Böcker i Religion in America-serien

The Protestant conviction that believers would rise again, in bodily form, after death, shaped their attitudes towards personal and religious identity, community, empire, progress, race, and the environment. In To Walk the Earth Again Christopher Trigg explores the political dimension of Anglo-American Protestant writing about the future resurrection of the dead, examining texts written between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.

The term "Manifest Destiny" has traditionally been linked to U.S. westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the desire to spread republican government, and racialist theories like Anglo-Saxonism. Yet few people realize the degree to which "Manifest Destiny" and American republicanism relied on a deeply anti-Catholic civil-religious discourse.

By identifying a historic fight within Anglo-American Protestantism, and how it related to major contemporary political developments in the early American republic, Sam Haselby explains the origins of the distinct language and means of combining political and religious authority that characterizes American nationalism.

"A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren". So reads Noah's curse on his son Ham, and all his descendants, in Genesis 9:25. In this work, Stephen Haynes examines the history of the American interpretation of Noah's curse, turning to the ways in which the curse was appropriated by American pro-slavery and pro-segregation interpreters.

Examines the debate over the proper connection in society between religion and public life, that took place in the fifty years following the American Revolution. This book challenges the conventional wisdom, finding an essential continuity to the period's public Christianity.

This book offers a comprehensive examination of Methodist practice, tracing its evolution from the earliest days up to the present. Using liturgical texts as well as written accounts in popular and private sources, Karen Westerfield Tucker investigates the various rites and seasons of worship in Methodism and examines them in relation to American society.

No American denomination identified itself more closely with the nation's democratic ideals than did the Baptists. Yet paradoxically no denomination wielded religious authority more effectively than they did. Wills traces this dichotomy to two rival strains within the Baptist church - moderates who emphasized personal religious freedom and tolerance, and fundamentalists who preached discipline.

This study analyses the conflicts between Methodists - primarily white women, slaves, and the poor - and their opponents in the Revolutionary and early national American South. Cynthia Lyerly shows how, by condemning pride, violence, gentry hegemony, and slavery, Methodists fashioned an ethic radically at odds with that of southern elites and the masculine culture of honour.

This is a study of Cuban-American popular Catholicism, focusing on the shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami, which is the sacred centre of the Cuban community in exile. Tweed uses historical and ethnographic methods to discover why the shrine attained so much importance and attracts so many visitors, and what it can tell us about larger issues of religion, identity, and place.

This study approaches the Puritan experience in church government from the perspective of both the pew and the pulpit. The author has immersed himself in local manuscript church records and these previously untapped documents provide a glimpse of lay-clerical relations in colonial Massachusetts.

Nineteenth-century American writers frequently cast the Mormon as a stock villain in various genres of popular fiction. The Mormons were depicted as a violent and perverse people. Applying the methods of literary criticism, Givens shows how the image of the Mormon as a religious and social `Other' was constructed.

Focusing on the slaveholding border state of Missouri, Houses Divided shows that congregational and local denominational schisms, which arose initially over the moral question of African-American bondage, played a central role in sectionalism, Civil War, and Reconstruction.

This unconventional cultural history explores the lifecycle of the radical historical Jesus, a construct created by the freethinkers, feminists, socialists and anarchists who used the findings of biblical criticism to mount a serious challenge to the authority of elite liberal divines during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Although many refer to the American South as the "Bible Belt", the region was not always characterized by a powerful religious culture. In the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, religion-in terms both of church membership and personal piety-was virtually absent from southern culture. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, however, witnessed the astonishingly rapid rise of evangelical religion in the Upper South. Within just a fewyears, evangelicals had spread their beliefs and their fervor, gaining converts and building churches throughout Virginia and North Carolina and into the western regions. But what was it that made evangelicalism so attractive to a region previously uninterested in religion? Monica Najar argues that early evangelicals successfully negotiated the various challenges of the eighteenth-century landscape by creating churches that functioned as civil as well as religious bodies. The evangelical church of the late eighteenth century was the cornerstone of its community, regulating marriages, monitoring prices, arbitrating business, and settling disputes. As the era experienced substantial rifts in the relationship between church and state, the disestablishment ofcolonial churches paved the way for new formulations of church-state relations. The evangelical churches were well-positioned to provide guidance in uncertain times, and their multiple functions allowed them to reshape many of the central elements of authority in southern society. They assisted inreformulating the lines between the "religious" and "secular" realms, with significant consequences for both religion and the emerging nation-state. Touching on the creation of a distinctive southern culture, the position of women in the private and public arenas, family life in the Old South, the relationship between religion and slavery, and the political culture of the early republic, Najar reveals the history behind a religious heritage that remains a distinguishing mark of American society.

Examining the interaction of the Dutch and the English in colonial New York and New Jersey, this study charts the decline of European culture in North America.

David Holland tells the stories of antebellum Americans who advocated the idea of an open canon, considering the place of cultural authority in a democratized society, the tension between subjective truths and communal standards, a rising historical consciousness, the expansion of print capitalism, and the principle of religious freedom.

In a wide-ranging collection of articles, a distinguished set of commentators on American religion examine the denomination's past and present roles, its definable nature, and its evolution over time.

This is a collection of previously unpublished papers on `denominationalism' - the `free market' mode of organizing religious life which, it has been argued, manages to combine traditional religious claims with a free society in a peculiarly American way. The authors explore the history of denominational studies, as well as promising new approaches in the field.

Sympathetic Puritans places sympathy at the heart of Puritanism and challenges the literary history of sentimentalism. It argues that a Calvinist theology of fellow feeling shaped the politics, religion, rhetoric, and literature of seventeenth-century New England, influencing the development of American culture.

Michael Pasquier examines the "lived" religion of French missionaries in their daily encounters with anti-Catholic Protestants and anti-clerical Catholics on the American frontier. Focusing on the collective thoughts, feelings, and actions of priests who found themselves caught between the formal canonical standards of the church and the informal experiences of missionaries in American culture, Pasquier illuminates the historical intersection of American, French, andRoman interests in the United States. He finds that at no point did French missionaries engage more directly in distinctively American affairs than in the religious debates surrounding slavery, secessions, and civil war. These issues, he shows, compelled even the most politically aloof missionariesto step out of the shadow of Rome and stake their church on the side of the Confederacy.

AJ Tomlinson (1865-1943) was one of the most important leaders of early Pentecostalism. This biography of Tomlinson's life story offers a narrative which sheds light on the roots of some of the twentieth century's most vigorous popular religious movements.

This group biography follows three generations of ministers' daughters and wives in a famed American Unitarian family. Cynthia Tucker examines the Eliots, their religious tradition, and the Eliot women's largely neglected female vocation. Spanning 150 years from the early 19th century forward, the narrative is shaped into a series of stories. Each of six chapters takes up a different woman's experience, from the deaths of numerous children and the anguish ofinfertility to the suffocation of small parish life with its chronic loneliness, doubt, and resentment.

This book is a study of seven autobiographies by women who defied the domestic ideology of nineteenth-century America by serving as itinerant preachers. Literally and culturally homeless, all of them used their autobiographies to construct, from an array of materials, plausible identities as women and Christians in an age that found them hard to understand.

The common view of the 19th century pastoral relationship, was that women and clergymen formed a natural alliance. In this book, Karin Gedge tests this thesis by examining the pastoral relationship from the perspective of the minister, the female parishioner, and the larger culture.

This is a study, from an insider's perspective, of the worship practices and social ethics of the African-American family of Holiness, Pentecostal, and Apostolic churches known as the Sanctified Church, identifying the theme of exile as a key to the nature of African-American religious life.