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A new historiography of the courtroom locates it not just as a place of top-down power, but a space to negotiate social order that included men and women of different ranks. Using evidence from the Irish petty sessions reported in the local press in the 1820s, this article argues that an ideal of 'impartiality', common to the law and to elite masculinity alike, provided an opportunity for Protestants and Catholics to discuss and contest the relative power of different social groups within Irish society in a context where political speech was constrained. The courtroom became a space both within and outside of society, allowing a broader range of political debate and expression that was typically allowed. When reported in the press, such discussion could have political import. Moreover, due to the pressure on magistrates to appear impartial, lower order Irish men and women could use the desire to appear impartial as an opportunity to contest traditional power structures and to use the courts to their advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the significance of political mobilization among ecumenical Protestants during World War II and the importance placed on human rights and civil rights, particularly the role of the organization the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and the FCC's involvement in the establishment of the United Nations (UN) following the war. It also discusses the World Order Movement.

The article discusses funeral and memorialization practices at the court of Württemberg, Germany in relation to the Protestant Reformation. Topics include the use of epitaphs and sculptures as funeral monuments, the theological role of the dead in relation to Lutheran Reformation, and the Lutheran funeral liturgies.

The article discusses the role of music in 16th century Lutheran homes. Topics include the relation of music to material culture and imagery among Lutherans, the domestic performance of sacred music such as hymns, and the influence of the Protestant Reformation on domestic and familial life in relation to multisensory aspects of music.

The article discusses the sensory aspects of early modern Lutheran culture. Topics include the historiography of sensory culture, the impact of orthodoxy on Lutheran sensory culture, and the significance of the ringing of a church bell in Ulm, Germany in relation to Lutheran theology. Different views of the sense of smell by businessman Joseph Furttenbach the Elder and town superintendent Conrad Dieterich are noted.

The article discusses the religious conflict and wars between Protestants and Catholics in late 16th century Montpellier, France, including in regard to the religious and civic identities in the region and Montepellier's sacred spaces. An overview of Catholics' conflict with Huguenots, including 1563 Peace of Amboise's requiring of Protestants to abandon Catholic churches they took over, is provided.

An essay which examines how East German Protestants used the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to articulate and implement different church-state models in their sociopolitical context in 1949-1989. Particular focus is given on the Saint Nicholas Church's used of Bonhoeffer's political theology, which rooted in his Christology or his thinking on the person of Jesus Christ, during the October 9, 1989 demonstrations in Leipzig.

