Co-sponsored by the University of Chicago Divinity School, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University
Seminars are held from 4:00-6:00 PM,
at the Newberry Library, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, IL.
Papers are pre-circulated. For a copy e-mail scholl@newberry.org
2003-2004
October 2, 2003—"'Be of One Mind:' The Ordeal of Religious Integration in Colonial America"
Chris Beneke, Bentley College
By the 1750s and 1760s, colonial British Americans were regularly doing something remarkable: they were interacting with individuals who adhered to different modes of faith. Mobilizing members of traditionally hostile churches to undertake common actions or even just persuading them to get along proved no easy task. To this end, public figures often insisted on the reduction of principles to the fundamentals upon which all could agree, while rejecting the demand for conformity to the particulars to which few could assent. This chapter in a larger work on religious differences explores the opening of American institutions to a wide range of Protestant denominations and the increasingly ecumenical rhetoric with which it was accompanied.
November 6, 2003—"Character and Communication: Seeking God and Knowledge in Antebellum America"
David Holland, Stanford University
This paper follows the evolving nature of American providentialism, defined as a mode of religious epistemology in which physical events are scrutinized for divine truths, from the Founding through the Civil War. Arguing that changing notions of the divine character were actually more influential than mechanistic science in challenging older providentialist paradigms, the paper shows how providentialism's decomposition created fertile soil for the growth of new revelatory movements, most notably Transcendentalism and Mormonism. It concludes by demonstrating how the Civil War compelled Americans to re-embrace providentialism in what ultimately proved a death grip.
February 12, 2004—"'Dominies and Doughboys:' The Great War, Religious Authority, and the American Fighting Man"
Jonathan Ebel, University of Chicago
This paper examines American soldiers' understandings of religious authority during their involvement in the Great War. During the most intense fighting America had endured since 1864, the spiritual shepherds of America's soldiers found their legitimacy questioned by the sheep. In attempting to bring men to Christianity in the four decades preceding the war, American clergymen had forged a Christian ideal that placed physicality and vigor above theological education, pastoral service, and other allegedly sissified, over-civilized pursuits. As a result, even the coarsest man fighting and dying in France for the cuase of civilization surpassed the chaplain and religious aid worker as an imitator of Christ the man. Soldiers used masculine Christian teachings to fashion themselves as the true religious authorities of the Western Front, authorizing religious leadership, sorting religious essence from irrelevant accretion, and forging meaning when standard answers did not satisfy.
March 11, 2004—"The Menace: Catholics, Anti-Catholics, and Civil Liberties in Early 20th-Century America"
Francis G. Couvares, Amherst College
This paper will explore the civil libertarian critique of Catholicism and the Catholic Church in early 20th-century America. I came to the subject indirectly: having worked through the papers of Theodore Schroeder, longtime head of the Free Speech Leage, I found evidence of surprising connections between the League and anti-Catholics, such as those associated with the Menace, perhaps the most famous anti-Catholic periodical in the first two decades of the century. These connections were made when, at the behest of Catholic authorities, the editors of the Menace were indicted for sending obscene matter through the mail. The League took up the case and won it for the defendants, but its files, along with other records, reveal a broader pattern of legal harassment of anti-Catholic speakers and writers in cities where Catolics were a majority or a significant minority, and where the Church had come to wield significant political power. Beyond the practices of the Church and its followers, including Catholic police and judicial personnel, libertarians found the doctrines of the Church increasingly troubling. They found encyclicals and pronouncements of successive pontiffs upon political matters, especially those concerning separation of church and state, incompatible with American democratic ideas and practices. Although it is difficult to separate nativism from this kind of libertarian reactiion - and in some anti-Catholics both strains are evident - I think it is fair to call the views of Schroeder and people like him "non-nativist anti-Catholicism." In any event, my purpose in this paper will be to explore, first, a range of actions aimed at suppressing the free speech of anti-Catholics and, second, the ways in which libertarians connected these actions with Catholic doctrine to develop a broader critique of the influence of the Catholic Church on American democracy. Although I cannot hope to make any firm connections in this paper, some of my findings may suggest longer-term continuities between these conflicts and events of the 1930s (the Legion of Decency, Catholics support for Franco), the McCarthy era (Catholic anti-communism), and even the more recent era of neo-conservatism; and between the intellectual critique of Catholicism offered by Schroeder and others of his time and those offered by 1930s anti-fascists and 1940s liberals such as Gilbert Seldes, Paul Blanshard, and others.
April 8, 2004—"'Ethiopia Shall Stretch Out Her Hand:' Female Colonization Support and the Making of an American Evangelical Empire" (formerly titled "American Colonization in Antebellum America")
Karen Fischer Younger, Pennsylvania State University
In the late 1820s, white women began a more systematic, organized and public campaign in support of the colonization of freed blacks to Africa. These women advocated the tenets of traditional concepts of womanhood, urged the merits of non-sectarian evangelicalism, and encouraged the effort to reconcile the civic with the spiritual realms in an amalgam of Christianity and traditional republicanism. They also inextricably fused female obligation to the advancement of America's global mission and helped construct the emerging religious discourse that advocated the necessary and integral place of women in education and missionary activity. But, perhaps, female colonization supporters' most enduring influence is that they helped normalize the foreignness of African American women and men and contributed to a political environment unwilling to consider a multiracial society or include African Americans in their vision of an American democratic society.
May 13, 2004—"Preparing for the Future: Promoting Higher Education in Chicago's Catholic High Schools, 1910-1935"
Ann Marie Ryan, University of Illinois at Chicago
By the 1930s most Chicago Catholic high schools were accredited by the University of Illinois. Accreditation meant recognition as a school that met the professional standards of the day and access to higher education for a school's graduates. While Catholic schools were concerned with establishing credibility through accreditation and promoting higher education, they were not necessarily interested in access to public institutions such as the University of Illinois. This paper examines the complex aims of Chicago's Catholic high schools during their early development and their focus on preparing students for Catholic higher education.
The seminar format assumes that all participants have read the essay in advance, and that all who request the paper will attend the seminar. Please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.
To be placed on the mailing list for notices of presentations, contact Ginger Shulick at scholl@newberry.org, or call 312.255.3524. Please include your e-mail address if you are willing to receive notices by e-mail.