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Fall 2021 Volume 31 Number 3
Smelling Things: Essential Oils and Essentialism in Contemporary American Spirituality
ABSTRACT Contemporary yogis, evangelical Christians, and witches have incorporated essential oils and their aromas into practices as diverse as yoga, meditation, prayer, Bible reading, anointing, and spellcasting in the United States over the past forty years. These groups often view each other with alarm, yet they tread common ground in utilizing essential oils to intensify varied spiritual practices. This article answers two related questions. How do spiritually diverse practitioners justify using the same consumer products to amplify their practices, and why are essential oils considered sacred by these same consumers? Drawing from a diverse archive of essential oil use guides, marketing materials, and social media posts, I argue that spiritual “oilers” are (1) perennialists who mythologize ancient uses of scent to authenticate their postmodern embodied practices, and (2) essentialists who believe that essential oils contain universal, transcendent properties. Consequently, oilers’ beliefs and practices blur classifications between traditions and sharpen our attention to the importance of the sense of smell in contemporary spirituality. This project contributes to studies of spirituality and consumerism by offering a comparative analysis of how three groups use smell, via essential oils, to intensify their individual spiritual practices as well as their collective identities as oilers.
The “Black Buddhism Plan”: Buddhism, Race, and Empire in the Early Twentieth Century
ABSTRACT This article traces the life of a single figure, Sufi Abdul Hamid, to bring into conversation the history of the transmission of Buddhism to the United States with the emergence of new Black religio-racial movements in the early twentieth century. It follows Hamid’s activities in the 1930s to ask what Hamid’s life reveals about the relationship between Buddhism and race in the United States. On the one hand, Hamid’s own negotiation of his identity as a Black Orientalist illustrates the contentious process through which individuals negotiate their religio-racial identities in tension with hegemonic religio-racial frameworks. Hamid constructed a Black Orientalist identity that resignified Blackness while criticizing the racial injustice foundational to the American nation-state. His Black Orientalist identity at times resonated with global Orientalist discourses, even while being recalcitrant to the hegemonic religio-racial frameworks of white Orientalism. The subversive positioning of Hamid’s Black Orientalist identity simultaneously lent itself to his racialization by others. This is illustrated through Hamid’s posthumous implication in a conspiracy theory known as the “Black Buddhism Plan.” This theory drew on imaginations of a Black Pacific community formulated by both Black Americans and by government authorities who created Japanese Buddhists and new Black religio-racial movements as subjects of surveillance. The capacious nature of Hamid’s religio-racial identity, on the one hand constructed and performed by Hamid himself, and on the other created in the shadow of the dominant discourses of a white racial state, demonstrates that Buddhism in the United States is always constituted by race.
‘Driven Insane by Eddyism’: Christian Science, Popular Psychology, and a Turn-of-the-Century Contest over Faith and Madness
ABSTRACT At the turn of the twentieth century, Christian Scientists contended with ongoing allegations that their faith was more of a mental pathology than a religion. This article analyzes how the Church of Christ, Scientist, in particular its public relations branch the Committee on Publication, systematically contended with popular portrayals of Christian Science as a source or indicator of insanity. Two highly profiled court cases, both predicated on the purported insanity of a Christian Science woman and her attendant inability to manage her business affairs, are explored for their cultural effect on the promotion of the causal association between Christian Science and madness. This study employs newspaper clippings collected and archived by the Church’s Committee on Publication as well as court records to argue for the salience of the insanity charge in shaping the early history of Christian Science and its public perception. As a religious tradition premised on divine healing and health, popular psychopathological interpretations of Christian Science were particularly subversive and functioned not only to discredit and undermine the religion’s claims to healing but to forward societal fears that Christian Science study posed a unique threat to women’s health. This examination draws attention to a dynamic historical exchange between the press and a new religious movement, as well as the polyvalent gendered presumptions embedded in popular charges of insanity in association with religion.
The Politics of Interdependent Independence in Black Religion: The Case of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal Priest
ABSTRACT In the Reconstruction period, Black religion and politics intersected and fostered ideas about black interdependent independence in predominantly white churches. We see this form of black religious politics exemplified in the experiences and ideas of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal priest who was educated at the Branch Theological School (BTS) in Petersburg, Virginia. It was upon the foundation of Bragg’s experiences at the BTS, established as a racially segregated alternative to the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary (in Alexandria, Virginia), and in the Readjuster Movement (a biracial political coalition that controlled Virginia’s legislature from 1879–1885), that he wrote histories of Black people in the Episcopal Church, histories that extolled black leadership, the need for (white) economic support for but also autonomous action of black churches and black leaders, and the efficacy of the Episcopal Church as a political training ground for black church members. Bragg’s case both demonstrates how broadening the definitions of black religion reconfigures studies of religion, reconstruction, and Blackness, and expands our notions of Black political critique as deriving from more than the familiar binaries of protest and accommodation.
