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The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism
The Civil War in Southern Appalachian Methodism
addresses a much-neglected topic in both Appalachian and Civil
War history—the role of organized religion in the sectional
strife and the war itself. Meticulously researched, well written,
and full of fresh facts, this new book brings an original
perspective to the study of the conflict and the region. In many
important respects, the actual Civil War that began in 1861
unveiled an internal civil war within the Holston Conference of
the Methodist Episcopal Church, South—comprising churches
in southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North
Carolina, and a small portion of northern Georgia—that had
been waged surreptitiously for the previous five decades. This
work examines the split within the Methodist Church that occurred
with mounting tensions over the slavery question and the rise of
the Confederacy. Specifically, it looks at how the church was
changing from its early roots as a reform movement grounded in a
strong local pastoral ministry to a church with a more
intellectual, professionalized clergy that often identified with
Southern secessionists. The author has mined an exhaustive trove
of primary sources, especially the extensive, yet
often-overlooked minutes from frequent local and regional
Methodist gatherings. He has also explored East Tennessee
newspapers and other published works on the topic. The
author’s deep research into obscure church records and
other resources results not only in a surprising interpretation
of the division within the Methodist Church but also new insights
into the roles of African Americans, women, and especially lay
people and local clergy in the decades prior to the war and
through its aftermath. In addition, Dunn presents important
information about what the inner Civil War was like in East
Tennessee, an area deeply divided between Union and Confederate
sympathizers. Students and scholars of religious history,
southern history, and Appalachian studies will be enlightened by
this volume and its bold new way of looking at the history of the
Methodist Church and this part of the nation.
eBook
St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel
The impact of St. Mark’s Community Center and United
Methodist Church on the city of New Orleans is immense. Their
stories are dramatic reflections of the times. But these
stories are more than mere reflections because St. Mark’s
changed the picture, leading the way into different
understandings of what urban diversity could and should mean.
This book looks at the contributions of St. Mark’s, in
particular the important role played by women (especially
deaconesses) as the church confronted social issues through the
rise of the social gospel movement and into the modern civil
rights era. Ellen Blue uses St. Mark’s as a microcosm to
tell a larger, overlooked story about women in the Methodist
Church and the sources of reform. One of the few volumes on
women’s history within the church, this book challenges
the dominant narrative of the social gospel movement and its
past.
St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel begins by
examining the period between 1895 and World War I, chronicling
the center’s development from its early beginnings as a
settlement house that served immigrants and documenting the
early social gospel activities of Methodist women in New
Orleans. Part II explores the efforts of subsequent generations
of women to further gender and racial equality between the
1920s and 1960. Major topics addressed in this section include
an examination of the deaconesses’ training in Christian
Socialist economic theory and the church’s response to
the Brown decision. The third part focuses on the
church’s direct involvement in the school desegregation
crisis of 1960 , including an account of the pastor who broke
the white boycott of a desegregated elementary school by taking
his daughter back to class there. Part IV offers a brief look
at the history of St. Mark’s since 1965. Shedding new
light on an often neglected subject,
St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel will be
welcomed by scholars of religious history, local history,
social history, and women’s studies.
eBook
One Family Under God
Originally a sect within the Anglican church, Methodism blossomed into a dominant mainstream religion in America during the nineteenth century. At the beginning, though, Methodists constituted a dissenting religious group whose ideas about sexuality, marriage, and family were very different from those of their contemporaries. Focusing on the Methodist notion of family that cut across biological ties,One Family Under Godspeaks to historical debates over the meaning of family and how the nuclear family model developed over the eighteenth century. Historian Anna M. Lawrence demonstrates that Methodists adopted flexible definitions of affection and allegiance and emphasized extended communal associations that enabled them to incorporate people outside the traditional boundaries of family. They used the language of romantic, ecstatic love to describe their religious feelings and the language of the nuclear family to describe their bonds to one another. In this way, early Methodism provides a useful lens for exploring eighteenth-century modes of family, love, and authority, as Methodists grappled with the limits of familial and social authority in their extended religious family. Methodists also married and formed conjugal families within this larger spiritual framework. Evangelical modes of marriage called for careful, slow courtships, and often marriages happened later in life and produced fewer children. Religious views of the family offered alternatives to traditional coupling and marriage-through celibacy, spiritual service, and the idea of finding one's true spiritual match, which both challenged the role of parental authority within marriage-making and accelerated the turn within the larger society toward romantic marriage. By examining the language and practice of evangelical sexuality and family,One Family Under Godhighlights how the Methodist movement in the eighteenth century was central to the rise of romantic marriage and the formation of the modern family.
eBook
Through an Indian's looking-glass : a cultural biography of William Apess, Pequot
\"The life of William Apess (1789-1839), a Pequot Indian, Methodist preacher, and widely celebrated writer, provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America's early nationhood. Apess's life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Christian spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its \"Indian question\" in favor of extinction. Through meticulous archival research, close readings of Apess's key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about his largely enigmatic life, Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of this singular Native American figure. This new biography will sit alongside Apess's own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Beyond the Pulpit
In the formative years of the Methodist Church in the United States, women played significant roles as proselytizers, organizers, lay ministers, and majority members. Although women's participation helped the church to become the nation's largest denomination by the mid-nineteenth century, their official roles diminished during that time. InBeyond the Pulpit,Lisa Shaver examines Methodist periodicals as a rhetorical space to which women turned to find, and make, self-meaning.In 1818,Methodist Magazinefirst published \"memoirs\" that eulogized women as powerful witnesses for their faith on their deathbeds. As Shaver observes, it was only in death that a woman could achieve the status of minister. Another Methodist publication, theChristian Advocate,was America's largest circulated weekly by the mid-1830s. It featured the \"Ladies' Department,\" a column that reinforced the canon of women as dutiful wives, mothers, and household managers. Here, the church also affirmed women in the important rhetorical and evangelical role of domestic preacher. Outside the \"Ladies Department,\" women increasingly appeared in \"little narratives\" in which they were portrayed as models of piety and charity, benefactors, organizers, Sunday school administrators and teachers, missionaries, and ministers' assistants. These texts cast women into nondomestic roles that were institutionally sanctioned and widely disseminated.By 1841, theLadies' Repository and Gatherings of the Westwas engaging women in discussions of religion, politics, education, science, and a variety of intellectual debates. As Shaver posits, by providing a forum for women writers and readers, the church gave them an official rhetorical space and the license to define their own roles and spheres of influence. As such, the periodicals of the Methodist church became an important public venue in which women's voices were heard and their identities explored.
eBook
The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800
The Methodists and Revolutionary Americais the first in-depth narrative of the origins of American Methodism, one of the most significant popular movements in American history. Placing Methodism's rise in the ideological context of the American Revolution and the complex social setting of the greater Middle Atlantic where it was first introduced, Dee Andrews argues that this new religion provided an alternative to the exclusionary politics of Revolutionary America. With its call to missionary preaching, its enthusiastic revivals, and its prolific religious societies, Methodism competed with republicanism for a place at the center of American culture.
Based on rare archival sources and a wealth of Wesleyan literature, this book examines all aspects of the early movement. From Methodism's Wesleyan beginnings to the prominence of women in local societies, the construction of African Methodism, the diverse social profile of Methodist men, and contests over the movement's future, Andrews charts Methodism's metamorphosis from a British missionary organization to a fully Americanized church. Weaving together narrative and analysis, Andrews explains Methodism's extraordinary popular appeal in rich and compelling new detail.
eBook