Charity without borders: Alms-giving in New Spain for captives in North Africa

Karen Melvin discusses how the plight of Spaniards kidnapped into Muslim slavery in North Africa depended on members of the Mercedarian Order that took a sacred oath common among religious orders to redeem Christian captives. The order supported campaigns against Muslims by serving as priests in armies and by collecting alms and moving to enemy territory to redeem captives. Karen feels that the possible explanation for the increase in ransoming expeditions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might be response to demand if the number of Europeans being taken captive was also rising. Mercedarian appeals for alms in New Spain kept their focus on this conflict instead of its prisoners of war. Captives were a peripheral part of the message. Residents of the New World did not need to have personal acquaintance with captives to care about their struggle that was finally about neither slavery nor captivity

The globalization of reform

The Franciscan missionaries entered the town barefoot, carrying a large cross and an image of Christ crucified. They prayed the rosary and sang religious songs on the way to the church where they declared to the gathering crowd that they were there as ambassadors of Christ, ready to help people become good Christians. More people gathered at the church, brought by messengers who ran through the streets, ringing bells and shouting, \u27To the mission! To the mission!\u27. They and the missionaries then set out on formal procession through the town, walking in silence. They stopped occasionally for the friars to explain to new listeners why they had come, and then resumed their hushed journey. Back at the church, prayers and a blessing concluded the ceremony.1 This carefully choreographed opening of a mission was one of many such events organized throughout the early modern world. This one, however, does not fit neatly into how most scholarship classifies missions. It was not run by Europeans seeking to introduce the Gospel to nonChristian people outside Europe. Nor was it one of the \u27popular missions\u27 that took place throughout Europe and which sought to make people better Catholics. Instead, this description comes from a popular mission outside Europe, one directed to an already Christianized audience and one sharing with its European counterparts the post-Tridentine goal of creating a better-educated and more pious population

THE INFLUENCE OF DEPRESSIVE SYMPTOMS ON FATHERS’ BEHAVIORS AND ATTITUDES

The present study examines the impact of young, poor, unwed fathers on their family by investigating the influence of depressive symptom frequency on fathers’ relationship with their children and partners. Couples from seven American cities with populations over 200,000 were recruited and interviewed about such areas of life as romantic and parental relationships, health, and employment at the hospital within 24 hours after the birth of their child. An Item Response Theory (IRT) within-group analysis of the 1,759 African-, Caucasian-, Hispanic-, Asian-, and Native American fathers in the study yielded a 3-class clustering of depressive symptoms. Class 1 fathers had the lowest frequency of depressive symptom expression; class 2 fathers had a low frequency; and class 3 fathers had low to medium rates of depressive symptoms. Multivariate statistics revealed that depressive class membership predicted domestic violence toward fathers’ partners but not affection toward their children. The importance of the parental behavior of teaching children about life, however, varied by class, with class 2 fathers most highly endorsing this behavior. Implications of young, unwed, poor fathers' behaviors and attitudes toward their children and romantic partners will be discussed in terms of men's contributions to family life.