Author: Edward W. Osowski Publisher: University of Arizona Press ISBN: 0816549443 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
While King Carlos I of Spain struggled to suppress the Protestant Reformation in the Old World, the Spanish turned to New Spain to promote the Catholic cause, unimpeded by the presence of the “false” Old World religions. To this end, Osowski writes, the Spanish “saw indigenous people as necessary protagonists in the anticipated triumph of the faith.” As the conversion of the indigenous people of Mexico proceeded in earnest, Catholic ritual became the medium through which indigenous leaders and Spaniards negotiated colonial hegemony. Indigenous Miracles is about how the Nahua elite of central Mexico secured political legitimacy through the administration of public rituals centered on miraculous images of Christ the King. Osowski argues that these images were adopted as community symbols and furthermore allowed Nahua leaders to “represent their own kingship,” protecting their claims to legitimacy. This legitimacy allowed them to act collectively to prevent the loss of many aspects of their culture. Osowski demonstrates how a shared religion admitted the possibility of indigenous agency and new ethnic identities. Consulting both Nahuatl and Spanish sources, Osowski strives to fill a gap in the history of the Nahuas from 1760 to 1810, a momentous time when previously sanctioned religious practices were condemned by the viceroys and archbishops of the Bourbon royal dynasty. His approach synthesizes ethnohistory and institutional history to create a fascinating account of how and why the Nahuas protected the practices and symbols they had appropriated under Hapsburg rule. Ultimately, Osowski’s account contributes to our understanding of the ways in which indigenous agency was negotiated in colonial Mexico.
Author: Edward W. Osowski Publisher: University of Arizona Press ISBN: 9780816528554 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
"Edward Osowski focuses on a regional set of Nahua Constantines, who, with their conversionary moments generations behind them, sought to lead by example---through patronage, public demonstrations of devotion around chosen holy images, ritual good works and almscollection schemes, and a jealous guardianship of indigenous roles in the pious parading of Christian membership and privilege. Osowski's study banishes older views of a uniformly disoriented native society, trudging drunk and leaderless into the colonial new order, duped into demeaning collaboration and the limits of social climbing. His stress upon a selflegitimizing indigenous nobility, and upon the calculated and instrumental aims of these protagonists, raises vital questions that ought to stimulate new lines of research into Nahua Christian expression, not least those exploring what such vibrant religious membership and shared devotions included, and what they felt like to a widening and multi-ethnic body of participants." ---Kenneth Mills, University of Toronto, co-editor of Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History "A highly significant work of religious and urban history, Osowski's book has much to teach us about Nahua life, Culture, and religious practice in eighteenth-century New Spain." ---Susan Kellogg, author of Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500-1700 While King Carlos I of Spain struggled to suppress the Protestant Reformation in the Old World, the Spanish turned to New Spain to promote the Catholic cause, unimpeded by the presence of the "false" Old World religions. To this end, Osowski writes, the Spanish "saw indigenous people as necessary protagonists in the anticipated triumph of the faith." As the conversion of the indigenous people of Mexico proceeded in earnest, Catholic ritual became the medium through which indigenous leaders and Spaniards negotiated colonial hegemony. Indigenous Miracles is about how the Nahua elite of central Mexico secured political legitimacy through the administration of public rituals centered on miraculous images of Christ the King. Osowski argues that these images were adopted as community symbols and furthermore allowed Nahua leaders to "represent their own kingship," protecting their claims to legitimacy. This legitimacy allowed them to act collectively to prevent the loss of many aspects of their culture. Osowski demonstrates how a shared religion admitted the possibility of indigenous agency and new ethnic identities. Consulting both Nahuatl and Spanish sources, Osowski strives to fill a gap in the history of the Nahuas from 1760 to 1810, a momentous time when previously sanctioned religious practices were condemned by the viceroys and archbishops of the Bourbon royal dynasty. His approach synthesizes ethnohistory and institutional history to create a fascinating account of how and why the Nahuas protected the practices and symbols they had appropriated under Hapsburg rule. Ultimately, Osowski's account contributes to our understanding of the ways in which indigenous agency was negotiated in colonial Mexico.
