While we are reading about prosperity gospel and preachers as celebrity- here is something that popped up in my news feed: http://www.vice.com/read/andrew-keegan-started-a-new-religion-814 I think my favorite line in the entire article is how celebrities have become gods. Maybe this is the new trend, instead of preachers gaining prosperity through television maybe we are turning the…
What it means to be Latino in the United States is the central purpose of Latino Mennonites.[1] In order to trace the development of a Latino Mennonite identity, Felipe Hinojosa traces the history of Mexican American (Chicano) and Puerto Rican adherents to the Mennonite Church from the 1930s through the 1970s. This forty-year period is…
A collection of essays rather than a single overarching narrative, David Hollinger’s After Cloven Tongues of Fire is quite different from the other books we have seen this semester. However, it is immediately obvious that After Cloven Tongues of Fire is simply ten very separate essays with an introduction and conclusion taped on, and it…
After Cloven Tongues of Fire is a work of scholarship quite apart from our other readings this semester. Rather than a straightforward monograph, we have a collection of previously published essays on various, but thematically connected, subjects. More on this later, but it is also, in the Tweed sense, the most “positioned” of the other…
In Contentious Spirits David Yoo presents a concise and well-crafted social, political, and cultural history of the paradoxes of race, religion and identity as Korean agricultural laborers, student-laborers, and exiles migrate to Hawaii and California during the first half of the twentieth century. Yoo, a professor of Asian American Studies and Director of the Asian…
Contentious Spirits lays out the history of Korean American Religion over a span of 42 years. While that seems like a short period of time, David K. Yoo is able to cover vast amounts of religious history as well as place the events in a broader context. The book is laid out with three main…
John McGreevy Parish Boundaries- the Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North, is a well-researched and documented book about the continuous conflicting struggle between migrating African Americans from south into white urban Catholic neighborhoods. His book focuses on the major cities of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Boston. The period in…
We didn’t yet know what to make of the new “kid” at school. She was one of the few white people at our school in Collinwood, a nearly all Black Cleveland neighborhood surrounding an old but stately Catholic school named St. Joseph’s. Cajoling her to play kickball with us, she surprisingly accepted. She belted the…
First off, as an aside tip for everyone, when writing your reviews type them first in Word or a similar program, and then copy/paste it to the website. That way, when your computer decides to restart to install “mandatory updates,” you won’t lose everything and have to start from scratch. Most of you probably know…
In the book, The Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930, Kelly J. Baker explores some of the more obscure and popularly unknown components of the Ku Klux Klan. She argues that the Klan is “part and parcel” of the social history of our nation. As such, the organization deserves…