bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Dawn of Reformation Preaching
Authors: Petersen Rodney L
Published: November 2023

Reformation preaching, concerned with particular religious abuses, was shaped by prophetic anticipation.’ Whether in Italy, among apocalyptic Spiritualists who drew inspiration immediately from Savonarola and more distantly from Joachite spirituality, or in Spain among mystically oriented Alumbrados in search of a “third church, “ or in the heartland of the empire, in central Europe, among such peasant movements as associated with the visionary Johann Eberlin of Gilnzberg, one can discern such expectation. Deepened biblical study, whether Humanist or mystical in intent,2 the search for a universal science,3 astrology,4 and divination5 were all used to strengthen the prophetic vision despite caution and censure from the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517).

Much of this prophecy was linked to particular events at the close of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. New economic conditions in central Europe were leading to an upheaval in social relations. The fall of the Byzantine Empire and the arrival of Turkish armies from the east into European precincts offered a sense of the impending Judgment of God upon the last of the kingdoms envisioned by the biblical prophet Daniel. Finally, continued anxiety over religious and institutional failure in the Church contributed to the popularity of apocalyptic prophecy, fear of false prophets, and search for true ones. Competing theories about who such prophets were grew through the sixteenth century, sometimes including one who would appear like an earlier paragon of virtue, perhaps a restored Enoch or Elijah.
Bullinger and the Testimony of the Church
Authors: Petersen Rodney L
Published: November 2023

To the anxieties of the sixteenth century, whether political fears of internal social disintegration, Turkish advance into Europe, natural catastrophe, or even that of a fraudulent clergy,1 Luther’s answer was to preach the effective graciousness of God. Our two witnesses were actual or symbolic representatives of God’s last call to humanity to accept that grace prior to Judgment. Heinrich Bullinger, and many of the reformers who would take the name “Reformed “ as opposed to “Lutheran, “2 nuanced this answer differently. Without denying the proffered grace of God, their preaching focused more upon God’s promise given throughout the history of his people. Our witnesses became symbols of that promise.

Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575), reformer of Zurich in Switzerland and successor to Huldrych Zwingli, writes about prophets as they herald God’s promise. The existence of the Christian ministry is a sign of God’s care for humanity. The work of that ministry, of prophets and preaching or prophesying, is to call people to live in terms of this covenant. Prophets are a part of Bullinger’s concern for the restoration of the precepts of the covenant in the sixteenth century. They call God’s people to return to the theological simplicity and spiritual immediacy connoted for him by the covenant. The way in which Bullinger’s ideas of prophets, prophecy, and, indeed, the covenant are handled in his set of sermons on the Apocalypse, a book which he argues is a summary of biblical revelation, offers (1) an affective argument to his conception of the place of the covenant in shaping history, (2) a polemical yet effective vision of the Reformed pastor, and (3) lays an important part of the foundation for the later speculative development of the Apocalypse among Reformed churches and with implications for Protestant historiography.7
Rebuilding the Temple
Authors: Petersen Rodney L
Published: November 2023

Commenting on our text (Rev. 11:11-13), Heinrich Bullinger noted that he had seen arisen in the previous thirty years a company of prophets (communis prophetia) like “Mirandola, Reuchlin, Erasmus, Luther, Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Melanchthon. “1 “Innumerable others “ are cited as having taken the mantle. Many stepped forward to prophesy with the new vernacular Bible in hand, thus raising the issue of the definition of prophecy and of prophetic legitimacy.

While the general subject of prophecy is beyond the scope of this study, the question itself, as it was raised in relation to our text, is intriguing and can serve to provide a guide to the contours of prophecy as it was conceived in Reformed circles. In searching for the identity of the two witnesses we have seen how from the start prophetic models were drawn upon from Israel’s past. Not only do specific allusions in our text call for such, but the Apocalypse is replete with references to the books of the Old Testament. By raising up an Elijah or Enoch one raised up the company of prophets in the Old Testament.
Introduction
Authors: Prelinger Catherine M
Published: November 2023

Mainline Protestantism is the current focus of significant scholarly attention; the popular press has also been attracted by what it calls the shift “from mainline to sideline”, or “those mainline blues.” Oddly, few so far have addressed the situation of women in the mainline or asked what it may have to tell us about the mainline’s widely analyzed “decline.” As a category of analysis, gender has been so overlooked in attempts to understand the mainline that little attention has been given even to the proposition, formulated as early as 1977, of the feminization of American Protestantism achieved by the alliance between an influential sector of Northeast American women and their clerical mentors. Nor has an opinion on the prominence of women among the mainline missionaries been ventured.
The Anthropology of Vitality and Decline: The Episcopal Church in a Changing Society
Authors: Buchanan Constance H
Published: November 2023

