Prophetic Perfectionism: The Afterlives of Nat Turner and John Brown

ABSTRACT

Recent fiction, film, art, and scholarship on nineteenth-century American abolitionists Nat Turner and John Brown shed light on the politics of their prophetic religion. Both men led violent rebellions against slavery for which they were executed. Prophetic perfectionism drove Turner and Brown but tended to fade in works about them. Exceptions to this pattern of reception include Jacob Lawrence's John Brown series (1941), Nate Parker's film The Birth of a Nation (2016), and Ted Smith's book Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (2014). This essay situates Turner's and Brown's prophetic perfectionism and their reception in the context of contemporary political theologies and aesthetics of religion and race.     

Quakers,North Carolinians and Blacks in Indiana's Settlement Pattern

Indiana had an unusually sizeable Quaker population by 1850 that formed the state's fifth largest denomination and comprised the fourth largest number of Quakers in the United States. Quaker churches were concentrated in east-central Indiana. Most of the Quakers came from the South, particularly North Carolina. Southern Quakers had freed their slaves by 1800 and were actively opposed to the “peculiar institution,” and many free blacks lived near them. When economic and political conditions in North Carolina became intolerable for the Quakers and blacks, many of them moved to Indiana together. Although some blacks migrated separately and settled different areas, many chose to locate close to the Quakers due to their antislavery and humanitarian philosophy. As a result, there was a close association in Indiana among natives of North Carolina, Quakers and blacks by 1850.     

On the Margins of the Enlightenment: Blacks and Jews

The postmodern critique of the Enlightenment is much concerned with what it regards as the unwillingness of progressive thinkers of the eighteenth century to accept the legitimacy of national or cultural groups that differed significantly from norms in Western Europe. My aim is to examine how eighteenth-century thinkers, including Hume, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Condorcet, and the Abbé Grégoire, perceived prototypical “others” such as Blacks and Jews, by looking at the sources—from contemporary medical science to travel literature, proto-anthropology, history, biblical scholarship and reformist projects—on which these views were based. Perceptions of Blacks cannot easily be separated from the issue of slavery, nor that of the Jews from biblical history and theology. I argue that those who wanted to exclude these groups from mainstream society generally based their arguments on a one-dimensional, self-referential empirical methodology, while those who argued for their eventual inclusion usually posited a multidimensional reality in which a shift from one dimension to the other was a matter of will and planning. While the inclusionists tended to use general categories, such as humanity or a universal spiritual order, the exclusionists tended to use particularizing categories such as race or nation.     

论重建后工业化对美国黑人社会的影响

重建后,工业化对美国黑人的社会、政治、经济学各方面都产生了深远的影响。工业化和城市化改变了黑人在美国的人口分布,刺激了黑人人口的流动与黑人人口结构、劳动就业结构和家庭结构的变化,并促进了黑人新型的社会、经济和家庭结构的形成。工业化为黑人在20世纪的崛起准备了条件。     

Reconsidering John Sergeant's Attacks on Locke's Essay

The Catholic polemicist John Sergeant published three major works of philosophy towards the end of his literary career, The Method to Science (1696), Solid Philosophy (1697) and Metaphysics (1700). They were highly critical of what Sergeant saw as the idea‐grounded epistemology of the Cartesians and John Locke, whom he labelled ‘ideists’. Previous scholars have interpreted Sergeant's texts as manifestations of his lifelong obsession with certainty, as initially developed in his Restoration polemics against Anglican divines. Using a previously neglected autobiographical letter, it is demonstrated that Sergeant's intentions were very different. Like Edward Stillingfleet and other critics, Sergeant saw Locke's philosophy as inspiring contemporary heterodoxy. The article identifies the specific channels by which Sergeant saw Lockeanism seeping into irreligion. Moreover, unlike Locke's Anglican critics, Sergeant resorted not to polemical accusations, but to abstract philosophy. This must also be explained contextually: Sergeant wished his works to become textbooks at the universities, concerned as he was by the pedagogical impact of the Essay. A premise of this article is that reception history is less useful for elucidating on the meaning of the received text than for telling us something about the intentions of the receiver, and about the intellectual culture in which the process of reception occurs. With this in mind, the article finishes by recontextualizing Sergeant's works within a broader narrative: his was an attempt to reassert the place of philosophy as a propaedeutic to theology in an age when such a conception of philosophy's social role was coming under intense scrutiny.