The Young Scholars in American Religion program was founded in 1991. Since then, 185 new faculty have completed the program. Each person is required to produce a course syllabus, with justification of teaching approach and institutional context, for their own use and for this database. These syllabi are accessed often by scholars and teaching professionals across the country and around the world.
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“Religion &” is a series of monthly conversations between leading academics and thinkers in multiple fields hosted by the Center to continue these critically important interventions. Every Third Thursday at 3p ET we discuss a topic that looks at the relationship between religion, the pressing issues of our day, and their impact on the fields we study.
Previous episodes of “Religion &” can be viewed on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/RAACTUBE/playlists.
Find related teaching and learning resources for each video by clicking on the video page or searching in the Teaching Resources page.
As we begin the fourth season of “Religion &”, we continue to find questions about religion and American culture at the center of public conversations as we simultaneously face increasing polarization that threatens the possibility and promise of healthy discourse. The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is uniquely positioned to facilitate discussions on the relationship between these cultural shifts, the study of religion, and the role of the modern scholar and teacher. For over 30 years, CSR&AC has brought together scholars and practitioners to engage religion and its relationship to the most important questions in our fields, on our campuses, and throughout our society. “Religion &” is a series of monthly conversations between leading academics, activists and public thinkers hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture to continue these critically important interventions.
Every month via Zoom and Facebook, emerging scholars alongside established thinkers will engage the pressing issues of this current moment, their impact on our fields of study, and the groundbreaking research, teaching and public engagement taking place across the country. This is our opportunity, as thinkers of religion and American culture, to assess and respond to this current moment and create a culture of sustained conversation on “Religion &” its impact on our changing world.
As we begin the third season of “Religion &”, we continue to find questions about religion and American culture at the center of public conversations and policy debates. The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is uniquely positioned to facilitate conversations on the relationship between these cultural shifts and the category of religion. For over 30 years, CSR&AC has brought together scholars and practitioners to engage religion and its relationship to the most important questions in our fields, on our campuses, and throughout our society. “Religion &” is a series of monthly conversations between leading academics and public thinkers in multiple fields hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture to continue these critically important interventions.
Every third Thursday at 3:00p ET via Zoom and Facebook, young and emerging scholars alongside established thinkers will engage the pressing issues of this current moment, their impact on our fields of study, and the groundbreaking work and engaged research taking place across the country. This is our opportunity, as thinkers of religion and American culture, to assess and respond to this current moment and create a culture of sustained conversation on “Religion &” the pressing issues of the day.As we begin the second season of “Religion &”, we continue to find questions about religion and American culture at the center of public conversations and policy debates. The COVID-19 pandemic still rages on alongside political realignments and environmental catastrophes that are unparalleled in their ferocity and the their impact on our social, political and religious structures. The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is uniquely positioned to facilitate conversations on the relationship between these cultural shifts and the category of religion. For over 30 years, CSR&AC has brought together scholars and practitioners to engage religion and its relationship to the most important questions in our fields, on our campuses, and throughout our society. “Religion &” is a series of monthly conversations between leading academics and public thinkers in multiple fields hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture to continue these critically important interventions.
Every third Thursday at 3:00p ET via Zoom and Facebook, young and emerging scholars alongside established thinkers will engage the pressing issues of this current moment, their impact on our fields of study, and the groundbreaking work and engaged research taking place across the country. This is our opportunity, as thinkers of religion and American culture, to assess and respond to this current moment and create a culture of sustained conversation on “Religion &” the pressing issues of the day.
2020 has been a year of significant changes that have impacted the climate and conversation of the American and global public. The COVID-19 pandemic and the current protests associated with the long struggle for racial justice in the United States have informed every aspect of American culture, from politics to music to religious communities. The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is uniquely positioned to facilitate conversations on the relationship between these cultural shifts and the category of religion. For over 30 years, CSR&AC has brought together scholars and practitioners to engage religion and its relationship to the most important questions in our fields, on our campuses, and throughout our society. “Religion &” is a series of monthly conversations between leading academics and thinkers in multiple fields hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture to continue these critically important interventions.
Every third Thursday at 3:00 ET via Zoom and Facebook, young and emerging scholars alongside established thinkers will engage the pressing issues of this current moment, their impact on our fields of study, and the groundbreaking work and engaged research taking place across the country. This is our opportunity, as thinkers of religion and American culture, to assess and respond to this current moment and create a culture of sustained conversation on “Religion &” the pressing issues of the day.
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Both sport and religion are multi-billion dollar endeavors in American life. In this episode of Religion &, our panelists explore the multitude of ways that sport and religion converge and diverge in American life. Featuring expertise in the history of sport and religion, sports fandom and religion, and sport and religious experiences, panelists highlight how race, politics, and religion manifest through play. Join us as we consider fields, courts, pitches, and turf and their role in the creation and exporting of American culture.
