Changing American Congregations: Findings from the Third Wave of the National Congregations Study

The third wave of the National Congregations Study (NCS-III) was conducted in 2012. The 2012 General Social Survey asked respondents who attend religious services to name their religious congregation, producing a nationally representative cross-section of congregations from across the religious spectrum. Data about these congregations was collected via a 50-minute interview with one key informant from 1,331 congregations. Information was gathered about multiple aspects of congregations’ social composition, structure, activities, and programming. Approximately two-thirds of the NCS-III questionnaire replicates items from 1998 or 2006-07 NCS waves. Each congregation was geocoded, and selected data from the 2010 United States census or American Community Survey have been appended. We describe NCS-III methodology and use the cumulative NCS dataset (containing 4,071 cases) to describe five trends: more ethnic diversity, greater acceptance of gays and lesbians, increasingly informal worship styles, declining size (but not from the perspective of the average attendee), and declining denominational affiliation.

American Manna: Religious Responses to the American Industrial Food System

“American Manna: Religious Responses to the American Industrial Food System” is an investigation of the religious complexity present in religious food reform movements. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at four field sites. These field sites are a Jewish organic vegetable farm where the farmers begin their days with meditation, a Christian raw vegan diet center run by Messianic Jews, a Christian family that raises their cattle on pastures and sends them to a halal processing plant for slaughter, and a Jewish farm where Christian and Buddhist farm staff helped to implement shmita, the biblical agricultural sabbatical year.

The religious people of America do not exist in neatly bound silos, so in my research I move with the religious people to the spaces that are less clearly defined as “Christian” or “Jewish.” I study religious food reformers within the framework of what I have termed “free-range religion” because they organize in groups outside the traditional religious organizational structures. My argument regarding free-range religion has three parts. I show that (1) perceived injustices within the American industrial food system have motivated some religious people to take action; (2) that when they do, they direct their efforts against the American food industry, and tend to do so outside traditional religious institutions; and finally, (3) in creating alternatives to the American food industry, religious people engage in inter-religious and extra-religious activism.

Chapter 1 serves as the introduction, literature review, and methodology overview. Chapter 2 focuses on the food-centered Judaism at the Adamah Environmental Fellowship at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, CT. In Chapter 3, I discuss the Hallelujah Diet as prescriptive literature and as it is put into practice at the Hallelujah Diet Retreat Center in Lake Lure, NC. Chapter 4 follows cows as they move from the grassy hills of Baldwin Family Farms in Yanceyville, NC to the meat counter at Whole Foods Markets. In Chapter 5, I consider the shmita year, the biblical agricultural sabbatical practice that was reimagined and implemented at Pearlstone Center in Baltimore, MD during 2014-2015. Chapter 6 will conclude this dissertation with a discussion of where religious food reform has been, where it is now, and a glimpse of what the future holds.

“Newter”-ing the Nicodemite: Reception of John Calvin’s Quatre sermons (1552) in Sixteenth-Century England

This dissertation examines the publication history of a single work: John Calvin’s 1552 Quatre sermons de M. Jehan Calvin traictans des matières fort utiles pour nostre temps, avec briefve exposition du Pseaume lxxxvii. Overlooked for both its contribution to Calvin’s wider corpus and its surprising popularity in English translation, successive editions of Quatre sermons display how Calvin’s argument against the behavior of so-called “Nicodemites” was adapted to various purposes unrelated to refuting religious dissimulation. The present study contributes to research in Calvin’s anti-Nicodemism by highlighting the fruitfulness of focusing on a discrete work and its reception. Borrowing a term (“Newter”) from John Field’s 1579 translation of Quatre sermons, this study’s title adumbrates its argument. English translators capitalized on the intrinsic malleability of a nameless and faceless opponent, the Nicodemite, and the adaptability of Quatre sermons’ genre as a collection of sermons to reshape—or, if you will, disfigure—both Calvin’s original foes and his case against them to advance various new agenda. Yet they were not the first to use the reformer’s sermons this way. They could have learned this from Calvin himself.

