bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Five READING LIFE: THE INTERPRETING OF TEXISTENCE
Authors: Randall William L , McKim A. Elizabeth
Published: September 2008

This chapter begins applying concepts pertaining to reading literature (as introduced in Chapter 4) to reading life — a complex interpretive process which is central to growing, as opposed to merely getting old. The object of this process is the internalized narrative text through which we compose and comprehend our identity, or our “texistence.” The chapter explores various occasions, contexts, or types of self-reading — automatic, relational, therapeutic, programmatic, prescribed, doctrinaire, disciplined, cultural, literary — and the unique constraints and opportunities that each entails. It addresses the controversial question of a “good lifestory,” drawing on criteria put forward by psychologist Dan McAdams: coherence, openness, credibility, differentiation, reconciliation, and generative integration. To these criteria, the chapter adds critical awareness, ironic orientation, vitality, and truth value. The chapter concludes with the proposal that, ultimately, a lifestory is only as “good” as the reading it receives.
Seven EXPANDING OUR STORIES: THE MYSTERY OF MEMORY
Authors: Randall William L , McKim A. Elizabeth
Published: September 2008

This chapter discusses the infinite complexity of autobiographical memory and yet its utter necessity for constructing a viable sense of the self, i.e., a strong self-story. Like a literary text, however, memory contains countless gaps, given that we only perceive and process a fraction of what goes on around us: we are forgetting beings as much as remembering ones. Instead of accepting the prevailing metaphor for memory as a computer, the chapter submits a more appropriate metaphor — that of a compost heap — especially in light of memory's narrative dimensions and its association with faction more than fact. It then elaborates four angles from which the complexity of autobiographical memory can be appreciated: time, truth, self, and other. In the process, the chapter broaches such concepts as narrative truth, the narrative unconscious, and self-defining memories. Finally, the chapter outlines strategies for better accessing our memories and thus expanding our stories.
Eight EXAMINING OUR STORIES: THE QUEST FOR MEANING
Authors: Randall William L , McKim A. Elizabeth
Published: September 2008

This chapter discusses the quest for meaning-in-life and the need for a robust sense of it especially in later life, given the challenges it can bring. It argues that the nature of existential meaning cannot be comprehended without appreciating the narrative complexity of memory itself. Leaning on insights from narrative therapy, it explores what happens when meaning breaks down — when our lifestories become dominated, disjointed, disrupted — and we stand in need of narrative repair. After noting different types of reminiscence that researchers have identified, the chapter look at dynamic reminiscence as particularly fruitful for restarting stalled life-narratives, and for reading our stories in a deep or aesthetic manner. The chapter ends with comments on the nature of lifestory as meaning-filled, and suggests a heuristic for examining our lives that involves delving into our memories as we would into literary stories, critiquing them in terms of emplotment, characterization, narration, and interpretation.
Nine TRANSFORMING OUR STORIES: THE UNFOLDING OF WISDOM
Authors: Randall William L , McKim A. Elizabeth
Published: September 2008

This chapter explores the relationship between reading our lives and the unfolding of wisdom. It argues that a key manifestation of wisdom is self-knowledge, which itself needs viewing through a narrative lens. It then reconsiders both the formal practice of life review and the criteria for a good lifestory in light of a narrative perspective on wisdom. It goes on to discuss wisdom as the transformation in self-awareness that occurs as a result of continuing narrative development, irony as integral to narrative in general, and therefore an ironic orientation as integral to wisdom itself. In essence, narrative irony — the recognition of the disparity, fragmentation, openness, and multivalence that can characterize experience — permeates the good lifestory. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the sorts of self-reading contexts, or narrative environments, in which wisdom might therefore flourish. Such contexts are called wisdom environments.
Ten TRANSCENDING OUR STORIES: THE POETICS OF SPIRITUAL AGING
Authors: Randall William L , McKim A. Elizabeth
Published: September 2008

This chapter argues that spiritual aging is ultimately a narrative endeavor. After considering the relationship between spirituality and wisdom, aging, and religion, it proposes that spirituality has to do with transcending our lifestories. The inevitability of death is then explored from a poetic perspective, with death seen as having an aesthetic necessity, as The End. Along such lines, the chapter critiques the notion of “successful aging.” The powerful role of master narratives in the formation of individuals' lifestories is considered next, as is the idea that a life can be conceived as a sacred story, or parable, with limitless potential for meaning. The chapter then enlists the concepts of gerotranscendence, generativity, and genealogy to trace the various ways in which, effectively, we let our stories go. It argues that the recognition of the open-endedness of our stories and the experience of wonder at their mystery is a hallmark of spiritual growth.
The Global Environment, Natural Resources, and Economic Growth
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