At any moment in the past year, the international news has been filled with stories of increasing global violence and war. Many of these wars are shaped by long-held rivalries, contrasting views of faith and belonging, and the opinions of dispersed communities that far-exceed the borders of the nation-state. Theorists have argued that the historical relationship between war and religion rests on three propositions: first, war creates martyrs; second, war is about the meaning of religion; and third, war is a manifestation of faith. While pithy, each of these propositions captures centuries-long debates that are complex and substantial. In the present, debates about war and whether peace as reality exists will involve how the public and thought leaders characterize the three propositions. Join us as we explore these and other propositions at the intersection of war, religion, and the possibility of peace.
Study of the secular and secularism has always been of interest to thinkers and theorists of religion. In a moment when the traditional boundaries between religion and the secular continue to be blurred, the time is ripe to return to this category, examine emerging theorists and theorizations, and explore its continued usefulness. The panel will explore its many and varied meanings and how different constructions of the secular help us narrate contemporary phenomena. They will explore the ways that secularism not only help us theorize what some have called the “losing of religion” but also the reconfiguring of traditional and new religious movements. Additionally, this panel will discuss why the current evangelical revival, discourses on Afro-pessimism, and rising political partisanship cannot be read apart from histories of and discourses on the secular. Join us as we explore these and other critical questions at the intersection of secularism, the study of religion, and American culture.
Popular culture productions often reflect the deepest concerns of a society. It is in these movies, literature, and music that a culture and its artists do the work of unpacking the fears and aspirations of a generation and even a nation. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop, America as well as the wider globe has reflected upon Hip Hop’s origins in Black expressive cultures, its unique contributions, and its evolving shape and reach. This panel seeks to address the ways in which Hip Hop has and continues to function as a type of script or scripture for narrating Black life, belonging and the afterlives of transatlantic enslavement. Furthermore, this panel will address the deep relationship between hip hop, spirituality, and alternative Black religions. How has Hip Hop shaped and nurtured discourses on Black religious diversity? What role has Hip Hop played in creating the narrative capacity for varied groups to imagine worlds otherwise, culturally, theologically, and politically? How might the study and teaching of religion more fully engage the contributions and insights of Hip Hop and its far reaching impact on our culture? Join us as we explore these and other critical questions at the intersection of Hip Hop, the study of religion, and cultural production.
While discourses around religion and Artificial Intelligence have been with us for decades, the exponential growth of models such as GPT-3 (the basis of Chat GPT) and the ascendancy of OpenAI as a company has accelerated the conversation at both philosophical and practical levels. This panel seeks to address the question of how religious studies as a discipline can serve as a fruitful conversation partner for both perennial and emerging questions around AI. For instance: to what extent are such historically determined concepts as “soul” and “real” helpfully informed by religious studies? As the academy wrestles with incorporation of AI into both student work and scholarly research, how might religious studies as a discipline be affected? Will the landscape of the practice of religion be altered significantly by AI, or are such prognostications premature? Join us as we explore these and other salient questions surrounding this timely topic.
Over the last couple of years, the University, its curricula, and its responses to ongoing ideological debates have been under an intense microscope. This new reality has impacted every constituency on the university campus, but is has been particularly noteworthy for scholars whose work intersects with politics, activism, and community engagement. In this episode, a group of deeply engaged and outspoken scholars will address the role of being a public intellectual in politically fraught moments. Our panelists will discuss the ways that their latest works and discourse in the public sphere have placed them in an increasingly complex and unrelenting spotlight. Additionally, they will engage their process of creating more public and accessible works and the impact these works have on their relationship with the university, community partners, and the broader public. Join us for a conversation at the intersection of religion, activism, and the role of the public intellectual.
The complex relationship between religion and drugs has long intrigued scholars and the general public. While some religious groups have issued prohibitions against the use of certain drugs, others have involved drugs in their ritual practices. Religion has also played a part in U.S. drug policy. Religious ideologies and institutions have mobilized in the War on Drugs, at the same time that transnational drug cartels have drawn on devotional practices and folk saints to maintain their power. Join us for a thought-provoking discussion with an interdisciplinary panel of experts to explore the fascinating and multi-faceted relationship between religion and drugs, a topic that offers abundant opportunities to think anew about the intersection of American religion, culture, and politics.
In addition to the Beatles being bigger than Jesus Christ, we might argue that movies have been bigger than religion. Movies played in “cathedrals” to popular culture, and the silver screen created icons that defined eras for people all around the world. Furthermore, from the origins of the medium to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the movies have used religious stories, figures, and tropes to attract audiences. But we also know that as much as the idea of religion has grown elastic and contested, movies that depict religion and faith have reflected this complexity. Our panelists expand upon the history of religion in the movies to include other visual mediums and provide a critical comparative perspective on faith and films.
