Emily Suzanne Clark

ExtractEmily Suzanne Clark The individual’s religion may be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all. Psychologist and theorist of religion William James (1842–1910) was interested in individuals’ religious feelings and experiences. He defined religion as, “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. ” James’s emphasis on religious experience led him to the conclusion that there was something authentic and true about religion, even if it was only the experience and not necessarily the theology behind it. That realness lay within the interiority of the religious subject in their experience....

This article unpacks Jesuit assessments of Indigenous Alaskan religious practices and does so through a focus on how Jesuit missionaries wrote about “superstition” and, especially, “medicine men” or “shamans.” Through a close reading of the Jesuits’ mission records, we can see the Jesuit, missionary, colonizing lens through which they viewed Indigenous Alaskan communities and their cultures. In particular, the “shamans” were of great interest to the Jesuits. The Jesuits saw these “superstitions” as an obstacle to their mission and the shaman as their major foe. Perhaps to explain the challenges of mission work, the Jesuits needed a foe. Native “superstitions” and the medicine men provided that. I argue that the missionaries were an arm of colonialism, and furthermore that their targeting of Indigenous religion and religious leaders were actions of ideological, social, cultural, psychological, emotional, and religious colonialism.

Chapter 1. Digital Materiality: Possibilities of Interpretive Frameworks in the Academic Study of Religion was published in Volume 6 Digital Humanities and Material Religion on page 1.

Conclusion. Challenges and Possibilities in Digital Humanities and Material Religion was published in Volume 6 Digital Humanities and Material Religion on page 207.

This review essay examines Khyati Y. Joshi’s new book, White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America. With attention to relevant historiography on religion and race, as well as reflection on contemporary white Christian nationalism, this review essay argues that Joshi’s book is an important contribution to the field and will be particularly instructive in classrooms and other educational settings.

From 1858 to 1877 a group of Afro-Creole men in New Orleans practiced American Spiritualism and received messages from the spirit world. The spirits of the dead advised the Cercle Harmonique, as they called themselves, on issues of theology and politics. Though the Spiritualism practiced by the Cercle Harmonique was similar to that of white, northern Protestants, the practice of the Afro-Creoles was a distinctively African American religion. One of the clearest ways to navigate the process in which Spiritualism became Afro-Creole Spiritualism is by attending to the group's use of the language and rhetoric of martyrdom. Martyrdom provided the Cercle Harmonique a language for understanding the racial violence that surrounded them, and that language also offered the proper response to the violence. The Spiritualist martyrs who engaged the Cercle Harmonique were those who died in defense of Black rights and in contest with white supremacy.