Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South PDF Download

Author: Tracy Elaine K'Meyer
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813920023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Koinonia Farm, an interracial cooperative founded in 1942 in southwest Georgia by two white Baptist ministers, was a beacon to early civil rights activists. K'Meyer (history, U. of Louisville) describes the influence of this single community on the history of the civil rights movement. In the process, she provides a new perspective on white liberalism as well as a nuanced exploration of an extraordinary case of religious belief informing progressive social action. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Andrew S. Moore
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807148628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In The South's Tolerable Alien, Andrew S. Moore probes the role of Catholics in the post--World War II South and argues persuasively that, until the 1960s, religion rivaled race as a boundary separating residents of the Bible Belt. Delving deep into underutilized diocesan archives, he explores the ways in which southern Catholics worked to be both good Catholics and good southerners in a region largely defined by Protestant denominations, and explains how the burgeoning civil rights movement ultimately breached these religious barriers. With religious intolerance integral to southern Protestant identity, anti-Catholicism persisted longer in the South than in any other part of the country. Yet despite the prejudices against them, southern Catholics refused to shrink from public view, creating a separate subculture to sustain their religious identity as they marked out public sacred space from which they could engage their critics. Moore describes in detail the Catholics' civic displays and public rituals -- including the diocese of Mobile-Birmingham's annual Christ the King celebrations, which featured downtown parades of over 25,000 people. More than mere assertions of their presence, these pageants provided Catholics with opportunities to craft a secular identity within the American mainstream. As Moore maintains, the rise of the civil rights movement slowly diminished religious tension among white southerners as violent confrontations in Selma and Birmingham forced Catholics, as well as others, to take a stand. Once the civil rights movement was in full swing, either support for or opposition to racial desegregation became paramount and contributed to social and political realignments along racial lines instead of religious ones. Comparing the responses to the struggle to end Jim Crow among dioceses, Moore finds that, among Catholics, there was no simple liberal/conservative dichotomy. Instead, he argues that, in the South, the civil rights movement was more important than the Second Vatican Council in reshaping the social and political stances of the Catholic Church. By describing the relationship between Catholics and Protestants in the South from a Catholic perspective, Moore demonstrates that, despite the persistence of anti-Catholicism throughout this period, white Protestants were gradually coming to terms with the modern South's religious pluralism. With The South's Tolerable Alien, Moore offers the first serious analysis of southern Catholicism outside of Louisiana and makes an enormous contribution to the study of southern religion.

Author: Ken Fones-Wolf
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252097009
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In 1946, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) undertook Operation Dixie, an initiative to recruit industrial workers in the American South. Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf plumb rarely used archival sources and rich oral histories to explore the CIO's fraught encounter with the evangelical Protestantism and religious culture of southern whites. The authors' nuanced look at working class religion reveals how laborers across the surprisingly wide evangelical spectrum interpreted their lives through their faith. Factors like conscience, community need, and lived experience led individual preachers to become union activists and mill villagers to defy the foreman and minister alike to listen to organizers. As the authors show, however, all sides enlisted belief in the battle. In the end, the inability of northern organizers to overcome the suspicion with which many evangelicals viewed modernity played a key role in Operation Dixie's failure, with repercussions for labor and liberalism that are still being felt today. Identifying the role of the sacred in the struggle for southern economic justice, and placing class as a central aspect in southern religion, Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South provides new understandings of how whites in the region wrestled with the options available to them during a crucial period of change and possibility.

Author: Yaacov Oved
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351517260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
After World War II, communes and cooperative communities became internationally oriented in their membership and networking began to develop. Unlike earlier such enterprises, these groups shared an openness to international relationships. This was evident both in the groups' social composition, and in the extension of networks beyond their own country. Such globalization opened up the possibility of comparative analysis, which has become a trend in research since the 1950s. The dynamism and speed with which voluntary communities have spread throughout the world is impressive. In the 1950s there were only a few hundred such societies, but by the end of the last century there were thousands. These have taken a variety of forms. There are religious and secular communes, intentional communities, ecological communities, co-housing projects, various types of Christian communities, communities of Eastern religions, and spiritual communities inspired by New Age thought. Yaacov Oved shows that such societies maintain a community based on cooperation and expand their influence through newspapers, television, and the Internet. Their chief characteristic is their openness to the outside world, and their search for a way to move beyond a world of individualism and competitiveness. To accomplish this, they embrace all the tools of the modern world. Oved observes that those who predicted the failure of communes and intentional communities failed to appreciate the extent to which people in today's society aspire to communal life. This book answers the doubters and does so with a sense of deep historical understanding.