Author: Clifford E. Trafzer Publisher: University of Arizona Press ISBN: 0816537429 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
Indigenous people of wisdom have offered prayers of power, protection, and healing since the dawn of time. From Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet, to contemporary healer Kenneth Coosewoon, medicine people have called on the spiritual world to help humans in their relationships with each other and the natural world. Many American Indians—past and present—have had the ability to use power to access wisdom, knowledge, and spiritual understanding. This groundbreaking collection provides fascinating stories of wisdom, spiritual power, and forces within tribal communities that have influenced the past and may influence the future. Through discussions of omens, prophecies, war, peace, ceremony, ritual, and cultural items such as masks, prayer sticks, sweat lodges, and peyote, this volume offers examples of the ways in which Native American beliefs in spirits have been and remain a fundamental aspect of history and culture. Drawing from written and oral sources, the book offers readers a greater understanding of creation narratives, oral histories, and songs that speak of healers, spirits, and power from tribes across the North American continent. American Indian medicine ways and spiritual power remain vital today. With the help of spirits, people can heal the sick, protect communities from natural disasters, and mediate power of many kinds between the spiritual and corporeal worlds. As the contributors to this volume illustrate, healers are the connective cloth between the ancient past and the present, and their influence is significant for future generations. CONTRIBUTORS R. David Edmunds Joseph B. Herring Benjamin Jenkins Troy R. Johnson Michelle Lorimer L. G. Moses Richard D. Scheuerman Al Logan Slagle Clifford E. Trafzer
Author: Patrick J. Hayes Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 673
Book Description
Miracles give hope to the hopeless and exemplify the intersection of the divine and the mundane. They have shaped world history and continue to influence us through their presence in films, television, novels, and popular culture. This encyclopedia provides a unique resource on the philosophical, historical, religious, and cross-cultural conceptions of miracles that cut across denominational lines. Multidisciplinary in approach, this informative yet entertaining encyclopedia covers major aspects of miraculous phenomena through more than 150 alphabetically arranged entries that document how humanity's belief in religious miracles over multiple places, periods, and faiths have affected society—even changed the course of history. Written for high school students and general readers, the coverage enables readers to learn about different civilizations and cultures, the controversies surrounding different beliefs, and the often uncomfortable engagement of religion with science. This single-volume book provides a one-stop ready-reference that addresses a broad variety of subject matter on miraculous phenomena and guides further investigations into the subject. Helpful illustrations and lucid explanations of the ancillary concepts associated with miraculous phenomena make learning about this topic more engaging. Readers will be able to link the doctrinal concepts, such as "grace" or "prayer," with the descriptions of miraculous events, especially those associated with saints or holy objects. The examination of the controversial aspects of different belief systems along with the book's balanced coverage of the interpretation of miracles will encourage students to weigh different explanations, thus fostering the development of their critical thinking skills.
Author: Elisa Eastwood Pulido Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190942118 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 357
Book Description
This book is the first full-length biography of Margarito Bautista (1878-1961), a celebrated Latino Mormon leader in the U.S. and Mexico in the early twentieth century who was a Mexican cultural nationalist, visionary, founder of a utopian commune, and Mormon dissident. Surprisingly little is known about Bautista's remarkable life, the scope of his work, or the development of his vision. Elisa Eastwood Pulido draws on his letters, books, pamphlets, and unpublished diaries to provide a lens through which to view the convergence of Mormon evangelization, Mexican nationalism, and religious improvisation in the U.S. Mexico borderlands. A successful proselytizer of Mexicans for years, from 1922 onward Bautista came to view the paternalism of the Euro-American leadership of the Church as a barrier to ecclesiastical self-governance by indigenous Latter-day Saints . In 1924, he began his journey away from mainstream Mormonism. By 1946, he had established a completely Mexican-led polygamist utopia in Mexico on the slopes of the volcano Popocateptl, twenty-two kilometers southeast of Mexico City. Here, he preached an alternative Mormonism rooted in Mesoamerican history and culture. Based on his indigenous hermeneutic of Mormon scripture, Bautista proclaimed that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were a chosen race, destined to wrest both political and spiritual authority from the descendants of Euro-American colonists. This book provides an in-depth look at a man still regarded with cultural pride by those Mexican and Mexican American Mormons who remember him as an iconic and revolutionary figure.
