The Art of the Public Grovel

The Art of the Public Grovel
Author: Susan Wise Bauer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2016-06-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691170827

Whether you are a politician caught carrying on with an intern or a minister photographed with a prostitute, discovery does not necessarily spell the end of your public career. Admit your sins carefully, using the essential elements of an evangelical confession identified by Susan Wise Bauer in The Art of the Public Grovel, and you, like Bill Clinton, just might survive. In this fascinating and important history of public confession in modern America, Bauer explains why and how a type of confession that first arose among nineteenth-century evangelicals has today become the required form for any successful public admission of wrongdoing--even when the wrongdoer has no connection with evangelicalism and the context is thoroughly secular. She shows how Protestant revivalism, group psychotherapy, and the advent of talk TV combined to turn evangelical-style confession into a mainstream secular rite. Those who master the form--Bill Clinton, Jimmy Swaggart, David Vitter, and Ted Haggard--have a chance of surviving and even thriving, while those who don't--Ted Kennedy, Jim Bakker, Cardinal Bernard Law, Mark Foley, and Eliot Spitzer--will never really recover. Revealing the rhetoric, theology, and history that lie behind every successful public plea for forgiveness, The Art of the Public Grovel will interest anyone who has ever wondered why Clinton is still popular while Bakker fell out of public view, Ted Kennedy never got to be president, and Law moved to Rome.

The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Scandal and the Rise of Public Confession

The Art of the Public Grovel: Sexual Scandal and the Rise of Public Confession
Author: Susan Wise Bauer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2007
Genre: Clergy
ISBN: 9780549078890

Between 1969 and 2002, three American politicians (Edward Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton) and three ordained clergymen (Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Cardinal Bernard Law) made public confessions of wrongdoing to national audiences. These public confessions reveal that Protestant religious culture, particularly the neoevangelical culture of the twentieth century, had changed the expectations of many who did not consider themselves within neoevangelicalism's sphere of influence. By tracing the historical development of public confession from its medieval roots to its use in twentieth-century entertainment programming, this dissertation shows that Protestant confessional practice affected both secular American political discourse and American Catholic expectations. Examination of these six confessions further shows that, in order to survive the ordeal of public confession, leaders must identify themselves with the weak and dispossessed, place themselves on the right side of a holy war against evil, and give followers the power to take part in the cleansing ritual of forgiveness. This study concludes that, by the end of the twentieth century, Americans who were neither Protestant nor neoevangelical had nevertheless come to expect a Protestant ritual of public confession from erring leaders, and also demanded a role in the task of forgiveness and restoration.

AHA Student Edition

AHA Student Edition
Author: Kyle Idleman
Publisher: David C Cook
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0781411653

In the AHA Student Edition, students will discover that when God’s truth and the power of the Holy Spirit collide, anything can happen! In this student edition of AHA, Kyle Idleman combines personal stories, biblical teaching, and humor to engage students in the process of true biblical life transformation. This edition will appeal to a wide range of students including high school and college-aged readers.

Time and Space in the Internet Age

Time and Space in the Internet Age
Author: Stephen Kern
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2024-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040098401

This book analyzes how new technologies transformed life and thought between two periods, 1880-1920 and 1980-2020, with a focus on temporal experiences of past, present, future and the spatial experiences of form, distance, and direction. The signature contrast is between experiences of time and space transformed by the telephone in the earlier period and the Internet in the later period along with other sharp contrasts: the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11, World War I and the Gulf Wars, gravity bombs and smart bombs, the pandemics of 1918 and 2020, assembly lines and flexible production, Farmer’s Almanacs and computer-based weather predictions, cash transactions and one-click ordering, decolonization and globalization, internationalism and planetarity. The book also makes three interpretive arguments: the Epistemological Argument covers how greater knowledge introduced uncertainties; the Ethical Argument tracks how new technologies prompted ethical judgments about their value; and the Re-hierarchizing Argument tracks the erosion of spatial hierarchies most notably in religion, society, and politics with the increasing progress of secularization, social mobility, and democratization. Time and Space in the Internet Age is a thought-provoking study for academics and general readers interested in the history of technology and science.