Mainline Protestantism, widely understood to be the primary religious force shaping America’s national identity and social values since the Pilgrims landed, is increasingly viewed as in decline. With it the Episcopal Church, long a flagship of the liberal Protestant establishment, is seen as in decline as well. It seems the center will not hold. This is one of the chief features of the landscape of American religion at the close of the twentieth century. Among North American Christians, the prominence of liberal mainline Protestantism is perceived as giving way in the face of the vitality of black Protestant groups, Roman Catholic Church membership, and the conservative evangelical churches especially. The liberal religious establishment has been defined by scholars as at once a particular set of Protestant denominations and a personal network of leaders in American society connected with those denominations. It is this establishment that appears no longer to be in the position to direct American Protestantism as a whole and, as the dominant force in American religious life, to aspire as well to the exercise of broad cultural authority.
The Nature Of The Human Condition: The Human As Mythic And As Homo ReligiOsus
Authors: Cave David
Published: November 2023

In Eliade’s The Old Man and the Bureaucrats, the gentle, elderly Farama Zaharia, former principal of Primary School No. 17 on Mantulesa Street, undertakes a visit to Vasile I. Borza, a major in the Ministry of Internal Affairs (the Police), whom Farama believes is a former student of his. Farama hopes to renew contact and relive nearly forgotten memories.
Introduction
Authors: Rue Loyal
Published: November 2023

When Charles Darwin’s revolutionary thesis began to work its way through the halls and streets of London, a lady of the period is reputed to have remarked, “It cannot be true; but if it is let us hope it does not become generally known.” I must confess that something of the spirit of this woman’s remark has been at work in motivating this book. A dangerous thesis has been growing in our midst for the past two centuries or so, one I feel has become too generally known.
Deception in Historical Perspective
Authors: Rue Loyal
Published: November 2023

The Task before us is to assess the manner in which deception has been regarded within the context of Western intellectual and moral traditions, both religious and secular. A thorough examination of this topic might easily occupy an intellectual historian for the better part of a long career. But since the scope of this book is more broadly defined, our survey of the historical dimension must be restricted. In particular, the focus of this chapter is limited to Western attitudes toward the dangers of being deceived, quite aside from the evils of deceiving. At first sight this restriction might seem to exclude half the story, since the topic of deceiving others has held a prominent place in Western culture. Yet on reflection it becomes obvious that the cultural bias against acts of deceiving is derived from the more fundamental belief that one is harmed by being deceived. It is our profound fear of being deceived that gives moral substance to prohibitions against deceiving.
Deception in Evolutionary Perspective
Authors: Rue Loyal
Published: November 2023

In Chapter I I attempted to defend a rather immodest claim: that the intellectual and moral traditions of Western culture have been shaped extensively by a bias against deception. Having relinquished any pretense to modesty, I shall now proceed to advance an even larger claim: that the dynamics of deception play a decisive role not merely in cultural history but in the process of biological evolution as well. The latter argument is encouraged by the former under the principle that wherever we find unanimity in cultural values, there we may suspect the influence of deeper, biological principles.
Religion and Ideology
Authors: Lachmann Richard
Published: November 2023

Religion in earlier chapters of the book is addressed primarily in its institutional aspects. Churches were sites of conflict because they were repositories of wealth and power. But churches also were places where people gave allegiance to religious leaders and ideas and, Max Weber believed, as such were crucial to the development of capitalist practices.
Other Prophetic Figures
Authors: Gray Rebecca
Published: November 2023

This chapter examines the remaining accounts in Josephus’ writings concerning prophetic figures from the late Second Temple period. In addition to Jesus son of Ananias, whom I considered briefly in chapter 1, these figures include Onias, who was renowned for the effectiveness of his prayers; the Pharisees Pollion and Samaias; and some unnamed pharisaic prophets from the time of Herod the Great. For the most part, Josephus’ reports provide only sparse information about the prophetic activities of these individuals, and they are surveyed here largely for the sake of completeness. In Antiquities 14.22–24 Josephus describes an incident involving a Jew named Onias, known from rabbinic literature as Honi. The earliest rabbinic traditions about Honi describe how he once ended a serious drought by praying to God in a distinctive and insistent manner.1 Josephus was evidently familiar with these or similar traditions, for he reports that Onias “had once in a rainless period prayed to God to end the drought, and God had heard his prayer and sent rain” (Ant. 14.22). He says no more about this feat, however, and the remainder of his account concerns another incident, which took place in Jerusalem sometime close to Passover in the year 65 B.C.E
Islam And The West
Authors: Lewis Bernard
Published: November 2023

