordano, OFM, Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Divinity School’s Alumna of the Year for 2012.

Time: 12:00pm, May 3, 2012

Place: Swift 208

Food: Lunch will be provided with an RSVP: please email Paul at changp@uchicago.edu to confirm.

Paper: Material to be covered in the seminar is available by contacting changp@uchicago.edu.

Prof. Taves will be covering a syllabus from a class called “New Religious Movements.” I will quote a portion of the syllabus here:

Course Description: This class draws on research on new religious movements (NRMs) in religious studies, sociology, and anthropology to consider the emergence and development of a wide range of groups that might plausibly fall under the heading of NRMs. Case studies will include Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, ISKCON (Hare Krishna), Alcoholics Anonymous, Scientology, UFO networks, New Age channelers, and Transpersonal Psychology/Noetic Science. Students will be expected to research one of the groups in depth using published and Internet sources and learn how current members view their group’s history and development through interviews and visits to local groups.

 

Goals of the Course:

• To consider what scholars refer to as New Religious Movements critically in relation to the emergence and development of religious groups more generally.

• To analyze emergent groups in light of their goals, the means they offer for achieving them, and the organizational structures they develop for doing so.

• To consider how they legitimate whatever is new and seek to transmit it authentically in light of criticism, dissent, and other challenges to their worldview.

• To provide students with the tools needed to research the emergence and development of one group in depth.

This seminar is being held in conjunction with the Office of the Dean of the Divinity School.

Best,

–Paul

—

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Paul Chang in advance at changp@uchicago.edu.

Tags: Ann Taves, pedagogy

Dear Workshop,

On Thursday, April 19, Kyle Wagner, PhD candidate in the History of Christianity at the Divinity School will present:

“Countering the Great Humanist Threat: The Assemblies of God Educator and the Construction of a New Pentecostal Model of Higher Education, 1956-1975”

Time: 12:00, Thursday, April 19, 2012

Place: Swift Hall, Room 400

Food: Snacks provided, feel free to bring your lunch!

Paper: A copy of this essay can be obtained by emailing Paul at changp@uchicago.edu

An excerpt from Kyle’s paper follows:

In February 2002, in the still confused mix of shock, mourning, and patriotism that characterized much of the American national mood just months after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft performed his composition “Let the Eagle Soar” for an audience at the Charlotte, North Carolina campus of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. This patriotic and explicitly Christian tune, with lines such as “Let the might eagle soar/soar with healing in her wings/as the land beneath her sings/’Only God, no other kings” subsequently was employed for satiric effect by Michael Moore in his film Farenheit 9/11 as well as becoming a punch-line for comedians from David Letterman to Stephen Colbert. This ridicule in popular media sources, however, masks the intriguing fact that John Ashcroft, a member of the Assemblies of God (AOG), had ascended to the highest public office ever occupied by a Pentecostal Christian in the United States, complicating a common perception of Pentecostals as anti-intellectual and disengaged from politics.

In many ways, the story of John Ashcroft’s rise to this position of national influence must be traced back to his father, J. Robert Ashcroft, an Assemblies of God minister who became the denomination’s National Secretary of Education from 1953 to 1958 and President of Evangel College, the AOG’s first liberal arts college, from 1958 to 1974. Writing in 1957, Robert Ashcroft bemoaned the embattled state of the body, mind, and soul in a nation perceived to be advancing steadily toward ‘secularism’ and away from God. For Ashcroft, this national decline was intimately linked with higher education. Not only was higher education the source of our nation’s failure, it was also the key to its future success; the only question was what proper higher education actually should entail.

Best,

- Paul Chang

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Paul Chang in advance at changp@uchicago.edu.

Tags: Assemblies of God, higher education, Pentecostalism

Dear Workshop,

On Thursday, April 5, Catherine Brekus, Associate Professor in the Divinity School will present:

“Love Thy Neighbor” a chapter from her book Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (forthcoming from Yale in Fall of 2012)

Time: 12:00, Thursday, April 5, 2012

Place: Swift Hall, Room 400

Food: Snacks provided, feel free to bring your lunch!