For a month after childbirth, the authors of medical and religious prescriptive literature instructed new mothers to keep to their beds. During this time they were expected to bleed away the bodily remnants of pregnancy. At the end of this month writers considered women 'well'. Bleeding, in this definition, was commensurate with recovery. This article shows that although in prescriptive material, maternal health was measured according to this process of purging, for early modern middling and upper sort women and their families, the bodily effects of childbearing continued to impede their ability to return to normal household tasks and behaviours long after the ritual month of 'lying-in' had ended. Using life-writing, casebooks and vernacular medical literature, this article challenges prevailing notions of what it meant to recover in early modern England, arguing that women's 'childing' or 'childebed' narratives only ended when they perceived their bodies to be unaffected by pregnancy and labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent interpretations of religious change in modern Britain have stressed the importance of a sudden and abrupt 'sexual revolution' during the 1960s. The role the Churches played in bringing about their own demise remains a point of debate, particularly in the case of the Catholic Church. This article attempts to move beyond existing historical disputes over a 'religious crisis' and whether it was rooted in 'internal' causes (problems within the Church) or 'external', secular developments. It explores the way sexual knowledge was discussed and disseminated by Catholic authorities during this decade of perceived cultural transition, drawing on the previously unpublished papers of the Papal Commission for Birth Control 1963-5 and the training manuals of the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council (CMAC). These sources offer a unique insight into the often problematic task of reconciling Catholic thought with the discourses of 'sexual liberation'. While the central hierarchy's continued opposition to women's contraceptive autonomy has understandably dominated historical attention, the material presented here suggests that Catholic understandings of female sexuality were not universally at odds with the intellectual infrastructure of a 'sexual revolution'. On the question of female sexual pleasure, progressive Catholic authorities in both the Papal Commission and the CMAC made fervent efforts to engage with contemporary scientific modes of understanding. Perversely, this approach served to neglect certain aspects of corporeal and emotional experience, thereby limiting the case for meaningful doctrinal change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of early modern Europe have long been interested in how female monastics responded to the Reformation's message. While most modern scholars emphasize the socio-economic reasons a woman might have wished to remain in her convent, this article shows that religious concerns led the vast majority of monastic women in Württemberg to both reject the Reformation and refuse to leave a territory which had become Protestant. These women did so in part because they believed they were spiritually responsible for protecting the property and financial assets of their convent's founders and benefactors. This article therefore explores early modern monasticism's emphasis on the spiritual significance of property and place and how the Reformation challenged that belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the generation and management of refugees in the Balkans in the late nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. The violence of the Eastern Crisis of 1875-78 produced Muslims and Christian refugees at an unprecedented scale and rate. After surveying Habsburg and Ottoman traditions of refugee management, the article looks at the case of over 250,000 Christian refugees fleeing Ottoman Bosnia-Herzegovina to the Habsburg Empire, and argues that domestic and international political circumstances of the flight created new demands and opportunities for imperial governments. The Habsburg government created an extensive refugee aid programme, while the Ottoman Empire initiated a cooperative effort at repatriation. In each case, implementation of government policies shaped the category of refugee, attaching to it attributions of victimhood and immiseration while attempting to exercise state control over refugee movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Catholic anti-communist movement in Italy during the early Cold War period, including the symbolic aspects of the anti-communist movement and its role in meaning-formation. An overview of the role that communism played in Italy's democracy, including the communist political party the Italian Communist Party (PCI), is provided.

The article discusses the relationship between the Enlightenment and the Christian concept of original sin in England during the 18th century, including through referencing the Christian British wine merchant Pentecost Barker's diary. It discusses the psychology of Barker concerning original sin and salvation.

An essay is presented about the visions of Welsh girl Elizabeth Orton as a popish imposture and whether or not she was really a fraud. Topics include the precarious stability of the Elizabethan polity at a moment of political crisis in Wales, rhetorical strategies by which Orton was described and discredited, and how anxiety about the status and source of Orton's ecstatic experiences converged with intense and growing concern on religious conformity.