Is it correct to equate Islam with the West, a religious community with a geo-political entity? Islam is not a place; it is a religion. But, in this enlightening and distinguished collection of essays, several of them previously unpublished in English, Bernard Lewis questions the apparent asymmetries between Islam and the West, explores the vast common heritage both communities share and investigates each side’s perception of the other. Many of the pieces examine the troubled relations between the two regions since the Middle Ages, focusing in particular on the impact of the West on the Middle East in modern times, and the Islamic responses to Western dominance. Especially timely are articles on the resurgence of Islam and anti-Western sentiment in recent years and on the failure of democratic institutions to take hold in the region. Bernard Lewis is one of the world’s leading scholars of the Middle East. He is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus, at Princeton University. Previously, a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Deborah: Biblical Antiquities 30–33
Authors: Murphy Frederick J
Published: November 2023

Deborah is one of the most remarkable figures in the Biblical Antiquities. Her importance is proven by the number of chapters devoted to her, as well as by the fact that some of Pseudo-Philo’s most important ideas are put on her lips. Pseudo-Philo’s treatment of her is a testimony to his high regard for women and to his determination to give them their rightful place in Israel’s history.
The Real Author in Historical Context
Authors: Murphy Frederick J
Published: November 2023

It is always difficult to move from story world to real world. Historical criticism often tries to use texts as windows onto the real worlds—social, political, religious, and so on—that produced them. Such an enterprise is valid, but it must be done cautiously. Placing a work like the Biblical Antiquities into its historical context is difficult. It certainly was not written at the time of the events it narrates or any time close to them. Neither is it an account of those events using trustworthy historical evidence independent of the author’s main source, the Bible. Indeed, the Biblical Antiquities contributes nothing to knowledge about the preexilic period. Rather, as a rewriting of the sacred text of the Bible, it reveals more about the author’s ideological point of view than about the events described. But this is itself historically important.
Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, and the Orient
Authors: Versluis Arthur
Published: November 2023

Emerson was no American traditionalist. “Historical Christianity,” he said in his “Divinity School Address,” “has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion.”1 But, Emerson went on, “I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty, which ravished the souls of those Eastern men, and chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West also.”2 For Emerson, tradition is an encysting of the truth, whereas spiritual truth, linked to “those Eastern men,” is a kind of insanity, a rapture, a ravishment, a blasting excess of light.3 All traditions, or “attempts to communicate religion,” are corrupt in Emerson’s view, and he looks forward to the American worship of that supreme Beauty that ravished the souls of Eastern men. Emerson sought to resolve the tension be tween tradition and inspiration, between ritual and rapture, by extracting the moral and self-transcending aspects of traditional religions and by becoming a spokesman for “literary religion.”4
The Ambience: Orientalism in General-Interest American Magazines
Authors: Versluis Arthur
Published: November 2023

On the whole, American Transcendentalism entailed a sustained attempt at religious universalism. But at the same time, the Transcendentalists in general embraced and reflected the ideology of progress, the belief that America was the light of the world and that all traditional cultures should be subordinate to the superior American-European civilization. This ideology of progress governs the Orientalism that appeared in most articles on Asian religions and cultures in the nineteenth century. Hence, to understand the nature of American Transcendentalist Orientalism, we should consider the popular, often racist climate in which Transcendentalism arose, for it will help reveal the subtler prejudices apparent in Transcendentalism as well. The late Transcendentalist fascination with the Orient did not occur in a vacuum, but as part of a more general American discovery of the Orient, following on the heels of a new European Orientalist scholarly movement. Chief among the magazines that reflected this “discovery” in America were the liberal New England periodicals, above all the North American Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Christian Examiner. 1 Generally speaking, there was a constant battle between prejudice against the Asian religions and peoples and a more enlightened view of them. In discussing Orientalism in these three magazines, I will focus first on what we might call negative Orientalism hostile or deprecating depictions of Asian religions and cultures-then on positive Orientalism, or attempts at comparative religion, and finally widen our scope to consider Orientalism in popular magazines more generally. In virtually all cases, we will see reflected the ideology of progress.
The Divine Names
Authors: Rorem Paul
Published: November 2023

The Divine Names is the longest Dionysian treatise, and the most complex in both content and structure. On the surface, it seems straightforward on both counts. It contains the author’s interpretations of the biblical names ascribed to God, such as good, light, beautiful, and so on. As to structure, chapters 1 through 3 present the introduction to his interpretive methodology and chapters 4 through the interpretations themselves. But on closer examination complexities abound. Whence this interest and the examples of the names for God? Why are these names chosen, and why are they presented in this order, and what doctrine of God prevails? What understanding of good and evil accompanies the divine name “good”? In general, what light does this treatise shed on the author’s profound and complicated combination of the Christian tradition, with its biblical names for God, and Neoplatonism, with its own interest in the divine names? Finally, what is the relationship of this work to the rest of the corpus? These questions, and others related to specific topics and passages, have challenged readers, starting with the lengthy expositions in the Scholia, for centuries. The best introduction to such complexities is the sequential presentation of the treatise according to its own order of chapters and topics, in the commentary form used so far. This will be followed by a discussion of the influence of this book and of its teachings upon medieval Latin theology.’ Divine Names. Chapter 1, Dionysius the Elder to Timothy the Fellow-Elder: What the goal of this discourse is, and the tradition regarding the divine names” (585A, 49). The same situation, and the very same wording, was encountered in the two treatises already discussed, along with the technical reasons for considering this statement to be an editorial addition.
Introduction
Authors: Oberg Barbara B , Stout Harry S
Published: November 2023