Summer 2021 Volume 31 Number 2
Volume 31 Number 2″How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism,” by Sonia Hazard
“Lotteries and Overlapping Providences in Early America,” by T.J. Tomlin
“Flying Back to Africa or Flying to Heaven? Competing Visions of Afterlife in the Lowcountry and Caribbean Slave Societies,” by Jeroen Dewulf
“‘A verry poor place for our doctrine: Religion and Race in the 1853 Mormon Mission to Jamaica,” by Christopher Cannon Jones
Spring 2021 Volume 31 Number 1
“Queer Rumors: Protestant Ministers, Unnatural Deeds, and Church Censure in the Twentieth-Century United States,” by Suzanna Krivulskaya
“The 1940s as the Decade of the Anti-Antisemitism Novel,” by Rachel Gordan
“How to Read This Book: Jewish Lights Publishing and the Pragmatics of Spiritual Reading,” by Arielle Levites
“Gospel of Gold: Unearthing Religious Spaces in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” by Brennan Keegan
Fall 2020 Volume 30 Number 3
“Charts, Indexes, and Files: Surveillance, Information Management, and the Visualization of Subversion in Mainline Protestantism,” by Michael J. McVicar
“Born Again Black Panther: Race, Christian Conservatism, and the Remaking of Eldridge Cleaver,” by Dan Wells
“The Greatest Movie Never Made: The Life of the Buddha as Cold War Politics,” by Laura Harrington
“Pentecostals, Israel, and the Prophetic Politics of Dominion,” by Joseph Williams
Spring 2020 Volume 30 Number 2
“FORUM: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Will Change Our Future Teaching,” with contributions by Rebecca Barrett-Fox, Brandon Bayne, Valerie Cooper, Gastón Espinoso
“‘Deplorable Exegesis’: Dick Gregory’s Irreverent Scriptural Authority in the 1960s and 1970s,” by Vaughn Booker
“‘Real Good and Sincere Catholics’: White Catholicism and Massive Resistance to Desegregation in Chicago, 1965-1968,” by Matthew J. Cressler
“Antimodernism and Orthodox Judiasm’s Heretical Imperative: An American Religious Counterpoint,” by Zev Eleff and Seth Farber
Winter 2020 Volume 30 Number 1
“Conservative Christianity and the Creation of Alternative News: An Analysis of Focus on the Family’s Multi-Media Empire,” by Susan B. Ridgely
“From Aesthetics to Experience: How Changing Conceptions of Prayer Changed the Sound of Jewish Worship,” by Ari Y. Kelman and Jeremiah Lockwood
“Capital & the Cathedral: Robert H. Schuller’s Continual Fundraising for Church Growth,” by Gerardo Marti and Mark T. Mulder
“White Evangelicals as ‘a people’: The Church Growth Movement from India to the United States,” by Jesse Curtis
Autumn 2019 Volume 29 Number 3
“Daʿwa in the Neighborhood: Female-Authored Muslim Students’ Association Publications, 1963–1980,” by Justine Howe
“‘A Higher and Purer Shape’: Kaufmann Kohler’s Jewish Orientalism and the Construction of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” by Evan Goldstein
“‘Holy Ghost Tribe:’ The Needles Revival and the Origins of Pentecostalism,” by Skyler Reidy
“‘Fighting Spirit’: World War I and the YMCA’s Allied Boxing Program,” by Adam Park
Summer 2019 Volume 29 Number 2
“FORUM: The Religious Situation, 1968 (Part 2),” with contributions by Irene Oh, Richard Flory, Rebecca C. Bartel, John Modern, Joseph Winters, Lila Corwin Berman, Kathryn Lofton
“A Prophetic Guide for a Perplexed World: Louis Finkelstein and the 1940 Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion,” by Cara Rock-Singer
“‘The world food crisis is not a fad’: The More-with-Less Cookbook and Protestant Environmental Spirituality,” by Kevin Stewart Rose
“The Difference Denominations Made: Identifying the Black Church(es) and Black Religious Choices of the Early Republic,” Kyle T. Bulthuis
Winter 2019 Volume 29 Number 1
“FORUM: The Religious Situation, 1968,” with contributions by Kathleen Holscher, Jonathan Ebel, Jana Riess, Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds, Angie Heo, Ari Y. Kelman
“American Catholics and ‘The Use and Abuse of Reading,’ 1865–1873,” by Erin Bartram
“‘Development of Body, Mind, and Soul:’ Paramahansa Yogananda’s Marketing of Yoga-Based Religion,” by Dave Neumann
“The Parliament of Empire: Charles Bonney’s American Vision,” by Lucia Hulsether
Summer 2018 Volume 28 Number 2
“God, Country, and Anita Bryant: Women’s Leadership and the Politics of the New Christian Right,” by Emily Suzanne Johnson
“Fortune Telling and American Religious Freedom,” by Charles McCrary
“’Termites in the Temple’: Fundamentalism and Anti-Liberal Politics in the Post–World War II South,” by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf
“Agreeing to Disagree: American Orthodox Jewish Scientists’ Confrontation with Evolution in the 1960s,” by Rachel S. A. Pear
Winter 2018 Volume 28 Number 1
“Bureau Clergyman: How the FBI Colluded with an African American Televangelist to Destroy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” by Lerone Martin
“The Historyless Heathen and the Stagnating Pagan: History as Non-Native Category?,” by Kathryn Gin Lum
“Contesting Civil Religion: Religious Responses to American Patriotic Nationalism, 1919-1929,” by Michael Lienesch
“The Evolution of American Airport Chapels: Local Negotiations in Religiously Pluralistic Contexts,” by Wendy Cadge
Summer 2017 Volume 27 Number 2