The Christianization of Igbo-land in southeastern Nigeria, from the 1850s up to the 1920s and even beyond, occurred in a fraught atmosphere in which missionaries had encounters with forests set aside for certain sociocultural purposes and designated as “evil”/“bad.” This study dwells on these encounters and their legacies. The study uses oral, primary, and secondary sources to contribute to scholarship in social history by interrogating the relevance of the encounters and their legacies in understanding how Christian missionary works of the colonial period are remembered and captured through the experiences of indigenous people as active agents in their own history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The versified office of St Ansanus of Siena at first appears to be but one of numerous offices composed for local saints in the late Middle Ages. Yet a newly discovered source, the manuscript Arezzo, Archivio Capitolare, Duomo H (c.1320), invites a reconsideration of its historical and musical significance. This office was not, as previously thought, composed exclusively in Siena. It was instead the product of a de facto collaboration between that city and its historic rival, Arezzo, a scenario that belies the competitive spirit characteristic of most saints' cults in the Middle Ages. Finally, the version of the office of St Ansanus sung in Siena illustrates a distinctive, 'neo-Gregorian' style of plainsong characterized by the adaptation of Gregorian tune families and melodic formulae to rhymed accentual poetry. Indeed, it marks a rare rejection of the more modern, 'post-Gregorian' styles typical of versified offices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1929 sale of the Santuario de Chimayó in New Mexico from private Hispano owners to the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe highlights the various and contentious claims of ownership and control not only on the Santuario itself but on the religious lives and ritual expressions of Hispano Catholics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 824 the monk and teacher Wetti of Reichenau experienced a terrifying vision in which an angel led him through an afterlife where monks, clerics and laypeople experienced a variety of temporal and eternal punishments. Only the intercession of saints, martyrs and virgins saves Wetti, who would have been irrevocably doomed because he had corrupted his students through his teaching, his bad example and his deeds. Wetti's fellow monk Heito wrote a widely circulated prose version of this vision, which the Carolingian scholar Walahfrid Strabo later turned into an apparently metric version. Both versions extensively address the scelus sodomiticum (the crime of sodomy) but express fundamentally different viewpoints on the nature, the moral assessment and the dangers of same-sex sexuality in a monastic context. Heito implies that Wetti exposed himself and his students to the danger of eternal damnation through practising or at least facilitating sodomy. Walahfrid manages through a number of subtle alterations to acquit Wetti and his school from allegations of sodomy and to turn the scelus sodomiticum into an individual fault rather than a threat to the community and to monastic purity in general. Comparing the two versions of the Visio Wettini provides new insights into the medieval monastic classroom as a queer space, medieval assessments of same-sex desire, the role of classical learning in the monastic curriculum and the construction of monastic purity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the relationship between water deity worship and dike management in the Jianghan plain of central China from 1788 to 2013. The Jianghan plain is a water-rich area that has frequently suffered from water calamities. Hence, the building and maintenance of the dike system there has been critical to the local society and economy. In late imperial times, the Jianghan people prayed to water deities, asking them to protect the integrity of the dikes. Many iron statues of oxen were also erected on the dikes to ensure their integrity, a tradition encouraged by imperial edicts for moral or psychological reasons. Nonetheless, if a dike ruptured, the emperors punished the responsible officials. Although China underwent dramatic political changes in the Republican era (1912-1949), the tradition of water deity worship continued. After 1949, however, the idea of "man can conquer nature" prevailed, and with a better-maintained dike system, the people of Jianghan no longer prayed to water deities. Instead, many water conservancy projects were turned into tourist destinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the records of the ecclesiastical visitations in Hereford, England during the 13th century, including bishops Thomas Cantilupe and Richard Swinfield's visitations. An overview of the role in increasing the power of bishops in their parishes and dioceses is provided.

A speech by historian Jon Butler is presented which was first delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Providence, Rhode Island on April 9, 2016. It explores the history of religion and modernity in New York City. Topics considered include the 1953 novel "Go Tell It on the Mountain" by James Baldwin, religious congregations in the city from the 1850s to the 1960s, the social philosophies of intellectuals William James and Max Weber, and the impact of settlement patterns on the city's religious institutions.

The article discusses the history of the European Youth Campaign (EYC), an international anti-communist youth organization aimed to promote European unification, to illustrate the intersection of anti-communism during the Cold War in 1950-1959 with the concerns of the Catholic hierarchy over the vulnerability of youth in Ireland. It looks at the U.S. influence of Ireland. It examines the various ways in which Ireland's foreign policy has been circumscribed by the war. It also discusses the opportunities presented by the war to Ireland.

