Hillary Kaell
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 574572 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Hillary Kaell |
| NOMBRES | Hillary |
| APELLIDO | Kaell |
| FIRMA | KAELL H |
| AFILIACIONES | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-9271-2653 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 43 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 68 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 41 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2010 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Human
Desjardins banks
Within a generation of Alphonse Desjardins’s death in 1920, his caisses populaires had grown by staggering proportions in Quebec. Much less familiar is the story of their international spread. This article offers a preliminary exploration of how Catholics in Quebec and Antigonish, Nova Scotia, spearheaded a vast network of banks inspired by the Church’s social teaching. It identifies key characteristics of the banks, as well as some early promote…
A Multibeing Manifesto
Half playfully and half earnestly, this manifesto calls for a turn to multibeing studies. Reworking multispecies studies, it draws attention to what scholars of religion gain from this important analytical approach in the humanistic study of ecology, as well as what they can contribute. Multibeing studies includes many species—plants and microbes, human and nonhuman animals—as well as other-than-human beings, like God, ancestors, and spirits. As …
Ecological Gothic
The Elizabethan Gardens was designed in the mid-twentieth century as a living memorial for sixteenth-century English settlers who died on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. Today, it is a site where layers of mourning converge; for long-lost colonists and recently deceased relatives, absent Indigenous and Black people, and erosion-related land loss. Combining religious studies, multispecies studies, and literary studies of the Gothic, this article p…
A perfected bank
Alphonse Desjardins, a devout Quebecois Catholic, established North America’s first cooperative bank in 1900. The first English-language attempt to grapple with Desjardins’ faith, this article is an important addition to the many new studies of North American Christians and economics in Desjardins’ period, nearly all of which focus on Protestants. More particularly, it contributes to this historical conversation through conceptual models drawn fr…
Mapping the Field of Religion, Globalization and Youth Agency
Youth.Religion.Globalization.Each term has been studied in relation to one of the other two, but few studies combine all three.The articles gathered in this Special Issue contribute to filling the gap.Focusing on the Youth Buddhist Society of India, David Geary and Manish Kumar's paper examines how connections with transnational Buddhist networks allow young members to creatively appropriate the ancient traditions of Indian Buddhism.These changin…
Bus Station Clocks
Clocks are the kind of “religion” that spills out beyond the sphere of the sacred. Rows of clocks that evoke utopian, aspirational feelings of global connectedness. These are “religious” feelings in the deepest sense of the term
Material Economies of Life-Time
Working in Between
Through personal reflections on my work to date, this article explores how scholars of religion creatively define and redefine our subject matter. It emphasizes two main themes: temporality and the category of religion. Regarding time, I discuss how changing personal and political contexts have spurred my experiments with cross-disciplinary methodologies, as well as my reflections on citational politics and the role of citation in interdisciplina…
Semi-Public Hints of Jewish Lineage in Messianic Judaism
Based on a multi-sited study of five Messianic Jewish congregations in North America, this paper analyses the widespread tendency for gentile (non-Jewish) adherents to hint about having 'Jewish DNA'. I argue that Messianic Judaism's theology and social structures promote the search for Jewish roots while also suppressing it, which results in the grassroots circulation of hints in a 'semi-public' register. Bringing together work by Kim Tallbear on…
Aftermath
This chapter draws on studies that have tracked pilgrimage aftermaths in order to highlight trends organized around three key themes: pilgrims, sites, and objects. First, it examines how scholars have evaluated the results for pilgrims at a personal and societal level. Second, the chapter discusses the impact on sites and site management after pilgrims leave. Upon return, most pilgrims transmit aspects of their experience to others, effectively t…
The long history of child sponsorship, c. 1700–1950
The invention of child sponsorship, a fundraising tool that raises billions of dollars a year for global projects, is widely credited to the Save the Children Fund in 1919. This article is the first to revise that history, as it follows sponsorship through multiple iterations across more than two centuries. Doing so, it uncovers sponsorship’s roots in transatlantic Protestant missionary networks that combined new theologies of child saving with e…
The Value of Online Resources
Reflecting on my experience teaching Introduction to Global Christianity, this essay ponders questions at the heart of undergraduate teaching: How can we encourage students to utilize online sources? How can we empower them to seek out answers to their questions? It offers practical examples of how I have used the Catholics & Cultures website in my classroom at a large public university. In particular, I reflect on my experience working with stud…
