Presenting many slaveholders as intelligent, honorable and pious men and women, this study asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that inflicted gross abuse on slaves. The South had formidable proslavery intellectuals who participated fully in transatlantic debates and boldly challenged an ascendant capitalist ("free-labor") society. Blending classical and Christian traditions, they forged a moral and political philosophy designed to sustain conservative principles in history, political economy, social theory, and theology, while translating them into political action.

This book is a study of the pratical application of a religious idea: the belief in the continuing validity of the Old Testament, especially the Ten Commandments, which ordained the observance of the Sabbath on the seventh day, Saturday. The author traces the growth and development of the most radical of English Sabbath observers, those who revered the Jewish Sabbath in a Christian context. But this is not only a pre-history of the Seventh-Day Adventists. It is also the story of the remarkable persistence of a revolutionary religious belief powerful and convincing enough to survive the Restoration and continue into modern times. The Saturday-Sabbath gradually became institutionalized in a nonconformist sect in which the ideological foundation was sufficient to unite men who on political grounds should have been the most bitter of enemies, including Fifth Monarchists, millenarians, neutrals, and Royalists alike. That those men and their followers could amicably join forces after the Restoration is testimony to the power of religious ideas which might overshadow the political affiliations of the civil war.

European Religious Cultures is a set of stimulating essays first written as offerings for Christopher Brooke on his eightieth birthday. They are now gathered for the enjoyment of all those interested in the history of religious cultures. They address a variety of practices in religious life -- among them pilgrimage and the urban cult of saints, the monastic performance of liturgy, the choice to enter the priesthood -- and situate them within the life-cycles and social relations of medieval Europeans. The authors have been inspired by Christopher Brooke's own interests over a long and fruitful career. First published in 2008, European Religious Cultures is now reissued as an Open Access edition with a new introduction by Professor Miri Rubin.

This lively ethnography traces a fraught three months in the life of a Jewish congregation stubbornly persisting on the Lower East Side, and affords a candid, lucid and intimate introduction to contemporary synagogue practice. In these pages Jonathan Boyarin invites us to share the intimate life of the Stanton Street Shul, one of the last remaining Jewish congregations on New York's historic Lower East Side. This narrow building, wedged into a lot designed for an old-law tenement, is full of clamorous voices the generations of the dead, who somehow contrive to make their presence known, and the newer generation, keeping the building and its memories alive and making themselves Jews in the process. Through the eyes of Boyarin, at once a member of the congregation and a bemused anthropologist, the book follows this congregation of "year-round Jews" through the course of a summer during which its future must once again be decided. The Lower East Side, famous as the jumping off point for millions of Jewish and other immigrants to America, has recently become the hip playground of twenty-something immigrants to the city from elsewhere in America and from abroad. Few imagine that Jewish life there has stubbornly continued through this history of decline and regeneration. Coming inside with Boyarin, we see the congregation's life as a combination of quiet heroism, ironic humor, disputes for the sake of Heaven and perhaps otherwise, and above all the ongoing search for ways to connect with Jewish ancestors while remaining true to oneself in the present. Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul illustrates in poignant and humorous ways the changes in a historic neighborhood facing the challenges of gentrification. It offers readers with no prior knowledge of Judaism and synagogue life a portrait that is at once intimate and intelligible. Most important, perhaps, it shows the congregation's members to be anything but a monochromatic set of uniform "believers" but rather a gathering of vibrant, imperfect, indisputably down-to-earth individuals coming together to make a community.

Living from Convention to Convention: A History of the NCSY, 1954-1980

This enlightening book examines the physical objects found in elite Virginia households of the eighteenth century to discover what they can tell us about their owners’ lives and religious practices. Lauren F. Winner looks closely at punch bowls, needlework, mourning jewelry, baptismal gowns, biscuit molds, cookbooks, and many other items, illuminating the ways Anglicanism influenced daily activities and attitudes in colonial Virginia, particularly in the households of the gentry.