Literary responses to the martyrdom of English Catholic clergy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England have attracted much attention from scholars in recent years. Musical studies of English Catholic meditations on martyrdom have usually followed on from these: William Byrd's so-called scaffold motets and two motets of unknown origin in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Th. b.2, a Catholic encyclopedia (once thought to have been compiled by Thomas Tresham) are reputed to be musical settings of these priests' last utterances. Given the number of priests who are reported to have sung music either after being sentenced to death or at their execution, however, it would appear that music was used in English Catholic seminaries to help intending martyrs to construct their identity as much as it was used by the laity to venerate them. This study considers the musical practices of the English College at Valladolid during the seventeenth century in the context of the practices surrounding the veneration of 'La Vulnerata', a statue of the Virgin Mary desecrated and defaced by English and Dutch troops when they sacked the Spanish port of Cadiz in 1596. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which discusses the Quakers' involvement in politics and their relationships with British Army soldiers during the Crisis of 1659 amidst Great Britain's Revolution. An overview of the Quaker merchant George Bishop's political activity as a pamphleteer, including his tract titled "Mene Tekel" and his attitude on the relationship between Christianity and state, is provided.

An essay is presented on identity formation of majority religion in the context of intentional, political processes of change in state-church relations during the 20th century. Particular focus is given on the majority church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark. It also examines how various actors interact to achieve their goals in processes of institutional change and the application of governance to majority religion.

The largest cache of medieval liturgical furnishings that survives is in Protestant Germany. This survival has sometimes been attributed to Martin Luther's doctrine of the 'indifference' of objects. Using several examples, one from south Germany (the altar at Rothenburg ob der Tauber) and two from women's convents in the north (especially some devotional statues and their dresses from Kloster Wienhausen), this article argues not only that religious objects are far from indifferent but also that they alter our standard opinions about the Observant Reform of fifteenth-century Germany and the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and suggest new understandings of continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the French wars of religion and mentions horrifying massacres and assassinations associated with wars. Topics discussed include the religious violence Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the wars conducted as state and its revenue-raising apparatus were too weak to repress heresy effectively, political scientists observing war as a form of negotiation or bargaining, and the importance of political science literature to understand conceptual clarity of wars of religion.

Before the invention of megaphones, bells were the loudest and most far-reaching means of communication. Over the centuries, a cluster of practices had evolved around bell-ringing, which were called into question during the Reformation. In Germany, religious reformers attacked traditional beliefs in the special power of the bell sound and strove to reduce its meaning to a simple sign. But in the process of the formation of the Lutheran church on a territorial basis in the subsequent decades, a great variety of approaches towards the use of bells in a sacred context were developed that integrated some of the controversial traditions into Lutheran pious practice. This article traces these developments in the Holy Roman Empire from the 1520s until the end of the seventeenth century on the basis of church ordinances and sermons delivered at the inauguration of new bells. It reconstructs the transformation of the religious soundscape and its perception by contemporaries, thus contributing to the understanding of early modern confessional culture as well as to sensory history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the adoption of subsidiarity as a key norm in governance structures of the European Union, the principle has gained a degree of public currency. In this article, I consider subsidiarity as it has been invoked in support of decentralization and federalist political arrangements generally. I note that prevailing conceptions of subsidiarity have tended to neglect or only superficially appreciate its foundations in Catholic social doctrine. This, I contend, is no mere genealogical oversight: the separation of subsidiarity from its theological grounding obscures important features of the normative principle. These featuresçprincipally assumptions regarding social ontology and the normative function of civil associationsçultimately render the Catholic principle of subsidiarity incompatible with some of the prescriptive conclusions it is regularly alleged to support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been limited academic research on the issue of abortion in Ireland, north or south in an historical context and this article aims to fill this historiographical lacuna, taking a comparative approach to the issue of abortion in Belfast between 1917 and 1967. The experience of women who came before the authorities for attempting to terminate a pregnancy in Belfast is located in a wider historiographical context and the article discusses vernacular understandings of the legal and medical authorities' attitudes toward abortion. Evidence from court records is used to recreate knowledge networks and to reconstruct the medical marketplace and the options facing women with unwanted pregnancies. A study of abortion in Belfast not only offers a localized regional study, but also the religious and sectarian divisions in the city appear to have had a direct impact on networks of knowledge on how to terminate pregnancy. This article argues that Protestant women were significantly over-represented among those who appeared before the courts for abortion-related offences in comparison to their Catholic counterparts. It will also consider the high rate of single women identified in the court records for abortion-related offences in Belfast, suggesting this is an important reflection of the stigma and shame attached to illegitimacy in Ireland, north and south, in the first half of the 20th century, and the lack of support and options for unmarried mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the struggle for survival of Muslims and Islam in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under the country's communist leader Josip Broz Tito from the 1950s through the 1970s. An overview of Yugoslavian religious policies, including in regard to the religious diversity in the country, is provided.