It is difficult, if not impossible, to think of two more widely studied colonial figures than Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards. On Edwards alone there have been more than 1,500 books, articles, and dissertations published in the last century. Scholarship on Franklin is no less impressive: historians of politics, science, literature, and culture have produced close to 4,000 works-scholarly and popular-on Franklin.1 Most recently, two collections of essays have appeared detailing the present “state of the art” in Franklin and Edwards scholarship.2 Nor have their own writings been ignored. Modern editions housed at Yale University have been providing a steady volume of their work in critical editions designed to preserve their words into the twenty-first century.3 As Franklin and Edwards have been studied individually over the generations, so also have they been looked at together in comparative exercises dating back at least as far as George Bancroft in the 1840s.4 In all of those studies the two emerge as quintessential “representative men.” Like all representative figures, Franklin and Edwards considered together have not been studied for their own sake or simply to cast light on their age. Rather, they are selected because in some profound sense they prefigure or anticipate a subsequent era. In this case, while other colonial figures exerted comparable, or even greater, influence on their age, none so completely anticipated the subsequent shape of an American culture, at once material and spiritual, piously secular and pragmatically sacred, as did Edwards and Franklin. It is thus in the intersection of Franklin’s and Edwards’s colonial times with an ever changing American “present”
Religious Affections and Religious Affectations: Antinomianism and Hypocrisy in the Writings of Edwards and Franklin
Authors: Breitenbach William
Published: November 2023

When I received the letter inviting me to participate in a conference on Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards, I was somewhat startled to read in it the assertion that “there has been little serious effort to bring the thought and intellectual legacy of these figures into a scholarly dialogue.” If it startled me, this statement would have stunned my students, who for years have struggled with paper assignments and examination questions asking them to compare the ideas of these two great thinkers. Perhaps the key phrase in the letter was “serious effort,” for I cannot swear that my students always undertook their task with the appropriate solemnity. In any event, I’m sure they would be pleased to know that their doctor has finally been dosed with his own medicine. Let me begin with the same broad questions that I pose to my students.
Humanizing the Monster: Integral Self Versus Bodied Soul in the Personal Writings of Franklin and Edwards
Authors: Prospo R C DE
Published: November 2023

I should begin by thanking David Shields for reminding me that the ancient Greeks can make a distinction between pneuma and psyche: between soul proper, which is supreme in the subhierarchy of the creature, and mind, which, no matter how gifted, focused, trained, stands one rank lower. Shields does his best work when alert to the apparently merely curious and anomalous arcana of the past, including the otherthan-exclusively American past, as is true, I think, also of the many fine older scholars of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture in the British colonies of North America1 and the early United States, many of whom are here at this conference. The assemblage and preservation of such arcana enables the perception of unanticipated, sometimes even “extra vaganf’ structures-recall Thoreau’s philological play in the conclusion of Walden.2 It is fastidious research such as Shields’s that enables extravaganzas, like the teratology I’m going to propose here.
“Leave the Rest to Us”: The Assertive Republic, 1815–1837
Authors: Herring George C
Published: November 2023

During a tense exchange on January 27, 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and the British minister to the United States, Stratford Canning, debated the future of North America. Emphasizing the extravagance of Britain’s worldwide pretensions, Adams pointedly remarked: “I do not know what you claim nor what you do not claim. You claim India; you claim Africa; you claim—” “Perhaps,” Canning sarcastically interjected, “a piece of the moon.” Adams conceded he knew of no British interest in acquiring the moon, but, he went on to say, “there is not a spot on this habitable globe that I could affirm you do not claim.” When he dismissed Britain’s title to the Oregon country, implying doubts about all its holdings in North America, an alarmed Canning inquired whether the United States questioned his nation’s position in Canada. No, Adams retorted. “Keep what is yours and leave the rest of the continent to us.”
A Dose of Arsenic: Slavery, Expansion, and the Road to Disunion, 1837–1861
Authors: Herring George C
Published: November 2023

