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In the 21st century, many people will live transnational lives, belonging to several societies and cultures at once, and they will use religion to do so. This chapter discusses how immigrants from Pakistan, India, Ireland, and Brazil living in the Boston area are reshaping the religious landscape and, by so doing, calling into question fundamental assumptions about nations, immigration, and religion.

This chapter proposes two ways to study religion and healing. The first outlines a program that involves an urban ethnographic study of culturally/religiously based approaches to healing in the African Diaspora communities of Boston, Massachusetts. The second relates to ways in which findings from the first kind of course can be incorporated into different levels of medical education, thereby introducing a highly-focused aspect of religious studies into the training of biomedical clinicians.

This chapter presents a new model of technology management and regional innovation based on the principle of systems integration. The principle of systems integration is manifested in the organizational capability of firms — individually and networked — to foster rapid technological change. The effect is a network or cluster of entrepreneurial firms in which design is decentralized within the enterprise and diffused amongst networked enterprises. The combination of entrepreneurial firms and inter-firm networks fosters a range of dynamic cluster processes that, in turn, underlie the growth of Silicon Valley and the unexpected resurgence of Boston's Route 128.

This chapter explores the mixed history of Calvin’s influence on economic mores and practices in early America. It retraces Calvin’s ideal for economic discipline over the emergent market in Geneva. It shows how three different communities in colonial America transposed Calvinist ideals: Puritans in Boston, with their localized conceptions of social order; Dutch Reformed leaders in New York, with their urbane mercantile associations; and Huguenots in Charleston, with their dispersed social networks. Calvin promulgated a flexible and pragmatic approach to scripture that allowed his adherents to adapt economic instruction to the needs of their religious communities. Early American Calvinists followed this method when they transformed their teaching about commerce and the nascent market economy in the context of colonization. Throughout, this chapter challenges how the Weber thesis has been misapplied to the American context.

In December 1901 the MCA rented Boston’s famed Park Street Church for a ten-day revival with E. L. Harvey, Duke Farson, Bud Robinson and Seth C. Rees as principal evangelists. Evicted after several days for their dancing and attacks on traditional churches, Duke Farson rented nearby Mechanics Hall. The services attracted as many as seven thousand people to a single service. Shortly after the meetings began, Martin Wells Knapp died Cincinnati. In the power struggle that followed three women emerged as trustees of Knapp’s religious empire: Mary Storey, Knapp’s wife Minnie Ferle Knapp and Knapp’s secretary Bessie Queen who became editor of God’s Revivalist. In the ensuing power struggle the MCA claiming Knapp’s mantle separated from the Cincinnati movement.

In the spring of 1885, Boston police arrested three clergymen for preaching on Boston Common. Two of the men, H. L. Hastings and W. H. Davis, were fairly obscure evangelists; the third was A. J. Gordon, well-known pastor of the Clarendon Baptist Church in the South End. The event’s heavily publicized unfolding fueled conspiratorial speculation among Protestants, bringing them into direct confrontation with Hugh O’Brien, Boston’s newly elected Irish-Catholic mayor, and the Catholic-dominated city government.

The prologue narrates both the formative years of Bentley's life before his call to the East Church in 1783 and also the history of that church before that date. Born the son of an artisan father in Boston's North End in 1759 but educated at Harvard thanks to his own intellectual skills and the financial largesse of his maternal grandfather, Bentley began and continued through his life straddling two social worlds, a tension that would later help drive his ideological changes. Meanwhile, members of the East Church were no longer satisfied with their pastor after the Revolutionary War. They wanted a corresponding change of leadership in their own spiritual community. They could not easily dismiss their existing pastor, but they could call an assistant pastor in order to bring the conflict to a head. In Bentley they found their man and in 1783 invited him up to Salem.

This chapter illustrates the rich variety of the secularization process, looking at four cities representing four distinctive regions. These cities include New Delhi, Rome, Prague, and Boston. They represent the march of secularization and urbanization in, respectively, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the United States. Each of the four has felt the pressure of secularization differently, in part because of their diverse histories. The careers of these cities prove that the emergence of a world-wide urban civilization need not obliterate the distinctive coloration of particular cities or erase the uniqueness of their character. The chapter also demonstrates an important distinction made in an earlier chapter—the difference between secularization as a historical movement and secularism as ideology.

