Women And Twentieth Century Protestantism

Contributors consider the emergence of Latina Pentecostal clergy in the United States and the success of the Women's Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Convention in remaining independent of male-dominated denominational structures. Among other topics, the authors discuss Chinese immigrant women who embraced the relative freedom offered by Protestant religion, African American women who assumed religious authority through their historical writing, and the struggles of women faith healers in defining their role amid medical and evangelical professionalism.

By examinng education, charity, community discipline, the relationship between clergy and congregations, and working-class religion, the contributors shift the field of religious history into the realm of the socio-cultural. This novel perspective reveals that the Christian churches remained dynamic and popular in English and French Canada, as well as among immigrants, well into the twentieth century.

Anyone who seeks to understand the dynamics of culture and politics in the United States must grapple with the importance of religion in its many diverse and contentious manifestations. With conservative evangelicals forming the base of the Republican Party, racial-ethnic communities often organised along religious lines, and social-political movements on the left including major religious components, many of the country's key cultural-political debates are carried out through religious discourse. Thus it is misleading either to think of the US as a secular society in which religion is marginal, or to work with overly narrow understandings of religion which treat it as monolithically conservative or concerned primarily with otherworldly issues.In this volume, Mark Hulsether introduces the key players and offers a select group of case studies that explore how these players have interacted with major themes and events in US cultural history. Students in American Studies and Cultural Studies will appreciate how he frames his analysis using categories such as cultural hegemony, race and gender contestation, popular culture, and empire.Key Features:*Provides a concise introduction to the field*Balances a stress on religious diversity with attention to power conflicts within multiculturalism*Dramatizes the internal complexity and dynamism of religious communities*Brings religious issues into the field of cultural studies, building bridges that can enable more informed and constructive discussion of religion in these fields*Provides an integrated view of religion and its importance in recent US history.

In the early twentieth century, a good number of college-educated Protestant American women went abroad by taking up missionary careers in teaching, nursing, and medicine. Most often, their destination was China, which became a major mission field for the U.S. Protestant missionary movement as the United States emerged to become an imperial power. These missionary women formed a cohort of new women who sought to be liberated from traditional gender roles. As educators and benevolent emancipators, they attempted to transform Chinese women into self-sufficient middle-class professional women just like themselves. As Motoe Sasaki shows in Redemption and Revolution, these aspirations ran parallel to and were in conflict with those of the Chinese xin nüxing (New Women) they encountered. The subjectivity of the New Woman was an element of global modernity expressing gendered visions of progress. At the same time it was closely intertwined with the view of historical progress in the nation. Though American and Chinese New Women emphasized individual autonomy in that each sought to act as historical agents for modern progress, their notions of subjectivity were in different ways linked to the ideologies of historical progress of their nations. Sasaki’s transnational history of these New Women explores the intersections of gender, modernity, and national identity within the politics of world history, where the nation-state increased its presence as a universal unit in an ever-interconnecting global context.

This innovative volume provides an interdisciplinary, theoretically innovative answer to an enduring question for Pentecostal/charismatic Christianities: how do women lead churches? This study fills this lacuna by examining the leadership and legacy of two architects of the Pentecostal movement - Maria Woodworth-Etter and Aimee Semple McPherson.

A fundamental and well-illustrated reference collection for anyone interested in the role of women in North American religious life.

The-five volume Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions series is governed by a motif of migration ('out-of-England'). It first traces organized church traditions that arose in Britain and Ireland as Dissenters distanced themselves from a state church defined by diocesan episcopacy, the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and Royal Supremacy, but then follows those traditions as they spread beyond Britain and Ireland--and also analyses newer traditions that emerged downstream in other parts of the world from earlier forms of Dissent. Secondly, it does the same for the doctrines, church practices, stances toward state and society, attitudes toward Scripture, and characteristic patterns of organization that also originated in earlier British and Irish dissent, but that have often defined a trajectory of influence independent of ecclesiastical organizations. The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume V follows the spatial, cultural, and intellectual changes in dissenting identity and practice in the twentieth century, as these once European traditions globalized. While in Europe dissent was often against the religious state, dissent in a globalizing world could redefine itself against colonialism or other secular and religious monopolies. The contributors trace the encounters of dissenting Protestant traditions with modernity and globalization; changing imperial politics; challenges to biblical, denominational, and pastoral authority; local cultures and languages; and some of the century's major themes, such as race and gender, new technologies, and organizational change. In so doing, they identify a vast array of local and globalizing illustrations which will enliven conversations about the role of religion, and in particular Christianity.

This book is unique in recording the history of all the Protestant churches in Ireland in the twentieth century, though with particular focus on the two largest - the Presbyterian and the Church of Ireland. It examines the changes and chances in those churches during a turbulent period in Irish history, relating their development to the wider social and political context. Their structures and beliefs are examined, and their influence both in Ireland and overseas is assessed.