The United States will conquer Mexico,” philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted at the outbreak of war in May 1846, “but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.”1 Emerson correctly predicted that America’s first major foreign war would have disastrous consequences, but he was wrong about what they would be. The assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority he shared with his countrymen caused him to fear that absorption of Mexico’s alien people would sully the purity of America’s population and the strength of its institutions. In fact, it was the cancer of slavery within U.S. society that, when linked with disposition of the territory taken from Mexico, poisoned the body politic, provoking the irrepressible crisis that eventually sundered the Union.
“A Novel Burden Far from Our Shores”: Truman, the Cold War, and the Revolution in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1945–1953
Authors: Herring George C
Published: November 2023

With a touch of modesty—and no small hyperbole—former secretary of state Dean Acheson titled his 1969 memoir Present at the Creation and in the introduction called the Truman administration’s task after World War II “just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis.” The challenge, Acheson remembered, was to create from the chaos left by war “half a world, a free half … without blowing the whole to pieces in the process.” Acheson took understandable pride at “how much was done.” In fact, the results in terms of U.S. foreign policy were more revolutionary than even he allowed. Responding to the turmoil that was the new world “order” and to a perceived global threat from the Soviet Union, the Truman administration between 1945 and 1953 turned traditional U.S. foreign policy assumptions upside down. A country accustomed to free security succumbed to a rampant insecurity through which nations across the world suddenly took on huge significance. Unilateralism gave way to multilateralism. Through the policy of containment, the Truman administration undertook a host of international commitments, launched scores of programs, and mounted a peacetime military buildup that would have been unthinkable just ten years earlier. The age of American globalism was under way.
“A Unique and Extraordinary Moment”: Gorbachev, Reagan, Bush, and the End of the Cold War, 1981–1991
Authors: Herring George C
Published: November 2023

On November 11, 1983, millions of Americans gathered around their television sets to watch The Day After, a chilling account of the impact on ordinary people of a nuclear attack on the middle-American town of Lawrence, Kansas. Unbeknownst to these viewers, several days earlier, in response to NATO’s annual Able Archer military exercises, a nervous Soviet government, convinced that a nuclear attack was imminent, went on full alert and put its nuclear-capable aircraft on standby. The world had come “frighteningly” close to the nuclear abyss, a Soviet defector later recalled.
A Description Of Magnetically Confined Plasmas
Authors: Wakatani Masahiro
Published: November 2023

In this chapter we introduce fundamental equations for applications in the rest of this book. First, we describe the properties of high-temperature plasmas in section 3.2. For the study of collective phenomena, the Vlasov equation is introduced by using a phase space description for a many-particle system in section 3.3. Then magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) approximation is described. For the investigation of plasma dynamics in an inhomogeneous magnetic field, or particularly in a three-dimensional magnetic field such as the stellarator and the heliotron, one-fluid magnetohydrodynamic equations are the most appropriate and reasonable theoretical tool, and are explained in section 3.4. An extension to include the anisotropic pressure in MHD approximation is also given. The anisotropy appears between the parallel and perpendicular pressures, where the direction of the magnetic field vector is the reference for these pressures. When the MHD equations are linearized for the study of the dynamics of small-amplitude perturbations, three types of MHD waves appear, as shown in section 3.5 these are also important ingredients in the study of MHD instabilities in chapter 5. As an approximation to the Vlasov equation, the drift-kinetic equation is shown in section 3.6, which is useful in the study of collisional transport of magnetically confined toroidal plasmas. In order to study the transport phenomena of toroidal plasmas, the collision term in the phase space description is important. In the transport equations based on the moments of the Boltzmann equation (or the Vlasov equation with the collision term) collisional effects are included through resistivity, viscosity, and transport coefficients for density and temperature (see section 3.7). Finally, for an approximate description of heliotron plasma, we introduce averaged MHD equations in section 3.8: these are widely used to discuss the macroscopic behavior of heliotron plasma in this book.
Revolutionary Exhumations in Spain
Authors: Lincoln Bruce
Published: November 2023

Three times between 1931 and 1936 elections were held (June 1931, November 1933, February 1936), a procedure that can be described as the normal ritual whereby modern democratic states are periodically reconstructed. For here, not only are the formal structures and dominant ideologies of such societies legitimated, but rival parties and factions are also integrated as they cooperate in waging a rule-governed competition for (temporary) control of state power. In this case, however, little was gained either by way of political stability or of national unity. Rather, all three campaigns—the first and third of which were won by the Left, the second by the Right—were bitterly fought, and the rival segments of Spanish society emerged from each one more deeply estranged than ever before. In parliament both blocs sought to press their advantage when they had the upper hand and sought to stymie the other’s programs when in opposition.
The Dialectics of Symbolic Inversion
Authors: Lincoln Bruce
Published: November 2023

