Another Side of the Christian Left

Chapter 4 explores how another manifestation of Thurman’s pragmatism—his Christian liberalism—was represented within the Fellowship Church and beyond. Chapter 4 takes a broader look at Thurman’s activism within the scope of the midcentury Christian Left and examines how the characteristic cosmopolitanism and Christian liberalism of the movement thrived within the institution. The chapter also expands on how the Fellowship Church’s values transcended its walls through connections to a dynamic international community of religious liberals as well as through a thriving liberal religious middlebrow book culture via Thurman’s 1949 book, Jesus and the Disinherited. Overall, this chapter emphasizes the timeliness of the Fellowship Church and sheds light on the expressions of religious nonviolence that took shape in the mid-twentieth century.

Coloring the Christian Left

Chapter 2 utilizes Thurman’s biography to comment on the ways in which a dynamic minority point of view pushed the otherwise White-dominated Christian Left to take on a more pluralistic and tolerant identity in the 1920s and 1930s. In line with Du Bois’s theory that minorities have a special insight, or “second sight,” to critique dominant culture, the chapter emphasizes how Thurman and his peers merged the concerns of the colored cosmopolitan community—the “darker peoples” that lived under Western imperialism and American Jim Crow—with the concerns of the Christian spiritual cosmopolitan community whose ideology strived to transcend social position.

Concerto No. 6 in F Minor: By Johann Christian Bach?

Although Johann Christian Bach is best known today as a composer of operas and symphonies, his earliest large-scale works were keyboard concertos. In fact, the only incontestably authentic works that date from before his move to Italy in 1754 are the five concertos in autograph score that are now bound together as Bach Mus. MS P 390 in the Staaatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin (D-brd-B). Since these manuscripts were included in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's estate list at his death in 1788, it is assumed that the works were composed before Christian left for Italy, and most probably after he came to live in Berlin with his older half-brother following their father's death in 1750. These five works have recently appeared, in an edition by Richard Maunder, in the Complete Works of Christian Bach now being published by the Garland Press. Those with some knowledge of the youngest Bach's keyboard concertos may be somewhat surprised to find, however, that the volume of the earliest concertos contains not only the five works that make up the autograph manuscript P 390 but a sixth concerto as well. This work, in f minor, has a relatively extensive and confused manuscript tradition, and has not always been accepted as authentic. Since the editor offers only a brief statement supporting its inclusion in the critical edition, further comment is perhaps in order.

FABIOLA, A FOURTH CENTURY ROMAN LADY, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE FIRST PUBLIC HOSPITAL

Public hospitals for Roman citizens were established in many Roman cities during the early Christian era; the first of which was established at Rome in the fourth century by a Christian lady named Fabiola, as follows. The origin of public hospitals is remarkable, and not generally known. Ecclesiastical history informs us, that this, perhaps the grandest and most successful effort for alleviating human misery, arose from no common species of benevolence, but from the impulse of singular piety upon the sensibility of a female mind, softened by a series of domestic afflictions, and urged by the desire of atoning for imaginary guilt. In the fourth century, a Roman lady, of a noble birth, by name Fabiola, by religion a Christian, left by the death of her husband in sole possession of an affluent fortune, was the first who built an infirmary for the reception of the sick and houseless, where they were supplied with every comfort. Jerom[e] calls her the glory of the Christians, the wonder of the Gentiles! The account which he gives of her is this: Divorced from her first husband, who proved an abandoned libertine, during the life of the first she married a second husband, who was sincerely attached to her, and whom she survived. Among the melancholy reflections consequent upon his death, being led to conceive her second marriage criminal, she voluntarily underwent a solemn penance, assumed the plainest dress, defaced her beauty, submitted to the meanest drudgery, sold her estates, which were answerable to her noble birth, and converted them into money, for the relief of the poor, and was the first to build an infirmary, into which sick and distressed objects of every description were collected from the streets. Many who were afflicted with distempers, the most loathsome and offensive she attended in person, carried them in her arms, bathed their sores, moistened the lips of the dying with her own hands, and so tenderly assuaged their miseries, that many who were well envied the sick. Rome was a scene too confined for her charity; she visited, either in person or by her deputies, all the country round, and even crossed the sea in quest of new objects of compassion. At length she took a sudden and unexpected resolution of visiting Jerusalem; on which occasion she was entertained a short time by Jerom[e] in his retreat in Bethlehem. She returned to Rome, and devoted all her property and all her time to relieving the sick and the indigent till she died. Her funeral is said to have been attended by a more numerous concourse, and with a zeal infinitely more fervent, than the triumphs of Scipio or Pompey.