How God Becomes Real
How God Becomes Real is an immensely enjoyable read. Tanya M. Luhrmann, writing with the deft hand of an experienced anthropologist, elaborates on the arguments she set forth in her celebrated 2012 book, When God Talks Back, and subsequent articles. At the heart of How God Becomes Real is a question: why do people talk about “the gods” as real but then clearly distinguish between the realness of a chair, for example, and an invisible deity? Luhrm…
Religious Heritage and Nation in Post-Vatican II Catholicism
With Quebec's croix de chemin (wayside crosses) as a jumping off point, I explore the importance of heritage creation as the province transitioned away from pre-Vatican II Catholicism in the 1960s and 1970s. I include two 'sites of memory': fieldwork with contemporary cross caretakers and archival materials from a major government-funded inventory of the crosses in the 1970s. Heritage professionals have generally implied that Catholic objects los…
Immobile Global
Drawing on research with Christian child sponsors in the United States, this article explores the everyday techniques that work global commitments into being. It argues that global projects are compelling in how they tack back and forth between states associated with differing scales: the "immensity" of a God's-eye view and a grounded view of human relatedness. Both are emotive and often embodied forms; however, the former lifts one outside human…
Christian Globalism at Home
Systems and Statistics
This chapter examines how the statistical science of “large numbers,” notably population statistics, worked dialogically with the penny donations of systematic giving and the individual recipients associated with “special objects” charity. It focuses on statistical aesthetics and linguistic gigantism, where missionary audiences were treated to display after display of numbers, graphs, and maps that portrayed global immensities. These aesthetic fo…
Interlude
Following two sides of a sponsorship story, this interlude experiments with a narrative approach to further highlight the irresolution and silences that constitute global relations. It should be read alongside chapters 6 and 7, both of which raise questions about what it’s like to keep in touch and lose touch during sponsorship. The interlude is based on interviews with individuals I have called Carol and Rizal in 2017 and 2018, respectively. My …
Christian Globalism at Home
An exploration of how ordinary U.S. Christians come to feel globally connected through the multibillion-dollar child sponsorship industry Christian Globalism at Home looks at the massive charitable industry that is Christian child sponsorship, from its growth in nineteenth-century Protestant missions to its status as one of today’s most profitable private fundraising tools. Investigating two centuries of sponsorship and its related practices in A…
Renamed
Over the nineteenth century, thousands of North Americans and Europeans paid to sponsor and rename foreign children in mission stations across the world. This popular fundraising model has been largely unstudied to date. When the extant records are pieced together, it becomes evident that U.S. Protestants commonly renamed foreign children after their own beloved dead. As a result, these programs offer important insight into how Americans who neve…
The Holy Childhood Association on Earth and in Heaven
During the nineteenth century, the Holy Childhood Association enrolled thousands of North American Catholic children in a project to save Chinese babies by baptizing them before death. Using archives from Quebec and the United States, this essay builds on recent calls to explore supernatural frameworks in order to broaden which people and societies are included under the rubric of globalization. Excavating the largely forgotten cosmology of Holy …
Marking Memory
Catholic Globalism in the United States
Inspired by Norget, Napolitano, and Mayblin’s suggestion that anthropologists attend more closely to the mechanisms of Catholicism’s worldwide spread, this article juxtaposes two organizations—the Holy Childhood Association and Unbound—to explore “paganism,” conversion, and its legacy among U.S. laypeople. In the process, it makes two major points. The first concerns the recourse to “culture” as a rhetorical and ideational hinge connecting the si…
The Christian Horizon
The Christian Horizon Hillary Kaell (bio) Au risque de la conversion: L'expérience Québécoise de la mission au XXe siècle (1945–1980). By Catherine Foisy. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017. 344 pages. $120.00 CAD (cloth). $37.95 CAD (paper). Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid. By Heather D. Curtis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 384 pages. $29.95 CAD (cloth). The Kingdom of God Has No Bo…
Of gifts and grandchildren
Despite significant scholarship in anthropology and tourism studies related respectively to gifts and souvenirs, little is known about why and to whom people give souvenir gifts. Using an American case study, this article shows how Holy Land pilgrimage and its attendant gift-giving are a crucial way that older women navigate tensions specific to the consumer culture and religious patterns of the 21st-century US. By giving souvenirs, pilgrims upho…
