Special Worship in the British Empire: From the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

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Praying for (the) Community: Disasters, Ritual and Solidarity in the Eighteenth-Century Dutch Republic

“…93 In this case, these two perspectives were not mutually exclusive, but co-existed and even strengthened each other. 94 The local significance of prayer days and prayer hours could be found more clearly in another important element of prayer day solidarity: charity. One of the ritual deeds expected by the repentant ritual participants was giving alms.…”

Acts of God: Continuities and change in Christian responses to extreme weather events from early modernity to the present

“…Elsewhere, fasts and thanksgivings continued to be spontaneous affairs, called in response to unexpected events. Joseph Hardwick has shown that British colonial governments in late 19th‐century Australia and South Africa frequently summoned their cosmopolitan populations to observe days of humiliation and thanksgiving in times of drought: there are even examples of Australian and South African governments appointing days of prayer in the 1920s (Hardwick, , ; Hardwick and Williamson, , p. 277). The survival of these antique forms reveals something about the centrality of environmental crisis in Australia's settler history, as well as the extent to which drought was regarded as an aberration, a natural disaster, not as a characteristic of an Australian climate (Sherratt, , pp.…”

“…The task for researchers is to determine the extent to which climatic shocks did indeed prompt a sense of environmental crisis among settler communities, one that transcended gender, class and ethnic differences. Preliminary research on 19th‐century Australia suggests that we today might not always find useful lessons in these past examples, as ministers often struggled to build a sense of shared responsibility: town dwellers felt they had no reason to observe days of humiliation during droughts, as the visitation had been sent to punish sinful farmers, not innocent townspeople (Hardwick and Williamson, , p. 278). Nevertheless, it is in the sermons delivered in times of drought, and their emphasis on humility, shared communal responsibility and stewardship of nature, that we might find lessons for our climatic crisis.…”