Toward the end of the last chapter, I suggested that among the instruments through which sociotaxonomic structures can be attacked or undermined, anomaly and inversion figure prominently, and of these, it is inversion that has been most discussed in recent years.1 At times, the threat posed by acts of inversion to entrenched sociopolitical orders (and the symbolico-ideological orders on which they depend) has been taken quite seriously: Headstands are said to have been forbidden at the imperial Chinese court as images of social and cosmic chaos.2 In other instances, however, dominant classes have themselves employed processes of inversion to defend the status quo. In this chapter, I hope to explore two questions: First, how it is possible for an inversion to challenge a given order successfully, forcing significant modifications in it; second, why it is that inversions frequently contribute more to enhanced sociopolitical stability than to dynamic change.
Explaining American Exceptionalism
Authors: Quadagno Jill
Published: November 2023

Half a century ago the Carnegie Foundation invited the Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, to take a hard look at American race relations. Myrdal was not only an eminent scholar but also a foreigner, capable of scrutinizing American society with an objectivity no native could muster. Captivated by a nation he saw as simultaneously energetic, moral, rational, pragmatic, and above all, optimistic, Myrdal nonetheless discerned a disturbing contradiction between what he termed “the American creed” and the treatment of blacks. Rooted in an abiding liberal ethos, the American creed embodied ideals of liberty, justice, and equality of opportunity. Americans espoused this creed with a remarkable unanimity, regardless of national origin, race, or social class.
The Dilemma of Conscientious Objection for Afro-Americans
Authors: Stanfield II John H
Published: November 2023

Conscientious objection has posed a particular problem for Afro-Americans. The military has offered an area of opportunity for blacks and other members of lower-income groups. In addition, many black Americans have been willing and even eager to serve in the armed forces of the United States in most of the nation’s wars in support of their claim to equal rights and opportunities of citizenship. Nevertheless, a lesser-known tradition of opposition to military service and war also exists within the Afro-American community. The current literature about conscientious objection in America and abroad is quite Eurocentric. Whether these writings are content analyses of pacifist biographies, peace church statements, or government reports, Eurocentric moral, political, and social definitions and policy analyses enjoy an uncritical dominance. In view of the historical and the growing contemporary demographic presence and politicaleconomic importance of American racial minorities and Third World populations in the world system, there is a critical need to examine systematically the attitudes and actions regarding peace and war resistance among nonwhites.
Alternative Service in a Future Draft
Authors: Eberly Donald J
Published: November 2023

If a draft is instituted again in the United States, under the present formula it will include a system for handling conscientious objectors among those drafted that was created in the 1980s to avoid the problems of the 1960s and 1970s. The Military Selective Service Act of 1980 and the regulations established by the various directors of the Selective Service System in the past dozen years form the basis for the operation of the draft system. In such a system, judgments about CO status would be made by local draft boards that would be more representative of a pluralistic community, when activated, and would apply more uniform standards than the draft boards of past years. Under such a draft, registrants would be able to apply for CO status if they were conscientiously opposed to war in any form and to combatant training and service. Those COs who could accept noncombatant training and service, if they met the other requirements, would be drafted into the armed forces and given noncombatant duties. Those COs who were conscientiously opposed to any participation in military service would be required to meet their service obligation by completing a period of alternative civilian service. If this scenario materializes, the major figures will be the COs themselves, a number of CO-oriented religious groups, and the U.S. Selective Service System.
Norway: Toward Full Freedom of Choice?
Authors: Gleditsch Nils Petter , Agøy Nils Ivar
Published: November 2023

Although most of the Scandinavian countries have been in the vanguard of the liberalization of conscientious objection, their individual traditions and sociopolitical conditions have created national variations. Norway, for example, has a strong tradition of egalitarian conscription dating back to the eleventh century and reinforced by the modem constitution of 1814, when the nation gained its independence from Denmark. National service remains compulsory in Norway: all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-four are eligible for conscription for twelve months’ service in the army or fifteen months in the navy or air force. The military, however, has been challenged by a strong peace movement in modem times. In the aftermath of World War I, the Norwegian government recognized religious and secular conscientious objectors and offered them the option of performing alternative civilian service. The number of COs has grown dramatically, especially since the late 1960s, but several issues concerning conscientious objection in Norway remain unresolved.
The German Democratic Republic: Dissidence That Prevailed
Authors: Bredow Wilfried Von
Published: November 2023

The political system and the social structure of the German Democratic Republic (gdr) is literally history. The unification of the gdr with the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990 brought a final end to the old Soviet-socialist regime. This chapter on conscientious objection in the gdr is therefore of necessity a retrospective one. It is difficult to trace the development of conscientious objection in the gdr because of the sparse sources available. Under the old regime conscientious objection was regarded as hostile behavior by the communist party and its allies. There are no official statistics or open debates and no empirical research; only silence “from above” and the courageous, but of course often repressed, attempts of those who tried to bring conscientious objection into the political arena. All this changed in the fall of 1989.
Conclusion: The Secularization of Conscience Reconsidered
Authors: Moskos Charles C , Chambers II John Whiteclay
Published: November 2023

