Identifying the Image of God: Radical Christians and Nonviolent Power in the Antebellum United States

by Dan McKanan

Overview

Between 1820 and 1860, American social reformers invited all people to identify God's image in the victims of war, slavery, and addiction. Identifying the Image of God traces the theme of identification—and its liberal Christian roots—through the literature of social reform, focusing on sentimental novels, temperance tales, and slave narratives, and invites contemporary activists to revive the "politics of identification."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195145328
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/14/2002
Series:	Religion in America
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.20(d)
Lexile:	1490L (what's this?)

About the Author

Dan McKanan is Assistant Professor of Theology at St. John's University and College of Saint Benedict in Minnesota.

Table of Contents

	Introduction: The Power of Identification	3
1.	Wheat and Tares: The Liberal Encounter with Puritan Violence	11
2.	From Sentimentality to Social Reform: The Emergence of Radical Christian Liberalism	46
3.	The Gospel, the Declaration, and the Divine Child: Theology and Literature of Ultra Reform	66
4.	Looking for Victims: Violence and Theology in Temperance Narratives	102
5.	Through the Blood-Stained Gate: Violence, Birth, and the Imago Dei in Fugitive Slave Narratives	127
6.	Epics of Ambivalence: Nonviolent Power in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Antislavery Novels	157
7.	Violent Messiahs: Radical Christian Liberals and the Civil War	174
	Conclusion: Liberal Irony	215
	Notes	219
	Bibliography	257
	Index	281

Editorial Reviews

Identifying the Image of God is extraordinarily persuasive in arguing that the imago dei was crucial to the sentimental structure of feeling."—American Literature

"McKanan excavates a radical liberal Christian theology beneath antebellum reform...presents a convincing case that such antebellum reformers as William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Clarke Wright, and Adin Ballou embraced a radical liberal Christian theology."—American Historical Review

From the Publisher