As a result of human activities, the Earth system is undergoing dramatic change and a disruption of the climate, signaled through mega-fires, depleted natural resources, and mass extinctions. At the same time that there are religious denials of climate change and other human-induced environmental catastrophes, there are also religious calls to restore and respect the environment and the other creatures who live here and to turn to more sustainable practices in order to address pressing global-scale environmental problems as well as the social problems they exacerbate. This conversation will address the American religious landscape and its myriad responses to environmental catastrophe.
Religion isn’t always serious business! From standup comedy to the satire we watch onstage and onscreen, religion often provides rich source material for humor. At the same time, many Americans learn about religious people, ideas, and practices through humor. An important cultural touchstone, humor serves as a medium through which groups articulate religious identities and become socially legible, and through which the public develops their understanding of not only particular groups, but religion overall. Join us for a lively discussion with a panel of experts on Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish humor and explore the fascinating relationship between religion and humor in American popular culture.
The field of Mormon Studies has grown exponentially in recent years, resulting in an explosion of scholarship and the creation of endowed chairs at several universities. In this episode, three leading scholars will discuss the state of the field, considering such questions as: How has Mormon Studies changed our understanding of American religion? Where does the historiography of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stand in relation to the study of other Mormonisms? Is the term “Mormon” here to stay? How does scholars’ church affiliation (or lack thereof) affect their work? What are some major neglected areas in scholarship?
This episode addresses the idea of the human as it is intertwined with issues of anthropogenic exploitation of and extraction from the planet and complicated by relationships with machines. The voices in this episode explore developments in technology and in the American fields of transhumanism and Afrofuturism with the aim of bringing to the fore the ethical, political, and religious implications of the relationality of the human, the machine, and the environment.
It’s October, the time of year when Americans celebrate Halloween and indulge their fascination with all things haunted, hideous, and horrifying. And what’s a common theme in the monster movies and spirit possession thrillers that are so popular this time of year? Religion! Whether we’re reading novels by Stephen King, revisiting classic films like The Exorcist, or watching new television shows like Midnight Mass, religion is everywhere in the horror genre. It’s the source of inspiration for many of the characters, plots, and imagery that make horror so compelling. At the same time, many Americans learn about religious people, ideas, and practices through horror. Join us for a thought-provoking discussion with an interdisciplinary panel of experts who will help us understand the enduring power of religion and horror in American popular culture.
Religious Studies departments, like many other departments in the humanities, have been under attack by legislators for their content and methods while simultaneously dealing with declining enrollments and interest from student populations. The impact of the pandemic and the changing shape of the modern university have only exacerbated the demand for thinkers and teachers of religion to reimagine the field, the delivery of content in the classroom, and the role of religious studies departments in the higher education landscape. On this episode, panelists will explore the ways that creative and boundary-pushing Religious Studies departments have re-imagined themselves in the last 10 years, discuss the benefits and costs of new models in graduate education, and suggest the possible futures for the humanities and Religious Studies in light of the changing and often erratic political context.
As the modern university transforms and there continues to be a growing appetite for the history and engagement of religion and religious subcultures, scholars of religion and American culture have increasing opportunities to present their research to a broad public. For this episode, we will focus on teaching outside of the classroom and even beyond the typical venues for academics, with guests who write for broader publics, work on documentaries, create blogs, consult with businesses and policy makers, and use social media to instruct and engage. We will discuss the tasks involved in building and maintaining an audience; the opportunities and professional costs associated with translating scholarship to a more general audience; and the possibility of creating spaces where knowledge and knowledge production are democratically accessible. Join four engaged scholar-teachers as they discuss the ways their scholarship and teaching move beyond the university and impact broad segments of the public sphere.
In foundational museum studies literature of the past 50 years, museums have been called “temples,” “sacred groves,” and places to connect with “something higher, more sacred, and out-of-the-ordinary.” How do museums today engage religion and spirituality, with whom, and why? Can encounters with objects and exhibits move people beyond the material world to consider the divine, the transcendent, the magical? In what ways do museums serve the growing number who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious,” those of different faiths, and those of no faith? In light of global challenges, how could museums contribute further to spiritual well-being as well as our collective future? Join four public-engaged scholar-practitioners of museum studies and/or religion to explore these intriguing questions and highlight the growing connections between religion, spirituality, and museums.
Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers played his first game in the major leagues on April 15, 1947, ending the “color line” in baseball and forever changing sport and society. Robinson famously promised Branch Rickey, the team’s president, that he would turn the other cheek when confronted with the hostilities of racial bigotry. How did Robinson’s faith prepare him for the trauma he endured and the sacrifices he made? Moreover, how have the presumed obligations of religious faith and nationalism haunted professional athletes, especially athletes of color, ever since? Major League Baseball will commemorate the 75th anniversary of Robinson’s first game on April 15. However, it will do so once again within the lens of white America alongside the ways in which religion, capitalism, and sport intersect. “Turning the other cheek becomes an expectation of subsequent Black and Brown players,” Professor Carmen Nanko-Fernandez writes, “and martyrdom is a way of domesticating dangerous memories and complicated inconvenient prophets such as Jackie Robinson.” In this episode, the panelists will not only discuss the complicated history and memories of Robinson’s integration of baseball, but they also will address the ways in which American sport has been an especially compelling case to theorize the relationship between race and religion. Join humanities scholars and journalists for a timely and thoughtful conversation at the intersection of American studies, religion, and sport.
On the first Monday of February 2022, the Supreme Court reinstated an Alabama congressional map that a lower court had argued diluted the power of Black voters and was a threat to equal representation for all communities. These type of challenges, court cases, and state laws are on the rise and the question of the access to the franchise to all eligible voters has come under great scrutiny during the last couple of election cycles. Who gets to vote? When do voters have opportunity and access to vote? How have and how do electoral maps shape policies, elections, and the future of the US democracy? What roles have religious organizations and emerging activists groups played in bolstering or challenging the dilution of voting rights/access across the country? There has been considerable scholarly and public attention given to the ways that religious institutions and ideologies have impacted and continue to impact the mobilization of voters and political activitsts across the country. In this episode of Religion &, we will address the long history of the Voting Rights Act and voter suppression, the relationship of religious and civil rights organizations to this act, and how current communities and activists are deploying language, protest, and direct engagement in order to re-imagine and transform the possibilities of democratic participation. Join humanities and social science scholars for a conversation at the intersection of religion, voting rights, and competing visions of democracy.
At this time of planetary crisis and pandemic, it is critical to address questions about overlapping and multispecies injustice. This episode will interrogate issues about food accessibility and the frontline communities of climate change (human and non-human animal), specifically those who are the first to bear the brunt of environmental degradation and pandemics and the industries and policies most responsible for contributing to them. These panelists illuminate the ways that religious institutions are constructed and enacted in response to these evolving social and environmental conditions, especially as they pertain to animal, food, and racial justice; the histories of activist communities; and the work of diverse coalitions, including Black vegans, radical healthcare advocates, and animal rescue efforts, that imagine and enact forms of multispecies solidarity in the midst of society’s death-dealing structures. Join humanities and social science scholars for a conversation at the intersection of religion, animal rights, and food justice.
Religion and religious freedom are often key themes before the Supreme Court. A 2021 New York Times article went as far as to claim “An Extraordinary Winning Streak for Religion at the Supreme Court.” Both the current docket and the faith traditions of the sitting justices have ignited a series of questions around the issues of disestablishment, free exercise, and the ways race, class, and gender identity interact with each of these bedrock American principles. For instance, does the Supreme Court’s protection of religious freedom undermine equality before the law? Does this protection go beyond what even the Founders intended? Panelists will discuss the justices’ understanding of religion, the ways religion is changing in America, and the impact of these combined variables on American life. How can new scholarship about religion, race, gender identity, and jurisprudence help us interrogate the current moment? How can scholars in these fields help us understand the inflection points that define the relationship between Supreme Court decisions and our shared future? Join humanities and legal scholars for a conversation at the intersection of religion, equality, and the Supreme Court.
Religious participation in conspiracy theories has received increased attention in both scholarship and public discourse lately. As a result, a number of key questions have emerged: Why are some worldviews described as conspiratorial when others are seen as rational, or at least unthreatening? Are conspiracy theories in the body politic a problem to be solved as well as a phenomenon to be understood? What are the material, social, intellectual, and class conditions under which conspiracy theories arise and are transformed? How can religious studies understand and influence public invocations of terms like “conspiracy,” “cult,” etc.? This panel discussion will examine these and other questions in light of what many argue is a recent intensification of the connection between religion and conspiracy theories, particularly in the United States. Join humanities and social science scholars for a conversation at the intersection of religion, the state, and conspiracy.
