UT Publications
- Theorizing Radical Islam in Northern NigeriaWar in Heaven / Heaven on Earth: Theories of the Apocalyptic
- The Matter of Jerusalem: The Holy Land in Angevin Court Culture and Identity, c. 1154-1216Katie Hodges-Kluck, Dissertation, Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange
Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States by
Anyone who seeks to understand the dynamics of culture and politics in the United States must grapple with the importance of religion in its many diverse and contentious manifestations. With conservative evangelicals forming the base of the Republican Party, racial-ethnic communities often organized along religious lines, and socio-political movements on the left including major religious components, many of the country's key cultural-political debates are carried out through religious discourse. In this volume, Mark Hulsether leads readers on a tour of religion in the United States. He introduces key players and offers a set of case studies to explore the interaction of these players with major trends in U.S. cultural history. Students in American studies and cultural studies will especially appreciate how Hulsether frames his analysis using categories such as cultural hegemony, race and gender contestation, popular culture, and empire, enabling a more informed and constructive discussion of religion in these fields. Hulsether offers a synthesis that is concise yet internally complex and dynamic--one that gives special attention to religious diversity and conflict, the relations between religious groups and broader historical trends, and the internal struggles of religious people as they set priorities and cope with emerging change.
Call Number: BL2525 .H85 2007bISBN: 0231144032Publication Date: 2007-08-21
Nebuchadnezzar's Dream : the Crusades, apocalyptic prophecy, and the end of history by
In 1099, the soldiers of the First Crusade took Jerusalem. As the news of this victory spread throughout Medieval Europe, it felt nothing less than miraculous and dream-like, to such an extent that many believed history itself had been fundamentally altered by the event and that the Rapturewas at hand. As a result of military conquest, Christians could see themselves as agents of rather than mere actors in their own salvation.The capture of Jerusalem changed everything. A loosely defined geographic backwater, comprised of petty kingdoms and shifting alliances, Medieval Europe began now to imagine itself as the center of the world. The West had overtaken the East not just on the world's stage but in God's plans. Tojustify this, its writers and thinkers turned to ancient prophecies, and specifically to one of the most enigmatic passages in the Bible the dream King Nebuchadnezzar has in the Book of Daniel, of a statue with a golden head and feet of clay. Conventional interpretation of the dream transformed thestate into a series of kingdoms, each less glorious than the last, leading inexorably to the end of all earthly realms - in short, to the Apocalypse. The First Crusade signified to Christians that the dream of Nebuchadnezzar would be fulfilled on their terms. Such heady reconceptions continued untilthe disaster of the Second Crusade and with it, the collapse of any dreams of unification or salvation-any notion that conquering the Holy Land and defeating the Infidel could absolve sin.In Nebuchadnezzar's Dream, Jay Rubenstein boldly maps out the steps by which these social, political, economic, and intellectual shifts occurred throughout the 12th century, drawing on those who guided and explained them. The Crusades raised the possibility of imagining the Apocalypse as more thanprophecy but actual event. Rubenstein examines how those who confronted the conflict between prophecy and reality transformed the meaning and memory of the Crusades as well as their place in history.
Call Number: D161.2 .R746 2019ISBN: 0190274204Publication Date: 2019-01-02
Armies of Heaven : the first crusade and the quest for apocalypse by
At Moson, the river Danube ran red with blood. At Antioch, the Crusaders-- their saddles freshly decorated with sawed-off heads--indiscriminately clogged the streets with the bodies of eastern Christians and Turks. At Ma'arra, they cooked children on spits and ate them. By the time the Crusaders reached Jerusalem, their quest--and their violence-- had become distinctly otherworldly: blood literally ran shin-deep through the streets as the Crusaders overran the sacred city. Beginning in 1095 and culminating four bloody years later, the First Crusade represented a new kind of warfare: holy, unrestrained, and apocalyptic. In Armies of Heaven, medieval historian Jay Rubenstein tells the story of this cataclysmic event through the eyes of those who witnessed it, emphasizing the fundamental role that apocalyptic thought played in motivating the Crusaders. A thrilling work of military and religious history, Armies of Heaven will revolutionize our understanding of the Crusades.
Call Number: D161.2 .R73 2011ISBN: 0465019293Publication Date: 2011-11-01
UT Apocalypse Scholars
- Jordan Amspacher, MAJordan Amspacher is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the history department working under the supervision of Jay Rubenstein. His dissertation, "Troya Victa : Empire, Identity, and Apocalypse in the Frankish Chronicles of the Fourth Crusade" examines western European reactions to the crusader conquest of Christian Constantinople. It argues that twelfth-century understandings of sacred time featured heavily in contemporary Latin understandings of Greek Christianity and that this apocalyptic mentality was one of several factors which compelled the crusaders to attack their coreligionists in the spring of 1204.
- Katie Hodges-Kluck, PhDKatie Hodges-Kluck's research explores how ideas about Jerusalem and the Holy Land shaped the development of English identity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As part of this work, Dr. Hodges-Kluck investigates the roles of prophecies and apocalyptic belief, especially in their relation to the events of the Third Crusade (1189-92). She is particularly interested in the use of apocalyptic imagery and language surrounding the coronation of Richard I "the Lionheart" in 1189 and his subsequent crusading activities. Medieval writers of that period chronicled events through an eschatological lens, seeking apocalyptic signs in the unsettling events of their day. Dr. Hodges-Kluck is also interested in Richard the Lionheart's meeting with the famous Italian apocalyptic thinker Joachim of Fiore in 1190, during which the king and the apocalypticist debated the identity of the Antichrist and the timing of Antichrist's prophecized defeat by the Christian armies, which Richard believed was near at hand.
- Mark Hulsether, PhDSeveral of Mark Hulsether's past publications have dealt with the cultural politics of end-times themes in twentieth century US religion. Most notable, perhaps, are sections about this subject in Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth Century United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), one of which was reprinted in Cultural Studies: an Anthology, ed Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). Dr. Hulsether's first book dealt extensively with how left-wing Protestant social thinkers used categories related to “eschatology” (in “utopian” and critical/dystopian veins) if not always “apocalypse” straight on. His most recent publication, “Four Levels of Religious Meaning in Bob Dylan’s Music and Why It Matters to Hear Them All,” in New Approaches to Bob Dylan, ed. Anne-Marie Mai (Odense: University of Southern Denmark, 2019) discusses how Dylan’s influential critical or prophetic voice intersects with his Jewish and Christian prophetic influences that have often crossed over into the “apocalyptic.” This sort of reflection, relevant also to other musicians like Bob Marley and Lupe Fiasco, are part of a book he is now working on called Listening for More: Spirituality and Cultural Critique in American Popular Music.
- Greg B. Kaplan, PhDGregory B. Kaplan has been working for several years on a project that involves Jewish views toward the imminence of the Apocalypse during the seventeenth century. Kaplan’s research centers on manuscripts possessed by the Ets Haim Library of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam. This synagogue was founded during the early 1600s by conversos(descendants of forced converts from Judaism to Catholicism)—including the family of Baruch Spinoza—who fled to Amsterdam in order to escape inquisitorial persecution in Spain and Portugal. Kaplan studies unedited eschatological treatises composed by Saul Levi Morteira, who was born in Venice in the 1590s and who became the chief rabbi of the Portuguese Synagogue from 1616 until his death in 1660. Morteira’s main task was to encourage conversos to practice rabbinic Judaism, which Jews and Christians considered to portend the Apocalypse. Morteira’s treatises offer detailed explanations of the process by which the rejudaization of conversos would trigger the Apocalypse. In 2013, Kaplan received an NEH Fellowship to publish a translation from Spanish into English and a critical introduction to one of Morteira’s works, Arguments against the Christian Religion in Amsterdam by Saul Levi Morteira, Spinoza’s Rabbi (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). In his follow-up book, The Origins of Democratic Zionism(Routledge, 2019), Kaplan explores the link between the formation of modern Zionism and the eschatological visions by Morteira and Spinoza of an apocalyptic Jewish polity in the Holy Land. Arguments against the Christian Religion in Amsterdam is the first treatise by Morteira to be translated into English, and Kaplan is currently collaborating with Professor David A. Wacks (University of Oregon) on an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant proposal to fund the translation into English of the entire corpus of Morteira’s Spanish and Portuguese treatises.
- Jered Sprecher, MFAJered Sprecher's paintings are influenced by a "healthy" respect/fear/awe of the immensity of the world around us. He is interested in exploring how that respect/fear/awe is aimed at the prevalence and immensity of the technology that surrounds us. His art strives to reveal the beauty and tensions of this world, even to the point of discovering preservation within destruction. Here is a link to a lecture that Professor Sprecher gave in Spring 2018 in Kansas City, as part of an exhibition called Anxious Abstraction at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KXpM6u81B8&t=429s