“The World Day of Prayer: Ecumenical Churchwomen and Christian Cosmopolitanism, 1920-1946,” by Gale L. Kenny
“Constructing a Plan for Survival: Scientology as Cold War Psychology,” by Robert Genter
“Worship Wars, Gospel Hymns, and Cultural Engagement in American Evangelicalism, 1890-1940,” by Tamara J. Van Dyken
“‘If There Were One People’: Francis Weninger and the Segregation of American Catholicism,” by David Komline
Winter 2017 Volume 27 Number 1
FORUM: “Studying Religion in the Age of Trump,” with contributions by Randal Balmer, Kate Bowler, Anthea Butler, Maura Jane Farrelly, Wes Markofski, Robert Orsi, Jerry Z. Park and James Clark Davidson, Matthew Avery Sutton, and Grace Yukich
“‘Satan Mourns Naked upon the Earth’: Locating Mormon Possession and Exorcism Rituals in the American Religious Landscape, 1830-1977,” by Stephen Taysom
“Lineage Matters: DNA, Race, and Gene Talk in Judaism and Messianic Judaism,” Sarah Imhoff and Hillary Kaell
Summer 2016 Volume 26 Number 2
“Ordering Antimony: An Analysis of Early Mormonism’s Priestly Offices, Councils, and Kinship,” by Kathleen Flake
“Evangelicals and Unevangelicals: The Contested History of a Word, 1500-1900,” by Linford D. Fisher
“For God and Country: Religious Minorities Striving for National Belonging through Community Service,” by Rosemary R. Corbett
“Before Hinduism: Missionaries, Unitarians, and Hindoos in Nineteenth-Century America,” by Michael J. Altman
Winter 2016 Volume 26 Number 1
“Prayer is the answer”: Apocalypticism, Our Lady, and Catholic Identity,” by Jill Krebs
“Declension Comes Home”: Cotton Mather, Male Youth Rebellion, and the Hope of Providential Affliction in Puritan New England,” David Setran
“Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Long Social Gospel Movement,” by Vaneesa Cook
“Evolution and Voices of Progressive Catholicism in the Age of the Scopes Trial,” by Alexander Pavuk
Summer 2015 Volume 25 Number 2
FORUM: “The Role and Future of Academic Journals,” with contributions by Ava Chamberlain, Christopher Evans, Curtis Evans, and Paul Harvey
“Working Jews: Hazanim and the Labor of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America,” by Shari Rabin
“From Sputnik to Spaceship Earth: American Catholics and the Space Age,” by Catherine Osborne
“Beyond Parish Boundaries: Black Catholics and the Quest for Racial Justice,” by Karen J. Johnson
Winter 2015 Volume 25 Number 1
“’An Authentic Record of My Race’: Exploring the Popular Narratives of African American Religion in the Music of Duke Ellington,” by Vaughn Booker
“’Practical Outlet’ to Premillennial Faith: G. Douglas Young and the Evolution of Christian Zionist Activism in Israel,” by Daniel G. Hummel
“Chrismukkah: Millennial Multiculturalism,” by Samira K. Mehta
“Liberal Protestants and Urban Renewal,” by Mark Wild
Summer 2014 Volume 24 Number 2
“Jesus Didn’t Tap: Masculinity, Theology, and Ideology in Christian Mixed Martial Arts,” by Justine Greve
“Bigger, Better, Louder: The Prosperity Gospel’s Impact on Contemporary Christian Worship, by Kate Bowler and Wen Reagan
“‘The Quiet Revivial’: New Immigrants and the Transformation of Christianity in Greater Boston,” by Marilyn Johnson
“Youth, Christianity, and the Crisis of Civiliation, 1930-45,” by Thomas E. Bergler
Winter 2014 Volume 24 Number 1
FORUM: “Religion and the Biographical Turn,” by Leigh Eric Schmidt, Catherine Brekus, Nick Salvatore, Matthew Avery Sutton, and Debby Applegate
“‘If a War It May Be Called’: The Peace Policy with American Indians,” by Jennifer Graber
“Religion, ‘Moral Insanity’, and Psychology in Nineteenth–Century America,” by Jodie Boyer
“The Politicization of Family Life: How Headship became Essential to Evangelical Identity in the Late Twentieth Century,” by Anneke Stasson
Summer 2013 Volume 23 Number 2
“‘Modern Christianity Is Ancient Judaism’: Rabbi Gustav Gottheil and the Jewish-American Religious Future, 1873–1903,” by Caleb J. D. Maskell
“Faith Healing, Medical Regulation, and Public Religion in Progressive Era Chicago,” by Timothy E. W. Gloege
“‘Just a Bunch of Agitators’: Kneel-Ins and the Desegregation of Southern Churches,” by Joseph Kip Kosek
“Antirevivalism and Its Discontents: Liberal Evangelicalism, the American City, and the Sunday School, 1900–1929,” by Matthew Bowman
Winter 2013 Volume 23 Number 1
Forum: “Contemporary Mormonism: America’s Most Successful ‘New Religion,'” with contributions
by Terryl L. Givens, Kathryn Lofton, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, and Patrick Q. Mason
“The Humbug in American Religion: Ritual Theories of Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism,” by David Walker
“‘Doubts still assail me’: Uncertainty and the Making of the Primitive Baptist Self in the Antebellum United States,” by Joshua Guthman
“Yoga for the New Woman and the New Man: The Role of Pierre Bernard and Blanche DeVries in the Creation of Modern Postural Yoga,” by Joseph Laycock
Summer 2012 Volume 22 Number 2
Review Essay: “The Quest for Green Religion,” by Mark Stoll
“‘According to His Own Judgment’: The American Catholic Encounter with Organic Evolution, 1856-1896,” by David Mislin
“The Death of Mormon Separatism in American Universities, 1877-1896,” by Thomas W. Simpson