Religious communities have often been at the forefront of providing services and support for parishioners with varying health, social, and economic needs. However, this attention to difference has not always translated to a thoughtful encounter with intersectionality and the ways in which ability operates differently across race, gender, and class. This panel hopes to address questions of access by examining the intersection of disability and religion through a lens that focuses on embodied religious practice and embodiment more broadly. Moreover, this panel will address how disability and religion provide a novel space to think critically about inclusion and visibility in the political arena, classrooms, and religious spaces. We ask: “How has disability theory and activism opened up new arenas for social protest and political belonging—particularly with regard to religious spaces?” This panel discussion will examine these and other topics in light of what many argue is a renewed attention to neurodiversity, varied abilities, and access in an age of social media and distance learning. Join humanities and social science scholars for a conversation at the intersection of religion, disability, and resistance.
At this very moment, thousands of Afghan refugees are arriving in the United States and other places around the world after a frenzied evacuation effort and bungled military withdrawal. This moment not only revives old debates about the United States’ relationship with Afghanistan and the Taliban regime, but it also reopens critical questions about policies on refugees, migration, and asylum. At the same time, the US continues to contend with the ongoing arrival of migrants fleeing Central America and the contested nature of a US-Mexico border policy. In this “Religion &”, panelists will address the history of refugee and migration policies and the role of religious organizations in supporting or challenging policies. Additionally, this episode will explore how scholars of religion and practitioners are employing new methods to study the movement, agency, and institution building of refugee and migrant communities. Join scholars and leaders in the field of migration policy as they explore these issues and the larger relationship between religion, refugees, and migration policy in the United States.
Given the renewed attention to teaching–including public teaching and online learning–that emerged during the pandemic, we want to end this yearlong series of discussions with the topic of teaching and public engagement. How are our fields thinking about re-imagining teaching in light of the pandemic/racial reckoning and how are faculty and universities preparing for the fall? This topic, of course, goes beyond the pandemic and we want to think about the role and impact of public teaching and how creative and thoughtful scholars are shaping the classroom, the blogsphere, and podcasts to better reach their core audiences.
Given the year we’ve been through—the multiple types of losses and “sadnesses” people have struggled with—it is fitting that we consider the roles of religion in all of this. “Religion & Grief,” however, extends beyond the pandemic, and this discussion will explore the ways scholars of religion and American Studies are theorizing grief, death, suffering, and the rituals that attend to these moments. Have our understandings of grief changed or expanded in this current moment? Do new religious movements or the deeper engagement of groups (like the nones, women of color, victims of racialized or sexual violence) complicate our analysis and narration of grief? Is grief an adequately compelling and capacious term to address the loss and sadness that we theorize in our work? Join humanities and social science scholars as they explore these questions and the larger relationships between religion, ritual, and various types of grief and loss.
As the pandemic dominated Americans’ attention in 2020, another crisis—climate change—worsened with alarming speed. The year 2020 brought the most active Atlantic hurricane season ever, the West Coast’s worst fire season, and the hottest global temperatures (tied with 2016). All of this unfolded even as the Trump administration, in alliance with evangelical climate-change deniers, continued to thwart policies that would combat global warming. Now, with the election of Joe Biden, the U.S. has rejoined the Paris climate accord and environmentalism is regaining political momentum. What is religion’s role in this new environment, and how does it shape Americans’ understanding of climate change? What questions should scholars be pursuing on religion and climate? Join our expert panelists as they reflect on these and related questions.
The field of Africana Religious Studies has undergone significant reappraisal in the last 10 years. Specifically, the field has begun to actively and from an interdisciplinary perspective engage the idea of futurity and Afro-diasporic futures. Scholars from across the spectrum are advancing new approaches to understanding the human condition and social institutions in an age of intelligent machines, social media and technological innovation. In this panel, we will look at the emerging approaches to Black futures in the fields of religious studies and American studies and how approaches from new media, social sciences and brain sciences have opened new models for studying Black religious futures. Join humanities and social science scholars for a conversation at the intersection of religion, technological innovation and Black futures.
The United States is an idea, one that, for better and for worse, has been contested and affirmed for generations through the practice of voting. And while democracy is far more than a presidential election, that contest captures both the popular imagination of what the nation is while also quite directly designating who will run the country. Therefore, Presidents inherit a popular faith as well as an office; they assume a role that is often seen as much sacred as it is political; and they perform duties not unfamiliar to leaders of religious communities throughout the country. Thus the presidential inauguration every four years serves as perhaps the key ceremony in the memorialization of the state—offering Americans a singular opportunity to reflect upon the purpose of their country and their quasi-mystical relationship to it. Join social science and humanities scholars for a conversation about the relationship between religion and memorializing the state.
2020 has been dominated by a variety of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, from outright fear to blatant disregard to interventions sanctioned by local, state, and federal organizations. With a vaccine on the horizon, scholars, public health officials and the greater public are asking how do we approach and communicate a thoughtful and ethical model for the distribution and safe implementation of a vaccine protocol. In this panel, we will look at the history of pandemics and vaccine protocols; discuss the role that religious organizations and leaders played during these historic moments; and outline the tools our fields offer to deal with the thorny ethical issues that emerge in the midst of surviving and responding during a global health crisis. Join social science, medicine and humanities scholars for a conversation about Pandemics, Vaccines, and Public Policy.
