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

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Oxford University Press, Nov 14, 2002 - Religion - 304 pages
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."

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Contents

Wheat and Tares The Liberal Encounter with Puritan Violence
11
From Sentimentality to Social Reform The Emergence of Radical Christian Liberalism
46
The Gospel the Declaration and the Divine Child Theology and Literature of Ultra Reform
66
Looking for Victims Violence and Theology in Temperance Narratives
102
Through the BloodStained Gate Violence Birth and the Imago Dei in Fugitive Slave Narratives
127
Epics of Ambivalence Nonviolent Power in Harriet Beecher Stowes Antislavery Novels
157
Violent Messiahs Radical Christian Liberals and the Civil War
174
Liberal Irony
215
Notes
219
Bibliography
257
Index
281
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About the author (2002)

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

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