“American Saints: Gender and the Re-Imagining of U.S. Catholicism in the Early Twentieth Century,” by Kathleen Sprows Cummings
“Broadcasting Mainline Protestantism: The Chicago Sunday Evening Club and the Evolution of Audience Expectations from Radio to Television,” by Michael Stamm
Winter 2012 Volume 22 Number 1
Forum: “American Religion and the Old and New Immigration,” with contributions by Jenna Weissman Joselit, Timothy Matovina, Roberto Suro, and Fenggang Yang
“Permission to Dissent: Civil Religion and the Radio Western, 1933-1960,” by Kip Anthony Wedel
“The Measure of a Magazine: Assessing the Influence of Christian Century,” by Elesha Coffman
“‘Outside the Shul’: The American Soviet Jewry Movement and the rise of Solidarity Orthodoxy, 1964-1986,” by Adam S. Ferziger
Summer 2011 Volume 21 Number 2
Review Essay: “Past Practices—Ethnography and American Religion,” by Courtney Bender
“‘Until This Curse of Polygamy is Wiped Out’: Black Methodists, White Mormons, and Constructions of Racial Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century,” by James B. Bennett
“A Sane Gospel: Radical Evangelicals, Psychology, and Pentecostal Revival in the Early Twentieth Century,” by Heather Curtis
“An ‘Aristocracy of Virtue’: Cultural Development of the American Catholic Priesthood, 1884-1920s,” by Donna J. Drucker
Winter 2011 Volume 21 Number 1
Forum: “American Scriptures,” with contributions by Philip L. Barlow, Paul S. Boyer, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Mark A. Noll, and Claudia Setzer
“‘The Secret at the Root’: Performing African American Religious Modernity in Hall Johnson’s Run, Little Chillun,”by Judith Weisenfeld
“Identity Politics and the Fragmenting of the 1970s Evangelical Left,” by David R. Swartz
“‘Last Night, I Prayed to Matthew:’ Matthew Shepard, Homosexuality, and Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America,” by Scott W.Hoffman
Summer 2010 Volume 20 Number 2
Review Essay: “Religion and the American Presidency,” by Frank Lambert
“The Rise of Black Ethnics: The Ethnic Turn in African American Religions, 1916-1945,” by Sylvester A. Johnson
“Developing the ‘Christian Gentleman’: The Medieval Impulse in Protestant Ministry to Adolescent Boys, 1890-1920,” by David P. Setran
“The Preacher’s Blues: Religious Race Records and Claims of Authority on Wax,” by Jonathan L. Walton
“In the Eye of the Beholder: Perspectives on Intermarriage Conversion in Orthodox Christian Parishes in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” by Amy Slagle
Winter 2010 Volume 20 Number 1
Forum: “American Religion and Scholarly Publishing: Restrospect and Prospect,” with contributions by John Corrigan, Elaine Maisner, Reed Malcolm, and John Wilson
“Garveyism and the Eschatology of African Redemption in the Rural South, 1920-1936,” by Jarod Roll
“Breaking Faith: Religion, Americanism, and Civil rights in Postwar Milwaukee,” by Kevin D. Smith
“Mourning Becomes Hers: Women, Tradition, and Memory Albums,” by Anne Blue Wills
Summer 2009 Volume 19 Number 2
Review Essay: “Religion, War, and the Meaning of America,” by Harry S. Stout
“Tamales on the Fourth of July: The Transnational Parish of Coeneo, Michoacán,” by Luis E. Murillo
“The Bible, the First Amendment, and the Public Schools in Odessa, Texas,” by Mark A. Chancey
“The Zen of Anarchy: Japanese Exceptionalism and the Anarchist Roots of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance,” by James Brown
“The International Social Turn: Unity and Brotherhood at the World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 1893,” by Amy Kittelstrom
Winter 2009 Volume 19 Number 1
Forum: “American Religion and ‘Whiteness,'” with contributions by Edward J. Blum, Tracy Fessenden, Prema Kurien, and Judith Weisenfeld
“The Remaking of the Catholic Working Class: Detroit, 1919-1945,” by Matthew Pehl
“‘Representatives of All That Is Noble’: The Rise of the Episcopal Establishment in Early-Twentieth-Century Philadelphia,” by Thomas F. Rzeznik
“Twenty-First-Century American Ghosts: The After-Death Communication—Therapy and Revelation from beyond the Grave,” by Susan Kwilecki
Summer 2008 Volume 18 Number 2
Review Essay: “Where the Action Is-—Law, Religion, and the Scholarly Divide,” by Sarah Barringer Gordon
“Racial Identity and the Civilizing Mission: Double Consciousness at the 1895 Congress in Africa,” by Paul W. Harris
“‘Terrible Laughing God’: Challenging Divine Justice in African American Antilynching Plays, 1916-1945,” by Craig Prentiss
“‘It is a Day of Judgment’: The Peacemakers, Religion, and Radicalism in Cold War America,” by Leilah Danielson
Winter 2008 Volume 18 Number 1
Forum: “Religion and Politics on the American Scene,” with contributions by Daniel Walker Howe, Sheila Suess Kennedy, Kevin Phillips, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
“Why Southern Gospel Music Matters,” by Douglas Harrison
“The Religious and Racial Meanings of The Green Pastures,” by Curtis J. Evans
“Framing Catholicism: Jack Chick’s Anti-Catholic Cartoons and the Flexible Boundaries of the Culture Wars,” by Michael Ian Borer and Adam Murphree
“The Greening of American Catholicism: Identity, Conversion, and Continuity,” by Keith Douglass Warner, O.F.M.