Religion and politics are intimately intertwined in American civic life, especially when it comes to presidential elections. In this “Religion &” panel, we’ll unpack the 2020 Election focusing on questions like: What role did religion play in the U.S. election? Which candidates and campaigns reflected religious themes? How did religious Americans vote? Join social science and humanities scholars for a conversation about election results and the aftermath.
100 years after the ratification of the 19th amendment and at this moment of racial reckoning, the American political climate is still dominated by the unequal representation of women, especially women of color, in local, state, and electoral politics. For the inaugural session of “Religion &”, we will explore the intersection of gender, race, politics, and the role of religion. Specifically, this panel will analyze the role that religious traditions play in sustaining or mitigating new models of engagement, political formation, and social change. How do current works on the intersection of gender, race, religion, and political participation help us frame and anticipate this current electoral season? Furthermore, have our theoretical focus on certain groups, like white Evangelicals, and insistence on traditional constructions of topics, like climate change from the perspective of nation-states and the corporate elite, adversely impacted our ability to tell a compelling story of the American religious landscape and its resistances to the current moment? How might we tell a more comprehensive story of the American electorate and its relationship to gender, race, religion, and belonging?
The next generation of leading teachers and scholars in American religion is at work in our colleges and universities today. With support from Lilly Endowment, the Center assists these early career scholars in the improvement of their teaching and research and in the development of professional communities through the Young Scholars in American Religion program. In addition to its historic concentration on teaching and research, the Young Scholars Program now includes a seminar devoted to such other professional issues as constructing a tenure portfolio, publication, grant writing, and department politics.
To subscribe to Religion & American Culture and view articles online visit our site at Cambridge Core.
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.
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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
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
“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
“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
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
“’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
“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
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
“‘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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
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
“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
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
“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
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
“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
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
“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
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
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
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
Popular culture productions often reflect the deepest concerns of a society. It is in these movies, literature, and music that a culture and its artists do the work of unpacking the fears and aspirations of a generation and even a nation. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop, America as well as the wider globe has reflected upon Hip Hop’s origins in Black expressive cultures, its unique contributions, and its evolving shape and reach. This panel seeks to address the ways in which Hip Hop has and continues to function as a type of script or scripture for narrating Black life, belonging and the afterlives of transatlantic enslavement. Furthermore, this panel will address the deep relationship between hip hop, spirituality, and alternative Black religions. How has Hip Hop shaped and nurtured discourses on Black religious diversity? What role has Hip Hop played in creating the narrative capacity for varied groups to imagine worlds otherwise, culturally, theologically, and politically? How might the study and teaching of religion more fully engage the contributions and insights of Hip Hop and its far reaching impact on our culture? Join us as we explore these and other critical questions at the intersection of Hip Hop, the study of religion, and cultural production.
Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies, Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, IUPUI
Professor Tucker Edmonds’ research interests are black and womanist theologies, alternative Christianities in the black Atlantic, and the role of scripture in African and African American religious traditions. Joseph has received grants from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning, the Fund for Theological Education, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. His most recent scholarship has focused on the relationship between alternative Christian movements and the Black body with a recent article entitled “The Canonical Black Body: Alternative African American Religions and the Disruptive Politics of Sacrality” in the journal Religions. In addition to his focus on African and African American Christian traditions, Tucker Edmonds is a noted teacher and an engaged scholar. He serves as the president of the local Indianapolis branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), is a member of the editorial board of the Wabash Center’s Journal on Teaching, and is currently leading a community-engaged project that is studying the impact of COVID-19 on Black arts and cultural institutions in Indianapolis.
Erika D. Gault, Director of the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life at the Smithsonian, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at The University of Arizona
Dr. Erika Gault is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies with a Ph.D. in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Erika Gault’s scholarly work focuses on the intersection of religious history, technology, and urban black life in post-industrial America.On the topic of hip hop, religion, and digital ethnography she has delivered and published a number of papers regionally, nationally, and internationally. She is an ordained elder at Elim Christian Fellowship and an award winning slam poet. She is currently working on her first book project titled No Matter What They Think of Me: Black Millenials, Hip Hop and the New Black Church and a co-edited volume entitled You Gon’ Learn Today: The Aesthetics of Christians in Hip Hop.
