Americans used to believe that much of the world was populated by “heathens.” What did that view of the world entail? And what are the continuing repercussions on American ideas about race as a “heathen inheritance”?
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, white American psychiatrists declared that mental illness among African Americans in the South had reached alarming proportions and argued that, in a notable percentage of these cases, “religious excitement” was the key precipitating…
Abstract: The Bible is the Good Book. Everyone knows it—or at least that it commands such a reputation. Yet the Bible is not, as no book can be, a moral agent on its own. Bible interpreters work to make it so, through ongoing creative negotiations, rhetorical labor, and…