After ruminating on the subject of John Harvey Kellogg for a week I’ve taken note of what has passed through the sieve of my interest.
One: The many details regarding Kellogg’s later preoccupation with the eugenics fervor of late 19th and early 20th century America.
Two: Kellogg’s inflammatory (though likely insincere) prescriptions for negative eugenics (ie. forced castration and threats of mutilated clitorises rank high here).
Three: Kellogg’s breakfast cereals.
These points have been forcefully pressed, dripping down like reluctant beads of colonial molasses, and mopped up to create more life for what I hope to preserve:
- Kellogg’s evolving predilection for pantheism as well as divine immanence (a reflection of the growth of New Thought) and the concomitant break with Ellen White’s vision for the limits of Seventh Day Adventism
- “Sometimes we get near enough to God so that we can think his thoughts, and then we think aright. …The thing we need to do, is to have our brains ‘in tune with the Infinite,’ and then we can think God’s thoughts all the time, and then our thoughts will be God’s thoughts.”
- The developing adoption of the doctrine of soul sleep in response to Spiritualist claims
- A connection between the introduction of germ theory and the rise of millenial interpretations predicting a mass cleansing by fire
- Kellogg’s familiarity with my preferred 19th central religious radical John Humphrey Noyes and his system of science-guided human propagation stirpiculture
- Kellogg’s interest in fully reconciling both philosophically and practically the worldviews of religion and science
- The intertwining currents and cross-pollination of Christian physiology
- Fletcherism and “the millenium of nutrition normality”
Fletcherizing
Sabbath Ways 