Darrius Hills, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Grinnell College
Darrius D. Hills is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Grinnell College. He received his M.Div. from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, and his M.A. and Ph.D in Religion (concentration in African American Religion) from Rice University. His research interests privilege African American religious thought, liberation theologies, womanist religious thought, Black male studies, and religion and culture. Dr. Hills’ course offerings will largely address the intersections of religion, race, and gender in American culture. Currently, Dr. Hills is completing his first book, tentatively titled: Religion, Race, and Manhood: Black Religious Thought and Black Male Identity, which is under contract with New York University Press. Dr. Hills’ essays, reviews, and other writings can be found in journals such as American Religion, the Journal of Africana Religions, and Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. Most recently, Dr. Hills was selected one of ten junior religion scholars nation-wide as part of the 2020-2022 cohort of the prestigious Young Scholars in American Religion program.
Andre E. Johnson, Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Film, The University of Memphis
Andre E. Johnson, Ph.D. is a Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Film and holds a University Research Professorship at the University of Memphis. He is also the Andrew Mellon Just Transformation Fellow at the Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State University, National Research Fellow for the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture, and Visiting Scholar at Memphis Theological Seminary. Grounded in an interdisciplinary understanding of scholarship, Dr. Johnson studies the intersection of rhetoric, race, and religion. He teaches classes in African American public address, rhetorical criticism, religious communication, prophetic rhetoric, homiletics, and the rhetoric of social movements. Dr. Johnson is the author of three national award-winning books, The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (2012), The Struggle Over Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter (with Amanda Nell Edgar, Ph.D., 2018), and No Future in this Country: The Prophetic Pessimism of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner (2020). He is also the editor of the forthcoming The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner: The Press, the Platform, and the Pulpit (2023) and Preaching During a Pandemic: The Rhetoric of the Black Preaching Tradition (with Kimberly P. Johnson, Ph.D. and Wallis C. Baxter IV, Ph.D., 2023)
The next generation of leading teachers and scholars in American religion is at work in our colleges and universities today. With support from Lilly Endowment, the Center assists these early career scholars in the improvement of their teaching and research and in the development of professional communities through the Young Scholars in American Religion program.
Every two years, the Center holds a highly interactive national conference on religion and American culture featuring the work of nationally recognized scholars speaking on a wide variety of subjects.
The Center partnered with Ivy Tech Community College to introduce fifteen community college instructors to the religious traditions of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist communities in greater Indianapolis. The program, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, resulted in the production of nearly 150 course modules that incorporate knowledge about world religions into core humanities curriculum.
With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center has hosted programs for K-12 teachers interested in learning how better to teach about religion in their classrooms.
The Center hosts a variety of events for scholars, educators, and the general public. Recent topics include race, rock ‘n’ roll, and evangelicalism in the 1950s and 1960s, the role of religion in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, evangelical Christianity and social engagement, Mormonism in the 21st century, and flea market religion.
Religion and politics are intimately intertwined in American civic life, especially when it comes to presidential elections. In this “Religion &” panel, we’ll unpack the 2020 Election focusing on questions like: What role did religion play in the U.S. election? Which candidates and campaigns reflected religious themes? How did religious Americans vote? Join social science and humanities scholars for a conversation about election results and the aftermath.
Jamil W. Drake, Florida State University
Jamil W. Drake specializes in American religious history with particular interests in 20th century African-American religious cultures; religion and politics; and religion and popular culture. More specifically, he is interested in questions around religion and racial identity in the U.S. He is currently writing a history of race and class in American religion tentatively entitled, To Know the Soul of the People: American Folk Studies and Racial Politics of Popular Religion, 1900-1940. To Know the Soul of People tells a story of how the study of race and religion became a central topic in folklore research and the developing social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. His research explores how the use of “folk religion” played a fundamental role in the process of classifying cultural behaviors that contributed to defining black lower and working-class communities in twentieth-century America.
Janelle Wong, University of Maryland
Janelle Wong is Professor of American Studies and a core faculty member in the Asian American Studies Program. From 2001-2012, Wong was in the Departments of Political Science and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in 2001 from the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Wong is the author of Immigrants, Evangelicals and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change (2018, Russell Sage Foundation), Democracy’s Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions (2006, University of Michigan Press) and co-author of two books on Asian American politics, including Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and their Political Identities (2011, Russell Sage Foundation), based on the first national, multilingual, multiethnic survey of Asian Americans. She was a Co-Principal Investigator on the 2016 National Asian American Survey, a nation-wide survey of Asian American political and social attitudes.
Andrew L. Whitehead, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Andrew L. Whitehead is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives (theARDA.com) at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI. Whitehead’s research focuses on how religion both shapes and is shaped by contemporary American culture. He is the author of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2020) and over three dozen peer-reviewed journal articles. In 2019 his co-authored article “Make America Christian Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election” (Sociology of Religion, 2018) won the Distinguished Article Award for both the Association for the Sociology of Religion and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Whitehead’s research has been featured across several national outlets including The New Yorker, The Washington Post, CNN Today, Salon, and The Guardian and he is routinely contacted for perspective on religion and politics from national and international news media. Along with his work on Christian nationalism, Whitehead’s current research focus also explores childhood disability and religion.
