In Revolutionary Change and Democratic Religion, Celucien Joseph provides a fresh and careful reexamination of Haiti's intellectual history by focusing on the ideas and writings of five prominent thinkers and public intellectuals: Toussaint Louverture, Joseph Antenor Firmin, Jacques Roumain, Dantes Bellegarde, and Jean Price-Mars. The book articulates a twofold argument. First of all, Haiti has produced a strong intellectual tradition from the revolutionary era to the postcolonial present, and that Haitian thought is not homogeneous and monolithic. Joseph puts forth the idea that the general interweaving themes of rhetoric, the race concept, race vindication, universal emancipation, religious pluralism, secular humanism, the particular and the universal, and cosmopolitanism are representative of Haiti's intellectual tradition. Secondly, the book also contends that Haitian intellectuals have produced a religious discourse in the twentieth century that could be phrased religious metissage. The religious ideas of these thinkers have been shaped by various forces, ideologies, religious traditions, and philosophical schools. In the same way, the religious experience of the Haitian people should be understood in terms of conflicting, heterodox, and pluralistic manifestations of religious piety, as the people in Haiti reacted to the crisis of slavery, Western colonialism and imperialism, and the arrogance of race in modernity in their striving to reposition themselves within the framework of universal and human metanarratives. The book departs from the dominant (contemporary) Vodou scholarship that is often characteristic of North American and Western studies on the religious life of the Haitian people and Haitian thinkers.

In Revolutionary Change and Democratic Religion, Celucien Joseph provides a fresh and careful reexamination of Haiti’s intellectual history by focusing on the ideas and writings of five prominent thinkers and public intellectuals: Toussaint Louverture, Joseph Antenor Firmin, Jacques Roumain, Dantes Bellegarde, and Jean Price-Mars. The book articulates a twofold argument. First of all, Haiti has produced a strong intellectual tradition from the revolutionary era to the postcolonial present, and that Haitian thought is not homogeneous and monolithic. Joseph puts forth the idea that the general interweaving themes of rhetoric, the race concept, race vindication, universal emancipation, religious pluralism, secular humanism, the particular and the universal, and cosmopolitanism are representative of Haiti’s intellectual tradition. Secondly, the book also contends that Haitian intellectuals have produced a religious discourse in the twentieth century that could be phrased religious metissage. The religious ideas of these thinkers have been shaped by various forces, ideologies, religious traditions, and philosophical schools. In the same way, the religious experience of the Haitian people should be understood in terms of conflicting, heterodox, and pluralistic manifestations of religious piety, as the people in Haiti reacted to the crisis of slavery, Western colonialism and imperialism, and the arrogance of race in modernity in their striving to reposition themselves within the framework of universal and human metanarratives. The book departs from the dominant (contemporary) Vodou scholarship that is often characteristic of North American and Western studies on the religious life of the Haitian people and Haitian thinkers.

21st Century Revolution was written based upon the author's 53 years of continuous involvement in the movement for fundamental, justice grounded, political, social, economic and cultural change--revolution. He was driven to write it because of deep concern about the systemic threats to the possibility of a decent life for future generations, particularly the climate emergency and related environmental threats, the rise of a neo-fascist threat in the USA and elsewhere, and the widening gulf of economic/racial inequality. 21st Century Revolution was written to encourage those who consider themselves part of the movement for systemic change to consider a mix of issues and history that the author believes are essential to the prospect of eventual success in our collective revolutionary project. Glick's particular personal history, which includes not just decades of political activism and organizing but also in-and-out relationships with and study of religion and spirituality, has given him a vantage point which has been of value to others. 21sr Century Revolution does a number of things. It explores the issue of the relation between the socialist project since The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and organized religion, primarily Christianity. Within that context it addresses the questions, does God exist, and does it matter, as far as the historical project of fundamental social, political, cultural and economic change. It analyzes the major social, economic and cultural changes which began to take place approximately 10,000 years ago in Europe, Asia and North Africa as humans in those areas, after hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers, evolved into settled societies. This change led to an historic shift from men-and-women run, predominantly peaceful partnership societies to male-dominated, militaristic and class societies. It puts forward and explains the importance of a wide range of necessary cultural changes in present-day society, including within the political Left, if the human race is going to be able to avoid worldwide societal breakdown because of an intensifying climate crisis and ecological crisis. It describes what the author sees as seven distinct classes in U.S. society, as a contribution toward understanding the potentials, or lack of them, of each class to help make that revolution. It concludes with an articulation of and explanation in support of ten aspects of a winning strategy for revolutionary change in the 21st century which the author considers to be both necessary and already taking place.

