New Directions in American Religious History / Edition 1

by Harry S. Stout, D. G. Hart

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195112139
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/01/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.20(d)
Lexile:	1690L (what's this?)

About the Author

Berkeley College, Yale University

Westminster Theological Seminary

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"Perhaps the best current survey of the state of historiography on American religious history."—Religious Studies Review

"Both the experienced scholar and the novice in American religious history will find this work to be an invaluable source of information and insights."—The American Religious Experience

From the Publisher