Recently, the public attention has turned toward the intricate interrelation between economic growth and global warming. This book focuses on this nexus but broadens the framework to study the issue. Growth is seen as global growth, which affects the global environment and climate change. Global growth, in particular high economic growth rates, implies a fast depletion of renewable and non-renewable resources. Thus, this book deals with the impact of the environment and the effect of the exhaustive use of natural resources on economic growth and welfare of market economies, as well as the reverse linkage. It is arranged in three parts: Part I of the book discusses the environment and growth. The role of environmental pollution is integrated into modern endogenous growth models and recently developed dynamic methods and techniques are used to derive appropriate abatement activities that policymakers can institute. Part II looks at global climate change using these same growth models. Here, too, direct and transparent policy implications are provided. More specifically, tax measures, such as a carbon tax, are favored over emission trading as instruments of mitigation policies. Part III evaluates the use and overuse of renewable and non-renewable resources in the context of a variety of dynamic models. This part of the book, in particular, considers the cases when resources interact as an ecological system and analyze issues of ownership of resources as well as policy measures to avoid the overuse of resources. In addition, not only intertemporal resource allocation but also the eminent issues relating to intertemporal inequities, as well as policy measures to overcome them, are discussed in each part of the book.
Introduction
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This introductory chapter focuses on the impact of the globalization of economic activities on global growth, resources, and environment. It cites the increased demand for natural resources, especially by developing countries. It also considers the effects of environmental pollution. An overview of the three parts of the book is presented.
Introduction and Overview
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter presents an overview of the five chapters (Chapter 2-6) in Part I of the book. It discusses the economic models that study the link between economic growth and the environment. It focuses on a class of models in which economic activities lead to environmental degradation, and through this economic activity negatively affects the utility of households or the production activities of firms.
The Basic Economic Model
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter presents a simple variant of an economic model with environmental pollution and productive public capital. It considers a decentralized economy with a household sector, a productive sector, and the government. This model is analyzed assuming a logarithmic utility function.
The Dynamics of the Model with Standard Preferences
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

The growth model with environmental pollution and productive public capital analyzed in Chapter 2 was characterized by local and global determinacy. However, this result may have been derived due to the assumptions made, especially concerning the utility function of the household. This chapter allows for a more general utility function and then gives a complete characterization of the dynamics of the model. It also contributes to the literature on the dynamics of competitive economies with externalities.
Concluding Remarks
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter presents some concluding remarks about the economic models presented in Chapters 2 to 5. An endogenous growth model was presented with public capital and pollution. The uniqueness of this approach compared to the literature on environmental pollution and endogenous growth is the assumption that pollution only affects the utility of the household and not production possibilities directly. Analyses of the model demonstrated the effects of fiscal policy on the long-run balanced growth rate. Variations in both the income tax rate and the pollution tax rate were also shown to have either positive or negative growth effects.
Introduction and Overview
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter presents an overview of the chapters (Chapters 7-12) in Part II of the book. It discusses the problem of global warming and the numerous studies that analyze the impact of environmental degradation on economic growth. It then describes the model used in the subsequent chapters to study to the interaction between global warming and economic growth.
Facts on GHG Emissions and the Change in Average Global Surface Temperature
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter describes scientific knowledge concerning greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the change in global average surface temperature. It considers the climate system of the Earth is in terms of its global energy balance using so-called energy balance models (EBM).
A Descriptive Model of Endogenous Growth
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter presents the descriptive model of endogenous growth. It discusses the structure of the model and the balanced growth path. Numerical examples are also provided.
TheAKEndogenous Growth Model
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter presents a special form of the growth model by assuming that physical capital and the stock of knowledge can be summarized in one variable. This gives the so-called AK model of endogenous growth. The second-best abatement share as well as the socially optimal value for the investment share and the abatement share is computed assuming a logarithmic utility function.
A Model with Optimizing Agents
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter examines a model of endogenous growth and climate change assuming optimizing agents. It discusses the competitive economy, the social optimum, and the modeling of nonlinear feedback effects of the rise in temperature.
Concluding Remarks
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter presents some concluding remarks about the economic model presented in Chapters 8-11. Part II of the book studied the interrelation between anthropogenic global warming and economic growth assuming a simple descriptive model of endogenous growth. Using simulations, it was shown that increases in abatement spending may yield a win-win situation. That means a rise in abatement activities both reduces greenhouse gas emissions and raises economic growth. This holds for both the balanced growth rate and for the growth rate of GDP on the transition path.
Introduction and Overview
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter presents an overview of the chapters (Chapters 14-16) in Part III of the book. This part of the book focuses on the high demand for renewable and non-renewable resources arising from global economic growth.
Regulation of Resources
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This chapter exemplifies the problem of resource regulation by studying the tax rate as regulatory instrument. It presents a prototype intertemporal model of resource extraction with three state variables and one control variable. The three state variables are the stock of the resource, the capacity of the extractive industry, and its evolution of debt. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 16.2 lays out a three-dimensional model of resource exploitation that originates in Clark's contribution. Section 16.3 demonstrates, by employing a dynamic programming algorithm, that cyclical trajectories remain preserved even if a dynamic equation for the evolution of debt is added to the dynamics. Section 16.4 provides some concluding remarks.
Conclusion
Authors: Greiner Alfred , Semmler Willi
Published: September 2008

This concluding chapter presents a synthesis of discussions in the preceding chapters. The first part of the book analyzed in a small-scale model the interrelation between economic growth, the environment, and welfare of a country. The second part of the book studied the interaction of growth and global warming. The third part was concerned with economic growth and renewable and nonrenewable resources as well as with policies to prevent overextraction of those resources.
Minos and the Moderns
Authors: Ziolkowski Theodore
Published: September 2008

This book considers three mythological complexes that enjoyed a unique surge of interest in 20th-century European literature, art, and music. While many works deal with the literary use of myth—a subject of growing interest in recent decades—it is conspicuous that most of them ignore the three myths that are identified with the island of Crete and linked by the figure of the legendary King Minos: Europa and the bull (his parents), the minotaur (his stepson) and the labyrinth, and Daedalus and Icarus (his subjects). The book adduces the ideas of such precursors of modernism as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to explain the revitalization of myth in the early twentieth century. It posits an essential distinction between “primary” and “secondary” myth: that is, myth that has been ironized beyond its original religious meaning and liberated for literary and artistic adaptation. To this end the work analyzes examples drawn from every realm of art—from fiction and poetry and drama to painting, sculpture, opera, and ballet—to explore the particular appeal of the three Cretan myths to the modern consciousness.
Introduction: The Modernization of Myth
Authors: Ziolkowski Theodore
Published: September 2008

The introduction analyzes the resurgence of interest in Minoan civilization—its history and its myths—in the modern consciousness following the spectacular publicity in 1900 surrounding the excavations at Knossos of Sir Arthur Evans. It goes on to survey the role in this resurgence of such precursors in the modernization of myth as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It reviews the influence of writers including T. S. Eliot and Thomas Mann, who hailed the use of myth in modern literature and explains the distinction between primary and secondary myth. It suggests that fears of social chaos preceding and following World War I generated an urgent search for principles of order, which were fulfilled for many writers and artists by the striking and newly rediscovered Cretan myths.
The Other Cretans: Alienation, Invention, Liberation
Authors: Ziolkowski Theodore
Published: September 2008

This chapter, “The Other Cretans,“ briefly surveys literary treatments of the three principal Cretan women—Pasiphaë, Ariadne, and Phaedra—and then focuses on the shifting popularity of Daedalus and Icarus. While Daedalus initially held the foreground as the hero of scientific invention and technology, he was gradually displaced in popularity by his son, who came to public attention with the ascendancy of aviation and, in 1912, with the rediscovery of Pieter Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Icarus provided an appealing image of youthful rebellion and idealism as well as a personification of the poet. The chapter examines the case of the Italian resistance fighter Lauro de Bosis, whose life and death in 1931 eerily reenacted his poetic drama Icaro. It also examines some of the many poems that deal with Bruegel's painting.
Conclusion: The Modernity of Myth
Authors: Ziolkowski Theodore
Published: September 2008

The conclusion summarizes the manners in which the economic, aesthetic, psychological, and anthropological re-visions enabled precisely these three myths to be taken up as a mirror of the modern consciousness and suggests the essential modernity of myth as a vehicle for such ideas as sexual liberation, alienation, totalitarianism, technology, and personal liberation. It reviews the many forms and genres assumed from case to case by the three Cretan myths and concludes that their permeation of so many defining works of 20th-century literature, art, and musical drama convincingly demonstrates the remarkable resilience and modernity of ancient myth.
2 Methodology and the Study of Modernist Fiction
Authors: Gandal Keith
Published: September 2008

This chapter discusses methodology and places the book in the context of related scholarship on the subject. In particular, it takes issue with literary scholarship whose approach is based on a history of ideas or discourses and thus eschews attention to authors' biographies, or experiences of authors — and thus ultimately ignores historical experiences.(It addresses Walter Michaels' Our America, which is an influential example of such scholarship that addresses modernist novels and their relationship to 1920s nativism.) The chapter also argues with studies of the relationship between modernist style and politics that give attention to stylistics per se, apart from plot and character. It discusses the common plot that unifies the 1920s novels at issue, discusses why critics have missed this plot, and offers an alternative argument about modernist style in the context of modernist plots and characters, as well as the historical context of the mobilization. In so doing, it traces the deconstruction of the sentimental novel of seduction by Progressive Era realist writers and the rise of the modernist, racist promiscuity plot, which the three 1920s novels at issue here share with each other, and with Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust.
3 The Great Gatsby and the Great War Army
Authors: Gandal Keith
Published: September 2008