Paper: Please email changp@uchicago.edu to request a copy of Professor Brekus’ paper.

The following is a short excerpt from the chapter:

1759. The French and Indian War is in its fifth devastating year. Many families in Newport have lost loved ones in the fighting, and because of high prices and dwindling food supplies many are also destitute. Newport’s almshouse is filled with widows and orphans who lack food, clothing, and a safe place to sleep.

Sarah spends many sleepless nights worrying about whether she and Henry might fall into bankruptcy again, but even though she can barely pay their rent, she is determined to help the hundreds of other impoverished and distressed people in Newport whose lives have been disrupted by the war. Praying to God in the pages of her diary, she promises to open her hand and heart to the “sick, poor, and needy”—a description that easily could have been written about Sarah herself. She, too, is chronically ill and has little money to spare, but inspired by Jesus’ injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” she resolves to emulate three biblical characters who sacrificed their own needs for the good of others: the good Samaritan who tenderly bathed a stranger’s wounds, the poor widow who gave away her last two mites to the public treasury, and the “profitable servant” in the Parable of the Talents who treated the hungry, naked, sick, and imprisoned as if they were Jesus himself. Inspired by the words of Jesus to his disciples, she transcribes them in her diary: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” If she cannot afford to give money to the poor, she can still visit the sick, comfort the dying, and share the gospel with others, and if she feels too weak to leave her house she can still pray. “Make me a blessing in my day,” she implores God.

One of the distinctive features of the new evangelical movement was its commitment to doing good. As we have seen, evangelicals were ambivalent about the humanitarian movement because of their conviction that suffering could be redemptive, but they also absorbed its language of benevolence as their own. Although evangelicals refused to see human flourishing as the greatest good, they accepted the premise that people should strive to alleviate suffering and to create a better world, and they had obvious affinities to a movement that echoed Jesus’ ethical command to “love they neighbor as thyself.” Holding two beliefs in tension, Sarah thought that God’s plan for the world included suffering, but she was also convinced that Christians were called to alleviate it. “If you have no Compassion, no Value of the bodies of Men,” George Whitefield warned, “you are not, indeed, my dear Brethren, Christians, nor true Disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Best wishes to all, and I hope to see you there!

- Paul

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Paul Chang in advance at changp@uchicago.edu.

Tags: Evangelicalism, humanitarianism, Sarah Osborn

Dear Workshop,

On Thursday, February 23rd, we will be having a special lunch and discussion with Mark Noll, Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at Notre Dame University.

Our discussion will focus on some of Professor Noll’s work on the Civil War, including his reviews of David Goldfield’s America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, George C. Rable’s God’s Almost Chosen People: A Religious History of the American Civil War, Harry S. Stout’s Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, and Professor Noll’s own article “Battle for the Bible” from the Christian Century.

Lunch will begin at 12:00pm in the Swift Hall Common Room, with a discussion of  the works to follow. Please email Paul Chang at changp@uchicago.edu for a copy of the papers under discussion and to RSVP for lunch.

The following is a short excerpt from Prof. Noll’s review of Rable’s book:

 

Finally, Rable demonstrates convincingly that the war between the states was, by far, “the ‘holiest’ war in American history” (p. 397).  It was not that religious disputes per se brought on the conflict or that troops and home fronts were by any means all faithfully pious or that religious considerations monopolized efforts to explain the conflict.  Rather, it was that religion “added a moral and often uncompromising intensity” (p. 49) to every phase of the war.  Moreover, the perhaps one-fifth to one-third of the populace for whom religious conviction was manifestly central “occupied a powerful if not commanding position in American intellectual, social, and cultural life” (p. 49).  In addition, interpretations of the war “under God” and in light of eternity were in both the shallow civil religion of the masses and the profound meditations of Abraham Lincoln the most serious efforts that Americans attempted during the conflict and immediately thereafter to fathom the meaning of the war’s immense destruction, the social revolution it caused for slaves and former slave owners, and the cultural earthquake it represented in so many spheres.

