5 Questions with David Endres

I corresponded recently with Fr. David Endres about his new book, