LITMIR.BIZ

MexicanAmerican folk and religious healing, often referred to as curanderismo, has been a vital part of life in the Mexico-U.S.border region for centuries. A hybrid tradition made up primarily of indigenousand Iberian Catholic pharmacopeias, rituals, and notions of the self, curanderismo treats the sick person witha variety of healing modalities including herbal remedies, intercessory prayer,body massage, and energy manipulation. Curanderos,“healers,” embrace a holistic understanding of the patient, including body,soul, and community. Border Medicine examines the ongoingevolution of Mexican American religious healing from the end of the nineteenthcentury to the present. Illuminating the ways in which curanderismo has had an impact not only on the health and cultureof the borderlands but also far beyond, the book tracks its expansion from MexicanAmerican communities to Anglo and multiethnic contexts. While many healers treat Mexican and MexicanAmerican clientele, a significant number of curanderoshave worked with patients from other ethnic groups as well, especially thoseinvolved in North American metaphysical religions like spiritualism, mesmerism,New Thought, New Age, and energy-based alternative medicines. Hendricksonexplores this point of contact as an experience of transcultural exchange. Drawingon historical archives, colonial-era medical texts and accounts, earlyethnographies of the region, newspaper articles, memoirs, and contemporaryhealing guidebooks as well as interviews with contemporary healers, Border Medicine demonstrates the notableand ongoing influence of Mexican Americans on cultural and religious practicesin the United States, especially in the American West.

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Sincethe 1950s, millions of American Christians have traveled to the Holy Land tovisit places in Israel and the Palestinian territories associated with Jesus’s lifeand death. Why do these pilgrims choose to journeyhalfway around the world? How dothey react to what they encounter, and how dothey understand the trip upon return? This book places theanswers to these questions into the context of broad historical trends, analyzing howthe growth of mass-market evangelical and Catholic pilgrimagerelates to changes in American Christiantheology and culture over the last sixty years,including shifts in Jewish-Christian relations, the growth of small group spirituality, and the development of a Christianleisure industry. Drawing on five yearsof research with pilgrims before, during and after their trips, Walking Where Jesus Walked offers a lived religion approach thatexplores the trip’s hybrid nature for pilgrims themselves: both ordinary—tiedto their everyday role as the family’s ritual specialists, andextraordinary—since they leave home in a dramatic way, often for the firsttime. Their experiences illuminate key tensions in contemporary US Christianitybetween material evidence and transcendent divinity, commoditization andreligious authority, domestic relationships and global experience. Hillary Kaell crafts the first in-depth study of thecultural and religious significance of American Holy Land pilgrimage after1948. The result sheds light on how Christian pilgrims, especially women, makesense of their experience in Israel-Palestine, offering an important complementto top-down approaches in studies of Christian Zionism and foreign policy.

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Who was Elizabeth Tuttle? In most histories, she is a footnote, a blip. At best, she is a minor villain in the story of Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the greatest American theologian of the colonial era. Many historians consider Jonathan Edwards a theological genius, wildly ahead of his time, a Puritan hero. Elizabeth Tuttle was Edwards’s “crazy grandmother,” the one whose madness and adultery drove his despairing grandfather to divorce. In this compelling and meticulously researched work of micro-history, Ava Chamberlain unearths a fuller history of Elizabeth Tuttle. It is a violent and tragic story in which anxious patriarchs struggle to govern their households, unruly women disobey their husbands, mental illness tears families apart, and loved ones die sudden deaths. Through the lens of Elizabeth Tuttle, Chamberlain re-examines the common narrative of Jonathan Edwards’s ancestry, giving his long-ignored paternal grandmother a voice. Tracing this story into the 19th century, she creates a new way of looking at both ordinary families of colonial New England and how Jonathan Edwards’s family has been remembered by his descendants,contemporary historians, and, significantly, eugenicists. For as Chamberlain uncovers, it was during the eugenics movement, which employed the Edwards family as an ideal, that the crazy grandmother story took shape. The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle not only brings to light the tragic story of an ordinary woman living in early New England, it also explores the deeper tension between the ideal of Puritan family life and its messy reality, complicating the way America has thought about its Puritan past.

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Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s,significant numbers of Haitian immigrants began to arrive and settle in Miami.Overcoming some of the most foreboding obstacles ever to face immigrants inAmerica, they, their children, and now their grandchildren, as well as morerecently arriving immigrants from Haiti, have diversified socioeconomically.Together, they have made South Florida home to the largest population ofnative-born Haitians and diasporic Haitians outside of the Caribbean and one ofthe most significant Caribbean immigrant communities in the world. Religion hasplayed a central role in making all of this happen. Crossing the Water and Keeping the Faith is a historical andethnographic study of Haitian religion in immigrant communities, based onfieldwork in both Miami and Haiti, as well as extensive archival research.Where many studies of Haitian religion limit themselves to one faith, Rey andStepick explore Catholicism, Protestantism, and Vodou in conversation with oneanother, suggesting that despite the differences between these practices, thethree faiths ultimately create a sense of unity, fulfillment, and self-worth inHaitian communities. This meticulously researched and vibrantly written bookcontributes to the growing body of literature on religion among new immigrants,as well as providing a rich exploration of Haitian faith communities.

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