Author: Fay Botham
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807899224
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
In this fascinating cultural history of interracial marriage and its legal regulation in the United States, Fay Botham argues that religion--specifically, Protestant and Catholic beliefs about marriage and race--had a significant effect on legal decisions concerning miscegenation and marriage in the century following the Civil War. She contends that the white southern Protestant notion that God "dispersed" the races and the American Catholic emphasis on human unity and common origins point to ways that religion influenced the course of litigation and illuminate the religious bases for Christian racist and antiracist movements.

Author: Mark R. Gornik
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1666753548
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
In Sharing the Crust, Mark Gornik tells the story of an unbreakable love through the life and witness of Allan Tibbels and a communion of saints in the Sandtown neighborhood of Baltimore. Sharing the Crust is about the power of small changes, "the little way," and the hard work of peacemaking in a divided world. It is about the meaning of companionship in this life and the life to come, of who we are to one another. A refreshingly complex story of ministry, church life, and community development, Sharing the Crust is a witness to faith, hope, and love for our times.

Author: Ted Ownby
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146964701X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
When Tammy Wynette sang "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," she famously said she "spelled out the hurtin' words" to spare her child the pain of family breakup. In this innovative work, Ted Ownby considers how a wide range of writers, thinkers, activists, and others defined family problems in the twentieth-century American South. Ownby shows that it was common for both African Americans and whites to discuss family life in terms of crisis, but they reached very different conclusions about causes and solutions. In the civil rights period, many embraced an ideal of Christian brotherhood as a way of transcending divisions. Opponents of civil rights denounced "brotherhoodism" as a movement that undercut parental and religious authority. Others, especially in the African American community, rejected the idea of family crisis altogether, working to redefine family adaptability as a source of strength. Rather than attempting to define the experience of an archetypal "southern family," Ownby looks broadly at contexts such as political and religious debates about divorce and family values, southern rock music, autobiographies, and more to reveal how people in the South used the concept of the family as a proxy for imagining a better future or happier past.

Author: Scott Kaufman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118907582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
With 30 historiographical essays by established and rising scholars, this Companion is a comprehensive picture of the presidencies and legacies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Examines important national and international events during the 1970s, as well as presidential initiatives, crises, and legislation Discusses the biography of each man before entering the White House, his legacy and work after leaving office, and the lives of Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, and their families Covers key themes and issues, including Watergate and the pardon of Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, neoconservatism and the rise of the New Right, and the Iran hostage crisis Incorporates presidential, diplomatic, military, economic, social, and cultural history Uses the most recent research and newly released documents from the two Presidential Libraries and the State Department

Author: Daniel L. Smith-Christopher
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567707636
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Daniel L. Smith-Christopher focuses on the life and efforts of Keir Hardie, one of the founders of the UK Labour Party and one of the foremost figureheads of trade unionism. Drawing upon the work of two contemporary and significant American theorists-Herbert Gutman's classic essay on “Working-Class Religion” and Michael Gold's call for “Proletarian Literature”-Smith-Christopher marries British and American historical and theoretical debates to argue that Hardie's work is surely the quintessential example of a “proletarian exegesis” of the Bible. Beginning with a summary of the major events in Hardie's life, Smith-Christopher draws both upon existing biographies and more recent historical discussions that question assumption of British social history. He then reviews previous debates upon the influence of Hardie's own Christian faith upon his journalistic output, and assesses three Christian Socialists whose work was advertised and reviewed by Hardie himself: Dennis Hird, John Morrison Davidson, and Caroline Martyn. Smith-Christopher proceeds to Hardie's copious writings, both for The Labour Leader and separately published lectures, pamphlets, and somewhat longer works of autobiography and comment. Highlighting Hardie's tendency to cite favorite texts (heavily from the Gospels and James, but also some notable Old Testament discussions), Smith-Christopher proves Hardie's serious discussion of these texts beyond mere political rhetoric; concluding by comparing a selection of Hardie's favorite Biblical arguments with contemporary research in Biblical Studies about these same passages, evaluating the problems and possibilities of proposing a “Proletarian Exegesis”.

Author: Rhonda Mawhood Lee
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1621894754
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
In an era of seemingly endless war, and similarly endless debates about the nature of marriage, Through with Kings and Armies offers a fresh look at what both war and marriage might mean for Christians. This is a love story: the tale of a sixty-three-year marriage grounded in the love of Jesus Christ and shaped by the conviction that his disciples must witness publicly to their faith in him. As a Presbyterian ministerial student in 1941, George Edwards renounced a draft deferment to register as a conscientious objector, serving at home and abroad for five years. Jean, his childhood friend, turned against war when the Battle of the Bulge left her a widow at twenty-three. After George and Jean fell in love overnight at the end of the war, their pacifist beliefs became the foundation for their life together. A pastor and biblical scholar yoked to a Christian educator, their gifts complemented each other as they organized communities of witnesses against war and racial violence, while raising three children and remaining active in the church that rarely supported their witness.