Summer 2007 Volume 17 Number 2
Review Essay: “Rethinking the American Jewish Historical Experience,” by Marc Lee Raphael
“‘Congenial to Almost Every Shade of Radicalism’: The Delaware Valley and the Success of Early Mormonism,” by Stephen J. Fleming
“Southern Harmony: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Antebellum South,” by Andrew Stern
“After the Exodus: The New Catholics in Boston’s Old Ethnic Neighborhoods,” by Regine O. Jackson
“‘And the Word was Made Flesh’: Divining the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century American and Catholic Culture,” by Marie Pagliarini
Winter 2007 Volume 17 Number 1
Forum: “How the Study of Religion and American Culture has Changed at Your Institution in the Past Decade,” with contributions by Catherine L. Albanese, W. Clark Gilpin, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Thomas A. Tweed
“The Church Historians Who Made the First Amendment What it is Today,” by Donald Drakeman
“Beautiful Women Who Dig Graves: Richard Baker-roshi, Imported Buddhism, and the Transmission of Ethics at the San Francisco Zen Center,” by Jason Bivens
“Sin, Spirituality, and Primitivism: The Theologies of the American Social Gospel,” by Matthew Bowman
Summer 2006 Volume 16 Number 2
Review Essay: “American Catholic Studies at a Crossroads,” by Paula Kane
“And Ever the Twain Shall Meet: The Holiness Missionary Movement and the Birth of World Pentecostalism, 1870-1920,” by Jay R. Case
“A Chosen People in a Pluralist Nation: Horace Kallen and the Jewish-American Experience,” by Daniel Greene
“‘The Right Achieved and the Wrong Way Conquered’: J.H. Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Conflict over Civil Rights,” by Wallace Best
“Minds Intensely Unsettled: Phrenology, Experience, and the American Pursuit of Spiritual Assurance, 1830-1880,” by Christopher G. White
Winter 2006 Volume 16 Number 1
Forum: “Electronic Media and the Study of American Religion,” with contributions by John Corrigan, David Morgan, Mark Silk, and Rhys H. Williams
“How the Irish became Protestant in America,” by Michael P. Carroll
“‘Monkeying with the Bible’: Edgar J. Goodspeed’s American Translation,” by R. Bryan Bademan
“The Preacher Paradigm: Promotional Biographies and the Modern-Made Evangelist,” by Kathryn E. Lofton
Summer 2005 Volume 15 Number 2
Review Essay: “American Religious Biography,” by Amanda Porterfield
“Native American Popular Religion in New England’s Old Colony, 1670-1770,” by Douglas Winiarski
“Sex in the City of God: Free Love and the American Millennium,” by Cathy Gutierrez
“The Beauty of the Lilies: Femininity, Innocence, and the Sweet Gospel of Uldine Utley,” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Winter 2005 Volume 15 Number 1
Forum: “American Religion and Class,” with contributions by David Hackett, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, R. Laurence Moore, and Leslie Tentler
“Sacred Sites: Nature and Nation in the U.S. National Parks,” by Lynn Ross-Bryant
“The Radicalization of the Social Gospel: Harry F. Ward and the Search for a New Social Order, 1898-1936,” by Doug Rossinow
“Morality for the ‘Democracy of God’: George Albert Coe and the Liberal Protestant Critique of American Character Education, 1917-1940,” by David P. Setran
Summer 2004 Volume 14 Number 2
“Passing as a Pastor: Clerical Imposture in the Colonial Atlantic World,” by Thomas Kidd
“The Politics of Ecumenical Disunity: The Troubled Marriage of Church World Service and the National Council of Churches,” by Jill K. Gill
“Mugwump Cartoonists, the Papacy, and Tammany Hall in America’s Gilded Age,” by Samuel J. Thomas
“Why Women Loved Billy Sunday: Urban Revivalism and Popular Entertainment in Early Twentieth-Century American Culture,” by Margaret Bendroth
Winter 2004 Volume 14 Number 1
Forum: “How I Have Changed My Mind,” with contributions by Catherine L. Albanese, Vine Deloria, Jr., Robert Ellwood, Andrew Greeley, and John F. Wilson
“‘The Christianization’ of Israel and Jews in 1950s America,” by Michele Mart
“The Robes of Womanhood: Dress and Authenticity among African American Methodist Women in the Nineteenth Century,” by Pamela Klassen
“‘Race’ Speech-‘Culture’ Speech-‘Soul’ Speech: The Brief Career of Social Science Language in American Religion during the Fascist Era,” by Anne C. Rose
Summer 2003 Volume 13 Number 2
Review Essay: “What is the Place of ‘Experience’ in Religious History?” by David D. Hall
“Hasidism in the Age of Aquarius: The House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco, 1967-1977,” by Yaakov Ariel
“Mission to America: The Reform Movement’s Missionary Experiments, 1919-1960,” by Lila Corwin Berman