Amanda Friesen, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Amanda Friesen is Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies and Project Director for the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture at IUPUI. Her research centers on exploring the origins political orientations – from policy preferences and ideology to political interest and participation. She researches and teaches about the intersection of gender, religion and personality with political engagement, using psychological methods and theory to explore these domains. She has published more than 20 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and serves on the Politics & Religion journal editorial board and the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences Governing Council. Her work has appeared in Political Behavior, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, Politics and the Life Sciences, Social Science Quarterly, Politics & Gender, and Politics & Religion.
Study of the secular and secularism has always been of interest to thinkers and theorists of religion. In a moment when the traditional boundaries between religion and the secular continue to be blurred, the time is ripe to return to this category, examine emerging theorists and theorizations, and explore its continued usefulness. The panel will explore its many and varied meanings and how different constructions of the secular help us narrate contemporary phenomena. They will explore the ways that secularism not only help us theorize what some have called the “losing of religion” but also the reconfiguring of traditional and new religious movements. Additionally, this panel will discuss why the current evangelical revival, discourses on Afro-pessimism, and rising political partisanship cannot be read apart from histories of and discourses on the secular. Join us as we explore these and other critical questions at the intersection of secularism, the study of religion, and American culture.
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Brian Steensland, Professor and Chair of Sociology, IUPUI
Dr. Steensland’s areas of interest include religion, culture, politics, and civic life in contemporary American society. His books include Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice, and Power (Oxford, 2022), co-edited with Jaime Kucinskas and Anna Sun; The New Evangelical Social Engagement (Oxford, 2014), co-edited with Philip Goff; and The Failed Welfare Revolution: America’s Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy (Princeton, 2008). His articles include “The Measure of American Religion” (Social Forces, 2000) and “Cultural Categories and the American Welfare State” (American Journal of Sociology, 2006). (For additional information, see briansteensland.com.)
Lucia Hulsether, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Skidmore College
Lucia Hulsether is an ethnographer and historian of religion committed to a enacting a democratic praxis in her teaching and her research. She works at the intersection of critical race and ethnic studies, feminist and queer theory, and the study of labor and capitalism. Her research is focused on the religious cultures of the Americas. She interprets this topic broadly, to encompass ritual practices and collective forms through which people organize their lives and articulate their values. Her first book, tentatively titled Liberated Market: On the Cultural Politics of Capitalist Humanitarianism, is about transnational “conscious capitalist” initiatives like fair trade, microfinance, and corporate social responsibility. She is also pursuing projects on the intellectual cultures of college policy debate competition and on the gendered history of U.S. civic education programs.
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis
Dr. Schmidt is the author of Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard, 2000), which won the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Historical Studies and the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association; Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (Basic, 2010); and Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (HarperOne, 2005). Dr. Schmidt has appeared on a number of NPR programs and other radio shows to discuss his books, including All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, John Batchelor Show, Bob Edwards Show, BackStory with the American History Guys, Talking History, Voice of America, Religion Matters, Odyssey, The Connection, On Point, and The Book Show. He has often commented on current issues in American religion and culture, including for such media outlets as The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, London Times, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Chicago Tribune, Hartford Courant, San Francisco Bay Guardian, U. S. News and World Report, Newsweek, Charlotte Observer, Atlanta Constitution, Newark Star-Ledger, San Bernardino Sun, Detroit Free Press, Raleigh News and Observer, Peoria Journal Star, San Diego Union Tribune, and the Religion News Service. He also serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion and American Culture, Practical Matters, and Religion & Politics.
Joseph Winters, Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies, Duke University
Joseph Winters is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies. He also holds secondary positions in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. His interests lie at the intersection of black religious thought, African-American literature, and critical theory. Overall, his project expands conventional understandings of black religiosity and black piety by drawing on resources from Af-Am literature, philosophy, and critical theory. His research examines how literature, film, and music (especially hip hop) can reconfigure our sense of the sacred and imagination of spirituality. Winters’ first book, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Duke University Press, June 2016) examines how black literature and aesthetic practices challenge post-racial fantasies and triumphant accounts of freedom. The book shows how authors like WEB Du Bois and Toni Morrison link hope and possibility to melancholy, remembrance, and a recalcitrant sense of the tragic. His second book project (under contract with Duke University Press) is called Disturbing Profanity: Hip Hop, Black Aesthetics, and the Volatile Sacred.