Seeing the Invisible
Journal Article Seeing the Invisible: Ambient Catholicism on the Side of the Road Get access Hillary Kaell Hillary Kaell *Hillary Kaell, Department of Religion, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 2J1. E-mail: [email protected]. Thank you to Cynthia Eller, the anonymous JAAR reviewers, Jean Simard, Sonia Hazard, and my colleagues in the Young Scholars in American Religion program, especially Anth…
Born-again seeking
Messianic Judaism is an American-born movement of congregations that hold evangelical beliefs and follow Jewish practices. Scholars have viewed it chiefly as a new religious movement (NRM) or a controversial branch of Judaism. As a result, they have downplayed or ignored its largely evangelical Christian base. The first study of ‘gentile believers,’ this article argues that Messianic Judaism is best understood through the lens of religious seekin…
Lineage Matters
Based on ethnographic and archival research conducted on North American Judaism and Messianic Judaism, this article argues that each group uses DNA in what appear to be sociologically similar ways but that actually differ profoundly at the theological level. Our analysis moves beyond DNA testing per se to focus on what anthropologist Kim Tallbear calls "gene talk," referring to "the idea that essential truths about identity inhere in sequences of…
Can Pilgrimage Fail? Intent, Efficacy, and Evangelical Trips to the Holy Land
Many scholars have debated the potential results of pilgrimage, but few have tracked how pre-trip goals actually relate to post-trip outcomes. Based on research with US evangelicals, this article argues that, despite being confronted with the possibility of disrupted meaning, nearly every pilgrim comes to see the trip as a success. To understand why, I draw on studies that frame Christian rituals as processes that are partial and in flux. Firstly…
Under the Law of God
Messianic Judaism, a network of congregations that incorporate Jewish ritual into evangelical worship, is one branch of a fast-growing trend among Christians globally towards 'Jewish affinity'. Drawing on a multi-site comparison in North America, this article examines one of Messianic Judaism's most significant internal debates: should non-ethnically Jewish 'gentile believers' (GBs) obey biblical laws? It argues that GBs do not simply imitate Jew…
The Holy Childhood Association on Earth and in Heaven
During the nineteenth century, the Holy Childhood Association enrolled thousands of North American Catholic children in a project to save Chinese babies by baptizing them before death. Using archives from Quebec and the United States, this essay builds on recent calls to explore supernatural frameworks in order to broaden which people and societies are included under the rubric of globalization. Excavating the largely forgotten cosmology of Holy …
Evangelist of Fragments
A century ago, the mite box (penny collection box) was ubiquitous in North America as a religious fundraising tool, especially for women and children. Using the Methodist Woman's Foreign Missionary Society as a case study, I ask what these boxes reveal about the intersection of gender, consumerism, and capitalism from circa 1870-1930. By cutting across traditional Weberian and Marxist analyses, the discussion engages a more complex understanding …
Immobile Global
Drawing on research with Christian child sponsors in the United States, this article explores the everyday techniques that work global commitments into being. It argues that global projects are compelling in how they tack back and forth between states associated with differing scales: the "immensity" of a God's-eye view and a grounded view of human relatedness. Both are emotive and often embodied forms; however, the former lifts one outside human…
Ritual Risk and Emergent Efficacy
Ritual is a domain of analysis shared across Christian confessions and continents. Yet in anthropological work on Christianity, studies of ritual have thus far remained piecemeal and disjointed, unwittingly perpetuating distinctions between north and south, ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ publics, Pentecostals and ‘the rest’. This introductory essay charts the analytic potential of developing a robust cross-cultural analysis of ritual from the perspect…
Working in Between
Through personal reflections on my work to date, this article explores how scholars of religion creatively define and redefine our subject matter. It emphasizes two main themes: temporality and the category of religion. Regarding time, I discuss how changing personal and political contexts have spurred my experiments with cross-disciplinary methodologies, as well as my reflections on citational politics and the role of citation in interdisciplina…
Semi-Public Hints of Jewish Lineage in Messianic Judaism
Based on a multi-sited study of five Messianic Jewish congregations in North America, this paper analyses the widespread tendency for gentile (non-Jewish) adherents to hint about having 'Jewish DNA'. I argue that Messianic Judaism's theology and social structures promote the search for Jewish roots while also suppressing it, which results in the grassroots circulation of hints in a 'semi-public' register. Bringing together work by Kim Tallbear on…
The long history of child sponsorship, c. 1700–1950
