Tobin Miller Shearer
Biographic Data
| ID | 172500 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tobin Miller Shearer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tobin Miller |
| FAMILY NAME | Shearer |
| SIGNATURE | SHEARER T M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Montana |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 9 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Toward a Historical Synthesis of the Black Struggle for Inclusion in Christian Communities
for the last three decades, religious historians have been crafting narratives about the struggles of African Americans to fully enter into and participate in White religious communities. That historiography has told a similar story. Despite good intentions, White church bodies—whether Presbyterian, Methodist, Mennonite, Moravian, Roman Catholic, or Baptist—segregated their churches in some form. Mennonites did it. So did Moravians. Methodists de…
SNCC's Stories: The African-American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South
Saints in the Struggle: Church of God in Christ Activists in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968
Journal Article Saints in the Struggle: Church of God in Christ Activists in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968 Get access Saints in the Struggle: Church of God in Christ Activists in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968. By Jonathan Chism. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. xii, 219 pp. Cloth, $100.00. Paper, $39.99.) Tobin Miller Shearer Tobin Miller Shearer University of Montana, Missoula, Montana Search for other works by …
Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America
Two Weeks Every Summer , which is based on extensive oral history interviews with former guests, hosts, and administrators in Fresh Air programs, opens a new chapter in the history of race in the United States.
Striking at the Sacred: The Violence of Prayer, 1960-1969
This essay explores the complex relationship between public prayer and violence during ten years of the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s and throughout the long civil rights era, activists who used the race-based, highly performative act of public prayer incited violence and drew the nation’s attention to the black freedom struggle. Study of the public prayers that led to violence further suggests that the introduction of prayer into publi…
The Constructed Mennonite: History, Memory, and the Second World War
Invoking Crisis: Performative Christian Prayer and the Civil Rights Movement
ists used performative prayer to foster socially destabilizing crisis by inviting arrest or physical violence, destabilizing the status quo, and drawing national attention to their cause. A new theoretical framework for analyzing public acts of piety and the resultant crises builds on the themes of body, word, and drama and intervenes into Bruce Lincoln’s work on the relationship between religion and social change. A final section positions perfo…
Conflicting identities: White racial formation among Mennonites, 1960–1985
In this essay, I argue that rather than correlating white identity and whiteness studies first with invisibility, power and privilege, white identity is more accurately correlated with overt conflict and crisis. Moreover, the study of white racial formation in one US-based but internationally focused religious organization between 1960 and 1985 also suggests that white identity is a conflict that results in power and privilege but that the power …
Chickens, Crops, and Tractors’: The Use of Machines as Sacred Resource in Mennonite Fresh Air Hosting Programs
This essay argues that machines filled a sacred purpose in the middle of the twentieth century that has gone unrecognized by scholars of religion. The Mennonites who hosted African-American children from urban environments for one- to two-week stays in the country used tractors to promote their religious Fresh Air programs. From 1950 through 1979, tractors also figured prominently in the children’s testimonies about their rural sojourns. Fresh Ai…
No prominent works on this page.
Chickens, Crops, and Tractors’: The Use of Machines as Sacred Resource in Mennonite Fresh Air Hosting Programs
This essay argues that machines filled a sacred purpose in the middle of the twentieth century that has gone unrecognized by scholars of religion. The Mennonites who hosted African-American children from urban environments for one- to two-week stays in the country used tractors to promote their religious Fresh Air programs. From 1950 through 1979, tractors also figured prominently in the children’s testimonies about their rural sojourns. Fresh Ai…
Conflicting identities: White racial formation among Mennonites, 1960–1985
In this essay, I argue that rather than correlating white identity and whiteness studies first with invisibility, power and privilege, white identity is more accurately correlated with overt conflict and crisis. Moreover, the study of white racial formation in one US-based but internationally focused religious organization between 1960 and 1985 also suggests that white identity is a conflict that results in power and privilege but that the power …
Striking at the Sacred: The Violence of Prayer, 1960-1969
This essay explores the complex relationship between public prayer and violence during ten years of the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s and throughout the long civil rights era, activists who used the race-based, highly performative act of public prayer incited violence and drew the nation’s attention to the black freedom struggle. Study of the public prayers that led to violence further suggests that the introduction of prayer into publi…
The Constructed Mennonite: History, Memory, and the Second World War
Invoking Crisis: Performative Christian Prayer and the Civil Rights Movement
ists used performative prayer to foster socially destabilizing crisis by inviting arrest or physical violence, destabilizing the status quo, and drawing national attention to their cause. A new theoretical framework for analyzing public acts of piety and the resultant crises builds on the themes of body, word, and drama and intervenes into Bruce Lincoln’s work on the relationship between religion and social change. A final section positions perfo…
Two Weeks Every Summer: Fresh Air Children and the Problem of Race in America
Two Weeks Every Summer , which is based on extensive oral history interviews with former guests, hosts, and administrators in Fresh Air programs, opens a new chapter in the history of race in the United States.
Saints in the Struggle: Church of God in Christ Activists in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968
Journal Article Saints in the Struggle: Church of God in Christ Activists in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968 Get access Saints in the Struggle: Church of God in Christ Activists in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968. By Jonathan Chism. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019. xii, 219 pp. Cloth, $100.00. Paper, $39.99.) Tobin Miller Shearer Tobin Miller Shearer University of Montana, Missoula, Montana Search for other works by …
SNCC's Stories: The African-American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South
Toward a Historical Synthesis of the Black Struggle for Inclusion in Christian Communities
for the last three decades, religious historians have been crafting narratives about the struggles of African Americans to fully enter into and participate in White religious communities. That historiography has told a similar story. Despite good intentions, White church bodies—whether Presbyterian, Methodist, Mennonite, Moravian, Roman Catholic, or Baptist—segregated their churches in some form. Mennonites did it. So did Moravians. Methodists de…
Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Race, History, and American Society (5 works) · Agriculture and Farm Safety (3 works) · Art (3 works) · Civil rights (3 works) · Religious studies (3 works) · Sociology (3 works)