Reformation Roundtable
Esther Chung-Kim, associate professor of religious studies at CMC will moderate the discussion by first setting the stage of the European Reformation by outlining the impact of religious change on social welfare reform, especially as it relates to poverty, wealth and social change. Her research interests include religious authority and conflict, as well as the religious impact on social change. Her current research project focuses on religious reform and poor relief in early modern Europe.
Lori Anne Ferrell is the John D. and Lillian Maguire Distinguished Professor in Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of Government by Polemic: James I and the King’s Preachers (Stanford University Press) and The Bible and the People (Yale University Press) as well as many articles on Renaissance literature and the Reformation, the early modern sermon, and the early modern Bible. Her revisionist analysis of the role scripture played in the English Reformation is featured in the new Oxford History of Anglicanism (2017). She will present the concept of conversion to a national church as sincerely and religiously (rather than politically) motivated. Her case study for this concept is the poet and Church of England priest John Donne, whose corpus of St Paul’s sermons she has edited for the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (forthcoming 2018), work that allows her also to discuss the nature and importance of literary evidence in Reformation studies.
Seth Lobis is an associate professor of literature at CMC. He is the author of The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (Yale University Press) as well as essays on Erasmus, Milton, and others. He will cover the topic regarding "The Disenchantment of the World." This phrase, which Weber borrowed from Schiller, has long been associated not only with the progressive rationalization of western culture but also, more specifically, with the particular significance of the Reformation in that broader process. On this account the reformers opposed and sought to eliminate the magical, or more magical-seeming, elements of Christianity. In recent decades, historians have challenged Weber's thesis from different angles even as the idea of modernity as a complex configuration of ideas about magic, science, and religion has remained entrenched.
Carina Johnson is a professor of history at Pitzer College. Her current research focuses on cross-cultural encounters, proto-ethnography, memory, and the experience of violence in the 16th century Habsburg Empire. She is also interested in questions of material and visual culture, religious and cultural identities, and theorizing colonialism in the early modern era. She will present on Reformations in the European, Mediterranean, and global contexts. The Reformation is often described in terms of its profound religious, social, and political impacts within Europe, or as counter-Reformation Catholicism and Protestantism moved across the globe through European colonial structures. Her presentation focuses on two other important components of the Reformation era: the parallel confessionalization process occurring in the Islamic Ottoman and of the extra-European world, Safavid empires and the Reformation’s impacts on European conceptualizations of the extra-European world.