![]() ![]() In order to construct the model, I draw on the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, missiologist Stephen Bevans and cultural studies scholar Henry Jenkins. The model draws on missiology and participatory cultural studies, enabling the construction of a theory that is fully contextual and fosters participation. The “convergent model of renewal” proposed here demonstrates how renewal can conserve tradition while being innovative. Often the response to revitalization is to eschew tradition altogether or rigidly cling to it. In the wake of modernity, faith traditions face the challenge of how to adapt within changing cultures, new scientific discoveries, and other pressing realities that bring about crisis. This chapter highlights the fruits of relatively new research by identifying the Ranters, exploring their origins, examining how they were seen by contemporaries, accounting for their activities, discussing their beliefs, assessing their possible sources, and reviewing the ways in which their texts were expressed and suppressed. While none of this was exclusive to the Ranters, and while there was no Ranter archetype that conformed precisely to all aspects of this characterisation, collectively it embodies the central features of their perceived ideas, outward conduct and self-fashioned identities. The term Ranter should be used cautiously to indicate hostile yet shifting contemporary attitudes towards individuals who normally knew each other (usually through conventicles, Baptist congregations or as members of spiritual communities) believed themselves to have been liberated from, or passed beyond, the outward observance of gospel ordinances maintained that all things sprang from God and that God was in all living things espoused similar theological notions that were regarded as blasphemous, especially that sin was imaginary and that to the pure all things are pure justified transgressive sexual behaviour, drunkenness and cursing through scriptural precedents and interpretations demanded that Christians fulfil their charitable obligations by giving to the poor, sick and hungry and enacted shocking gestures as prophetic warnings of the impending Day of Judgement. An example based on preliminary results from a project studying members of the Religious Society of Friends (‘Quakers’) in the British Virgin Islands of the Caribbean in the mid-eighteenth century will explore how a religious identity may have been created in a way very different from those in ‘core’ Quaker areas. Rather, a practice-based perspective will approach religions as lived, not as written, and so suggests the contribution of archaeological methodologies towards their study. Too often, this method has equated finds, types, or patterns with specific religious ‘meanings’ derived from single-authored texts, thereby obscuring local negotiations and variation. One goal will be to critique an over-reliance on written sources in labeling and interpreting ‘religious’ finds and groups. It considers how archaeologists can approach such ephemeral concepts as identity and religion-especially when these deny their own materiality-through material culture. ![]() This paper considers how materials are used to create and recreate a social identity built, explicitly, through a lack of focus on them. ![]() In following the migratory patterns of wealthy Barbadian Friends to the North American Middle Colonies, this article demonstrates the depth of their influence in promoting African slavery and quelling critiques of the institution. ![]() Although some Friends experimented with the idea that particular enslaved individuals could redeem themselves through ‘‘moral’’ behavior or industriousness, the process of legal racialization virtually negated the concept of free will, the heart of non-Calvinist Protestant conversion. Many leading West Indian Quakers embraced a paternalistic evangelization campaign to the enslaved in an effort to ease the consciences of individual masters, to create a consensus among the Society’s members, and to help Friends in the colonies build up a stock of ‘‘moral capital’’ to be used against their non-Quaker peers. For American Quakers during the seventeenth century, a careful moral calculus permeated the Society’s negotiations between their twin goals of spiritual reflection and economic sustenance-balancing one’s metaphorical plantations, both ‘‘inner’’ and ‘‘outer.’’ In Barbados, where the Society of Friends had attracted a large following by the 1660s, slaveholding and plantation culture were facts of life that dominated effort to implement universalist ideals without threatening social control. ![]()
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