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| | From Demon Possession to Magic Show (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-14) |
 | | What the enlightened strove, in particular, to contain was the explosive aurality of popular Christianity--all the internal and external voices that beckoned the faithful from George Fox and John Bunyan to John Woolman, Lorenzo Dow and Jarena Lee, all the "hearsay" of the demonic and the miraculous. |
 | | Antebellum Americans were prone, Tocqueville noted, to an "almost wild spiritualism," but they were also ever eager to "laugh at modern prophets," to arraign supernatural claims at the bar of their own critical reason and individual judgment. |
 | | Perhaps, as is common in American religious history, the evangelicals are having the last laugh with the rise of "gospel ventriloquism," with the re-Christiainization of this Enlightenment amusement, but the philosophes might well be laughing too at their success in turning a demonic struggle into a didactic illusion. |
| www.materialreligion.org /journal/magic.html (9081 words) |
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