ABSTRACT
This collection analyzes the theme of the "afterlife" as it animated nineteenth-century American women’s theology-making and appeals for social justice. Authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Martha Finley, Jarena Lee, Maria Stewart, Zilpha Elaw, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Belinda Marden Pratt, and others wrote to have a voice in the moral debates that were consuming churches and national politics. These texts are expressions of the lives and dynamic minds of women who developed sophisticated, systematic spiritual and textual approaches to the divine, to their denominations or religious traditions, and to the mainstream culture around them. Women do not simply live out theologies authored by men. Rather, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife: A Step Closer to Heaven is grounded in the radical notion that the theological principles crafted by women and derived from women’s experiences, intellectual habits, and organizational capabilities are foundational to American literature itself.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|61 pages
(God)Mothers of Theology
chapter 3|11 pages
Rewriting Heaven
chapter 4|18 pages
The Archetypal Girl Savior and the Child Theologian
part II|65 pages
Self-Made Theologies
chapter 5|13 pages
“As to the Nature of Uncommon Expressions”
chapter 6|15 pages
Conversion and Counter-memory
chapter 7|14 pages
“What Absurdity Next?”
chapter 8|20 pages
“Aleaving the World, the Flesh, and the Devil”
part III|77 pages
Women and Utopian Theologies