The article discusses division and debate within the Unitarian church concerning the use of the pulpit to support the abolition of slavery in the U.S. during the mid-19th century. It examines the views of Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing, the role of ministers in social change and the importance of revivalism, and the concept of the separation of church and state. It also contrasts Southern Unitarians such as minister Theodore Clapp with other Unitarian ministers whom some thought violated the concept of the duty of noninterference with matters such as slavery.

The Ghost Dance is commonly understood as a backward-looking rejection of modern life. Yet the teachings of the religion often incorporated exhortations to wage labor and other instructions for good living in the reservation era as necessary measures to precipitate the millennium. In reaching backward and forward simultaneously, the Ghost Dance helped resolve contradictions of Indian identity in the post-conquest world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the religious aspects of the 1979-1981 Iran Hostage Crisis, including U.S. President Jimmy Carter's Baptist religion and political Islam in the Iranian state under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. An overview of the impact that Carter's Baptist religion had on U.S. foreign relations with Iran is provided. An overview of the U.S.National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's role in ending the Iran Hostage Crisis, including his negotiations with Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and Iranian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi in Algeria, is provided.The efforts of the chief of the U.S. State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs bureau Harold Saunders in understanding Islam as a way to solve the Iran Hostage crisis are discussed.

An essay is presented which discusses the U.S. President Jimmy Carter's faith-based arbitration in efforts to bring peace to the Israeli-Arab conflict during the late 1970s, including in regard to his efforts to secure justice for Palestinians. The impact that Carter's Baptist religion had on his concept of justice is discussed.

The article focuses on the history of censorship within the Catholic church in Ireland. The author discusses the relationship between the Irish government and the Catholic church after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, explores the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act, and examines the opposition of the bill by the Irish newspaper the "Irish Statesman."

The article focuses on the changing church-state relations between the Catholic Cangzhou Diocese and the Chinese government. The author discusses the history of the Cangzhou Diocese, formerly the Xianxian Diocese, examines the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA), and analyzes the role of religious freedom in Chinese society.

The article discusses how members of the religious group the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), also known as Mormons, utilized sound, particularly in nature, music, and industry, to attempt to colonize and subjugate Native Americans of the Salt Lake, Utah, Valley and to project a civilized status to the East Coast of the U.S. during the mid-to-late 19th century. It discusses the significance of the group the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, attempts to assimilate by the LDS on issues such as polygamy, and anti-Mormon sentiment in the U.S.

