Catherine Wessinger

Religious Institutions and Women's Leadership: New Roles inside the Mainstream

Religious Institutions and Womens Leadership documents the movement of women into positions of leadership and ministry in mainline American Judaism and Christianity and evaluates how this trend will reshape traditional religion in the United States. Contributors compile data formerly found only in diverse scholarly and denominational publications to offer an enlightening interdisciplinary comparison of womens struggles for a more central role in mainstream religious leadership. In addition to providing historical information, the contributors pay particular attention to the experiences of women leaders in their respective denominations and to the changes they have introduced to worship, theology, and ministry. They trace the economic and social changes currently transforming patriarchal religions and examine such issues as the resistance to female leadership and the question of whether feminist objectives are better formed by women forming separate religious institutions or by remaining in established structures.

Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations outside the Mainstream

Historians, folklorists, and theologians explore what factors support womens religious leadership

The Second Generation Leaders of the Theosophical Society (Adyar)

The second generation and third generation of leaders continued to work out the tension between charismatic authority (the belief that someone has access to an unseen source of authority) and rational-legal authority in the evolving leadership and doctrines of the Theosophical Society. During the controversies involving the second and third generation of leaders, charismatic authority in the parent Theosophical Society was routinized into rational-legal authority. The members of the Theosophical Society (Adyar) ultimately opted to affirm the rational-legal authority of elected officers in the operation of the organization over the charismatic authority of claimed contact with the Masters. During the period of the second-generation leaders, Besant possessed the rational-legal authority of elected office as well as charismatic authority deriving from claimed contact with the Masters, but toward the end of her life she admitted that she had lost her conscious link with the Masters. Keywords:Adyar; charismatic authority; second-generation leaders; theosophical society

The Lee Hancock Collection: Federal and State Materials on the Branch Davidian Case

The Lee Hancock Collection of materials on the Branch Davidian case, located at the Loyola University New Orleans archive, contains an impressive set of internal memos, interview reports, and expert reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Texas Rangers, in addition to numerous government reports and documents relating to the criminal and civil trials. It also contains an array of news articles. The Hancock Collection provides important source materials relevant to research on the events in 1993 involving federal agents and the Branch Davidians, the subsequent trials and investigations, as well as media depictions. The federal documents in the Hancock Collection are particularly important in light of the withholding and destruction of source materials on the Branch Davidian case by United States agents and agencies.

Autobiographies of Three Surviving Branch Davidians: An Initial Report

This article provides an initial report on oral histories being collected from three surviving Branch Davidians: Bonnie Haldeman, the mother of David Koresh, Clive Doyle, and Sheila Martin. Their accounts are being made into autobiographies. Interviews with a fourth survivor, Catherine Matteson, are being prepared for deposit in an archive and inform the material gathered from Bonnie Haldeman, Clive Doyle, and Sheila Martin. Oral histories provided by these survivors humanize the Branch Davidians, who were dehumanized and erased in 1993 by the application of the pejorative ‘cult’ stereotype by the media and American law enforcement agents. These Branch Davidian accounts provide alternate narratives of what happened in 1993 at Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas, to those provided by American federal agents, and flesh out the human dimensions of the community and the tragedy. Branch Davidians are differentiated from many other people primarily by their strong commitment to doing Gods will as they understand it from the Bible. Otherwise they are ordinary, intelligent people with the same emotions, loves, and foibles as others.