Abstract This article examines the growing scholarship on scripture in American new religious movements, specifically on exemplary studies on African–American Islam, Mormonism, and Satanism. After reviewing the state of the scholarship, I seek to encourage additional work in this inchoate subfield at the intersection of new religious movements, American religious history, and scriptural studies by offering potential trajectories and publication venues.

No abstract is available for this article.

No abstract is available for this article.

Abstract This article surveys scholarly contributions to the study of Catholic devotional practice in the Americas, tracing how historical, sociological, and ethnographic studies have examined the relationship between devotion, gender, and embodiment. Scholars have explored how the saints have been brought to bear on the conditions of daily life including immigration and migration, suffering, and social change. Women's devotion has been at the center of studies of gender and lived religion, as scholars explore the creative and tensile ways, women's religious practice has exceeded the institutional authority and architectural boundaries of the church. This essay ends with a provocation about how the study of men and masculinities can challenge the portrayal of devotion as an exclusively feminine domain and complicate the binary of (male) clerical authorities/women that pervades studies of religious practice and materiality.

Abstract Contemporary scholars of ancient Judaism struggle to describe Jewishness, recognizing that ancient Jewish concepts of social collectivity do not fully correspond with modern understandings of ethnicity, nationality, race, or even religion. But despite current efforts, categorical anachronism may be inherently inescapable. Scholars should therefore evaluate modern descriptive terms based on their analytic utility. By this standard, scholars would do well to consider embracing an obviously anachronistic—but nevertheless utilitarian—term to understand ancient Jewishness: “peoplehood.” Mordecai Kaplan's conceptions of “civilization” and “peoplehood” were developed as conscious rejections of more limited (and Protestant) understandings of religion. Kaplan proposed a more nuanced understanding of Jewishness, straddling the same divides (between ethnicity, nationality, and religion) that confound scholars of ancient Judaism today. Kaplan's understanding of the Jewish civilization—land, language, folkways, sanctions, institutions, and arts—presents a striking (if inexact) articulation of the way scholars of ancient Judaism discern Jewishness in our ancient evidence. This in turn justifies utilizing “peoplehood” as an analytic category for the understanding of ancient Jewishness.

No abstract is available for this article.

No abstract is available for this article.