In The Shadow Of The Pulpit

Ranging from the nineteenth-century to the present, this book explores several central aspects of the ways in which the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales has responded to what was, for a crucial period of a century or so, the dominant culture of Wales: the culture of Welsh Nonconformity. In the introduction, the author reflects on why no sustained attempt has hitherto been made to investigate one of the formative cultural influences on modern 'Anglo-Welsh' literature, the Nonconformist inheritance. The importance of addressing this strange and significant cultural deficit is then explained, and a preliminary attempt made to capture something of the spirit of Welsh Nonconformity. The succeeding chapters address and seek to answer such questions as: What exactly did the Welsh chapels believe and do? Why have the English-language writers of Wales, from Caradoc Evans and Dylan Thomas to R.S. Thomas and the authors of today, been so fascinated by them? How accurate are the impressions we've been given of chapel life and chapel people in the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales? The answers offered may alter our views both of the Welsh Nonconformist past and of Welsh writing in English. One of the ideas advanced is that many of Wales' most important writers went to war with the preachers in their texts, and that their work is therefore the site of cultural struggle. Theirs was a war in words waged to determine who would have the last word on modern Welsh experience.

In the stories and anecdotes that make up this book, the reader will discover the invincible power that resides in every human being to survive vicissitudes and reach a renaissance of peace. Ann and Joel Klein write their history from their personal perspectives and follow the time-honored story-telling tradition of their people that celebrates joy and sorrow with the eternal hope that life is beautiful. This powerful meaning of their own and their extended family's lives on two continents under four divergent political systems breaks through their words. The stories tell a couple's private and professional life in one particular setting. Their significance lies in the inescapable recognition that every man and woman in any setting will find relevance to his or her life in them.

Focusing on the broken friendship between Teddy Roosevelt and his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, revisits the Progressive Era during which Roosevelt wielded the Bully Pulpit to challenge and triumph over abusive monopolies, political bosses, and corrupt money brokers only to see it compromised by Taft.

With seemingly obsessive regularity, American authors, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, evoke the sermon at culturally loaded moments in their works, deploying the form to underscore the cultural work they imagine their novels or poetry to perform. Examining this longstanding tradition of “literary preaching,” this book draws on literary applications of design theory to provide a nuanced account of American literature's complex, anxious, and persistent engagement with the Protestant sermon. Analyzing literary preaching as a transhistorical form that simultaneously attracts and repels authors, Smalley demonstrates how major US writers–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison–have subverted the sermon's predominantly religious content in order to reimagine profound moments of reform in a political, cultural, and aesthetic mode. This study elucidates new lines of literary kinship, offers fresh readings of familiar works, and establishes literary preaching as an undertheorized but significant tradition in American literature.

Matthew Bowman explores the world of a neglected group of American Christians: the self-identified liberal evangelicals who began in late nineteenth-century New York to reconcile traditional evangelical spirituality with progressive views on social activism and theological questions. These evangelicals emphasized the importance of supernatural conversion experience, but also argued that scientific advances, new movements in art, and the decline in poverty created by a new industrial economy could facilitate encounters with Christ. The Urban Pulpit chronicles the struggle of liberal evangelicals against conservative Protestants who questioned their theological sincerity and against secular reformers who grew increasingly devoted to the cause of cultural pluralism and increasingly suspicious of evangelicals over the course of the twentieth century. Liberal evangelicals walked a difficult path, facing increasing polarization in twentieth-century American public life; both conservative evangelicals and secular reformers insisted that religion and science were necessarily at odds and that evangelical Christianity was incompatible with cultural diversity. Liberal evangelicals rejected these simple dichotomies, but nonetheless found it increasingly difficult to defend their middle way. Drawing on history, anthropology, and religious studies, Bowman paints a complex portrait of these understudied Christians at work, at worship, and engaged in advocacy in the public square.

The darkness holds many surprises. In this collection of thirty stories of horror and the bizarre, we shall explore some of those surprises. Even though I’ve been extolling the virtues of darkness, I do encourage you to read this book with the lights on. Light does have its practical applications, you know. You have to see the words.