She balances her petite frame on a pedestal perched above the altar in a little sixteenth-century church set atop an ancient Mesoamerican pyramid-mountain known as the Tlachihualtepetl, or Mountain Made by Hand, in the city of Cholula, Mexico. Often sporting traditional blue, her dress color will change based on her calendar of events: the processions she will lead, the churches she will visit, the feast days she will celebrate, her birthday. A FB photo of her posted at 6:35pm this... Read more
I posted last time about the importance of Freemasonry for understanding American history, American empire, and its religious dimensions. It is a lengthy story with large implications that stretch beyond Christianity. It also reminds us of a time in that history – only yesterday, in fact – when religion played a central role in politics. Masons and Toleration As a social and political movement, modern Freemasonry developed in the British Isles in the early eighteenth century. It was devoted to... Read more
“Since we cannot study the future yet, we need the past to help us see the present more clearly.” C. S. Lewis Rarely does research result in the desire to be a better person. I recall one book from seminary on history method that said the researcher should strive to be objective and neutral. I found, however, this was difficult to maintain as I listened to testimony after testimony from friends, colleagues, and family about Dr. Jesse Miranda this summer.... Read more
Writing under the name “William Penn” in 1829, Jeremiah Evarts penned a series of essays eviscerating the United States government and comparing Andrew Jackson to Ahab, a wicked king of Israel from the Hebrew Bible. Just as Ahab was held liable for the murder of Naboth after stealing his vineyard, Evarts saw his nation on the brink of a similar crime on a grander scale. As the United States congress considered the Indian Removal Act, Evarts believed they were countenancing... Read more
I once sat in a courtroom listening to horrific crimes being read out at an arraignment. There were hundreds of crimes, and it took several hours to read them. The defendant pled guilty to them all. I was there with one of the victims and we were surrounded by other victims and/or their families. To this day it remains the most confronting context I have experienced around justice with its elements of vengeance and punishment. The plea allowed everyone to... Read more
I have written quite a bit on Freemasonry through the years, including several posts at this site. That material has a renewed significance for me given my present interests in empire, specifically American empire, with a special focus on its religious dimension. For the United States, as for the other empires of its time, Freemasonry played a critical role in the building and sustaining of empire. And by any reasonable standard, it was at its heart a religious movement, however... Read more
“But I’ll tell you what. Growing up in a small town like that, you learn how to take care of each other. That family down the road, they may not think like you do, they may not pray like you do. They may not love like you do. But they’re your neighbors. And you look out for them. And they look out for you. Everybody belongs. And everybody has a responsibility to contribute . . . Then I came back... Read more
In a recent, already field-defining, essay in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, historian Matthew Avery Sutton offers a historiography of American evangelicalism. As he explains: In the1980s, in response to the rise of the Religious Right, prominent religious historians occupying influential chairs and possessing access to institutional resources, cultivated a historical “consensus” that defined evangelicalism broadly, abstractly and optimistically, and created an unbroken lineage of both orthodoxy and orthopraxy throughout American history. However, Sutton argues, this imagined... Read more
by Janine Giordano Drake I think a lot about the Second Great Awakening. I think about its overlap with the market revolution, with the growth of Jacksonian democracy, with the rise indigenous removal and settler colonialism, and with the growth of Anti-Mormon and Anti-Catholic sentiment. But perhaps most of all, I think a lot about the role of the Second Great Awakening in forming Americans’ understandings of what a democracy looks like. Democracy, for so many Americans in the early... Read more
In recent years, American historians have reached a fair consensus that their nation’s history must be considered in terms of its being an empire, and from its earliest era. As such, we should apply to that history the insights of the modern study of empires, which is a very lively field of study. In this series of posts, I have been considering the implications for the specific theme of religion. Today I will be describing several critical aspects of that... Read more
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