In The Baptism of Early Virginia, Rebecca Anne Goetz examines the construction of race through the religious beliefs and practices of English Virginians. She finds the seventeenth century a critical time in the development and articulation of racial ideologies—ultimately in the idea of “hereditary heathenism,” the notion that Africans and Indians were incapable of genuine Christian conversion. In Virginia in particular, English settlers initially believed that native people would quickly become Christian and would form a vibrant partnership with English people. After vicious Anglo-Indian violence dashed those hopes, English Virginians used Christian rituals like marriage and baptism to exclude first Indians and then Africans from the privileges enjoyed by English Christians—including freedom. Resistance to hereditary heathenism was not uncommon, however. Enslaved people and many Anglican ministers fought against planters’ racial ideologies, setting the stage for Christian abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using court records, letters, and pamphlets, Goetz suggests new ways of approaching and understanding the deeply entwined relationship between Christianity and race in early America. "Goetz has done an impressive job bringing religion to the center of the historiography on race, and her study is a must-read for all scholars interested in the development of race and the role of Protestantism in the Atlantic world."—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society "In a compact 173 pages, Goetz links race and religion in colonial Virginia in ways that few other scholars have even attempted."—Journal of American History "This is impressive scholarship grounded in letters, pamphlets, court records, colonial statutes, and a wide array of additional archival and secondary sources . . . It is a book that will find ready readership in graduate seminars, seminaries, and undergraduate classrooms."—Virginia Magazine of History and Biography "Professor Goetz . . . is to be warmly applauded for having produced a work of such methodological scope and intellectual sophistication, a most persuasive work that ranks as a major contribution to the field."—Slavery and Abolition Rebecca Anne Goetz is an associate professor of history at New York University.

"Examines the development of oppressive Christian theologies and the normalization of white superiority and white privilege in the United States"--

Images of bodies and bodily practices abound in early America: from spirit possession, Fasting Days, and infanticide to running the gauntlet, going "naked as a sign," flogging, bundling, and scalping. All have implications for the study of gender, sexuality, masculinity, illness, the "body politic," spirituality, race, and slavery. The first book devoted solely to the history and theory of the body in early American cultural studies brings together authors representing diverse academic disciplines.Drawing on a wide range of archival sources—including itinerant ministers' journals, Revolutionary tracts and broadsides, advice manuals, and household inventories—they approach the theoretical analysis of the body in exciting new ways. A Centre of Wonders covers such varied topics as dance and movement among Native Americans; invading witch bodies in architecture and household spaces; rituals of baptism, conversion, and church discipline; eighteenth-century women's journaling; and the body as a rhetorical device in the language of diplomacy.

Michael Green offers biblical and ecumenical answers to disputed questions about baptism. The gateway into the church. An individual’s testimony to faith and repentance. The reception of the Holy Spirit. The meaning of baptism varies wildly between different Christian traditions. Seeking common ground, Michael Green turns to Scripture to assess the varieties of baptismal theology. Though Green assents that baptism is no substitute for saving faith, he endorses infant baptism, confronting common objections head-on. He also addresses the related problems of confirmation and rebaptism. Green’s lively and clear argument will challenge and intrigue readers of all denominations.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.