“‘Praying for a Wicked City’: Congregation, Community, and the Suburbanization of Fundamentalism,” by Darren Dochuck
Winter 2003 Volume 13 Number 1
Forum: “The Years Ahead in Scholarship,” with contributions by Leigh E. Schmidt, Deborah Dash Moore, Richard T. Hughes, and Mark Valeri
“Women and Christian Practice in a Mahican Village,” by Rachel Wheeler
“Re-placing Memory: Latter-day Saint Use of Historical Monuments and Narrative in the Early Twentieth Century,” by Kathleen Flake
“‘My God and My Good Mother’: The Irony of Horace Bushnell’s Gendered Republic,” by Mark Edwards
Summer 2002 Volume 12 Number 2
Review Essay: “Local ‘Lived’ Religion in America,” by Rhys H. Williams
“Mystery of the Moorish Science Temple: Southern Blacks and American Alternative Spirituality in 1920s Chicago,” by Susan Nance
“Islamizing the Black Body: Ritual and Power in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam,” by Edward E. Curtis IV
“‘Heathens and Infidels’? African Christianization and Anglicanism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1700-1750, by Annette Laing
“‘Gods of Physical Violence, Stopping at Nothing’: Masculinity, Religion, and Art in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston,” by Peter Powers
Winter 2002 Volume 12 Number 1
Forum: “Teaching the Introductory Course in American Religion,” with contributions by Thomas A. Tweed, Grant Wacker, Jon Pahl, Valarie H. Ziegler, William D. Dinges
“Peace of Mind (1946): Judaism and the Therapeutic Polemics of Postwar America,” by Andrew R. Heinze
“The Influence of American Missionary Women on the World Back Home,” by Dana L. Robert
“The Evil of Abortion and the Greater Good of the Faith: Negotiating Catholic Survival in the Twentieth-Century American Health Care System,” by Kathleen M. Joyce
Summer 2001 Volume 11 Number 2
“Body Salvation: New Thought, Father Divine, and the Feast of Material Pleasures,” by R. Marie Griffith
“Curious Gentiles and Representational Authority in the City of the Saints,” by Eric A. Eliason
“Hollywood Theology: The Commodification of Religion in Twentieth-Century Films,” by Jeffery A. Smith
“Describing the Elephant: Buddhism in America,” by Peter N. Gregory
Winter 2001 Volume 11 Number 1
Forum: “American Religious People as ‘Other'”, with contributions by David Chidester, Sung Gyung Kim, Knud Krakau, M. Thomas Thangaraj
Review Essay: “An Edwards for the Millennium,” by Bruce Kuklick
“The Emergence of California in American Religious Historiography,” by Eldon G. Ernst
“Giving Voice to Place: Three Models for Understanding American Sacred Space,” by Belden C. Lane
“Of Markets and Missions: The Early History of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches,” by Melissa M. Wilcox
Summer 2000 Volume 10 Number 2
Review Essay: “Religion Goes to the Movies,” by Peter W. Williams
“Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” by Scott W. Hoffman
“The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” by J. Albert Harrill
“The Sisters of the Holy Family and the Veil of Race,” by Tracy Fessenden
Winter 2000 Volume 10 Number 1
Forum: “Public Theology in Contemporary America,” with contributions by William Dean, Mark A. Noll, Mary Ferrell Bednarowski, and J. Bryan Hehir
“The Aura of Wellness: Subtle-Energy Healing and New Age Religion,” by Catherine L. Albanese
“The Difference Difference Makes: Justine Wise Polier and Religious Matching in Twentieth-Century Child Adoption,” by Ellen Herman
“Infallible Proofs, Both Human and Divine: The Persuasiveness of Mormonism for Early Converts,” by Steven C. Harper
Summer 1999 Volume 9 Number 2
Forum: “American Spirituality,” with contributions by Wade Clark Roof, Anne E. Patrick, Ronald L. Grimes, and Bill J. Leonard
“Entering the ‘Tent of Abraham’: Fraternal Ritual and American Jewish Identity, 1880- 1920,” by Daniel Soyer
“Liberators for Colonial Anahuac: A Rumination on North American Civil Religions,” by Randi Jones Walker
“The Poetic Uses of Religion in The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez,” by Luis Leon
“Counterculture and Mission: Jews for Jesus and the Vietnam Era Missionary Campaigns, 1970 – 1975,” by Yaakov Ariel
Winter 1999 Volume 9 Number 1
Forum: “Religion and American Autobiographical Writing,” with contributions by Susan Juster, John D. Barbour, Gary Comstock, and Richard Rabinowitz
“With Bible in One Hand and Battle-Axe in the Other: Carry A. Nation as Religious Performer and Self-Promoter,” by Frances Grace Carver
“‘We Have Heard the Joyful Sound’: Charles E. Fuller’s Radio Broadcast and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism,” by Philip Goff
“The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America,” by Marie Ann Pagliarini