The “new” conscientious objection, by definition, must imply significant departure from previous usage. Otherwise “new” is just another misapplication of an overworked adjective. This book would offer a useful perspective on the study of conscientious objection even if the only new dimension were a dispassionate and comparative approach to the topic. It has done that and much more: This multinational study of conscientious objection in the West demonstrates the recent and unprecedented reshaping of conscientious objection and its relationship to the armed forces, the state, and to society. The new dimensions—the augmenting, indeed, near supplanting, of the old religious and communal grounds for objection by a new secular and often privatized base; the proliferation of COs in uniform; and the recognition and acceptance of these trends by the state—warrant the appellation the “new” conscientious objection.
Introduction
Authors: Wegner Judith Romney
Published: November 2023

The most important social revolution of the late twentieth century has been the rise of modern feminism. The raising of women’s consciousness has, for the first time in recorded history, brought substantial numbers of men and women to understand how patriarchal culture constructed and maintained male dominance and female subservience, and how the restriction of women to the private realm of domesticity and their exclusion from the public domain of intellectual activity has systematically deprived women of the life of mind and spirit available to men (or at least to male elites) within patriarchal society.
The Wife
Authors: Wegner Judith Romney
Published: November 2023

When the Israelite daughter leaves her father’s house for that of her husband, she exchanges subjection to one man for subservience to another. But something else changes, too. As her father’s daughter she was a virtual chattel, lacking almost all the rights, duties, and powers we earlier defined as indicators of personhood. In advancing from the status of daughter to that of wife, she becomes a person, that is, she acquires numerous legal entitlements and obligations. Marriage transforms the girl into a woman in more ways than one, for besides fulfilling her biological des tiny it brings her into a relationship marked by a reciprocal nexus of spousal rights and duties that clearly defines her as a person in the mishnaic system.
Woman And The Public Domain
Authors: Wegner Judith Romney
Published: November 2023

Given the patriarchal background of the Mishnah, many of the women discussed in the previous chapter enjoyed a surprising degree of person hood. Indeed, an autonomous woman’s legal entitlements and obligations in matters of personal status and private commerce scarcely differed, in theory, from those of a man. Yet even autonomous women (much less dependent woman) never attain total equality with men because law and custom conspire to exclude women in general from the public domain of mishnaic culture.
From Abdullah to Hussein
Authors: Satloff Robert B
Published: November 2023

This book examines the most turbulent period in the history of Jordan's ruling house, the six years following the assassination of the kingdom's founder, Abdullah (1951-1957). Those years witnessed the country's lone episode of weak monarchy, when the king--the novice Hussein or his ill-starred father, Talal--was not the preeminent political actor in the land. Rather, it was during that time at the regime was left in the hands of a mix of Palestinian, Transjordanian, and Circassian royalists who had never before wielded executive authority inside the kingdom. Based on exclusive interviews and newly released archival resources, this book traces the only two royal successions in Jordanian history: the eleven-month reign of the little-known Talal, and the early years of King Hussein.
Abu’l Huda’s Last Hurrah
Authors: Satloff Robert B
Published: November 2023

Immediately after dismissing al-Mulqi, Hussein appointed Tawfiq Abu’l Huda to form a government once again. It was a move not without its irony. Abu’l Huda was exactly the sort of man Hussein would decry in his autobiography as one of those “rapacious politicians [who] fought for the crumbs of office” after Abdullah’s death three years earlier.1 Only once did Hussein refer in those memoirs to Abu’l Huda by name, and incorrectly, no less; no mention is made of Abu’l Huda’s replacement of al-Mulqi in May 1954.2 But when the young monarch needed a firm hand to restore balance to Jordanian politics, it was to the ten-time prime minister that he turned.3 Hussein was later to say that after al-Mulqi, he “had to go back to the older generation. I believe,” he admitted, “they gave us the chance to continue.”4
Sita’s Daughters: Coming Out of Purdah
Authors: Minturn Leigh
Published: November 2023

Leigh Minturn in this work recounts the dramatic changes in the role and status of Indian women in the Rajput caste of Khalapur that have taken place between 1955 and 1975. She explains the relationship of these changes to the decline in the observance of a complex system of customs collectively called purdah, which include the veiling of women's faces and bodies, subservient posture when speaking to men, separation of husbands and wives and deference of young wives to their mothers-in-law. The decline in the observance of the customs has both led to and been fostered by modernization. Unlike other studies of Indian women, Minturn preserves the individuality of her subjects.
A Genre for Mark
Authors: Bryan Christopher
Published: November 2023

I have yet to address directly the question asked earlier: What kind of text would Mark have been seen to be, either by its author or by its first readers and auditors? What, in short, was its genre?

