The Making And Unmaking Of A God Microform New Light On George Fox And Early Quakerism

This study is a discussion about Fox's meaning of the inner light. It argues that Fox's inner light was the celestial Christ who inhabited and divinized the believer. Fox argued for a celestial inhabitation of the believer that was almost corporeal. This helps explain Fox's thaumaturgical powers; the exalted language used among early Quakers, especially toward Fox; and the blasphemy trials and the Nayler incident. These belong at the very centre of early Quakerism, and are the logical result of the core elements of Fox's teaching. His notion of celestial flesh was one of the greatest challenges to Christian orthodoxy to appear in Christian history and it may be compared to Jesus' own challenge to Orthodox Judaism or the appearance of the high heresies of the 2nd and 3rd centuries after Jesus. Early Quakerism, as a result, was the most charismatic sect to appear since the days of the early Church, or at least since the era of Montanism.

This book investigates the historical context, meaning, and expression of early Quaker pacifism in England and its colonies. Weddle focuses primarily on one historical moment--King Philip's War, which broke out in 1675 between English settlers and Indians in New England. Among the settlers were Quakers, adherents of the movement that had gathered by 1652 out of the religious and social turmoil of the English Civil War. King Philip's War confronted the New England Quakers with the practical need to define the parameters of their peace testimony --to test their principles and to choose how they would respond to violence. The Quaker governors of Rhode Island, for example, had to reconcile their beliefs with the need to provide for the common defense. Others had to reconcile their peace principles with such concerns as seeking refuge in garrisons, collecting taxes for war, carrying guns for self-defense as they worked in the fields, and serving in the militia. Indeed, Weddle has uncovered records of many Quakers engaged in or abetting acts of violence, thus debunking the traditional historiography of Quakers as saintly pacifists. Weddle shows that Quaker pacifism existed as a doctrinal position before the 1660 crackdown on religious sectarians, but that it was a radical theological position rather than a pragmatic strategy. She thus convincingly refutes the Marxist argument that Quakers acted from economic and political, and not religious motives. She examines in detail how the Quakers' theology worked--how, for example, their interpretation of certain biblical passages affected their politics--and traces the evolution of the concept of pacifism from a doctrine that was essentially about protecting the state of one's own soul to one concerned with the consequences of violence to other human beings.

How could a glorious age of American history also give rise to the darkest of literary traditions, one that would inspire Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and many other best-selling American writers?"

A History of Communications advances a theory of media that explains the origins and impact of different forms of communication - speech, writing, print, electronic devices and the Internet - on human history in the long term. New media are 'pulled' into widespread use by broad historical trends and these media, once in widespread use, 'push' social institutions and beliefs in predictable directions. This view allows us to see for the first time what is truly new about the Internet, what is not, and where it is taking us.

This volume is the result of a long commitment of the online journal DEP: Deportate, esuli, profughe to the themes of women pacifists’ thought and activism in the 1900s. The volume is a collection of contributions centred around three main themes. The first part, “Living War: Women’s Experiences during the War”, brings together first-hand accounts from women’s lives as they face the horrors of war, drawn mainly from original sources such as diaries, letters, memoirs and writings. The second, “Thinking Peace: Feminist Thought and Activism”, explores the lives and thought of several key women activists who challenged inequalities and sought to create new opportunities for women, contributing to the definition of a transnational culture of peace. The final section, “International Relations: Toward Future World Peace”, examines the work of a group of women who saw the outbreak of the First World War and the emergence of an international women’s movement for peace as an opportunity to act for their personal emancipation, and, in some cases, for a different idea of politics. The volume fills a notable gap in international history studies, providing a selection of contributions from little-known European contexts such as Italy, Poland, and Austria. The presence and contribution of African-American women, which has been neglected in the history of women’s pacifism, is also explored. Particular attention is given to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and to the International Congress of Women, held in The Hague in 1915.

Disability is often mentioned in discussions of slave health, mistreatment and abuse, but constructs of how "able" and "disabled" bodies influenced the institution of slavery has gone largely overlooked. This volume uncovers a history of disability in African American slavery from the primary record, analyzing how concepts of race, disability, and power converged in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Slaves with physical and mental impairments often faced unique limitations and conditions in their diagnosis, treatment, and evaluation as property. Slaves with disabilities proved a significant challenge to white authority figures, torn between the desire to categorize them as different or defective and the practical need to incorporate their "disorderly" bodies into daily life. Being physically "unfit" could sometimes allow slaves to escape the limitations of bondage and oppression, and establish a measure of self-control. Furthermore, ideas about and reactions to disability—appearing as social construction, legal definition, medical phenomenon, metaphor, or masquerade—highlighted deep struggles over bodies in bondage in antebellum America.