My examination of Quatre sermons opens by setting the work in the context of Calvin’s other writings and his political situation (Introduction, chapters one and two). Calvin’s unrelenting literary assault on French Nicodemism over three decades has long been recognized for its consistency and negativity. Yet scholars have tended to neglect how Calvin’s polemic against religious dissimulation could exhibit significant flexibility according to the needs of his context. Whereas Calvin’s preface promises simply to revisit his previous argument against participation in the Mass, his approach to Nicodemism in Quatre sermons seems adapted to accomplish goals beyond decrying false worship, offering a carefully-crafted apology for Calvin’s pastoral authority directed at his political situation. Repeatedly emphasizing God’s purpose to bless his children through the ministry of a rightly-ordered church, Quatre sermons marks a shift in Calvin’s anti-Nicodemite rhetoric away from purely negative critique, stressing instead God’s provision of spiritual nurture via political exile. Read in light of Calvin’s 1552 context, two audiences emerge: sermons ostensibly targeting believers in France who hid their faith also appear especially designed to silence Calvin’s foes in Geneva.

The remainder of the study examines the reception of Quatre sermons in the rapidly shifting religious and social contexts of Marian and Elizabethan England, where it appeared in more unique editions than any of Calvin’s writings besides the Institutio and the reformer’s 1542/45 Genevan Catechism. Calvin’s anti-Nicodemism has not been examined for its distinct contribution to the overall English reception of his thought. Five English versions of Quatre sermons appeared between 1553 and 1584—four of these under a Protestant queen, a situation quite different from the French context Calvin addressed. After situating Calvin’s position within the currents of Tudor Protestant anti-Nicodemism (chapter three), I place each of the five translations in its particular context, investigating prefaces, appendices, marginalia, and translation methods to discover how and why individuals used Quatre sermons (chapters four to six). Like Calvin in 1552, those who brought Quatre sermons to English readers were not primarily concerned with Nicodemism. Rather, the malleability of Calvin’s Nicodemite as polemical opponent and the flexibility of Quatre sermons as a sequence of discrete, interrelated parts made it popular with those eager to press Calvin into the service of a variety of diverse goals he could not have imagined, including turning his anti-Nicodemism against fellow members of the English church.

Knowing The Way: Scriptural Imagination and the Acts of the Apostles

In this dissertation, I offer a pedagogical proposal for learning the Christian Scriptures guided by respect for the nature of the reader and the integrity of the biblical text. Christian educators have profitably developed recent theoretical interest in the body’s role in human meaning with regard to worship and praxis methodologies, but the implications of this research for communal study of the biblical text merit further development. I make the case for adopting scriptural imagination as the goal of pedagogically constructed encounters with the Christian Scriptures. The argument proceeds through a series of questions addressing both sides of the text/reader encounter.

Chapter one considers the question “what is the nature of the reader and, subsequently, the shape of the reader’s ways of knowing?” This investigation into recent literature on the body’s involvement in human knowing includes related epistemological shifts with Christian education. On the basis of this survey, imagination emerges as a compelling designator of an incorporative, constructive creaturely capacity that gives rise to a way of being in the world. Teachers of Scripture who intend to participate in Christian formation should account for the imagination’s centrality for all knowing. After briefly situating this proposal within a theological account of creatureliness, I make the initial case for Scriptural imagination as a pedagogical aim.

Imagination as creaturely capacity addresses the first guiding value, but does this proposal also respect the integrity and nature of the biblical text, and specifically of biblical narratives? In response, in chapter two I take up the Acts of the Apostles as a potential test case and exemplar for the dynamics pertinent to the formation of imagination. Drawing on secondary literature on the genre and literary features of Acts, I conclude that Acts coheres with this project’s explicit interest in imagination as a central component of the process of Christian formation in relationship to the Scriptures.

Chapters three and four each take up a pericope from Acts to assess whether the theoretical perspectives developed in prior chapters generate any interpretive payoff. In each of these chapters, a particular story within Acts functions as a test case for readings of biblical narratives guided by a concern for scriptural imagination. Each of these chapters begins with further theoretical development of some element of imaginal formation. Chapter three provides a theoretical account of practices as they relate to imagination, bringing that theory into conversation with Peter’s engagement in hospitality practices with Cornelius in Acts 10:1-11:18. Chapter four discusses the formative power of narratives, with implications for the analysis of Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27:1-28:16.

In the final chapter, I offer a two-part constructive pedagogical proposal for reading scriptural narratives in Christian communities. First, I suggest adopting resonance above relevance as the goal of pedagogically constructed encounters with the Scriptures. Second, I offer three ways of reading with the body, including the physical, ecclesial, and social bodies that shape all learning. I conclude by identifying the importance of scriptural imagination for Christian formation and witness in the twenty-first century.