The Art of Confession

The Art of Confession
Author: Paul Wilkes
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 0761168729

Paul Wilkes has written an elegant, prescriptive, secular book—a spiritual gem—that reinvents the power of confession for a contemporary audience. Confession is the foundation of religion, the essence of mental health. It is listening to the voice within to follow the path to honest and conscious living. And for thousands of years people have used the power of confession to find their best selves. Liberating confession from the confessional, The Art of Confession draws on traditions as old as ancient Greece and as modern as psychoanalysis as diverse as Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam, to show readers how to incorporate a confessional practice into their daily lives. There are visualizations, spiritual exercises, prompts, and meditations; private confessions, direct confessions, psychological confessions. Accompanied throughout by a wise “confessional chorus”—a rabbi, a priest, a psychiatrist, a nun, whose points-of-view complement and augment the text—The Art of Confession is an antidote to our age of oversharing, where we happily broadcast the minutest details of our lives in public, yet never find the time to discover the risk, relief, and ultimately the renewal that real, considered self-reflection offers.

This Is Our Message

This Is Our Message
Author: Emily Suzanne Johnson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-01-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190618949

Over the past 50 years, the architects of the religious right have become household names: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson. They have used their massively influential platforms to build the profiles of evangelical politicians like Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz. Now, a new generation of leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress enjoys unprecedented access to the Trump White House. What all these leaders share, besides their faith, is their gender. Men dominate the standard narrative of the rise of the religious right. Yet during the 1970s and 1980s nationally prominent evangelical women played essential roles in shaping the priorities of the movement and mobilizing its supporters. In particular, they helped to formulate, articulate, and defend the traditionalist politics of gender and family that in turn made it easy to downplay the importance of their leadership roles. In This Is Our Message, Emily Johnson begins by examining the lives and work of four well-known women-evangelical marriage advice author Marabel Morgan, singer and anti-gay-rights activist Anita Bryant, author and political lobbyist Beverly LaHaye, and televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker. The book explores their impact on the rise of the New Christian Right and on the development of the evangelical subculture, which is a key channel for injecting conservative political ideas into purportedly apolitical spaces. Johnson then highlights the ongoing significance of this history through an analysis of Sarah Palin's vice presidential candidacy in 2008 and Michele Bachmann's presidential bid in 2012. These campaigns were made possible by the legacies of an earlier generation of conservative evangelical women who continue to impact our national conversations about gender, family, and sex.

American Tricksters

American Tricksters
Author: William J. Jackson
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2014-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1630877336

Tricksters are known by their deeds. Obviously not all the examples in American Tricksters are full-blown mythological tricksters like Coyote, Raven, or the Two Brothers found in Native American stories, or superhuman figures like the larger-than-life Davy Crockett of nineteenth-century tales. Newer expressions of trickiness do share some qualities with the Trickster archetype seen in myths. Rock stars who break taboos and get away with it, heroes who overcome monstrous circumstances, crafty folk who find a way to survive and thrive when the odds are against them, men making spectacles of themselves by feeding their astounding appetites in public--all have some trickster qualities. Each person, every living creature who ever faced an obstacle and needed to get around it, has found the built-in trickster impulse. Impasses turn the trickster gene on, or stimulate the trick-performing imagination--that's life. To explore the ways and means of trickster maneuvers can alert us to pitfalls, help us appreciate tricks that are entertaining, and aid us in fending off ploys which drain our resources and ruin our lives. Knowing more about the Trickster archetype in our psyches helps us be more self-aware.

David Mamet and American Macho

David Mamet and American Macho
Author: Arthur Holmberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2012-02-02
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0521620643

What does it mean to be an American man? Holmberg demonstrates how David Mamet's plays explore complex issues of masculinity.

Intimate Politics

Intimate Politics
Author: James Stanyer
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2013-08-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0745662072

It is often remarked that politicians’ private lives are becoming a feature of political communication in many advanced industrial democracies. However, there have so far been no genuinely comparative studies examining the personalized nature of political communication. Intimate Politics provides for the first time a systematic comparative analysis of such developments in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it assesses the extent to which the private lives of politicians have become a feature of political communication in each democracy. The book provides a comprehensive account of the shifting boundaries between the public and private, and whether any developments are universal or more advanced in some democracies than others, and seeks to explain why this might be. Intimate Politics will be of great value for students and scholars of communication and media studies and political science and is required reading for anyone who wants a fuller understanding of the transformation of mediated politics in advanced industrial democracies.