Summer 1998 Volume 8 Number 2
Forum: “Southern Religion,” with contributions by Donald G. Mathews, Samuel S. Hill, Beth Barton Schweiger, and John S. Boles
Review Essay: “Religion in American Academic Life,” by Joel Carpenter
“‘To Form a More Perfect Union’: The Moral Example of Southern Baptist Thought and Education, 1890-1920,” by John M. Heffron
“Tares in the Wheat: Puritan Violence and Puritan Families in the Nineteenth-Century Liberal Imagination,” by Daniel P. Buchanan
“Mary Marshall Dyer, Gender, and A Portraiture of Shakerism,” by Elizabeth A. De Wolfe
Winter 1998 Volume 8 Number 1
Forum: “Interpreting Waco,” with contributions by Lawrence Foster, Joel W. Martin, David Chidester, and Nancy T. Ammerman
“Jewish GIs and the Creation of the JudeoChristian Tradition,” by Deborah Dash Moore
“‘Rational Amusement and Sound Instruction’: Constructing the True Catholic Woman,” by Penny Edgell Becker
“The Staking of the Monster: A Politics of Remonstrance,” by Ed Ingebretsen
“Trifling with Holy Time: Women and the Formation of the Calvinist Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, 1815 – 1820,” by Carolyn J. Lawes
Summer 1997 Volume 7 Number 2
“Conjure and Christianity: Religious Elements in Nineteenth-Century African-American Occultism,” by Yvonne Chireau
“Southern Baptists, Northern Evangelicals, and the Nature of Religious Alliances,” by Barry Hankins
“The Church Irrelevant: Paul Hanly Furfey and the Fortunes of American Catholic Radicalism,” by Eugene McCarraher
“Applying the Devil’s Work in a Holy Cause: Working Class Popular Culture and the Salvation Army in the United States, 1879 – 1900,” by Lillian Taiz
“‘Memorial Stones’: Death and the Geography of Womanhood in Heathen Women’s Friend, 1869 – 1879,” by Anne Blue Wills
Winter 1997 Volume 7 Number 1
Forum: “Neglected Resources in Scholarship,” with contributions by Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Giles Gunn, Peter J. Paris, and Anne C. Rose
“The Religious Construction of Masculinity in Victorian America: The Male Mediumship of John Shoebridge Williams,” by Bret E. Carroll
“The Scalabrini Fathers, the Italian Emigrant Church and Ethnic Nationalism in America,” by Peter R. D’Agostino
“Sentimental Catechism: Archbishop James Gibbons, Mass Print Culture, and American Literary History,” by James Emmett Ryan
“Character, Public School, and Religious Education, 1920-1934,” by Heather Warren
Summer 1996 Volume 6 Number 2
Forum: “Religious Communities,” with contributions by Kathleen Neils Conzen, Brooks Holifield, Harry Stout, and Michael Zuckerman
“Manna and Manual: Sacramental and Instrumental Constructions of Space in the Victorian Camp Meeting,” by Steven Cooley
“The Puritans as Founders: The Quest for Identity in Early Whig Rhetoric,” by Dean C. Hammer
“The New Divinity and Williams College, 1793-1836,” by David Kling
“Christians Love the Jews! Origins and Growth of American PhiloSemitism, 1790-1860,” by Robert K. Whalen
Winter 1996 Volume 6 Number 1
Editors’ Preface
“The Troubles with Harry: Freedom, America, and God in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels,” by Kyle A. Pasewark
“How Realistic Can a Catholic Writer Be? Richard Sullivan and American Catholic Literature,” by Una M. Cadegan
“Carnival of Shame: Doctorow and the Rosenbergs,” by Robert Detweiler
“In Memory of Cassie: Child Death and Religious Vision in American Women’s Novels,” by Ann-Janine Morey
Summer 1995 Volume 5 Number 2
“Gender and Religion in American Culture, 1870-1930,” by David G. Hackett
“Religion and Culture in Tension: The Abortion Discourses of the U.S. Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention,” by Michele Dillon
“The Spiritual Labour of John Barnard: An Eighteenth-Century Artisan Constructs His Piety,” by Erik R. Seeman
“Fundamentalism and Folk Science between the Wars,” by Edward B. Davis
“A New Denominational Historiograph?” by John F. Wilson
Winter 1995 Volume 5 Number 1
Forum: “Female Experience in American Religion,” with contributions by Rosemary Skinner Keller, Ann Braude, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
“The Holocaust, Second Generation Witness, and the Voluntary Covenant in American Judaism,” by Alan L. Berger
“‘Proclaiming Together’? Convergence and Divergence in Mainline and Evangelical Evangelism, 1945-1967,” by Thomas C. Berg
“Thomas Merton and the Religion of the Bomb,” by James J. Farrell
“The Ideal of Professionalism and the White Southern Baptist Ministry, 1870-1920,” by Paul Harvey
Summer 1994 Volume 4 Number 2
“The Easter Parade: Piety, Fashion, and Display,” by Leigh Eric Schmidt
“Vernacular American Landscape: Methodists, Camp Meetings, and Social Respectability,” by Roger Robins
