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Many scholars, according to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, have mistakenly attributed the coming of the Civil War solely to the slaveholding South’s determination to retain black bondage as a means of economic and political advantage. That view, he maintains, too readily diminishes the ethical dynamics involved in the chasm between antebellum North and South. In Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners, Wyatt-Brown explores in a series of wide-ranging essays the ethical differences—epically with regard to honor, liberty, and slavery—that divided the two regions of the country. Slavery was, of course, the crucial issue in the conflict, but such moral concerns as honor and shame, conscience and guilt were inextricably a part of the dispute as well. Northerners, under abolitionist and antislavery guidance, came to regard slavery as a violation of American conscience and understandings of individuality, personal liberty and civic responsibility, whereas soothers adhered to an ethical scheme based on traditional concepts of honor. Wyatt-Brown suggests that to most southern whites the rubric of honor was much more than a matter of duels and political posturing. It was instead an integral part of the moral and cultural heritage of the region, affecting a variety of social relationships. Sometimes the dictates of honor were even more powerful than the Christian morality that nearly all Americans espoused. Using Stanley Elkins’ antislavery interpretation as a point of departure, Wyatt-Brown devotes the first part of the book to the abolitionists’ dynamic relationship to evangelical culture in which conscience, implanted in childhood, became the primary ethical code guiding reformers. In the most dramatic and probing chapter in this section, he shows how the violent “antinomian” John Brown capitalized on the tensions between Christian conscience and primal manhood to gratify his own and his fellow countrymen’s desire for righteous glory, albeit for noble ends. The second half of the book reveals the contrasting ethical spirit of the South, as explained in W.J. Cash’s Mind of the South. After placing the proslavery argument in the context of evangelical and, later, secular “modernity,” Wyatt-Brown analyzes the ethical texture of secessionism in one of the book’s most original and intriguing arguments. Differences over the meaning and applicability of honor and shame, he contends, played a major part in the South’s struggle in 1860 and 1861 over secession and the North’s response to it. Making abundant use of anthropological, sociological, and psychological insights, Bertram Wyatt-Brown offers here an interpretation of the causes of the Civil war that is both provocative and persuasive.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1885.
In Smitten, Rodney Hessinger examines how the Second Great Awakening disrupted gender norms across a breadth of denominations. The displacement and internal migration of Americans created ripe conditions for religious competition in the North. Hessinger argues that during this time of religious ferment, religious seekers could, in turn, play the missionary or the convert. The dynamic of religious rivalry inexorably led toward sexual and gender disruption. Contending within an increasingly democratic religious marketplace, preachers had to court converts in order to flourish. They won followers through charismatic allure and making concessions to the desires of the people. Opening their own hearts to new religious impulses, some religious visionaries offered up radical dispensations—including new visions of how God wanted them to reorder sex and gender relations in society. A wide array of churches, including Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Shakers, Catholics, and Perfectionists, joined the fray. Religious contention and innovation ultimately produced backlash. Charges of seduction and gender trouble ignited fights within, among, and against churches. Religious opponents insisted that the newly converted were smitten with preachers, rather than choosing churches based on reason and scripture. Such criticisms coalesced into a broader pan-Protestant rejection of religious enthusiasm. Smitten reveals the sexual disruptions and subsequent domestication of religion during the Second Great Awakening.
The common view of the nineteenth-century pastoral relationship--found in both contemporary popular accounts and 20th-century scholarship--was that women and clergymen formed a natural alliance and enjoyed a particular influence over each other. In Without Benefit of Clergy, Karin Gedge tests this thesis by examining the pastoral relationship from the perspective of the minister, the female parishioner, and the larger culture. The question that troubled religious women seeking counsel, says Gedge, was: would their minister respect them, help them, honor them? Surprisingly, she finds, the answer was frequently negative. Gedge supports her conclusion with evidence from a wide range of previously untapped primary sources including pastoral manuals, seminary students' and pastors' journals, women's diaries and letters, pamphlets, sentimental and sensational novels, and The Scarlet Letter.