Biennial Boston College Conference on the History of Religion
“Religious Identities”
14-15 March 2008
Keynote Address Friday 2-3:15PM in Gasson Honors Library: Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University
Session #1 – Friday Afternoon, 3:30-5PM
Panel A. The City of the Big Shoulders on Its Knees: Varieties of Christian Identity in Chicago in Gasson 204
- Chair: Stephen Marini, Wellesley College
- Nick Salvatore, Cornell University
“Faith in Context: Chicago Catholics in the Late Nineteenth Century” - Davarian Baldwin, Boston College
“Singing Evangelists in the City: Black Women Migrants and the Emergence of Gospel Music” - Christopher D. Cantwell, Cornell University
“God Hath Restored My Manhood: Conversion and Identity at the Pacific Garden Mission”
Panel B. Christians and Jews in the Atlantic World in Gasson 206
- Chair: Michael Chapman, Boston College
- Hilit Surowitz, University of Florida
“La Nacion: Reconstructing Jewish Identity in the Early Modern Atlantic World” - Anna M. Lawrence, Florida Atlantic University
“The Best of Bonds: Family, Sexuality and Revolution in Early Transatlantic Methodism, 1730-1815” - Jacob M. Blosser, Texas Woman’s University
“Irreverent Empire: Anglican Inattention in an Atlantic World”
Panel C. Negotiating Modern Jewish Identities in Gasson 208
- Chair: Meaghan Dwyer, Boston College
- Martina Urban, Vanderbilt University
“Urban Self-Definitions: Jewish Renegotiations of Identity in Wilhelmine and Weimar Berlin” - Rachel Gordan, Harvard Unversity
“Milton Steinberg and Edith Alpert: Romantic Love in the Making of an American Religious Identity” - Jamie J. Wilson, Salem State College
“The First Step Toward a World Jewish Community: Hatzaad Harishon, Black Jews, and Jewish Identity in New York City during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements”
Panel D. Hybridity in Religious Identities in Gasson 210
- Chair: Mimi Cowan, Boston College
- Julius Bailey, University of Redlands
“Too Light to Lead: Daniel Coker and Racial Liminality in the Early AME Church” - Thomas Rzeźnik, Seton Hall University
“From Stigma to Status: Convert Identity among Philadelphia’s ‘Quaker-turned-Episcopal Gentry’” - Tobin Miller Shearer, Northwestern University
“Reinterpreting Religious Identity at the Border Between Activism and Withdrawal: Vincent Harding’s Sojourn with the Mennonites, 1958-1966”
Friday Evening Dinner, 5:30PM-8PM in the Heights Room in Corcoran Commons
Session #2 – Saturday Morning, 9-10:30AM
Panel A. Lay Catholic Piety and Action in Gasson 202
- Chair: Casey Beaumier, Boston College
- Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez, University of Chicago Divinity School
“The Queen of Heaven and the Angel in the House: The Influence of the Catholic Mary on Nineteenth-Century American Gender Ideology and the Development of Public Maternalism” - John Bieter, Boise State University
“’Lay People Can Teach’: The Role of Laity, Rural Life and the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine” - Matthew Sherman, Boston College
“Devotional Life, in Print and in Praxis: A Study of American Catholicism, Family, and Gender in the Pre-Vatican II Era”
Panel B. The “Other” Ocean: Religious Identities in the Pacific in Gasson 203
- Chair: Rebecca Nedostup, Boston College
- Grant Underwood, Brigham Young University
“Religious Identity Construction among New Zealand Maori Mormons” - D.E. “Gene” Mills, Jr., Florida State University
“The Transformation of Religious Identity as Evidenced in the Lives and Writings of Two Native Hawaiian Historians: John Papa I’I and Samuel Kamakau” - Jeremy Clarke, Boston College
"Red Lanterns and the Woman in White: the Boxer Uprising's Impact on Chinese Catholic Identities"
Panel C. Public and Private Religion in the British Isles in Gasson 204
- Chair: Bethany Tanis, Boston College
- Janay Nugent, University of Lethbridge
“Mothers and the Creation of a Confessional Identity in Early Modern Scotland” - Jennifer M. Lloyd, State University College at Brockport
“Gender as a Factor in Religious Identity in Nineteenth-Century British Methodist Sects”
Panel D. Catholic Identities in Germany, 1871-1933 in Gasson 205
- Chair: Michael B. Gross, East Carolina University
- Rebecca Ayako Bennette, Middlebury College
“Quintessential Germans: Catholics and the Use of Femininity in the Construction of National Identity” - Jeffrey T. Zalar, Pepperdine University
“The Everyday Lives of Priests in Imperial Germany” - Michael E. O’Sullivan, Marist College
“’Dear God, Am I Worthy of Your Goodness to Me?’: Miraculous Cures in Trier during 1933”
Session #3 – Saturday Morning, 10:45AM-12:15PM
Panel A. Memory and the Miraculous: Lived Religion in America in Gasson 202
- Chair: James O’Toole, Boston College
- Robert Fogarty, Antioch College
“Miraculous Boston, 1929” - Carrie Schultz, Boston College
“’Born of Water and the Spirit’”: American Catholics and Infant Baptism, 1920-1960”
Panel B. Transnational Lutheranism in Gasson 203
- Chair: Christopher Brown, Boston University
- Mary L. Fehler, Texas Christian University
“Faith and Family on the Frontier: Lutheran Immigrant Women in South and Central Texas, 1830-1850” - Laura Baines, Boston College
“Drinking, Dancing, and Dueling: Confessional Lutherans in the Evangelical American South” - Todd Green, Vanderbilt Divinity School
“Navigating the Public/Private Dichotomy: The Motherhouse System and the Construction of the Deaconess Vocation in Sweden”
Panel C. Accessing the Sacred in Latin America in Gasson 204
- Chair: Zachary Morgan, Boston College
- J. Timothy Ruckle Jr., University of California, Berkeley
“Transformative Re-Imaginings of la Virgen de Guadalupe: From Colonial Multivocality to Chicana Self-Identity” - Paula Lorena Lungov, Sorbonne University
“When Afro-Brazilian Deities Are Invited to a Pentecostal Church”
Panel D. Before, During, and After the Revolution: Religious Identity in Early Modern France in Gasson 205
- Chair: Paul Spagnoli, Boston College
- Sydney E. Watts, University of Richmond
“Schooling the Dames of Saint Louis at St. Cyr: The Formation of Religious and Secular Identity among French Girls under Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon” - Annette Chapman-Adisho, Salem State College
“The Abbés Grégoire & Volfius: Religious Identity and Its Evolution in the Constitutional Church” - Mary Kathryn Cooney-Robinson, Lourdes College
“Religious Identities and Secular Society: The Monks of the Congregation Saint-Maur During the French Revolution”
Saturday Afternoon Lunch, 12:30-2PM in the Heights Room in Corcoran Commons