Cultural and Philosophical Inquiry Books

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  Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination

  Jennifer Barry

  Gender Violence in Late Antiquity confronts the violent ideological frameworks underpinning the early Christian imagination, arguing that gender-based violence is not peripheral but is fundamental to understanding early Christian history. By analyzing hagiographical and doctrinal writings, Jennifer Barry reveals how male authors used portrayals of feminized suffering to shape ideals of sanctity and power, exploiting themes of domestic abuse, martyrdom, and sexualized violence to reinforce their visions of piety. The study first traces the roots of gendered violence within the Greco-Roman and early Christian imagination, and then explores the disturbing role of male fantasies and dreams in hagiographical traditions. Barry draws on womanist scholarship and engages with trauma studies and feminist horror theory in order to challenge traditional readings of Christian texts, offering new perspectives for understanding how narratives of violence continue to shape contemporary interpretations of gender and power.

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  Contentious Unions: Black Baptist Schools and White Baptist Money in the Jim Crow South

  Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews

  In Contentious Unions: Black Baptist Schools and White Baptist Money in the Jim Crow South, Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews interweaves the stories of the founding and development of Richmond Theological Seminary (Virginia), Central City College (Macon, Georgia), and American Baptist Theological Seminary (Nashville, Tennessee)—colleges that saw challenges, complexities, and hard-won accomplishments in the Post-Reconstruction era. Her study begins just after the Civil War, when one of these institutions provided educational opportunities for newly freed slaves, and follows the fortunes of the schools through the 1960s.

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  Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity

  Jennifer Barry

  Flight during times of persecution has a long and fraught history in early Christianity. In the third century, bishops who fled were considered cowards or, worse yet, heretics. On the face, flight meant denial of Christ and thus betrayal of faith and community. But by the fourth century, the terms of persecution changed as Christianity became the favored cult of the Roman Empire. Prominent Christians who fl ed and survived became founders and influencers of Christianity over time.

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  Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism Between the Wars

  Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews

  By presenting African American Protestantism in the context of white Protestant fundamentalism, Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars demonstrates that African American Protestants were acutely aware of the manner in which white Christianity operated and how they could use that knowledge to justify social change. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s study scrutinizes how white fundamentalists wrote blacks out of their definition of fundamentalism and how blacks constructed a definition of Christianity that had, at its core, an intrinsic belief in racial equality. In doing so, this volume challenges the prevailing scholarly argument that fundamentalism was either a doctrinal debate or an antimodernist force. Instead, it was a constantly shifting set of priorities for different groups at different times.

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  Anthropology and Egalitarianism: Ethnographic Encounters from Monticello to Guinea-Bissau

  Eric Gable

  Anthropology and Egalitarianism is an artful and accessible introduction to key themes in cultural anthropology. Writing in a deeply personal style and using material from his fieldwork in three dramatically different locales—Indonesia, West Africa, and Monticello, the historic home of Thomas Jefferson—Eric Gable shows why the ethnographic encounter is the core of the discipline's method and the basis of its unique contribution to understanding the human condition. Gable weaves together vignettes from the field and discussion of major works as he explores the development of the idea of culture through the experience of cultural contrast, anthropology's fraught relationship to racism and colonialism, and other enduring themes.

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  Rethinking Zion: How the Print Media Placed Fundamentalism in the South

  Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews

  Long before the red state/blue state divide, Americans have tended to think of the South as a natural home to and birthplace of Christian fundamentalism. Despite historical evidence and scholarly research to the contrary, the view of the South as a fundamentalist center persists. Rethinking Zion documents the process by which the South received its fundamentalist label and chronicles the forces at work in creating the image of the South as the Bible Belt.