"Why," an exasperated Jonathan Edwards asked, "can't we be contented with. . . the canon of Scripture?" Edwards posed this query to the religious enthusiasts of his own generation, but he could have just as appropriately put it to people across the full expanse of early American history. In the minds of her critics, Anne Hutchinson's heresies threatened to produce "a new Bible." Ethan Allen insisted that a revelation which spoke to every circumstance of life would require "a Bible of monstrous size." When the African-American prophetess Rebecca Jackson embarked on a spiritual journey toward Shakerism, she dreamt of a home in which she could find multiple books of scripture. Orestes Brownson explained to his skeptical contemporaries that the idea drawing him to Catholicism was the prospect of an "ever enlarging volume" of inspiration. Early Americans of every color and creed repeatedly confronted the boundaries of scripture. Some fought to open the canon. Some worked to keep it closed. Sacred Borders vividly depicts the boundaries of the biblical canon as a battleground on which a diverse group of early Americans contended over their differing versions of divine truth. Puritans, deists, evangelicals, liberals, Shakers, Mormons, Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, and Transcendentalists defended widely varying positions on how to define the borders of scripture. Carefully exploring the history of these scriptural boundary wars, Holland offers an important new take on the religious cultures of early America. He presents a colorful cast of characters-including the likes of Franklin and Emerson along with more obscure figures--who confronted the intellectual tensions surrounding the canon question, such as that between cultural authority and democratic freedom, and between timeless truth and historical change. To reconstruct these sacred borders is to gain a new understanding of the mental world in which early Americans went about their lives and created their nation.

Religious rivalry and persecution have bedeviled so many societies that confessional difference often seems an unavoidable source of conflict. Sacred Boundaries challenges this assumption by examining relations between the Catholic majority and Protestant minority in seventeenth-century France as a case study of two religious groups constructing confessional difference and coexistence

A study of the process by which a pluralistic religious world view is replaced by a monolithic one, this book questions basic assumptions about the efficacy of fundamentalist claims and the construction of all social and religious identities.

While the modern world has largely dismissed the figure of the saint as a throwback, we remain fascinated by excess, marginality, transgression, and porous subjectivity—categories that define the saint. In this collection, Françoise Meltzer and Jas Elsner bring together top scholars from across the humanities to reconsider our denial of saintliness and examine how modernity returns to the lure of saintly grace, energy, and charisma. Addressing such problems as how saints are made, the use of saints by political and secular orders, and how holiness is personified, Saints takes us on a photo tour of Graceland and the cult of Elvis and explores the changing political takes on Joan of Arc in France. It shows us the self-fashioning of culture through the reevaluation of saints in late-antique Judaism and Counter-Reformation Rome, and it questions the political intent of underlying claims to spiritual attainment of a Muslim sheikh in Morocco and of Sephardism in Israel. Populated with the likes of Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, and Padre Pio, this book is a fascinating inquiry into the status of saints in the modern world.

Growing up in a gang in the city can be dark. Growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago is a whole different story. This book takes a trip through that unexplored part of Indian Country, an intense journey that is full of surprises, shining a light on the interior lives of people whose intellectual and emotional concerns are often overlooked. This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians. He will be in readers’ heads for a long time to come.

Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge. This wisdom is based on the authors’ oral traditions, research, intuitions, and lived experiences—wisdom inspired by, and created from, personal trajectories on the path to spiritual conocimiento, or inner spiritual inquiry. This conocimiento has reemerged over the last fifty years as efforts to decolonize lives, minds, spirits, and bodies have advanced. Yet this knowledge goes back many generations to the time when the ancestors understood their interconnectedness with each other, with nature, and with the sacred cosmic forces—a time when the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization, particularly in these fraught times. The wisdom offered here appears in a variety of forms—in reflective essays, poetry, prayers, specific guidelines for healing practices, communal rituals, and visual art, all meant to address life transitions and how to live holistically and with a spiritual consciousness for the challenges of the twenty-first century.