Baby Blessing

The baby blessings performed by Mormon church elders were among the very first rituals adopted by the church. While Joseph Smith revealed no explicit details of this ritual beyond its necessity, church members began to perform it on the eighth day of the child’s life and in many cases associated it with naming the child. Baby blessings functioned in the early Zion period to delineate citizenship in the salvific community. After the fall of the temporal Zion and the rise of the Nauvoo Temple cosmology, baby blessings functioned to annunciate the sealed position of the child in the priesthood of heaven. After the arrival in the Great Basin, two concurrent practices emerged: the blessing of children at home by family members and the blessing at church by ecclesiastical leaders. In the twentieth century, church leaders focused exclusively on blessings at church, recasting them as the solemn duty of priesthood-holding fathers.

Ouderlinge met preekvergunning: ‘n Herlewing van Dordtse Kerkorde artikel 8?

Elders with consent to preach: A revival of Church order of Dordt (DCO) art 8? There seems to be a need for members other than trained ministers to preach in Reformed Churches. This need comes to the fore especially during periods in which traditional academically trained ministers are lacking. The well-known Synod of Dordt (1618–1619) made provision for members with extraordinary (singular) gifts to become ministers of the Word. In this it was continuing a practice in the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands of the 16th century. Other reformed churches followed. In the Dutch Reformed Church elders with the necessary abilities who are trained in short spells are nowadays also used to preach the Word. This article investigates the latter in the light of the former and the content of article 8 of the Church order of Dordt (DCO).

WORDY WOMEN: GENDER TROUBLE AND THE ORAL POLITICS OF THE EAST AFRICAN REVIVAL IN NORTHERN GIKUYULAND

This essay explores conversion to the East African Revival as a way that Gikuyu women and men argued about moral and economic change. Rural capitalism in the 1930s and 1940s attacked the material basis of Gikuyu gender order by denying some men land. Familial stability was at stake in class formation: landless laborers could scarcely be respectable husbands. Rural elders and revivalists offered contending answers to the terrifying problem of gender trouble. Literate male elders at Tumutumu Presbyterian church used customary law and church bureaucracy to discipline young men and women. Revivalists, many of them women, talked: they confessed private sins vocally, cleansing themselves of sorcerous familial strife. Tumutumu’s debate over Revival played out as a contest between the oral politics of conversion and the bureaucratic power of church elders. Mau Mau continued the debate.