Seeds Of Struggle Harvest Of Faith

The importance of religion in New Mexico is manifest in this collection of essays that represents the work of twenty-three of the region's most noted scholars and writers. Among the topics they cover are church architecture, the role of missionaries in colonization, the role of the church in education, the contributions of the Penitentes, and the work of specific orders, particularly the Jesuits and the Franciscans. Local devotion to such figures as St. Michael, La Guadalupana, La Conquistadora, and Nuestra Senora de Belen is addressed, as well as the work of such historic leaders as Padre Martinez and Archbishop Lamy. In addition to its importance for historians, this book will be of interest to genealogists. It includes an essay on sacramental records and the preservation of New Mexico family genealogies from the colonial era to the present.

In this book you will discover the establishment of the Catholic church in New Mexico and 400 years of strong faith in God that has had such a powerful influence in the lives of the people.

For the first time, this volume takes a global and comparative approach to the lived local history of Vatican II.

Religious Lessons tells the story of Zellers v. Huff, a court case that challenged the employment of nearly 150 Catholic sisters in public schools across New Mexico in 1948. Known nationally as the "Dixon case," after one of the towns involved, it was the most famous in a series of midcentury lawsuits, all targeting what opponents provocatively dubbed "captive schools." Spearheaded by Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the publicity campaign built around Zellers drew on centuries-old rhetoric of Catholic captivity to remind Americans about the threat of Catholic power in the post-War era, and the danger Catholic sisters dressed in full habits posed to American education. Americans at midcentury were reckoning with the U.S. Supreme Court's new mandate for a "wall of separation" between church and state. At no time since the nation's founding was the Establishment Clause studied so carefully by the nation's judiciary and its people. While Zellers never reached the Supreme Court, its details were familiar to hundreds of thousands of citizens who read about them in magazines and heard them discussed in church on Sunday mornings. For many Americans, Catholic and not, the scenario of sisters in veils teaching children embodied the high stakes of the era's church-state conflicts, and became an occasion to assess the implications of separation in their lives. Through close study of the Dixon case, Kathleen Holscher brings together the perspectives of legal advocacy groups, Catholic sisters, and citizens who cared about their schools. She argues that the captive school crusade was a transitional episode in the Protestant-Catholic conflicts that dominate American church-state history. Religious Lessons also goes beyond legal discourse to consider the interests of Americans--women religious included--who did not formally articulate convictions about the separation principle. The book emphasizes the everyday experiences, inside and outside classrooms, that defined the church-state relationship for these people, and that made these constitutional questions relevant to them.

As a result, Carroll concludes, Penitente membership facilitated the rise of the modernin New Mexico and--however unintentionally--made it that much easier, after the territory's annexation by the United States, for the Anglo legal system to dispossess Hispanos of their land.

Crossing Borders with the Santo Niño de Atocha journeys through the genesis, development, and various metamorphoses in the veneration of the Holy Child of Atocha, from its origins in Zacatecas in the late colonial period through its different transformations over the centuries, across lands and borders, and to the ultimate rising as a defining religious devotion for the Mexican/Chicano experience in the United States. It is a vivid account of the historical origins of the Santo Niño de Atocha and His transformations "Everywhere He ever walked," first in the nineteenth century, along the Camino de Tierra Adentro between Zacatecas and New Mexico, to His consolidation as a saint for the Borderlands, and finally, to His contemporary metamorphosis as a border-crossing religious symbol for the immigrant experience and the Mexican/Chicano communities in the United States. Using a wide variety of visual and written materials from archives in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, along with oral history interviews, participant observation, photography, popular art, thanksgiving paintings, and private letters addressed to the Holy Child, Juan Javier Pescador presents the fascinating and intimate history of this religious symbol native to the Borderlands, while dispelling some myths and inaccurate references. Including narrative vignettes with his own personal experiences and fragments of his family's interactions with the Holy Child of Atocha, Pescador presents the book "as a thanksgiving testimony of the prominent position the Santo Niño de Atocha has enjoyed in the altarcitos of my family and the dear place He has carved in the hearts of my ancestors." Visit the author's website at www.pescadorarte.com to learn more and to see images of the Santo Niño de Atocha included in the book.

Roman Catholicism in the United States: A Thematic History takes the reader beyond the traditional ways scholars have viewed and recounted the story of the Catholic Church in America. The collection covers unfamiliar topics such as anti-Catholicism, rural Catholicism, Latino Catholics, and issues related to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Vatican and the U.S. government. The book continues with fascinating discussions on popular culture (film and literature), women religious, and the work of U.S. missionaries in other countries. The final section of the books is devoted to Catholic social teaching, tackling challenging and sometimes controversial subjects such as the relationship between African American Catholics and the Communist Party, Catholics in the civil rights movement, the abortion debate, issues of war and peace, and Vatican II and the American Catholic Church. Roman Catholicism in the United States examines the history of U.S. Catholicism from a variety of perspectives that transcend the familiar account of the immigrant, urban parish, which served as the focus for so many American Catholics during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.

Presenting 16 new essays addressing important issues, movements and personalities in Latino religions in America, this book aims to overthrow the stereotype that Latinos are politically passive and that their churches have supported the status quo, failing to engage in or support the struggle for civil rights and social justice.