The invention of child sponsorship, a fundraising tool that raises billions of dollars a year for global projects, is widely credited to the Save the Children Fund in 1919. This article is the first to revise that history, as it follows sponsorship through multiple iterations across more than two centuries. Doing so, it uncovers sponsorship’s roots in transatlantic Protestant missionary networks that combined new theologies of child saving with e…
Age of Innocence
The link between US evangelicalism, Zionism, and Middle East policy is well documented, as is its refraction through Christian tourism/pilgrimage in Israel-Palestine. However, the scholarly focus on political Zionism oversimplifies how American Christian pilgrims, mostly older women, actually construe the experience: they see contemporary politics as unrelated, and even antithetical, to the trip's spiritual goals. Building on Liisa Malkki's notio…
Pilgrimage in the jet age
The period from 1948 to 1978 was the key transitional moment that brought modern, mass tourism to the Holy Land. It also saw the rise of American tourism as the primary market segment in the area. Yet the period remains woefully understudied, lost amidst ample scholarly work about Holy Land travel in earlier and later periods. This article examines the development of the American evangelical Holy Land travel industry in this period. It argues tha…
Pilgrimage in the jet age
The period from 1948 to 1978 was the key transitional moment that brought modern, mass tourism to the Holy Land. It also saw the rise of American tourism as the primary market segment in the area. Yet the period remains woefully understudied, lost amidst ample scholarly work about Holy Land travel in earlier and later periods. This article examines the development of the American evangelical Holy Land travel industry in this period. It argues tha…
Christian Teens and Biblezines
Released in 2003, Revolve was the first “Biblezine”, a format that combined scripture with a teen magazine. It sold extraordinarily well and spawned a series of copycats. This essay argues that previous scholarly analyses of Christian and secular teen magazines do not provide an adequate framework for understanding this new genre. A close reading of Revolve reveals a complicated pattern of socialization, where inerrant scripture interacts with po…
Of gifts and grandchildren
Despite significant scholarship in anthropology and tourism studies related respectively to gifts and souvenirs, little is known about why and to whom people give souvenir gifts. Using an American case study, this article shows how Holy Land pilgrimage and its attendant gift-giving are a crucial way that older women navigate tensions specific to the consumer culture and religious patterns of the 21st-century US. By giving souvenirs, pilgrims upho…
Performing Piety
Age of Innocence
The link between US evangelicalism, Zionism, and Middle East policy is well documented, as is its refraction through Christian tourism/pilgrimage in Israel-Palestine. However, the scholarly focus on political Zionism oversimplifies how American Christian pilgrims, mostly older women, actually construe the experience: they see contemporary politics as unrelated, and even antithetical, to the trip's spiritual goals. Building on Liisa Malkki's notio…
Born-again seeking
Messianic Judaism is an American-born movement of congregations that hold evangelical beliefs and follow Jewish practices. Scholars have viewed it chiefly as a new religious movement (NRM) or a controversial branch of Judaism. As a result, they have downplayed or ignored its largely evangelical Christian base. The first study of ‘gentile believers,’ this article argues that Messianic Judaism is best understood through the lens of religious seekin…
Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London
Charles Booth’s seventeen-volume series, The Life and Labour of the People in London (1886–1903), is a staple of late Victorian social history and a monumental work of scholarship. Despite these facts, historians have paid little attention to its section on religious influences. Thomas Gibson-Brydon’s The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London seeks to remedy this neglect. Combing through the interviews Booth and his researchers conducte…
Can Pilgrimage Fail? Intent, Efficacy, and Evangelical Trips to the Holy Land
Many scholars have debated the potential results of pilgrimage, but few have tracked how pre-trip goals actually relate to post-trip outcomes. Based on research with US evangelicals, this article argues that, despite being confronted with the possibility of disrupted meaning, nearly every pilgrim comes to see the trip as a success. To understand why, I draw on studies that frame Christian rituals as processes that are partial and in flux. Firstly…
Ritual Risk and Emergent Efficacy
Ritual is a domain of analysis shared across Christian confessions and continents. Yet in anthropological work on Christianity, studies of ritual have thus far remained piecemeal and disjointed, unwittingly perpetuating distinctions between north and south, ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ publics, Pentecostals and ‘the rest’. This introductory essay charts the analytic potential of developing a robust cross-cultural analysis of ritual from the perspect…
Seeing the Invisible
Journal Article Seeing the Invisible: Ambient Catholicism on the Side of the Road Get access Hillary Kaell Hillary Kaell *Hillary Kaell, Department of Religion, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Ouest, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3G 2J1. E-mail: [email protected]. Thank you to Cynthia Eller, the anonymous JAAR reviewers, Jean Simard, Sonia Hazard, and my colleagues in the Young Scholars in American Religion program, especially Anth…
