Zion did not spring up by chance along a rolling river or upon a hilltop. The land in which Zion City planted its roots was sought out by a surveying team and then purchased by Dr. John Alexander Dowie for the sole purpose of building a religious utopia. Before the first spade of soil was turned, attention was given to every detail, from utilities to commercial areas and educational institutions and (most importantly) the temple. In less than a decade, Dowie and his followers built a self-sufficient theocracy that sheltered its inhabitants from the outside world. Indeed, Zion boasts a unique history and is a most intriguing study in the successes and failures of a planned city of God.

In The People’s Zion, Joel Cabrita tells the transatlantic story of Southern Africa’s largest popular religious movement, Zionism. It began in Zion City, a utopian community established in 1900 just north of Chicago. The Zionist church, which promoted faith healing, drew tens of thousands of marginalized Americans from across racial and class divides. It also sent missionaries abroad, particularly to Southern Africa, where its uplifting spiritualism and pan-racialism resonated with urban working-class whites and blacks. Circulated throughout Southern Africa by Zion City’s missionaries and literature, Zionism thrived among white and black workers drawn to Johannesburg by the discovery of gold. As in Chicago, these early devotees of faith healing hoped for a color-blind society in which they could acquire equal status and purpose amid demoralizing social and economic circumstances. Defying segregation and later apartheid, black and white Zionists formed a uniquely cosmopolitan community that played a key role in remaking the racial politics of modern Southern Africa. Connecting cities, regions, and societies usually considered in isolation, Cabrita shows how Zionists on either side of the Atlantic used the democratic resources of evangelical Christianity to stake out a place of belonging within rapidly-changing societies. In doing so, they laid claim to nothing less than the Kingdom of God. Today, the number of American Zionists is small, but thousands of independent Zionist churches counting millions of members still dot the Southern African landscape.

Transcendence in general and transformation in particular have long been established as key motifs in apocalypses. The transformation of a seer during a heavenly journey is found commonly in such esoteric apocalypses as I Enoch. No heavenly journey occurs in the apocalypses treated here. Rather, symbolic women figures--"ladies" in the classical sense--who are associated with God's city or Tower, undergo transformation at key points in the action. The surface structures of Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse and The Shepherd of Hermas are traced, and the crucial transformation episodes are located within each structure. Transformation of figures which represent God's people points to the significance of identitiy within the apocalyptic perspective. Earlier analyses have demonstrated that the apocalyptic perspective urges the reader to consider life from a different stance in time and in space ("temporal" and "spatial" axes). The present analysis suggests that the apocalypse also charts its revelations along an "axis of identity" so that the reader is invited to become, as it were, someone more in tune with the mysteries he or she is viewing. Of special interest is the treatment of the increasingly well-known romance Joseph and Aseneth alongside apocalypses, a parallel which is fruitful because of the curious visionary sequence, closely related to apocalypse in content and form, which is found in the inner centre of that work.

The sources of Joseph Smith's literary works remain the most enigmatic aspect of Mormon history. Smith's "translation projects," the Book of Mormon, Book of Moses, the Inspired Bible and Book of Abraham, include prophecies, visions and allusions to the ancient biblical prophet Enoch. Before Joseph Smith began writing his visions of Enoch, Oxford professor Richard Laurence revived interest in the prophet through his 1821 English translation of the ancient text, the Book of Enoch, known as 1 Enoch. For decades, some historians have denied that Joseph Smith ever had access to the Book of Enoch, but many reserve the possibility that it directly influenced Smith's works. The author of this book documents the many similarities between the Book of Enoch and Smith's Mormon texts. Using source analysis and historical context, the author identifies the uniquely Mormon words, storylines, imagery and concepts that appear in Richard Laurence's translation of the ancient religious text.

Although much has been written on the Afro-Catholic syncretic religions of Vodou, Candomble, and Santeria, the Spiritual Baptists--an Afro-Caribbean religion based on Protestant Christianity--have received little attention. This work offers the first detailed examination of the Spiritual Baptists or "Converted". Based on 18 months of fieldwork on the Island of St. Vincent (where the religion arose) and among Vincentian immigrants in Brooklyn, Zane's analysis makes a contribution to the literature on African-American and African Diaspora religion and the anthropology of religion more generally.

In this volume, the Jesaja Werkplaats examines the question as to the unity of the book Isaiah from the perspective ‘city’. This volume offers an intriguing variety of contributions on the ‘city’ through the entire book Isaiah.