The New Measures A Theological History of Democratic Practice [Paperback]

This 2007 book debates about religion and democracy through a cultural history of nineteenth-century revival practice.The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice engages contemporary debates about religion and democracy through a cultural history of nineteenth-century revival practice. The book's eschatological angle of vision resists narratives of progress and decline to understand American democracy as both tangled in contradiction and caught up in redemption.The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice engages contemporary debates about religion and democracy through a cultural history of nineteenth-century revival practice. The book's eschatological angle of vision resists narratives of progress and decline to understand American democracy as both tangled in contradiction and caught up in redemption.The New Measures: A Theological History of Democratic Practice brings thick cultural history to contemporary debates about religion and democracy. Combining histories of performance, space, institutions, and ideas, the book tells the story of the 'new measures' that circulated in the religious revivals of the 1820s and '30s. The book's attention to detail moves it beyond abstraction and caricature to a more materialist political theology. And its eschatological hope resists narratives of progress and decline to understand American democracy as both tangled in contradiction and caught up in redemption.The Flyer: a preface for theologians, ethicists, historians, and homileticians; The Fugleman: a brief drill in methodology; 1. Some measures are plainly necessary; 2. You must have something new; 3. Sinners bound to change their own hearts; 4. Whosoever will; 5. The measure of self. Democracy can be interpreted by abstract theories but it is lived and practiced by people in specific times and places. Ted Smith's The New Measures is a thought-provoking and fascinating analysis of specific practices of the intersection of American democl³„