The Afterlife Is Not Dead: Spiritualism, Postcolonial Theory, and Early Christian Studies

摘要

TO explore how postcolonial theory may be productive for early Christiannstudies, I suggest we take an indirect approach and foregroundnspiritualism, which flourished during the height of the British Empire.nIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of spiritncommunication in the present—central to modern spiritualism—was cast bynthe emerging disciplines of comparative religion, anthropology, sociology,nand psychology as emblematic of “primitive” thinking.n2nAt the same time,nclassicists, historians, and biblical scholars produced a rash of publicationsnon the afterlife, many of which are published versions of endowed publicnlectures on immortality and afterlife.n3