2018, Vol., No.59

Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.39

pISSN : 1598-4230 / eISSN : 2586-7601
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ihss

The analysis that follows examines how religious citizenship evolved during the twelve years of Reconstruction (1865-1877) in the United States that followed Lincoln's injunction to his fellow Americans to act in the years ahead with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. The essay begins by tracing some of the divergences between postwar religious assumptions in the North and South to attitudes honed during the conflict. It takes as symbols of the contrasting views two of the opposing generals at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1862, Thomas Stonewall Jackson, the early avatar of the religion of the lost cause in the South, and Oliver Otis Howard, the future head of the Freedmen's Bureau. It then deals with how Americans made peace with the dead at least 620,000 of them, or two percent of the nation's population in ways that included Horace Bushnell's theology of vicarious sacrifice, resurgent spiritualism, and the annihilation of pain and suffering in Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health (1875). It concludes with the religious impulse to make peace with the living through reuniting the national family. However, this compassionate religious citizenship too often offered only a blinkered definition of family, for reconciliation with the white prodigal sons of the South typically entailed abandoning the newly admitted African American members of the national family.

Even though cultural geography has long exerted a productive influence on theatre studies, the relationship between modern drama and sacred or religious geography has yet to be thoroughly explored. Glaspell’s The Outside is influenced by religion as much as it constructs a sacred geography for the theatre. By reading The Outside through the paradigm of liturgical theology, this essay argues that Glaspell uses the imagery of a natural, exterior, and sacred landscape to open her audience up to the importance of the interior landscape of the spirit.

The paper, after making a few preliminary observations and briefly spelling out the relationship between classical and folk religious traditions in India, describes some of the salient features of folk religion as an “otherness.” The second part of the paper analyzes religious narratives about the origins of village/folk deities, particularly in South Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India. It is shown that most of the folk deities are women who as human beings met untimely and/or unnatural deaths. The victims of unjust social structures, they metamorphosed into spirits of extraordinary power who in their divinized incarnations became powerful guardians of their communities capable of alleviating the hardships of their devotees. The paper concludes that religious stories of folk deities often serve as border zones in which a transition from the social world of humans to the mythical realm of deities takes place in the textual and oral space of mutual interaction.