A Material Response to Spiritual Crisis

Alexander Ross’s Anglo-Israelist Monument of 1898–1899

Bibliographic Data

ID8201135
AuthorsAnnette Stott (University of Denver School of Art & Art History and the Iliff School of Theology–University of Denver Joint Doctoral Program in the Study of Religion, Denver, CO, USA, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume87
Issue1
Pages225-259
Publication date2019-03-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jaarel/lfy024
OpenAlexW2895828443
LanguageIT
References cited20

This article analyzes the cemetery monument that Alexander Ross caused to be erected at a moment of spiritual crisis when he realized that Jesus was not going to return in 1898. It reveals the complexity of a Protestant, Anglo-Israelist, premillenarian adventist’s intersecting religious, ethnic, racial, gender, and social identities at one moment in time as they became embodied in an object intended to outlast the physical body. Ross turned to a common rite of death and mourning—the erection of a gravestone—to cope with his spiritual loss. I argue that his excessive fear of death, literal hermeneutic, grief at the physical loss of family members, and position of social power contributed to the decision to meet a crisis of faith with an object of material Christianity, every aspect of which made his spiritual hopes and dreams solidly visible. Ross’s reaction to failed prophecy places materiality at the core of his adventism.

Aesthetics · Art · Christianity · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Faith · Grief · Materiality (auditing) · Protestantism · Rite · Sociology · Theology · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies · Social Movements and Cultural Identity · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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