This chapter argues that the plot and characters of Fitzgerald's famous novel can be illuminated with reference to historical events and figures connected to the mobilization. Gatsby himself, a poor ethnic American (who Anglicizes his Germanic name) is the beneficiary of a new military meritocracy that was extended to ethnic Americans with education or bilingual ability. As such, Gatsby is particularly receptive to the military's propaganda about its “new man,” the “clean” soldier who refrains from sexual activity abroad. Daisy meanwhile resembles the historical figure of the “charity girl,” the woman or girl who fraternized with soldiers at training camps and caused problems for military authorities, especially in terms of spreading venereal disease. (Thousands of such “charity girls” were arrested during the war.) The chapter also discusses Tom Buchanan and Nick Carraway in terms of historical developments during and after the war. Finally, the chapter contains an extended discussion of the army intelligence tests (they have previously been seen almost entirely in terms of their postwar exploitation by immigration restrictionists), considering them as part of a set of military personnel initiatives, which, though biased against immigrants and ethnic Americans overall, nonetheless extended wartime opportunities to educated and talented ethnic Americans.
4 The Sun Also Rises and “Mobilization Wounds”
Authors: Gandal Keith
Published: September 2008

This chapter turns to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and discusses its plot and characters in terms of the wartime meritocratic mobilization and the postwar development of Jewish quotas at universities and medical schools. Jake's famous genital war wound is elucidated as an emasculation due to being posted at a “joke front,” an emasculation that Hemingway suffered even more intensely because he was ineligible for armed service on physical grounds and ended up as a Red Cross ambulance driver at the same “joke front.” Meanwhile, Jewish Robert Cohn, Jake's rival for Brett, is explained in terms of his “military school” background (whose significance critics have missed) as well as his experience at Princeton University (which was a leader in terms of excluding the ethnic “other”). Hemingway, who has a problem with the military because of his own implicit rejection by it, sets up a contrast between Jewish Cohn, neurotic military schoolboy, and bullfighter Romero, the true warrior. Brett is discussed in terms of the figure of the charity girl.
5 The Sound and the Fury and Military Rejects
Authors: Gandal Keith
Published: September 2008

This chapter takes up Faulkner's famous novel The Sound and the Fury. Again missing a crucial connection to the mobilization, critics have failed to understand Benjy as having been shaped by the extraordinary attention given to the problem of the feebleminded during the war: the army's intelligence testing was initially instituted to eliminate “mental defectives.” Although Fitzgerald and Hemingway's novels focus on ethnic Americans who have experienced nondiscriminatory opportunity (as well as subsequent backlash), Sound switches the focus to Anglos who don't qualify or are losing the competition in the context of a rising meritocracy. (Faulkner was one such real-life Anglo who was rejected by the army.) Idiot Anglo Benjy is the opposite of talented ethnic Gatsby. The chapter also discusses the love triangle among promiscuous Caddy, her lover Dalton Ames (a returning soldier), and her brother Quentin (a romantic, emasculated Anglo figure who is awed by Ames). The chapter finishes with a discussion of the novel's portrayal of African Americans, Jewish Americans, and Italian Americans, and discusses the portrayal of the last group in terms of the postwar exploitation of the intelligence test results by immigration restrictionists.
6 Postmobilization Romance
Authors: Gandal Keith
Published: September 2008

These three authors, although compulsively writing out of a distress engendered by their “mobilization wounds,” learned by the time of writing their twenties masterpieces to submerge and transfigure this pain so as not to embarrass themselves with the revelation of their sense of inadequacy. All three had produced previous texts that openly address Anglo characters' humiliations in the military and so come off as bitter. The high modernism of Gatsby, Sun, A Farewell to Arms, and Sound, with its symbolism and its sense of tragedy (as opposed to bitterness), is a result of these authors developing the devices that allow them to disguise their mobilization traumas and thus to continue to exorcise them, but now obliquely. In Hemingway's and Faulkner's novels, “objective” sexual obstacles (injury, incest taboo) stand in for the military rejection that emasculated these Anglo authors, disguising and transfiguring it. Hemingway and Faulkner dignified the suffering of their Anglo alter egos by making their true loves impossible; Fitzgerald's alternative strategy for dignifying his sense of rejection was to split himself between two alter egos — one Anglo American and one ethnic American — and to give the experience of social rejection to a tragic character based only minimally on himself, namely, Gatsby.
Afterword Here We Go Again
Authors: Gandal Keith
Published: September 2008