The first chapter focuses on the imperial conflict as it unfolded in the maritime and commercial spaces of Boston. Boston hosted a series crowd actions: the Knowles Riot of 1747, the Stamp Act riots of 1765, the Liberty riot of 1768, the Boston Massacre of 1770, and the Boston Tea Party of 1773. British authorities repeatedly tried to assert control over Boston's waterfront community, and each time, merchants and mariners mobilized in response to impressment (by resisting), customs duties (by smuggling), and other impositions of imperial authority. Five times the Bostonians banished imperial officials, soldiers, and other pariahs to Castle Island in the harbor. The central significance of the Boston waterfront had crystallized by 1774, when Parliament singled the city out for punishment. Boston's conspicuous leadership among the waterfront communities of North America demonstrated how mobilization could unify city dwellers from throughout the social spectrum and across the continent.

Drawing upon fieldwork in five different Jewish communities or synagogues in the Boston area, this chapter examines nusach as an adaptive strategy. It uses an emic, or insider's, perspective to interpret nusach's complex dimensions, on one hand, traditional Jewish prayer modes and metrical songs, on the other; the metaphorical sense of being “torn away” from tradition, and the resulting mixing with local and individual practices of music and worship. Jewish sacred song opens outward to accommodate the religious experience of liberal and orthodox Jews in Boston, and it provides a context for their lives, allowing decisions that make Judaism in America inclusive and exclusive. Specific songs, such as “Arba'im shanah” (“Forty Years”) from the Sabbath eve service, provide case studies.

This chapter discusses the gradual processes which gave way to the independence of American colonists from British rule. The chapter looks at the ideology and principles that surrounded the Boston Tea Party, an event which signified the resistance of colonists to the political oppression and the economical impositions of exported British products. Compelled by the imposition of the Coercive Acts, the Boston Port Act, and the Administration Justice Act, the colonists incited American resistance which bordered on unanimity and universal participation. American political leaders identified with the people, shunning character and replacing it with personality as shown by the virtues of industry, frugality, and charity. To further the resistance to British oppression, the colonists formed the First Continental Congress which imposed economic regulations and devised moral programs as a way to resist British rule and as a form of political strategy to imply they were prepared to establish a republican government, to define their political position, and to create an identity which precipitated the declaration of American independence.

This chapter examines eleven regions in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s that were all rich in resources—ideas, money, and skills—which might have led to the formation of life sciences clusters. Yet only three of the regions—the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, and San Diego—developed into robust industrial districts for biotechnology. Most research on the emergence of high-tech cluster samples on successful cases and traces backward to find a developmental pattern. In contrast, rather than read in reverse from a positive outcome, the chapter builds networks forward from their early origins, revealing three crucial factors: organizational diversity, anchor tenant organizations that protect the norms of a community and provide relational glue across multiple affiliations, and a sequence of network formation that starts with local connections and subsequently expands to global linkages.

This chapter shows the early emergence of Silicon Valley and Boston. Much has been made of the cultural differences between Silicon Valley in the Bay Area and Boston's Route 128. The chapter digs beneath this surface portrait, discerning which organizations are most generative. It looks at the structural differences between two leading technology hubs. Using patent data that capture inventor networks, the chapter highlights the importance of careers. It also reveals much greater information flow and career mobility across organizations and industries in the Valley than in Boston. This movement of people and ideas was spurred by the critical intermediary roles of certain institutions which functioned like the anchor tenants that were the pollinators in the biotechnology clusters in Chapter 14. The chapter thus argues that this anchoring of diversity is central to the formation of technology clusters.

The 1882 ordination of Abby's son Christopher Rhodes Eliot (1856‐1945) in the Boston suburb of Dorchester brings the story back to the east, and eight years later, his marriage to Mary Jackson May (1859‐1926) introduces a radical spirit into the line of Eliot women. Descended from staunch abolitionist preachers and independent females the likes of Abby May and Louisa May Alcott, Mary takes charge as the dominant spouse and is instrumental in Christopher's moving the family to Beacon Hill and taking charge of Bulfinch Place Church in Boston's squalid West End. Summers at Camp Maple Hill on Lake Memphremagog in Quebec reinforce the female hegemony that emboldens the next wave of parsonage females. Martha May Eliot (1891‐1978) and Abby Adams Eliot (1892‐1992) will script larger lives without abandoning their inherited values.

The American tour of Hans von Bülow, recently divorced from Cosima Wagner, was managed by Bernard Ullman; Bülow's letters to Ullman provide insight into his contract negotiations, which included the sponsorship of the Chickering piano firm. Bülow's performances were recognized for their unfailingly flawlessness and their faithful interpretation. His opening appearances in Boston included the world premiere of the Tchaikowsky first piano concerto. His opening New York appearances included the dedication of the new Chickering Hall.