This book explores the phenomenon sometimes referred to as “ritualism” in the Anglican tradition. The use of gestures, vestments, lighted candles, incense and other rituals associated with Anglicanism’s Roman Catholic past has formed a part of worship patterns since the denomination’s birth in the sixteenth century. However, due to the suspicion with which the majority of English people viewed Roman Catholicism, such practices never entered the mainstream. In the middle of the nineteenth century, a new wave of ritual practice swept through Anglicanism, not only in England, but across the world. While this wave was held in great suspicion by most churchgoers at first, by the turn of the nineteenth century, it had begun to influence the status quo, such that weekly Communion services, vestments and candles now form a normal part of regular Anglican worship. This book provides an introduction to ritualism’s origins in Anglicanism, and then examines how this movement took root in colonial South Africa. It finds that, after a period of fairly robust antagonism towards ritualism, a general movement towards ritualist practices began to emerge which characterised local Anglicanism’s ethos. Those who are interested in church history, the colonial impact of the British Empire, ritual studies, or the tensions between class systems will find this book stimulating.

This study offers a new and challenging look at Christian institutions and practices in Britain’s Caribbean and southern American colonies. Focusing on the plantation societies of Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, Nicholas M. Beasley finds that the tradition of liturgical worship in these places was more vibrant and more deeply rooted in European Christianity than previously thought. In addition, Beasley argues, white colonists’ attachment to religious continuity was thoroughly racialized. Church customs, sacraments, and ceremonies were a means of regulating slavery and asserting whiteness. Drawing on a mix of historical and anthropological methods, Beasley covers such topics as church architecture, pew seating customs, marriage, baptism, communion, and funerals. Colonists created an environment in sacred time and space that framed their rituals for maximum social impact, and they asserted privilege and power by privatizing some rituals and by meting out access to rituals to people of color. Throughout, Beasley is sensitive to how this culture of worship changed as each colony reacted to its own political, environmental, and demographic circumstances across time. Local factors influencing who partook in Christian rituals and how, when, and where these rituals took place could include the structure of the Anglican Church, which tended to be less hierarchical and centralized than at home in England; the level of tensions between Anglicans and Protestants; the persistence of African religious beliefs; and colonists’ attitudes toward free persons of color and elite slaves. This book enriches an existing historiography that neglects the cultural power of liturgical Christianity in the early South and the British Caribbean and offers a new account of the translation of early modern English Christianity to early America.

Hymns and Constructions of Race: Mobility, Agency, De/Coloniality examines how the hymn, historically and today, has reinforced, negotiated, and resisted constructions of race. It brings together diverse perspectives from musicology, ethnomusicology, theology, anthropology, performance studies, history, and postcolonial scholarship to show how the hymn has perpetuated, generated, and challenged racial identities. The global range of contributors cover a variety of historical and geographical contexts, with case studies from China and Brazil to Suriname and South Africa. They explore the hymn as a product of imperialism and settler colonialism and as a vehicle for sonic oppression and/or resistance, within and beyond congregational settings. The volume contends that the lived tradition of hymn-singing, with its connections to centuries of global Christian mission, is a particularly apt lens for examining both local and global negotiations of race, power, and identity. It will be relevant for scholars interested in religion, music, race, and postcolonialism.

This volume aims to revitalize the exchange between sociological differentiation theory and the sociology of religion, which previously held center stage among the sociological classics. It brings together contributions from different disciplines, as well as various forms of regional and historical expertise, which are indispensable in forming a globally oriented sociological perspective today. Secularization is understood as a process of boundary demarcation, that is, as the enactment of semantic, practical, and institutional distinctions between religion and other spheres of activity and knowledge. These distinctions may emerge from within the religious field itself, or may be absorbed into the field having originally emerged elsewhere. They may even be directly imposed upon religion by external forces. The volume is therefore based on the premise that societal differentiation – and secularity as a specific expression of it – is a widespread structural feature that nonetheless takes on various forms, depending on its historical and cultural context. In order to make this diversity visible, the volume adopts a global comparative perspective, and examines historical distinctions and differentiations in the West and beyond. By examining different forms and modes of secularity in statu nascendi, the volume contributes to developing a better understanding of the diversity of secularities, even of those found in the present day, in terms of their historicity and their specific path dependencies. With this shift in perspective, this special volume initiates a global and historical turn in the theory of differentiation, as well as in the study of secularity.

This is a survey of the history of the 'Book of Common Prayer', and its descendants throughout the world. The guide shows how a classic text for worship and devotion has become the progenitor of an entire family of religious resources that have had an influence far beyond their use in Anglican churches.

Bengt Sundkler's long-awaited book on African Christian churches will become the standard reference for the subject.

This work examines patterns of everyday life in the colonial South from European contact to 1770, documenting how they evolved over time and differences across lines of geography, nationality, ethnicity, religion, race, gender, and class. This work provides the first synthesis of daily life in the colonial South from the time of European arrival to 1770—a period that is often overlooked or treated briefly in most surveys on the history of the South. Daily Life in the Colonial South describes how a diverse mix of people created new patterns of living, behaving, and believing across diverse and changing physical, demographic, economic, and social environments by adapting inherited cultures in new settings. The book emphasizes the everyday experiences of ordinary people from the Chesapeake Bay to the Lower Mississippi River, examining aspects of daily life such as work, families, possessions, food, leisure, bodies, and beliefs. It presents balanced coverage of English, French, Spanish, and Native American settlements, describing the lives of both men and women, and making use of quotes from historical documents. An introductory chapter profiles the colonial South at six periods set 50 years apart between 1500 and 1750, while the conclusion discusses colonial southern identities on the eve of the American Revolution.

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. Tracing the siblings' extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York, to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and--at times--white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as ten percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race--as well as on the role of religion in racial shift--in the first half of the nineteenth century.

"At a strategic time in South Africa's history, the Christian history which is absolutely basic to all developments, is presented in a comprehensive and objective way. Too little attention is given to the influence of religion in socio-political accounts. This is a creative and much-needed contribution to scholarship and general knowledge. . . . An outstanding work."--Dean S. Gilliland, Fuller Theological Seminary