Browsing by Subject "Protestantism"
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Item And footlights lit the path of the righteous: Theatricality and performance in the Second Great Awakening(2011-05) Branson, Leslie; Chansky, Dorothy; Bert, Norman A.This study examines the theatricalization of American Protestant evangelical Christianity during the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840). Using as organizing principles the concepts of form, function, and performance, I illustrate the theatrical shift in the religious culture of American evangelical Protestantism. Further, I attribute a large part of the success of the Second Great Awakening to the theatricalization of evangelical Protestantism.Item The healing subconscious: refocusing the historiography of psychology and religion through the Emmanuel Movement(2009-12) Ozanne, Rachel Lauren; Abzug, Robert H.; Tweed, Thomas A.The Emmanuel Movement is frequently cited by scholars of the history of religion and psychology in the United States. While the story of the movement has been told many times, scholars have missed key ideas about the movement that become clear when we compare the various historical approaches to the movement. I review the Emmanuel Movement’s ideas, taking note of its intellectual influences, its relationship to other liberal Protestant traditions, and its place in turn-of-the-century culture. By reviewing the ideas of the movement, I observe that the Emmanuel Movement brings into focus previously obscure intellectual figures in the history of the movement, foreshadows late-twentieth century cooperation between medicine and religion through mindfulness movements, and highlights a strand of liberal Protestantism that originates in a Jamesian psychology of the healing subconscious. This new look at the Emmanuel Movement thus provides new avenues of inquiry for students of religion and psychology.Item Local believers, foreign missionaries, and the creation of Guatemalan Protestantism, 1882-1944(2012-05) Dove, Stephen Carter; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 1957-; Kamil, Neil; Butler, Matthew; Tweed, Thomas; Sullivan-González, DouglassThis dissertation examines how Guatemalan converts transformed missionary Protestantism into a locally contextualized religion in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Using archival materials from local religious groups and public archives in Guatemala alongside missionary documents from the United States, this research identifies how converts adopted certain missionary teachings but reinterpreted or rejected others. This selective application not only altered the definition of Protestantism in Guatemala but also affected the early growth of the movement by creating contextualized forms of Protestantism that attracted more interest than foreign versions. The first section of the dissertation analyzes the theologies and goals that early missionaries brought to Guatemala and explains the intramural conflicts that created the first Protestant communities in the country. Between 1882 and 1921, five North American Protestant denominations and several independent missionaries entered Guatemala, each with particular ideas about how to improve the country both spiritually and materially. This internal diversity provided new converts with the ability to choose between multiple versions of Protestantism, but more importantly it also taught them how to carve out their own space between imported religious ideologies. The second section of the dissertation analyzes how local believers reinterpreted Protestantism within those spaces by pursuing four important areas of innovation: theological primitivism, Pentecostalism, political involvement, and nationalism. Despite protests from many foreign missionaries, between 1920 and 1944 numerous Guatemalan Protestants adopted variations of these four themes in attempts to create a culturally and socially relevant religious product. As new converts opted for these new local communities over missionary-led options, these four themes became defining hallmarks of Guatemalan Protestantism, which by the twenty-first century was practiced by one-third of the country’s population. This dissertation argues that these contextualized challenges to missionary ideas in the early twentieth-century made Protestantism an attractive local product in Guatemala and sparked the movement’s growth. It also demonstrates how poor and working class Guatemalans in the early twentieth century used Protestantism as a tool to participate in national conversations about race, gender, and class.Item Niches of Protestantism in Mexico : consequences of vacuums of political and religious influence(2015-05) Davis, María G.; Rodriguez, Nestor; Woodberry, Robert Dudley; Butzer, Karl W; Charrad, Mounira M; Green, Penny A; Young, Michael POver the last hundred and fifty years, Mexico's religious landscape has been undergoing an unprecedented change. The Roman Catholic majority established since colonial times has been experiencing a steady decline in membership, while Protestant affiliation has been steadily growing in rural and urban areas. Although scholars have focused on different aspects of the growth of Protestantism since the 1960s, research that examines the early development of religious pluralism in Mexico has been limited. This research analyzes the interplay of structural and cultural factors as well as religious and political vacuums that promoted the early settlement and continued presence of Protestant groups in the states of Campeche, Tabasco, and Yucatán between 1880 and 1960. A comparative historical approach highlights how changes in political, economic, social, and cultural spheres in southern Mexico contributed to religious pluralism and why early Protestantism followed a different pattern of expansion than that observed after the 1960s. Environmental, demographic, and socioeconomic factors influenced where Protestants settled and how they expanded to areas where the spiritual and practical needs of communities were not being met and how the social ties individuals built within those communities influenced the creation of religious pluralism. Social network analysis underlines the importance of key actors, such as women and local pastors, in the development of niches of Protestantism particularly during the period of strong conflict between the state and the Roman Catholic Church and during the creation of a new national identity. Finally, the importance that some Protestant denominations gave to the individual, their internal organizational structure, and their ability to navigate the growing secular field was the last element that contributed to the creation of niches of Protestantism in southern Mexico. By including both quantitative and qualitative data, this dissertation provides a research methodology that could be tested quantitatively and be applied to other areas of Mexico in particular and of Latin America in general.Item Speaking pictures : the sacramental vision of Philip Sidney(2009-08) Nydam, Arlen Dale; Wojciehowski, Hannah Chapelle, 1957-; Frost, Kate Gartner; Bruster, Doug; Chipps Smith, Jeffrey; Rumrich, JohnThis dissertation examines some of the Catholic ideas and people found in the life and writings of Philip Sidney. Due to Sidney’s aggressive advocacy of a pro-Protestant English foreign policy during the 1570s and 1580s, and to the anti-Catholic biases of many British and American academics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, previous studies have almost unanimously approached Sidney from an exclusively Protestant angle. This Sidney is the hero of English Protestant nationalism, the perfect poet-knight. The Sidney that emerges from the present study is much less unified: thoroughly anti-papal and anti-Spanish in his politics but warmly Catholic in his apparent metaphysical convictions. Catholic theology and devotional traditions were far from dead in Sidney’s England, and he was far from hostile toward them. By recovering Sidney’s engagement with Catholicism, from his consistent generosity to individual Catholics to the numerous sympathetic allusions to Catholic tradition in all his major works, this dissertation provides a new yet historically grounded way of reading Sidney. It also encourages a broader understanding of confessional diversity in the Elizabethan period.Item Transgressive agency and the English Romantic poets(2016-11-16) Bitgood, Nathan Daniel; Demson, Michael; Murfin, Audrey; Child, PaulThe theology of the Protestant Reformation, in particular, that of Calvinism, complicated the English Romantic poets’ approach to free will in diverse ways. In particular, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Gordon George Byron, and John Keats were profoundly affected by metaphysical concerns about individual agency. This thesis argues that while the Romantic poets wanted to believe in and advocate for individual liberty, their religious upbringings and subsequent development as reflective thinkers prompted a skepticism about free will and its ability to effect change for the better. In Coleridge and in Byron, individual liberty only affects chaos and, in the end, destruction. Keats, on the other hand, proved more ambivalent. Nonetheless, the critical response to his poetry, especially the long narrative poem Endymion, exposes a literary culture uncomfortable with the idea of free will effecting positive change.