New Directions in American Religious History

by Stout, Harry S.; Hart, D. G.

• ISBN13: 9780195112139
• ISBN10: 019511213X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-01-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The eighteen essays collected in this book originate from a conference of the same title, held at the Wingspread Conference Center in October of 1993. Leading scholars were invited to reflect on their specialties in American religious history in ways that summarized both where the field is and where it ought to move in the decades to come. The essays are organized according to four general themes: places and regions, universal themes, transformative events, and marginal groups and ethnocultural "outsiders." They address a wide range of specific topics including Puritanism, Protestantism and economic behavior, gender and sexuality in American Protestantism, and the twentieth-century de-Christianization of American public culture. Among the contributors are such distinguished scholars as David D. Hall, Donald G. Matthews, Allen C. Guelzo, Gordon S. Wood, Daniel Walker Howe, Robert Wuthnow, Jon Butler, David A. Hollinger, Harry S. Stout, and John Higham. Taken together, these essays reveal a rapidly expanding field of study that is breaking out of its traditional confines and spilling into all of American history. The book takes the measure of the changes of the last quarter-century and charts numerous challenges to future work.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 3
American Religion and Society
Studies of Religion in American Society: The State of the Art	p. 15
Protestantism and Region
Narrating Puritanism	p. 51
"Christianizing the South"--Sketching a Synthesis	p. 84
"As Canadian as Possible Under the Circumstances": Reflections on the Study of Protestantism in North America	p. 116
The Stages of American Protestantism
God's Designs: The Literature of the Colonial Revivals of Religion, 1735-1760	p. 141
Religion and the American Revolution	p. 173
Protestantism, Voluntarism, and Personal Identity in Antebellum America	p. 206
Protestantism and the Mainstream
Ethnicity and American Protestants: Collective Identity in the Mainstream	p. 239
Protestants and Economic Behavior	p. 260
Protestant Success in the New American City, 1870-1920: The Anxious Secrets of Rev. Walter Laidlaw, Ph.D.	p. 296
The Spirit and the Flesh: Gender, Language, and Sexuality in American Protestantism	p. 334
From Missions to Mission to Beyond Missions: The Historiography of American Protestant Foreign Missions Since World War II	p. 362
Experience and Explanation in Twentieth-Century American Religious History	p. 394
Protestants and Outsiders
On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Margins, Center, and Bridges in African American Religious History	p. 417
Recent American Catholic Historiography: New Directions in Religious History	p. 445
Jewish Intellectuals and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture in the Twentieth Century	p. 462
Afterword
Later Stages of the Recovery of American Religious History	p. 487
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