One of the standard narratives that scholars tell about the encounter of Asian religions with colonial modernity is the narrative of “Protestantization.” This article rethinks that narrative through close readings of texts written by the two protagonists of one of nineteenth-century India's most emblematic events: the Maharaj Libel Case (1862). During and after this scandalous trial, reformer and journalist Karsandas Mulji was cast as an “Indian Luther.” His opponent Jadunathji Brizratanji Maharaj, meanwhile, was depicted as an unreformed advocate of priestly tyranny. The article rereads the relationship between Mulji and the Maharaj in order to suggest how Protestantism might be refigured and retheorized from the colonial margin. Arguing that, in the nineteenth century, “reform” served as a site for the exchange of mobilized ascetic technologies, it tracks how ascetic technologies of self-discipline connected the religious worlds of Protestantism and Hinduism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Probing the discourse of religious freedoms exposes the complex and multidimensional relations between religion and social change. The critics of this discourse, especially as it is integrated into the articulation of American foreign policy, fittingly historicize and locate it in continuity with the broader discourses of orientalism, colonialism, and neo-imperialism/neoliberalism as well as with the domestic antagonisms between religious and political institutional spheres. This kind of interrogation is born out of, or shares affinity with, what I term “the phenomenology of the secular,” which is theoretically grounded, for the most part, in the work of anthropologist Talal Asad and his historicist and genealogical critique of “religion.” I argue that the phenomenologists of the secular are implicated in power reductionism and thus risk an antirealist and reactionary position. This debilitates their capacity to theorize an alternative to the hegemonic discourse they critique. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the impact exerted by the evacuation of civilians on the pastoral structures of Catholic dioceses in the Rhineland and Westphalia during the later years of the Second World War. It examines the religious lives of Catholic evacuees from these regions in other parts of Germany, such as Saxony and Thuringia, and also assesses how effectively their clergy were able to minister to them in these new surroundings. In so doing, this article contributes to historiographical debates concerning the role of religion in German society during the Second World War. Many excellent works claim that the later phases of the conflict witnessed a widespread return to religious faith on the home front. This article aims to challenge this historiographical assumption, by revealing the manifold ways in which Catholic life was profoundly disrupted by the evacuation of civilians during the last years of the war. Large numbers of evacuees from the Rhineland and Westphalia went for extensive periods without supervision by their clergy, and frequently displayed indifference towards religious matters. Rather than viewing the Catholic Church’s prominence in western Germany after 1945 as grounded in social developments under way during the war years, this article contends that it must be seen as the product of changed political circumstances in the later 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines anonymous contributions in nineteenth century charitable subscription lists in order to explore what the phenomenon of anonymity can illuminate about the Victorian culture of philanthropy. Anonymous giving has received little historical scrutiny. The article contrasts the public and private nature of philanthropy and considers why some individuals chose to conceal their identity when making charitable donations. It suggests that the use of anonymity is counter to the idea, prevalent in the historiography, that philanthropists used their wealth to gain public power and prestige. Instead, this article suggests that anonymous giving highlights the personal and private aspect of charitable giving that reflects both the philanthropist's relationship with God and their deeply felt connection with the charitable cause. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the history of cultural heritage and historical preservation in Russia and China. The author compares policies on the preservation and destruction of churches under communism and postcommunism. Emphasis is given to topics such as protection under state ownership of churches in the Soviet Union, the relationship between modern Chinese nationalism and temples, and religious life in communist China.

An essay is presented which discusses the Puritan president of Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts Henry Dunster's opposition to the practice of infant baptism within New England's Puritan movement during the mid 17th century. An overview of the leaders of the Puritan movement's efforts to convince Dunster accept infant baptism is provided.