This short Afterword concludes the book with a comparison between the post-World War I novels at issue and Burroughs's post-World War II novel. Burroughs's autobiographical novel seems at first glance a world away from the sublimations, projections, obfuscations, and tragic romanticisms of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. But on closer inspection, and despite the thrust of the Prologue and its conclusion that the narrator's drug addiction stems from a lack of motivation, Burroughs (along with his narrator) wanted to become an officer in World War II, but he was stymied in his substantial efforts to do so, much like the 1920s authors. Thus, his 1950s postmodern novel of “absent desire,” like the 1920s modernist novels of “impossible love,” is, on another level, a tale of a love or desire unrequited by the military. Given the US involvement in war in the 20th century — and the tremendous social upset, or accelerated modernizing, that mobilizing for world wars involves — along with the fact that the military was something like the supreme arbitrator of manhood in the world war eras, it is not surprising that there is a rich vein of what be called mobilization fiction in American literature, but it is a vein that has so far been mostly untapped.
Introduction
Authors: Maclean Kama
Published: September 2008

Departing from the debates about the nature of communitas vis‐à‐vis Hindu pilgrimage, the study begins by pointing out some of the conceptual shortfalls that have plagued the study of pilgrimage. Aiming to bring a broader concept of power to the study of pilgrimages, the Introduction reflects upon the potential of a pan‐Hindu, mass pilgrimage in engendering the imagination of a “national” community. After briefly describing the Kumbh Mela genre of festivals and Allahabad's annual counterpart, the Magh Mela, the themes of the book are identified, a conceptual framework is delineated, and an overview of each of the chapters is given. The nature of available and accessible historical sources and their attendant assumptions that have underpinned the colonial administration and study of popular piety in India are set out and problematized
Proclamation, Pilgrimage, and Politics
Authors: Maclean Kama
Published: September 2008

This chapter charts the changes in public expressions of piety at the sangam in the closing decades of the 19th century, as the festival became popularised and attended in progressively larger numbers. Seizing the arena of sovereignty that had been created around religious observances in the 1858 Proclamation, early Indian nationalists sought to influence and oppose British power in mela matters, arguing in sophisticated terms that religious rites had become rights. The British had always prided themselves on positive public perceptions of British rule gained at pilgrimage places, and attempted, where practicable, to incorporate Hindu opinion into mela management, but refused to consign the management of the festival into Indian hands. The colonial administration of the mela became highly politicised and a item of concern in the Indian press, partially in response to harsh measures applied to counteract the mela's capacity to spread epidemic diseases, but also the colonial concern that it also acted as a medium to spread sedition. The politics of the mela were also symbolic of larger, inchoate issues in Indian nationalism, such as representation and sovereignty. It was during this period that the mela most discernibly changed from being an eclectic social fair with pious aspects, to a more distinctly “religious” gathering. As political interest groups in Allahabad increasingly dictated the acceptable limits of mela management to the British, the mela turned from being a profitable enterprise for the British, to an expensive one.
Conclusion
Authors: Maclean Kama
Published: September 2008

While there are stark and obvious differences between the manner in which colonial and postcolonial governments manage the Kumbh Mela, there are also striking continuities. The capacity of the pilgrimages such as the Kumbh to act as a conduit for information as pilgrims move across regions to attend the festival, despite the obvious limitation that it speaks to predominantly Hindu audiences, is such that few governments declined to take advantage of it. Further, the defence of the mela from colonial excesses shows but one example of the manner in which “religion” came to constitute an important sphere of political activity.
Religion of Fear
Authors: Bivins Jason C
Published: September 2008

This book investigates American political religions by studying how conservative evangelical political orientations are shaped and spread by pop cultural narratives of fear and horror. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to what it calls the “religion of fear”, a form of religious social criticism produced and sustained in evangelical engagements with pop culture. The book's cases include Jack Chick's cartoon tracts, anti‐metal and anti‐rap preaching, the Halloween dramas known as Hell Houses, and Left Behind novels. By situating them in their sociopolitical contexts and drawing out their creators' motivations, the book locates in these entertainments a highly politicized worldview comprising evangelical piety, the aesthetics of genre horror, a narrative of American decline, and a combative approach to public politics. The book also proposes its own theoretical categories for explaining the cases: the Erotics of Fear and the Demonology Within. What does it say about American public life that such ideas of fearful religion and violent politics have become normalized? The book engages this question critically, establishing links and resonances between the cultural politics of evangelical pop, the activism of the New Christian Right, and the political exhaustion facing American democracy.
“Scary Jesus”
Authors: Bivins Jason C.
Published: September 2008