Best wishes to all,

–Paul

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Paul Chang in advance at changp@uchicago.edu

Tags: Christianity and the Civil War, Mark Noll

Dear Workshop,

On Wednesday, February 8th, 4pm-6pm, a symposium on Timothy Matovina’s new book “Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America’s Largest Church” will be held in Social Sciences 122 (1126 East 59th Street).

Timothy Matovina is a professor of Theology from Notre Dame University and the Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism.

More information can be found at the Lumen Christi website:

http://www.lumenchristi.org/?p=1172

I hope to see you all there!

–Paul

Tags: Catholicism, Latino

Dear Workshop,

On Thursday, January 26, Monica L. Mercado, PhD Candidate in the Department of History will present:

“ ‘What a Blessing it is to be Fond of Reading Good Books’: Catholic Women and the Reading Circle Movement in Turn of the Century America”

Time: 12:00, Thursday, January 26, 2011
Place: Swift Hall, Room 406
Food: Snacks provided, feel free to bring your lunch!
Paper: Copies of the essay are available by emailing changp@uchicago.edu.

Monica writes:

By the 1890s, Catholic reading circles—linked by a national journal and an active Catholic summer school program, modeled on Chautauquas—encouraged adult Catholics to embrace reading for pleasure and edification, as an extension of the American Church’s educational mission.  Actively promoting Catholic literacy and, often, women’s work to foster it, the Reading Circle movement embraced a wide range of texts and concerns.  “What a blessing it is to be fond of reading good books,” one 1896 article in the Catholic Reading Circle Review concluded, noting that “probably the greatest share of blessing imparted by the Reading Circle has come to women.”

This chapter is the fourth of five planned for my dissertation, “Women and the Word: Gender, Print, and Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century America.” Using the reading circles’ reports and syllabi, I explore one way that American Catholics at the turn of the century—lay women, but also many men—were encouraged to inhabit a world of ideas outside the boundaries of their local church or parish: through the printed word, with discussion in a lay-lead environment.  Furthermore, as middle and upper-middle class Catholic lay women approached the first years of the twentieth century, they often did so with a thirst for knowledge that had institutional supports unprecedented outside of the convent school. Focusing on Catholic reading circles from the late 1880s through the first decade of the twentieth century, then, I ask how exploring the act of reading “good books” might be one avenue for conceptualizing Catholic laywomen’s attempts to live their faith in the context of the hierarchical church and the larger world of late 19^th- and early 20^th- century America—especially in light of the fact that most studies of laywomen focus on devotional practice or personal faith.  And in the process of reading, I argue, American Catholics began to declare that “culture” and “Catholic” could be synonymous.

Best wishes and stay warm,

- Paul Chang

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Paul Chang in advance at changp@uchicago.edu.

Tags: Catholic women, reading circles

Dear Workshop,

On Thursday, January 12, Sarah Luna, PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology will present:

“Lovin’ on the Women of Boystown: The Spiritual, Spatial, and Relational Projects of American Missionaries in a Mexican Border Prostitution Zone”

Time: 12:00, Thursday, January 12, 2011
Place: Swift Hall, Room 406
Food: Snacks provided, feel free to bring your lunch!
Paper: Copies of the essay are available by emailing changp@uchicago.edu.

A small selection from Sarah’s work follows:

“There’s a real need to be needed in Americans, and it’s created like a “we need you” situation over here. The little girl Jasmine that came over and talked to us today for a long time would only come over and ask me when Americans were coming back to give her coloring books or to bring her shoes…And she has those things in her house, she doesn’t need them, and I thought, ‘I don’t want that to be the nature of our relationship.’ I’m happy to share whatever I have, that’s not the issue. The issue is… we’re both having needs met in an unhealthy kind of totally dysfunctional way. Somebody’s got some nice pictures to show at home of these sweet poor little Mexican kids they helped and somebody has a stash in their room of sweet gringo treats they’ve been getting their whole life.”