Work on deities and the extrahuman has been relatively sparse in studies on religion in Early China, tending to only incorporate the topic in so much as it matters to other discussions. This paints a picture of religious activity in which the extrahuman is at best passively involved and at worst simply not present. This article illustrates that such understandings are far from accurate and that deities are actually a very common and complex element of the religious practices and activities displayed in pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) writings by looking at Lesser Deities, specifically shen 神, in the Zuozhuan 左傳 and Guoyu 國語, two texts that display a vast swathe of information of this period. It shows that these texts depict these Lesser Deities in complex ways, constructing identities for them as active agents in socio-political roles with prescribed duties and responsibilities in the religious systems espoused by these texts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fear and anxiety are central to the conversion and rebirth process of early German Pietists, as exemplified in August Hermann Francke’s paradigmatic autobiography. This article explores the multilayered spatial structure both of frightening and of liberating from fright in these narratives. This spatiality illuminates not only the various steps of the Pietist salvation process but also the underlying notions of fear and anxiety. Narratives of divinatory dreams filled with fear, anxiety and terror are also analysed to reveal the significance of their structuring of the self in inner and outer spaces. This forms the basis for an argument that the conventional labelling of the mystical traditions as a ‘religion of feeling’ (Gefühlsreligion) or ‘religion of experience’ (Erfahrungsreligion) is based on a modern conceptualization of ‘feeling’. In early German Pietism, however, fear and anxiety were not yet referred to as mental events, hidden in the person’s interior; they were understood as ‘affects’, bodily phenomena and conditions that could be read as a language and attain a violent power. Authors of survival and conversion narratives talk about fear and anxiety in order to demonstrate how these affects might be overcome. It appeared that the first condition for this, paradoxically, was fear itself. If the Pietist concept of interiority is historicized, then it becomes clear that in its epistemology and affectology, early Pietism stood much closer to the Reformation traditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than to Enlightenment, sentimentalism, and modernity. These traditions were not ‘free’ from affects, and Pietist religiosity was not based exclusively on feelings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to contribute to the dialogue between the history and anthropology of Christianity by addressing the emotional practices of Vietnamese Pentecostals in present-day Berlin. Particularly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Vietnamese migrants, former contract workers in the former GDR, and ‘boat people’ whose flight from Vietnam led them to West Germany, founded Pentecostal churches and connected their old and new homes via transportable religious practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among Vietnamese migrants in Berlin who converted to charismatic Pentecostal Christianity after arriving in Germany, this article explores the allure of charismatic Pentecostal Christianity for people living in the diaspora, arguing that emotions as cultural practices represent a substantial part of religious rituals in Vietnamese Pentecostal charismatic networks. In the context of migration, emotions are transformed, transmitted, and performed in different ways, and at the same time, the migration experience generates specific emotions that are dealt with in religious practices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the Bā ʿAlawī—a group of Ḥaḍramī diaspora acknowledged as the descendants of the Prophet—in post-colonial Indonesia. In particular, it looks at the ḥawl, an annual commemoration of, or collective pilgrimage to, the tombs of Bā ʿAlawī saints/scholars. Focusing on two contemporary ḥawls in Central Java—that of Aḥmad b. ʿAbdullāh al-ʿAṭṭās (d. 1346/1927) in Pekalongan, and that of ʿAlī b. Muḥammad al-Ḥabashī (d. 1330/1912) in Solo—the article charts the transformations of both ḥawls from diasporic Arab gatherings into Indonesian public expressions of Islam. In the post-colonial period, when the place of the Ḥaḍramīs in the national imagination was far from being settled, the ḥawls have enabled the recasting of the Bā ʿAlawī as an integral part of the nation while allowing them to maintain their genealogical and spiritual distinctions. The sites, rituals, and commentaries of the ḥawl sustained the construction of networks connecting Bā ʿAlawī scholars to local Muslim scholars, providing the Bā ʿAlawī with cultural ties that maintain their distinction while anchoring them to the wider Muslim public. Examining the Bā ʿAlawī ḥawl underlines the importance of rituals in the creation and maintenance of informal Muslim networks, which in turn facilitate the practical integration into the larger public of a group previously considered an ethnic minority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The frequent pairing of electrical machines and Native American spirits in nineteenth-century Spiritualism was a topic first addressed by Werner Sollors in a 1983 article for American Quarterly. Building on Sollors’ observations, this article suggests that the juxtaposition of machines and Indian spirits reflects an alchemical worldview, one that framed Spiritualist conceptions of materiality and spiritual progression. As an industrializing America transformed nature into a modern infrastructure, Andrew Jackson Davis and John Murray Spear spiritualized technology, likening electricity and electrical machines to the rarefied matter of the spirit world. By the same alchemical logic, the rarefication of an Indian-inscribed nature was thought to yield Native American spirits, who circulated in and through the nation's new machines. This narrative has continued to shape the metaphysical imaginary, even as the popularity of Spiritualism has declined, reflecting a sustained meditation on the ultimate meaning of industrialization in America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]