The book's introduction describe the image of “Scary Jesus,” which prompted a shift in approach to American political religions from one rooted in conventional studies of protest and government to one oriented around cultural politics and representation. The chapter explores the way in which popular discourse and imagery can be manipulated for political purposes, and specifically engages the efficacy of tales of fright and horror in these endeavors. The chapter surveys standard approaches to religion and politics, and — drawing on multiple disciplines — proposes to move beyond standard approaches to “church and state” or “civil religion”. The chapter concludes by proposing two new terms — the Erotics of Fear and the Demonology Within — for thinking about the Religion of Fear.
“A Common Thrill”
Authors: Bivins Jason C.
Published: September 2008

This chapter establishes four contextual factors shaping the Religion of Fear: the history of evangelicalism, political fear, American Christian demonology, and the evangelical mediascape. By situating the Religion of Fear historically and comparing it with both political fear and earlier forms of demonology, this chapter reveals its specific contours. The chapter examines the fearful qualities of religion. It then describes the emergence of evangelicalism within a cluster of concerns to establish religious identity against fearful Others. This chapter next describes the way in which elements of horror and the Gothic resonate with religious strategies of alterity. The chapter concludes by describing the evangelical culture industry, which is part of the work on religious identities.
“Jesus Was Not a Weak Fairy”
Authors: Bivins Jason C.
Published: September 2008

The first of the book's four case studies examines the long‐standing cartoon ministry of Californian Jack Chick. Situating Chick's work in the history of the comics genre and in the visual culture of American religions, this chapter explores the specific narrative structures of Chick's political vision alongside the particular demons he portrays in his graphic art. The chapter also includes a detailed biography of Chick, a history of American comics, and a close reading of the Chick canon. The chapter concludes by documenting Chick's sense of social decline and religious fear, themes that acquire power as the Religion of Fear develops over time.
“Runnin' with the Devil”
Authors: Bivins Jason C.
Published: September 2008

This chapter explores long‐standing Christian criticisms of popular music and the way in which they serve as vehicles to articulate larger social concerns about “cults,” gender, crime, and authority. Two specific genres — heavy metal and rap — have attracted the greatest critical attention in recent decades. Critics such as Bob Larson, Jacob Aranza, and Jeff Godwin have engaged these genres consistently, seeing in these musics invitations to demonism, encouragements of self‐destructive behavior, and seductions away from a way of life once normative in “Christian America.” The chapter explores these criticisms, and how they received greater attention than similar themes in Chick, by examining the careers and literature of the critics, the two genres themselves, and anti‐rock's politics.
“Shake ’Em to Wake ’Em”
Authors: Bivins Jason C.
Published: September 2008

The subject of this chapter is the growing popularity of Christian alternatives to Halloween haunted houses. The most famous of these is Keenan Roberts's Hell House, a multiscene morality play that uses the techniques of horror entertainment to illustrate both a general and a specific narrative of social and political decline. These phenomena became very popular — attracting the attention of both supporters and critics — and explicitly engage the hot‐button political issues central to New Christian Right activism and organizing. Hell Houses' individual scenes illustrate to adolescents the harms (such as abortion, gay weddings, and school shootings) awaiting them in a society that — nominally committed to tolerance and social harmony — has unwittingly drawn them toward hellfire.
“Already Decided and Carrying a Weapon!”
Authors: Bivins Jason C.
Published: September 2008

The last of the case studies documents the vast popularity of the apocalyptic thrillers, Left Behind. Coauthored by long‐standing New Christian Right architect Tim LaHaye, these books use a dispensational premillennialist framework to pronounce judgment on a sinning America by projecting the fates of sinners “left behind” after the Rapture. Using narrative strategies lifted from both horror and technothrillers, the authors enact their political sensibilities by situating long‐standing Christian Right social concerns in end‐of‐the‐world fiction. The chapter examines these themes and also surveys Christian apocalypticism, Christian publishing, and the political history of Tim LaHaye.
“Like Beating the Dog”
Authors: Bivins Jason C.
Published: September 2008

The book's conclusion draws together the cases, exploring their similarities and differences. The bulk of the chapter focuses on the meanings of the religion of fear's politics, shown both in the way this discourse parallels the long‐standing activism of the New Christian Right and in the way it resonates with the culture of political decline and hostility in the United States. The chapter explores the limits of available literature on political religions — that produced by academics and also by public commentators — and encourages scholars of religion to engage their subjects more critically and politically.
Puritans and Revolution
Authors: Brissett Wilson N.
Published: September 2008

This chapter reviews the development of the puritan jeremiad tradition within the logic of covenant theology and suggests ways that its influence persisted in American culture after the era of regional puritan ascendancy. This chapter shows how the jeremiad, while wholly negative on the surface of its moral argument, was driven by an attempt to return to the social origin, correct the moral trajectory of society, and so prevent the social consequences of godlessness it so vividly prophesied. Later, the jeremiad proved to be a flexible cultural tool that could serve the purpose of dissent from established authority. In the end, it is the power of the jeremiad form to oppose social abuses, and advocate moral reform by recalling “originary principles,” that survives into the revolutionary and early republican periods.
The Early Republic
Authors: Neem Johann
Published: September 2008