Author: Bilinda Straight Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 0812209370 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
The Samburu of northern Kenya struggle to maintain their pastoral way of life as drought and the side effects of globalization threaten both their livestock and their livelihood. Mirroring this divide between survival and ruin are the lines between the self and the other, the living and the dead, "this side" and inia bata, "that side." Cultural anthropologist Bilinda Straight, who has lived with the Samburu for extended periods since the 1990s, bears witness to Samburu life and death in Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya. Written mostly in the field, Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya is the first book-length ethnography completely devoted to Samburu divinity and belief. Here, child prophets recount their travels to heaven and back. Others report transformations between persons and inanimate objects. Spirit turns into action and back again. The miraculous is interwoven with the mundane as the Samburu continue their day-to-day twenty-first-century existence. Straight describes these fantastic movements inside the cultural logic that makes them possible; thus she calls into question how we experience, how we feel, and how anthropologists and their readers can best engage with the improbable. In her detailed and precise accounts, Straight writes beyond traditional ethnography, exploring the limits of science and her own limits as a human being, to convey the significance of her time with the Samburu as they recount their fantastic yet authentic experiences in the physical and metaphysical spaces of their culture.
Author: Craig S. Keener Publisher: Baker Academic ISBN: 1493431382 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
Do miracles still happen today? This book demonstrates that miraculous works of God, which have been part of the experience of the church around the world since Christianity began, continue into the present. Leading New Testament scholar Craig Keener addresses common questions about miracles and provides compelling reasons to believe in them today, including many accounts that offer evidence of verifiable miracles. This book gives an accessible and concise overview of one of Keener's most significant research topics. His earlier two-volume work on miracles stands as the definitive word on the topic, but its size and scope are daunting to many readers. This new book summarizes Keener's basic argument but contains substantial new material, including new accounts of the miraculous. It is suitable as a textbook but also accessible to church leaders and laypeople.
Author: Jessica Bryan Publisher: Weiser Books ISBN: 9781578634415 Category : Body, Mind & Spirit Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
A journalistic quest that begins with the couldn't-be-more-personal experience of her own psychic surgery, Bryan takes the reader from The Faith in God Spiritual Church outside Reno, Nevada to the Pangasinan Province of the Philippines Island of Luzon, famous for its healers who perform surgery without cutting open the body - bare-handed surgery, where no anesthesia is used, and there is no pain, scars, or infection. Even as quantum physicists close in on a scientific description of how it works, Bryan asks: "Is psychic healing a miracle of God or a trickery of fake blood and cotton balls perpetrated by charlatans?" She goes on to explore how it might well be both. This is an open, honest, in-depth look at the multiple, often contradictory realities of faith healing and the ripples it casts into the realms of physics, metaphysics, spirituality, and higher consciousness. Into this heartfelt first person account of a life-changing journey from patient to student to sometimes teacher, Bryan weaves a parallel narrative full of historical detail and cultural perspective on telekinesis, the magnetic force of cells, trance mediums, miracles, the placebo effect, and the power of expectation, as well as minor and major deities on the order of John of God, Franz Mesmer, Emanuel Swedenborg, Albert Einstein, and Shirley MacLaine.
Author: Candy Gunther Brown Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199793069 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 421
Book Description
Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is a global phenomenon that comprises a quarter of the world's two billion Christians and is growing rapidly. This volume reveals that the primary appeal of pentecostalism worldwide is as a religion of healing. Contrary to popular stereotypes of flamboyant, fraudulent, anti-medical "faith healing" televangelists who preach a materialistic, "health and wealth" gospel, handle serpents, or sensationally "exorcize" demons, this book offers a more nuanced portrait. The collected essays illumine local variations, hybridities, and tensions in practices on six continents, and depict the extent of human suffering and powerlessness experienced by people everywhere and the attractiveness to many of a global religious movement that promises material relief by invoking spiritual resources. This is the first book of its kind. Achieving the twin goals of thick description and comparative analysis of global practices is best achieved by bringing area experts into conversation. This volume's distinguished, international team of contributors includes sociologists, anthropologists, historians, political scientists, theologians, and religious studies scholars from North America, Europe, and Africa. Read together, these essays set the agenda for a new program of scholarly inquiry into some of the largest forces of change at work in the world today-globalization, pentecostalism, and healing-each of which is extremely powerful in itself and which together are reshaping our world in vastly significant ways.
Author: Edward W. Osowski
Author: Edward W. Osowski
Author: William Norman Brown
Author: Clifford E. Trafzer
Author: Patrick J. Hayes
Author: Elisa Eastwood Pulido
Author: Bilinda Straight
Author: Craig S. Keener
Author: Jessica Bryan
Author: Candy Gunther Brown