Religion and the Marketplace in the United States

by Stievermann, Jan; Goff, Philip; Junker, Detlef; Santoro, Anthony; Silliman, Daniel

• ISBN13: 9780199361793
• ISBN10: 0199361797
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-02-12
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Jan Stievermann is Professor of the History of Christianity in North America at the University of Heidelberg. He has written on a broad range of topics in the fields of American religious history and American literature, including articles for Early American Literature, William and Mary Quarterly, and Church History. His book Der Sündenfall der Nachahmung: Zum Problem der Mittelbarkeit im Werk Ralph Waldo Emersons (2007; The Original Fall of Imitation: The Problem of Mediacy in the Works of R.W.E.) is a comprehensive study of the co-evolution of Emerson's religious and aesthetic thought. Together with Reiner Smolinski, he edited Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana-America's First Bible Commentary (2010). Most recently, he published with Oliver Scheiding A Peculiar Mixture: German-Language Cultures and Identities in Eighteenth-Century North America (2013). Currently, he leads a team transcribing and editing vol. 5 of Cotton Mather's hitherto unpublished Biblia Americana, the first comprehensive Bible commentary produced in British North America. For the Biblia-project as a whole (10 vols.) he also serves as the executive editor.

Philip Goff is Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at Indiana University Indianapolis. The author or editor of over thirty volumes and nearly 200 articles or papers on religion in North America, he has since 2000 been co-editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. His most recent edited volume, with Brian Steensland, is The New Evangelical Social Engagement (2013).

Detlef Junker is the Founding Director of the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, a former Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. (1991 - 1994) and a former Curt Engelhorn Chair in American History at Heidelberg University. He has published and edited books on American History, Transatlantic Relations, German History and on Theory of History in English and in German.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Contributors
General Introduction - Jan Stievermann, Daniel Silliman, and Philip Goff

PART ONE: Reassessment
1. Why Are Americans So Religious? The Limitations of Market Explanations - E. Brooks Holifield

PART TWO: Evangelicals and Markets
2. Weber and Eighteenth-Century Religious Developments in America - Mark Valeri
3. Billy Graham, Christian Manliness, and the Shaping of the Evangelical Subculture - Grant Wacker
4. Money Matters and Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family on the Traditional Family and Capitalist America - Hilde Løvdal

PART THREE: Religious Book Markets
5. The Commodification of William James: The Book Business and the Rise of Liberal Spirituality in the Twentieth-Century United States - Matthew Hedstrom
6. Literature and the Economy of the Sacred - Günter Leypoldt
7. Publishers and Profit Motives: The Economic History of Left Behind - Daniel Silliman

PART FOUR: Religious Resistance and Adaptation to the Market
8. Selling Infinite Selves: Youth Culture and Contemporary Festivals - Sarah Pike
9. Religious Branding and the Quest to Meet Consumer Needs: Joel Osteen's "Message of Hope" - Katja Rakow
10. Unsilent Partners: Sports Stadiums and their Appropriation and Use of Sacred Space - Anthony Santoro

PART FIVE: Critical Reflection and Prospect
11. Considering the Neoliberal in American Religion - Kathryn Lofton

Index