Thomas Jefferson is famous for believing that reason would moderate American Christianity. In time, he prophesied, Americans would replace faith‐based Christianity with a Unitarian Christianity better suited for a republic. This chapter explores Jefferson's theory of historical progress to understand how he reached his mistaken conclusion at a time when evangelical Christianity, far from receding, was deepening its influence in American culture. It argues that Jefferson believed that a “wall of separation” between church and state would reform American Christianity by subjecting it to public scrutiny.
The Civil War
Authors: Hsieh Wayne Wei‐siang
Published: September 2008

This chapter discusses the relationship between evangelical Protestantism and the American Civil War through the lives of Abraham Lincoln and William T. Sherman. The jeremiad script of evangelical Protestantism played a major role in sustaining both the Union's and the Confederacy's war efforts, even while Abraham Lincoln's own views on Providence evolved in a manner both similar to and distinctive from that of his contemporaries. Sherman, in contrast, represented the war's potential for fomenting godlessness, with the challenge his Deification of the State represented to conventional nineteenth‐century Christianity. While evangelicals proved equal to the task of fending off this heterodoxy in the short term, the military and political forces Sherman represented had lasting effects on some postwar figures like Oliver Wendell Holmes, and in historical terms, they cannot be ignored.
The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Authors: Nichols Christopher McKnight
Published: September 2008

This chapter examines three important strands of progressive thought in the late nineteenth century to reveal the tensions between ideas about progress, religion, and science, and resulting predictions about America's religious future. This chapter first delineates a populist‐secular group of thinkers, exemplified by Robert Ingersoll, “the great agnostic” proponent of freethinking, whose prophecies blended the older jeremiad form with a heightened emphasis on atheistical science and Enlightment rationality. The second strand of thought explored in this chapter came from the ranks of progressive intellectuals, represented in part by the powerful pragmatic philosophy of religion developed by William James in his book, Varieties of Religious Experience. Finally, this chapter argues for a third diverse group comprised largely of ministers and social gospel activists, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who attempted to reform the nation along explicitly Christian lines.
World War I and After
Authors: Schultz Kevin M.
Published: September 2008

In “Godlessness and the Scopes Trial,” Kevin M. Schultz examines the most famous battle over religion in the 1920s, and perhaps the most famous battle in the entirety of the twentieth century, the Monkey Scopes Trial of 1925. Schultz shows how the two sides that hogged the limelight during the debate—the thankful godlessness of Clarence Darrow and puritanical jeremiads of William Jennings Bryan—have crowded out a third tradition that was burgeoning in the 1920s, a tradition that matured into mainline liberal Protestantism. Schultz also explains that Bryan's fear of evolution had more to do with Bryan's opposition to the then‐respectable tradition of Social Darwinism, and not his fear that the Darwin account de‐centered man in the Biblical story of creation. Bryan's fear, thus, was not the damnation that would result from rising secularism but rather of the effect of exposing America's school children exposed to the dangerous notion that only the fittest will survive—a notion that potentially invalidates any attempt at social welfare.
From 11/9/1989 to 9/11/2001 and Beyond
Authors: Yates Joshua
Published: September 2008

This chapter examines leading figures and institutions of the Religious Right in the United States and the distinctive narrative form its public and political activism has taken from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present: namely, the jeremiad. The resurgence of publicly assertive religion has become the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny and the source of much political concern. Social scientists and policymakers have long presumed that as the world modernized it would inevitably secularize. The political ascendancy of the Religious Right in the United States and, more recently, the consequential militancy of radical Islamism confounds conventional wisdom of inevitable secularization. The chapter closes with a cursory comparison of the jeremiad with the jihad, the distinctive narrative form of radical Islamism, which reveals that despite strong rhetorical similarities between them, crucial differences persist in their political effects. Moreover, such a comparison reveals an important irony: just as the specter of resurgent religion has been undermining the longstanding academic confidence in the self‐evident inevitability of secularization, the perceived threat of secularization has been busy mobilizing the faithful both at home and abroad.
1 1800–1846
Authors: Ellis Katharine
Published: September 2008

