Barr: Willing to Know God

Willing to Know God

Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages

Jessica Barr

Although authors of mystical treatises and dream visions shared a core set of assumptions about how visions are able to impart transcendent truths to their recipients, the modern divide between “religious” and “secular” has led scholars to study these genres in isolation. Willing to Know God addresses the simultaneous flowering of mystical and literary vision texts in the Middle Ages by questioning how the vision was thought to work. What preconditions must be met in these texts for the vision to transform the visionary? And when, as in poems such as Pearl, this change does not occur, what exactly has gone wrong?

Through close readings of medieval women’s visionary texts and English dream poems, Jessica Barr argues that the vision required the active as well as the passive participation of the visionary. In these texts, dreamers and visionaries must be volitionally united with the divine and employ their rational and analytic faculties in order to be transformed by the vision.

Willing to Know God proposes that the study of medieval vision texts demands a new approach that takes into account both vision literature that has been supposed to have a basis in lived experience and visions that are typically read as fictional. It argues that these two “genres” in fact complement and inform one another. Rather than discrete literary modes, they are best read as engaged in an ongoing conversation about the human mind’s ability to grasp the divine.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Miller: Makover Nation

Makeover Nation

The United States of Reinvention

Toby Miller

Life is very much a project in the United States—but not a straightforwardly individual one. A duality of individual free choice and disciplinary institutional governance is the grand national paradox. Simply being—leading life without a bumper sticker avowing one’s elective institutional affinities—seems implausible in a country consumed by the makeover—the idea that what you were born as need not define you forever.

As Toby Miller writes in his introduction: “I come neither to bury the makeover nor to praise the makeover, but to criticize it, even as I stand alternately bewildered, amused, appalled, and attracted by it.” In Makeover Nation he does just that in a witty, no-holds-barred style. Miller looks at the power of various forms of knowledge about people and their emotions as they have been applied to the US population, from talk therapy to drug treatment. He is particularly interested in young people—in examining how childhood is constructed—and pays close attention to the much-favored (and overused) diagnosis and treatment of ADHD/ADD. He also focuses his attention on metrosexuals and right-wing Christians to disclose how these opposing groups manifest their drive toward self-creation. Miller believes that we must question the pleasures of reinvention even as we embrace them.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org

Bruno: Justified by Work

Justified by Work

Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches

Robert Anthony Bruno

In Justified by Work, Robert Anthony Bruno sheds light on the simple but rarely asked question: “What role do faith and religious observance play in the everyday lives of working people?” While some historical work has been done on middle-, upper-, and professional-class notions of faith, money, time, and business ethics, the theological beliefs and experiences of working-class Americans have been practically ignored. Bruno’s book is embedded in the contemporary religious practices and beliefs of working-class Chicago-area congregations to show both how faith is inextricably interwoven in the everyday lives of the people who regularly attend places of worship and how class impacts the daily manifestation of these people’s religion (from theology to practice).

Most past religious scholarship has drawn a dichotomy between urban and suburban churches and has compared religious observance and denominational membership by race, gender, ethnicity, and recently, around the emergence of a “knowledge” and “entrepreneurial” class forms of church practice. Diverging from previous models, Justified by Work, based on author interviews with a wide spectrum of working-class Chicagoans, offers a comparative study of working-class religious practice and faith, across race and ethnic identity. Christian churches are represented by a Catholic Mexican congregation, an African American Baptist church, and a mixed eastern European church. Bruno examines as well how religious observance affects the life and attitudes of working-class Jews and Muslims in Chicago.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org