2025’s annual meeting marks the centennial of an auspicious year for the idea of the “modern” in the arts—a year that saw the publication, curation, and emergence of important works, performances, and ideas that spoke to a modernizing world. This session focuses on work, workers, and movements situated in and around 1925, considering what it means to think about artistic modernism religiously, even it participates in debates and modes of representation that complicate or even reject the religious as it had been previously understood. Papers in this session consider the Boston Expressionists’ interest in the metaphysics of corporeal disintegration, Anglophone dramatists’ (including Shaw and Hurston) use of religion to revivify the theater’s modern potential, visions of Christian masculinity in Ben Hur, Mussolini’s reinterpretation of the legacy of St. Francis of Assissi, and the complex legacy of the North American reception of novels by Toyohiko Kagawa and Sundar Singh.
This paper reflects on the interstices of religion and drama written in English around the year 1925. In this formative year for modernist literature, playwrights explored the relations among theater, religion, and ritual, developing theories of dramatic performance that persisted across the long twentieth century. As I show, 1925 marked an apogee of Anglophone dramatists’ diverse investments in religion. Authors from G. B. Shaw to Zora Neale Hurston, inquiring into the dramatic roles of religion in modernity, participated in a set of consummately modernist formal concerns, insofar as they sought to reinvigorate the theater by returning to its presumptive origins in devotional practice. These artists turned to religion to peer into the deep histories of their chosen art and to speculate about its potential futures. Their fascinations with religion – centrally, but not exclusively, related to medieval Christianity – served, paradoxically, to make modernist theater new.
In 1925 Dorothy Adlow completed her first year as art critic for The Christian Science Monitor. While forging a strong national reputation, Adlow gave singular attention to the Boston Expressionists. Chief among them was Hyman Bloom who probed the metaphysics of corporeal disintegration. Like Bloom, others in the group integrated occult and mystical themes with references to the Jewish and Christian Bible. Noone knew these artists better than Adlow. In her reviews of the Boston Expressionists, one discovers the interplay and influence of traditional religion and new religious movements in modern art in the Jazz Age and beyond.
Theme: “Arts, Literature, and Religion at the Centennial of 1925”
In 1925, Benito Mussolini proclaimed that Italy had given the world the "most holy of saints to Christendom and humanity:" St. Francis of Assisi. As part of the seventh centenary anniversary of the saint’s death the following year, Mussolini proclaimed Francis’s feast day a national holiday. This paper examines how these events in 1925-1926 impacted Francis’s legacy in the context of Italian culture, fascist ideology and shifting Church–State relations. The paper also traces this history through several works linking contemporary issues with the saint, which attested to the attempted rapprochement in the lead up to the 1929 Lateran Pacts. Propaganda efforts exemplified the radical reinterpretation of St. Francis’s political legacy considering Mussolini’s cult of personality and autocracy, itself a form of political religion. The connections between Mussolini and St. Francis in 1925-26 also anticipated a broader cultural, post-war afterlife of the fascist co-option of religious ideas.
In May 1925, the New York Times reviewed Toyohiko Kagawa’s Before the Dawn, a Japanese bestseller that helped to bring Kagawa national public recognition both at home and in the United States. North Americans reviewers labeled Kagawa a mystic comparable to American spiritualists such Walt Whitman. But why was Kagawa, who in the Japanese context was primarily known and recognized as a social reformer, termed a mystic? Kagawa’s significance and his representation to American audiences as a mystic is best explained against the backdrop of another Asian Christian author who was published during the 1920s – Sundar Singh. Singh was a Sikh convert who lived as a Christian sadhu, or holy man, and became internationally famous through his books and speaking tours. Like Kagawa, Singh and his theological writings were largely discussed as mystical. This paper looks at Singh and Kagawa’s reception during the 1920s within the context of North American interest in mysticism and non-traditional religious movements and seeks to understand 1) how the reception of Singh informed the reception of Kagawa, and 2) how the publishing successes of both men shaped the North American religious imagination with regards to Asian Christianity and theology.
Analysis of the 1925 Ben-Hur film within its historical and theological contexts displays that the film functioned both as religious and cultural artifact, one that advocated Christian orthodoxy and essentialist Christian gender roles amid shifting ideologies of the 1920s. In particular, this paper will use the 1925 film as a case study, holding it up in contrast between the 1880 literary work that spawned it and the 1959 version that followed it, to ask how its particular vision of gender and theology was unique to its moment.