American missionary Stacy White

 

On a hot July day in the Mexican border city of Reynosa, a South African missionary named Elanore and I were two blocks from the prostitution zone (Boystown) looking for friends who, it turned out, were not home. As we walked back to my car, we passed a group of four Mexican children between the ages of about six and ten. My phone rang, and as I answered it and scheduled an interview with an American client who frequented Boystown, I saw the children posing and smiling as my missionary friend took pictures. The oldest girl, Jasmine, the one mentioned in the above quote, asked me if she could see what was in my purse, and I let her, mostly because I was distracted by my phone conversation. She reached into my purse, grabbed a ten dollar bill, and asked me in Spanish, “Will you give it to me?” I said no. She did this with several items in my purse, until I, who wanted her to leave me alone, finally agreed to let her have a pen. I finished my conversation with the Boystown client, and my missionary friend, Elanore, finished taking pictures.

This exchange, which occurred months after my interview with American missionary Stacy White, was a strange sort of literalization of the phenomenon she described, with the very same little girl asking me for money while Elanore, a member of Stacy’s team which focuses upon the prostitution zone, took photographs. The geographic proximity to the prostitution zone were what brought Elanore and me to Jasmine’s neighborhood, and it was in the walls of the same prostitution zone where I had first met Chuck, the client to whom I was talking on the phone. There we all were, each trying to get a little piece of the value produced by the difference the border creates—Jasmine digging dollars out of my purse, Elanore snapping photos of the cute Mexican kids, Chuck looking for inexpensive sexual encounters, and me taking head notes to later turn into fieldnotes for this vignette.

Best,

- Paul Chang

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Paul Chang in advance at changp@uchicago.edu.

Tags: Evangelicalism, Mexico, missions, prostitution

Dear Workshop,

On Thursday, December 1, Curtis J. Evans, Assistant Professor of History of Christianity will present:

“Demonstrating the Sufficiency of Christianity to Solve the Race Problem: The Federal Council of Churches and Race Relations, 1920-1950”

Time: 12:00, Thursday, December 1, 2011
Place: Swift Hall, Room 200
Food: Snacks provided, feel free to bring your lunch!
Paper: Copies of the essay are available by emailing changp@uchicago.edu.

A small selection from Prof. Evans’ work follows:

During its first meeting on July 12, 1921, held in Washington, D.C. at 10 o’clock in the morning, the Commission on Negro Churches and Race Relations of the Federal Council of Churches spelled out its analysis of the problem of race in America and what should be done about it. Robert Speer, the president of the FCC, called the meeting to order and spoke briefly about the requests of Southern representatives, black and white, to form a commission that specifically addressed racial issues. Speer stated that the problem of the “relations of the races” was the most difficult one facing humanity and presented “the most searching test” of Christian ideals and principles. He forcefully proclaimed that all gathered shared fundamental and common beliefs: God as the common father of all; humanity as an organ of the divine; and that all are bound together “in one bundle of life.” Given these shared premises, Speer noted, they were “committed to the method of cooperation and must, therefore, find ways of living together in mutual helpfulness, service and goodwill.” Especially in America, he asserted, where the race problem existed in its most acute form, American Christians had the “greatest opportunity in the world to make a constructive contribution to it its solution.” For Speer, the “mere existence” of the Commission would be testimony “to the fact that in Christianity there is a real solution for our inter-racial problem and that the churches are going to deal courageously with their responsibility of seeing that the Christian solution is achieved.” He expressed grave concern about the church’s failure to address racial conflict, noting that home and international missionary work would suffer as a result. If the church could deal successfully with its “racial problem in an effective way at home,” Speer concluded, the results would be “an undreamed of access of power to the Church on the foreign field.”

Professor Evans also has the following request for workshop participants:

One note: the paper that you have is the formal proposal that I sent to Oxford and I’m now in the process of formulating my response to three anonymous readers’ observations. I’d especially be interested in feedback on the most appropriate way to broaden this such that it is not merely an analysis of the internal dynamics of the FCC. This was one of the concerns of the readers.

Best,

- Paul Chang

Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Paul Chang in advance at changp@uchicago.edu.

Tags: Federal Council of Churches, race and Christianity, race relations