In this penetrating biography of Thomas Bradbury Chandler, S. Scott Rohrer takes readers deep into the intellectual world of a leading loyalist who defended monarchy, rejected rebellion and democracy, and opposed the American Revolution. Talented, hardworking, and erudite, this Anglican minister from New Jersey possessed one of the Church of England’s most outstanding minds. Chandler was an Anglican leader in the 1760s and a key strategist in the effort to strengthen the American church in the years preceding the Revolution. He headed the campaign to create an Anglican bishopric in America—a cause that helped inflame tensions with American radicals unhappy with British policies. And, in the 1770s, his writings provided some of the most trenchant criticisms of the American revolutionary movement, raising fundamental questions about obedience, subordination, and rebellion that undercut Whig assertions about republicanism and popular control. Working from Chandler’s library catalog and other primary sources, Rohrer digs into Chandler’s political and religious beliefs, exploring their origins and the events in British history that shaped them. An intriguing and thoughtful reappraisal of a consequential figure in early American history, this biography will captivate students, scholars, and lay readers interested in politics and religion in Revolutionary-era America.

For the Western world as a whole, the period from about 1760 to 1800 was the great revolutionary era in which the outlines of the modern democratic state came into being. It is the thesis of this major work that the American, French, and Polish revolutions, and the movements for political change in Britain, Ireland, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, and other countries, though each distinctive in its own way, were all manifestations of recognizably similar political ideas, needs, and conflicts.

No American denomination identified itself more closely with the nation's democratic ideal than the Baptists. Most antebellum southern Baptist churches allowed women and slaves to vote on membership matters and preferred populists preachers who addressed their appeals to the common person. Paradoxically no denomination could wield religious authority as zealously as the Baptists. Between 1785 and 1860 they ritually excommunicated forty to fifty thousand church members in Georgia alone. Wills demonstrates how a denomination of freedom-loving individualists came to embrace an exclusivist spirituality--a spirituality that continues to shape Southern Baptist churches in contemporary conflicts between moderates who urge tolerance and conservatives who require belief in scriptural inerrancy. Wills's analysis advances our understanding of the interaction between democracy and religious authority, and will appeal to scholars of American religion, culture, and history, as well as to Baptist observers.

The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion places objects and bodies at the center of scholarly studies of religious life and practice. Propelling forward the study of material religion, the Handbook first reveals the deep philosophical roots of its key categories and then advances new critical analytics, such as queer materialities, inescapable material entanglements, and hyperobjects that explode the small-scale personal view on religions. The Handbook comprises thirty chapters, written by an international team of contributors who offer a global perspective of religious pasts and presents, divided into four thematic parts: Genealogies of Material Religion Materializing the Terms of the Study of Religion Entanglements, Entrapment, Escaping Hyperobjects, or How Ginormous Things Affect Religions In these four parts, the study of material religion is redirected towards systematic, critical interrogations of the imbrication of religious structures of power with racial, economic, political, and gendered forms of domination. From Spinoza’s political theology to African philosophies of ubuntu; from the queer materialities of Mesoamerican religion to the Satanic Temple of the United States; from Islamic love and sacrifice in human-animal entanglements to Shia militants’ attachment to weaponry; from epidemic cataclysm in Latin America to vast infrastructures and the gathering of millions in India’s Kumbh Mela, the study of material religion proves to be the study par excellence of the human condition. The Handbook is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies, anthropology, history, and media studies, and will also be of interest to those in related fields such as archeology, sociology, and philosophy.