Following the massive and influential work of Rudolf Bultmann, and for reasons that have perhaps more to do with theological conviction than scientific criticism, there has been until recently a curious reluctance among New Testament scholars to consider this question seriously, or to look to literature contemporary with the written gospel for parallels that will help us understand its genre. The written gospel, it has been claimed, is of its own kind: sui generis. It is unique, having no exact parallel in any literature. The gospels can be understood only as expansions of the primitive Christian preaching, or as having risen in response to a need for Christian lections to match the Jewish calendar in the liturgy. There are elements of truth in all these claims. There is evidence that early Christian literature was read in the Christian assembly (Col. 4:16; compare Philem 2). Yet there is hardly evidence that at this period it was read in sequence, or in connection with a “calendar” that is itself a matter of considerable scholarly uncertainty. Justin’s description of the Roman liturgy in the mid-second century, when “the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets” were read “for as long as time permits,” appears in any case to contradict such an idea (Apology 1.67).
As It Is Written: Oral Characteristics of Mark’s Appeals to Scripture
Authors: Bryan Christopher
Published: November 2023

Scarcely has Mark gained our attention and begun his narrative, when he tells us that what we are to hear took place “as it is written” (1:2). As I have claimed to be considering the oral characteristics of Mark’s narrative, that I should now examine his appeal to written authority may seem surprising. Surely such an appeal is essentially alien to orality? In the whole of Homer, we may recall, there is only one possible reference to a written message, and even on that occasion it is not entirely clear that the “baneful signs”
No Longer a Wife: Widows in Rural North India
Authors: Wadley Susan S
Published: November 2023

This comment from Saroj, a Brahman widow in her fifties from the village of Karimpur in north India, captures the views of north Indian Hindu widows: to lose one’s husband is to lose one’s main support. Yet the branches that Saroj belittles-a woman’s other kin, both natal and affinal-must exist for support and be strengthened if the new widow is to prosper. Using case studies from Karimpur, this essay explores why widows find this loss so difficult and hence why marriage is of such major concern to Hindu women. While feminists may decry the pardii.system and the economic dependence of north Indian women, the lives of widows only reinforce the desirability of marriage for Hindu women themselves. Widows present both ideological and economic challenges to the Hindu system. Ideologically their femaleness and their sexuality is to be controlled by fathers, husbands, or sons. Economically they are to be supported by male kin, through whom they gain access to resources. Whether the control of women is rooted in ideology or economics, it rests in male hands. Ideally, if a woman is widowed at all, she is widowed in old age, with a son to control and support her.
The Apocalypses as Writing
Authors: Himmelfarb Martha
Published: November 2023

I have by now explored the central themes of the ascent apocalypses: the understanding of heaven as temple, the visionary’s achievement of angelic status in a process that echoes priestly investiture, and the phenomena of nature as a source of knowledge of God. This final chapter considers some basic but difficult questions: What kind of literature are these apocalypses? What kind of people wrote them, and for what purposes? Any attempt to answer these questions inevitably runs up against the pseudepigraphy of the apocalypses. Pseudepigraphy was a widespread phenomenon in the ancient world, by no means restricted to Jews and Christians. With different functions depending on genre, it assumes a distinctive shape in the apocalypses because of their claim to represent divine revelation. The epigraph, from Enoch’s journey to the ends of the earth in the Book of the Watchers, poses the problem clearly and sharply. The author claims Enoch’s authority for his account of sights that none of his readers has ever seen.

How are we to understand that claim? Some significant recent scholarship has claimed that, despite their pseudepigraphy, many apocalypses reflect the visionary experience of their authors. This point of view stands in dramatic contrast to the older style of study of the apocalypses, represented by the grandfather of
Introduction
Authors: Wentz Richard E
Published: November 2023

John Williamson Nevin was born on February 20, 1803, in the Cumber land Valley of Pennsylvania and spent his early life on his parents’ farm in Franklin County. His mother was a sister of Hugh Williamson, a prominent figure during the War of Independence and one of the framers of the Consti-tution. “Being of what is called Scotch-Irish extraction,” he writes, “I was by birth and blood also, a Presbyterian; and as my parents were both conscientious and exemplary professors of religion, I was, as a matter of course, care fully brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, according to the Presbyterian faith as it then stood.
The Public Character Of Theology
Authors: Wentz Richard E
Published: November 2023

German theologians, and German theology have their faults. Among these may be named the want of more close and living communion between the professors and the great body of the Church. . . . This gives a one-sided tendency to German theology, which we may hope to escape in this country. . . . The natural turn of the American mind [is] one of the conditions which will determine the character of American theology. . . . The pros perity of the Church, the advancement of society, the purification and elevation of public morals, will always enter as conditions into our theological science.