“The Church and American Destiny: Evangelical Episcopalians and Voluntary Societies in Antebellum America,” by Diana Hochstedt Butler
“Racial Justice and the People of God: The Second Vatican Council, the Civil Rights Movement, and American Catholics,” by John T. McGreevy
“Song and Dance: Native American Religions and American History,” by Lawrence E. Sullivan
Winter 1994 Volume 4 Number 1
Forum: “American Civil Religion Revisited,” with contributions by Phillip E. Hammond, Amanda Porterfield, James G. Moseley, and Jonathan D. Sarna
“‘A True Revival of Religion’: Protestants and the San Francisco Graft Prosecutions,1906-1909,” by Douglas Firth Anderson
“Purgatory and the Powerful Dead: A Case Study of Native American Repatriation,” by Johnny P. Flynn and Gary Laderman
“The Power of Interpretation: The Revival of 1857-58 and the Historiography of Revivalism in America,” by Kathryn T. Long
“Mass Culture, UpperClass Culture, and the Decline of Church Discipline in the Evangelical South: The 1910 Case of the Godbold Mineral Well Hotel,” by Ted Ownby
Summer 1993 Volume 3 Number 2
“Religion: A Private Affair, in Public Affairs,” by Martin E. Marty
“‘Spiritual Warfare’: Cultural Fundamentalism and the Equal Rights Amendment,” by Donald G. Mathews
“The Godly Insurrection in Limestone County: Social Gospel, Populism, and Southern Culture in the Late Nineteenth Century,” by Richard C. Goode
“Women, Public Ministry, and American Fundamentalism, 1920-1950,” by Michael S. Hamilton
“From Spiritualism to Theosophy: ‘Uplifting’ a Democratic Tradition,” by Stephen Prothero
“‘Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Left To Do’: Choosing a Textbook for Religion in America,” by Stephen J. Stein
Winter 1993 Volume 3 Number 1
Forum: “The Decade Ahead in Scholarship,” with contributions by Robert A. Orsi, George Marsden, David W. Wills, and Colleen McDannell
“Imaging Protestant Piety: The Icons of Warner Sallman,” by David Morgan
“Sociological Christianity and Christian Sociology: The Paradox of Early American Sociology,” by Susan E. Henking
“Mary Lyon, the Founding of Mount Holyoke College, and the Cultural Revival of Jonathan Edwards,” by Joseph A. Conforti
“Religion in the United States: Notes Toward a New Classification,” by Julia Mitchell Corbett
Summer 1992 Volume 2 Number 2
“Creation, Evolution, and Holy Ghost Religion: Holiness and Pentecostal Responses to Darwinism, ” by Ronald L. Numbers
“Representative Emersons: Versions of American Identity,” by David L. Smith
“The Apocalyptic Origins of Churches of Christ and the Triumph of Modernism,” by Richard T. Hughes
“The Early Years of the Jewish Presence at the University of Illinois,” by Winton U. Solberg
Winter 1992 Volume 2 Number 1
Forum: “Sources of Personal Identity: Religion, Ethnicity, and the American Cultural Situation,” with contributions by Robert Wuthnow, Martin E. Marty, Philip Gleason, and Deborah Dash Moore
“Benevolent Calvinism and the Moral Government of God: The Influence of Nathaniel W. Taylor on Revivalism in the Second Great Awakening,” by William R. Sutton
“The Troubled Soul of the Academy: American Learning and the Problem of Religious Studies,” by D. G. Hart
“Lemuel Haynes and the Revolutionary Origins of Black Theology, 1776-1801,” by John Saillant
“Witchcraft and the Colonization of Algonquian and Iroquois Cultures,” by Amanda Porterfield
Summer 1991 Volume 1 Number 2
Forum: “The Decline of Mainline Religion in American Culture,” with contributions by William R. Hutchison, Catherine L. Albanese, Max L. Stackhouse, and William McKinney
“The Private Hopes of American Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, 1925-1975,” by David Harrington Watt
“Saving the Children by Killing Them: Redemptive Sacrifice in the Ideologies of Jim Jones and Ronald Reagan,” by David Chidester
“The New Infidelity: Northern Protestant Clergymen and the Critique of Progress, 1840-1855,” by Mark Y. Hanley
“John Eliot and the Millennium,” by Richard W. Cogley
Winter 1991 Volume 1 Number 1
Editors’ Introduction
Review Essay: “The Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience,” by David Brion Davis
“Prophecy, Gender, and Culture: Ellen Gould Harmon [White] and the Roots of Seventh-day Adventism,” by Jonathan M. Butler
“Subverting Eden: Ambiguity of Evil and the American Dream in Blue Velvet,” by Irena Makarushka
“Religion and the American Public Philosophy,” by William Dean
“Authoritarian or Authority Minded? The Cognitive Commitments of Fundamentalists and the Christian Right,” by Dennis E. Owen, Kenneth D. Wald, and Samuel S. Hill
“The Incorporation of American Religion: The Case of the Presbyterians,” by Louis Weeks