The chapter begins with a discussion of the French museum concept, moving to an explanation of why the musical survivors from the ancien régime were all Italian or Italianate (mostly Pergolesi and Jommelli, but also Rousseau). Discussion of the work of Alexandre-Étienne Choron, the first wave of concerts historiques under François-Joseph Fétis, and the concert series of the Société de Musique Vocale Religieuse et Classique, illustrates how and why some categories of French music of the recent and more distant past were expunged from French collective memory, replaced by a (sometimes fake) Italian musical heritage that was promoted as superior, while other categories were marked out for nationalist celebration. The chapter discusses the rise of ultramontanism, and traditions in publishing and education, in relation to patterns in early-music revivalism, and ends with discussion of regional practices, especially at Carpentras (with its long-standing Cathedral tradition of performing the unfashionable Lalande) and Rouen (the pianist Amédée Méreaux's revivals of the Fétisian concert historique).
2 1846–1878
Authors: Ellis Katharine
Published: September 2008

This chapter focuses on a period when the expansion of early music activity began to cause adverse comment: was it a reactionary threat to living composers? Developments in music publishing attest to a burgeoning domestic and performance market; the performed repertory both diversifies and becomes more selective, with keyboard and other instrumental music appearing more frequently (but provoking gender-related protest) on the concert stage; amid expressions of self-doubt about musical richness nationwide and the quality of new composition, there are concerted attempts to create a musical France via amateur and orphéon performance of early choral masterworks. The chapter extends from the demise of La Moskova's “Palestrinian” society and the end of the July Monarchy, beyond the Franco-Prussian War, to the eve of stable Republican government in France. Change is most clearly signalled in new Second-Empire educational ventures in sacred music (the École Niedermeyer, with its focus on plainchant, Palestrina, and Bach; the rise of “Palestrinian” maîtrises at Langres, Rouen, Moulins, and Autun); transition is evident in continued attention to democratization, in repeated attempts to rehabilitate “la musique française” and in the increasingly nationalist rhetorics of historical and critical writings on early music.
3 1878–1900
Authors: Ellis Katharine
Published: September 2008

This chapter continues the exploration of repertorial change, beginning with an examination of the almost entirely masculine virtuoso cult of early organ music, given new impetus by Alexandre Guilmant's Trocadéro concerts from 1878. The contributions of Guilmant and Louis Diémer to Bach organ music and French clavecin music, respectively, are discussed intensively, as is the rise of Bach as a profound, Romantic, Wagnerian, and universally Christian composer. In a largely anticlerical age, religious politics reappear with a discussion of the Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais and the early Schola Cantorum as, in part, moderate ultramontane initiatives aimed at reconciling the differences of pro-Gregorian and pro-Palestrinian clerics. Intensifications of nationalist fervour result in new attempts to rehabilitate la musique française: in addition to Diémer's contribution, a first collected edition of French opera (Michaëlis, 1877-84); and Carpentras, Goudimel, Lassus, and Rameau performances by Charles Bordes and his Chanteurs from 1892. Regionalist imperatives underpin the first modern staging of Adam de la Halle's Jeu de Robin et de Marion, in Arras (1896).
4La musique françaiseat the Crossroads
Authors: Ellis Katharine
Published: September 2008

Three interrelated case studies demonstrate how revivalists sought to convince a war-torn society of the importance of their stage-music heritage: a periodical (La chronique musicale, 1873-6); a collected edition (the Chefs d'oeuvre classiques de l'Opéra français, 1877-84; and the fully staged productions of Lully and Charpentier incidental music at the Théâtre de la Gaîté and the Comédie-Française). The chapter shows how the 1870s revival of interest in French opera remained only symbolic unless the music was packaged as an “accessoire” (such as dances arranged for piano) or as concert excerpts: even the Lully and Charpentier stagings were dependent for their success on reverence for Molière. Nevertheless, crucial changes of the 1870s in the rhetorical presentation of this repertory would have fuller effect in the 1890s. The chapter ends with an analysis of the terms in which supporters redefined the Frenchness of the repertory in positive terms — terms that have, for better or for worse, remained descriptors of classic French music ever since.
5 Sources of Frenchness
Authors: Ellis Katharine
Published: September 2008

This chapter examines the book's earliest main repertories — from the 13th century to the death of Lassus — from the perspective of national pride. Adam de la Halle's Jeu de Robin et de Marion — viewed by Fétis in the 1830s as the first opéra-comique and therefore the first opera — provided increasingly important compensation for the absence of France from the traditional narrative of the birth of opera. Moreover, grounding its music in northern French folk traditions suggested that operatic art stemmed from French peasants unconnected with either Italian or elite culture. Beginning with a story of contested borders and composer appropriations, the chapter uncovers the sometimes conflicting elements which historians promoted as emblematic of Frenchness and superiority, analyzing the irony that sacred works by the celebrated Franco-Flemish school were uniformly vilified, even by patriotic historians. Monody was natural or “folk-like”, but polyphony by the same composer was often sidelined. Only in the 1890s, after Julien Tiersot began to celebrate early masses and motets as repositories of the voice of the French people, could rehabilitation begin.