Lived Theologies and Literature

Religion was largely ingrained into the identity and everyday existence of the nineteenth-century American woman, shaping the literature female authors produced. Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion examines this vast collection of fiction, political writings, poetry, and memoirs to explore the diversity of religious discourse of the time as told by authors, activists, and faith believers, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Piatt, Julia Ward Howe, Julia A. J. Foote, Lucy Mack Smith, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Fanny Newell. The collaborative product of ten scholars, this work focuses specifically on the lived theologies of these women, illuminating the ways they used the language of religious sentiment amidst the largely repressive context they found themselves in.

Mary McCartin Wearn opens with an introduction of the text, writing:

“Women’s literature of the nineteenth century provides an excellent artifact through which to illustrate the complicated and varied experience of religion in women’s lives. While feminine piety was a powerful force in the home, church, and community, women’s spiritual leadership was largely unofficial…

In a world where women were declared religious by nature but denied any official stature within the Church, the written word became an excellent means of establishing cultural authority and expressing faith in the public sphere.”

For more information on the book, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago

While the late 1800s brought a period of tremendous economic growth to the United States, this Gilded Age also revealed the extreme poverty and inequality suffered by the working class. In Union Made, author Heath W. Carter credits the beginnings of a new discipline– American Social Christianity– to these common laborers rather than the more often credited middle-class spiritual leaders of the day.

Workers believed God stood behind organized labor; institutional church leaders had strayed from the true gospel in their suspicions and reservations. With more and more working believers turning away from a false church, Carter writes that American Christianity was saved only when pastors embraced the plight of the common man in the spirit of the Social Gospel. Penned in the midst of a “New Gilded Age” developing today, Union Made offers a new way forward through lessons from the past.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“In contemporary America, where the gulf between the rich and poor threatens to yawn that wide again, Christianity and conservative politics have become so intertwined that many American believers are convinced that their faith mandates small government….Carter, however, shows us a different route.” —Church History

“No mere opiate or tool of oppression, working-class faith emerges from the pages of this extraordinary book as the generative force that made the nineteenth-century social gospel viable. Social Christianity made resistance against industrial capitalism and its barons a possible and necessary thing. Combining the finest qualities of classic social, urban, and labor histories with the curiosities of our scholarly (and political) moment, Union Made is a sharp, much-needed reminder that American Christianity has not always been free-market in persuasion or comfortable on the corporate side. Beautifully crafted, it is also a stirring must-read.” –Darren Dochuk, author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of EvangelicalConservatism

“In recovering these working-class voices, Carter makes a significant scholarly contribution to the field of American religious history while also deepening our understanding of the labor movement during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. More than just recasting the origins of Social Christianity, he reminds us of the profound moral debates that surrounded the rise of industrial capitalism and reveals how workers campaigned for justice as forcefully and ardently within the religious sphere as they did in the political and economic arenas.” –Thomas Rzeznik, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Find more information on the book here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness

Mental illness has always comprised a fundamental component of health, although the overwhelming majority of historical evidence shows little acceptance of and care for affected individuals. In Madness, Heather Vacek follows this trend in the American Protestant church’s response to mental illness through the last three centuries. Rooted in the notion that sickness was a consequence of sin, faith believers avoided association with patients and left them to the care of secular medical professionals.

However, five notable figures stood apart from this idea to reclaim the Christian response to mental illness: colonial clergyman Cotton Mather, Revolutionary-era physician Benjamin Rush, nineteenth-century activist Dorothea Dix, pastor and patient Anton Boisen, and psychiatrist Karl Menninger. Vacek considers these leaders amid the landscape of mass indifference to offer a way forward in the Christian care of patients and overall understanding of mental illness today.

In an excerpt from the book, Vacek writes:

“Human suffering concerned American Christians, but not all shapes of distress earned the same response. Beginning in the colonial era, Protestants professed to care for the well-being of bodies, minds, and souls, but those living with mental illnesses often received minimal attention…

The exploration of Protestants and mental illness demonstrates what appeared – and failed to appear – on congregational agendas. It also offers insight into how Christians engaged suffering, particularly seemingly intractable suffering. Within congregations, sufferers and their families struggled to voice their concerns about mental illness. Many simply remained silent and failed to receive the ministrations of the church. This volume explores why their journeys proved so difficult.”

To read more on this publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Changing the Narrative from Foe to Friend

Is there any hope for a future of better relations and peaceful coexisting between and among communities? Author Beatrice Bruteau says yes, basing her argument on two practices of Holy Thursday: the Footwashing and the Supper, or Holy Communion. She illustrates “how this new paradigm–a movement from Lord to friend–can dramatically alter our personal and social relations, our economic and political practices.” Creating new hopes out of a 2000-year-old tradition, The Holy Thursday Revolution is Bruteau’s longing for the transition from a world of distrust and dominance to one of peace and understanding.

In an excerpt of the 2005 publication, Bruteau writes:

“‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ This is such a well-known saying among us that we may not realize the profound dissonance involved, but we know that we are not able to live up to this ideal. We have excused ourselves by saying that it is an ideal, after all, and very difficult to attain, and we can only hope to approximate it sometimes and to a certain extent.

But this, according to my thesis, is not the trouble. The difficulty is that this exhortation flies in the face of everything else that our culture encourages and that our worldview sees. If we cannot love our neighbor as ourself, it is because we do not perceive our neighbor as ourself. We perceive the neighbor as precisely not ourself, but as a potential threat (or potential aid) to ourself… It is not a matter of the exhortation being an ideal that is difficult to attain; it is a contradiction of our culture that is strictly impossible to realize, so long as we see the world the way we do.”

Find more information on this book here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.