Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Scholars of Christianity have long acknowledged spiritual friendship as a powerful concept and model for human relationships from its origins through the seventeenth century. These thoughtful and probing essays convincingly show that ties built upon affect, family, and shared convictions have continued to inform lived religious experience in modern times and shape western Christianity in significant, sometimes surprising ways."—Jodi Bilinkoff, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
"Dunn and Moore have brought together a rich collection of essays which use intimate relationships to chart a course between "solitude and society" providing an original lens through which to examine religion in the modern Christian West. By broadening the narrow view of intimacy beyond the privacy of heteronormative marriage, this book demonstrates the ongoing political, public, and theological significance of friendship and embodied, affective relationship in the modern age."—Tamsin Jones, Trinity College
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Recovering Relationships as a Path through the Modern Christian West / Mary Dunn and Brenna Moore
1. Body, Subjectivity, and Society in Religious Studies / Constance M. Furey
2. "Thine Own by Adoption": Conversion, Integration, and Fictive Kinship in the Life of Thérèse Oionhaton, Seventeenth-Century Wendat Convert / Emma Anderson
3. Making Miracles Efficacious: Katherine Tekakwitha, Miraculous Cures, and Relational Networks in Seventeenth-Century New France / Mary Dunn
4. Søren Kierkegaard and Religious Sensibility: Communion in Intimate Life / Edward F. Mooney
5. Henry Adams, Clover Adams, and the Death of the Real / Amy Hollywood
6. Objects of Devotion: Intimacy and Material Relations in Mexican Catholicism / Jennifer Scheper Hughes
7. The Rhetoric of Solitude and the Practice of Friendship: Reading Catholic Intellectual History in the Study of Religion / Brenna Moore
8. A Vocation of Contested Intimacies: U.S. Roman Catholic Priesthood in the Mid-Twentieth Century / John Seitz
9. Embracing Nimrod's Legacy: The Erotic, the Irreverence of Fantasy, and the Redemption of Black Theology / Anthony Pinn