Under the Law of God
Messianic Judaism, a network of congregations that incorporate Jewish ritual into evangelical worship, is one branch of a fast-growing trend among Christians globally towards 'Jewish affinity'. Drawing on a multi-site comparison in North America, this article examines one of Messianic Judaism's most significant internal debates: should non-ethnically Jewish 'gentile believers' (GBs) obey biblical laws? It argues that GBs do not simply imitate Jew…
Everyday Sacred
Marking Memory
Across rural Quebec twenty-foot devotional crosses stand tall along the waysides. A tradition inherited from France, lay people constructed crosses on or near their property, especially during the "Marian century" (c. 1850s-1950s). Today, most associated devotional practices, including group prayers, have almost disappeared. Yet approximately 3,000 crosses remain and their continued existence defies the predictions of an earlier generation of "fo…
Place Making and People Gathering at Rural Wayside Crosses
Lineage Matters
Based on ethnographic and archival research conducted on North American Judaism and Messianic Judaism, this article argues that each group uses DNA in what appear to be sociologically similar ways but that actually differ profoundly at the theological level. Our analysis moves beyond DNA testing per se to focus on what anthropologist Kim Tallbear calls "gene talk," referring to "the idea that essential truths about identity inhere in sequences of…
Evangelist of Fragments
A century ago, the mite box (penny collection box) was ubiquitous in North America as a religious fundraising tool, especially for women and children. Using the Methodist Woman's Foreign Missionary Society as a case study, I ask what these boxes reveal about the intersection of gender, consumerism, and capitalism from circa 1870-1930. By cutting across traditional Weberian and Marxist analyses, the discussion engages a more complex understanding …
Middle of nowhere
"Middle of nowhere: religion, art, and pop culture at Salvation Mountain." Material Religion, 14(3), pp. 428–429
Marking Memory
Catholic Globalism in the United States
Inspired by Norget, Napolitano, and Mayblin’s suggestion that anthropologists attend more closely to the mechanisms of Catholicism’s worldwide spread, this article juxtaposes two organizations—the Holy Childhood Association and Unbound—to explore “paganism,” conversion, and its legacy among U.S. laypeople. In the process, it makes two major points. The first concerns the recourse to “culture” as a rhetorical and ideational hinge connecting the si…
The Christian Horizon
The Christian Horizon Hillary Kaell (bio) Au risque de la conversion: L'expérience Québécoise de la mission au XXe siècle (1945–1980). By Catherine Foisy. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017. 344 pages. $120.00 CAD (cloth). $37.95 CAD (paper). Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid. By Heather D. Curtis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. 384 pages. $29.95 CAD (cloth). The Kingdom of God Has No Bo…
Save Us for We Perish
This essay is a smudging or an exorcism — a chance to acknowledge a woodcut image's strange hold on me and free myself from its grip. It weaves together two kinds of analysis as a result. One is contextual: what is this thing and what was its intended purpose? The other is methodological: why do some things attract or repel us as scholars and how does that shape our work? In the process, I explore the mid-nineteenth-century transmission of Cathol…
Christian Globalism at Home
Systems and Statistics
This chapter examines how the statistical science of “large numbers,” notably population statistics, worked dialogically with the penny donations of systematic giving and the individual recipients associated with “special objects” charity. It focuses on statistical aesthetics and linguistic gigantism, where missionary audiences were treated to display after display of numbers, graphs, and maps that portrayed global immensities. These aesthetic fo…
Interlude
Following two sides of a sponsorship story, this interlude experiments with a narrative approach to further highlight the irresolution and silences that constitute global relations. It should be read alongside chapters 6 and 7, both of which raise questions about what it’s like to keep in touch and lose touch during sponsorship. The interlude is based on interviews with individuals I have called Carol and Rizal in 2017 and 2018, respectively. My …
Christian Globalism at Home
An exploration of how ordinary U.S. Christians come to feel globally connected through the multibillion-dollar child sponsorship industry Christian Globalism at Home looks at the massive charitable industry that is Christian child sponsorship, from its growth in nineteenth-century Protestant missions to its status as one of today’s most profitable private fundraising tools. Investigating two centuries of sponsorship and its related practices in A…
Sociology (30 obras) · History (23 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras) · Law (21 obras) · Political science (21 obras) · Religious Tourism and Spaces (17 obras) · Religious studies (13 obras) · Aesthetics (12 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras)