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The period from 1830 to 1937 was transformative for modern
Quakerism. Practitioners made significant contributions to world
culture, from their heavy involvement in the abolitionist and
women’s rights movements and creation of thriving communities of
Friends in the Global South to the large-scale post–World War I
humanitarian relief efforts of the American Friends Service
Committee and Friends Service Council in Britain. The Creation of
Modern Quaker Diversity, 1830–1937 explores these developments
and the impact they had on the Quaker religion and on the broader
world. Chapters examine the changes taking place within the
denomination at the time, including separations, particularly in
the United States, that resulted in the establishment of distinct
branches, and a series of all-Quaker conferences in the early
twentieth century that set the agenda for Quakerism. Written by the
leading experts in the field, this engaging narrative and
penetrating analysis is the authoritative account of this period of
Quaker history. It will appeal to scholars and lay Quaker readers
alike and is an essential volume for meeting libraries. In addition
to the editors, the contributors include Joanna Clare Dales,
Richard Kent Evans, Douglas Gwyn, Thomas D. Hamm, Robynne Rogers
Healey, Julie L. Holcomb, Sylvester A. Johnson, Stephanie Midori
Komashin, Emma Jones Lapsansky, Isaac Barnes May, Nicola Sleapwood,
Carole Dale Spencer, and Randall L. Taylor.
David Harrington Watt's Antifundamentalism in Modern America gives
us a pathbreaking account of the role that the fear of
fundamentalism has played—and continues to play—in American
culture. Fundamentalism has never been a neutral category of
analysis, and Watt scrutinizes the various political purposes that
the concept has been made to serve. In 1920, the conservative
Baptist writer Curtis Lee Laws coined the word "fundamentalists."
Watt examines the antifundamentalist polemics of Harry Emerson
Fosdick, Talcott Parsons, Stanley Kramer, and Richard Hofstadter,
which convinced many Americans that religious fundamentalists were
almost by definition backward, intolerant, and anti-intellectual
and that fundamentalism was a dangerous form of religion that had
no legitimate place in the modern world. For almost fifty years,
the concept of fundamentalism was linked almost exclusively to
Protestant Christians. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the
establishment of an Islamic republic led to a more elastic
understanding of the nature of fundamentalism. In the late 1970s
and early 1980s, Americans became accustomed to using
fundamentalism as a way of talking about Muslims, Jews, Hindus,
Sikhs, and Buddhists, as well as Christians. Many Americans came to
see Protestant fundamentalism as an expression of a larger
phenomenon that was wreaking havoc all over the world.
Antifundamentalism in Modern America is the first book to provide
an overview of the way that the fear of fundamentalism has shaped
U.S. culture, and it will lead readers to rethink their
understanding of what fundamentalism is and what it does.
In the contemporary United States, there are hundreds of thousands of Protestant churches whose members habitually carry their Bibles with them. These churches - often referred to as evangelical or fundamentalist - play a crucial role in shaping American society. In this book, David Watt draws on years of fieldwork to present an elegant reinterpretation of the way that conservative Protestants influence American politics and culture. At the heart of the book is a sympathetic, but far from uncritical, analysis of those forms of social power that are assumed to be natural among Bible-carrying Christians. While outsiders often presuppose that evangelical Christians take for granted the authority of certain institutions (among them the American state, corporations, ministers, men, and heterosexuals), Watt argues that the reality is far more complex. This is a concise and lively book that sheds new light on the way that Bible-carrying Christians influence the way that people in America think - and avoid thinking - about social power.
Thirty years after the Iranian Revolution and more than a decade
since the events of 2001, the time is right to examine what the
discourse on fundamentalism has achieved and where it might head
from here. In this volume editors Simon A. Wood and David
Harrington Watt offer eleven interdisciplinary perspectives framed
by the debate between advocates and critics of the concept of
fundamentalism that investigate it with regard to Christianity,
Islam, and Judaism. The essays are integrated through engagement
with a common selection of texts on fundamentalism and a common set
of questions about the utility and disadvantages of the term, its
varied application by scholars of particular groups, and the extent
to which the term can encompass a cross-cultural set of religious
responses to modernity.
Although the notion of fundamentalism as a global phenomenon dates
from around 1980, the term itself originated in North American
Protestantism approximately six decades earlier and acquired
pejorative connotations within five years of its invention. Since
the early 1990s, however, many scholars have endorsed the view that
the notion of fundamentalism--as relying on literalist
interpretations of the scriptures, firm commitment to patriarchy,
or refusal to confine religious matters to the private
sphere--facilitates our understanding of modern religion by
enabling us to identify and label structurally analogous
developments in different religions. Critics of the term have
identified problems with it, above all that the idea of global
fundamentalism confuses more than it clarifies and unjustifiably
overlooks, downplays, or homogenizes difference more than it
identifies a genuine homogeny.
The editor's rigorous exploration of both the usefulness and the
limitations of the concept make it an excellent counterpoint to the
many books that have a great deal to say about the former and very
little to say about the latter. It will also serve as an ideal text
for religious studies, history, and anthropology courses that
explore the complex interface between religion and modernity as
well as courses on theory and method in religious studies.
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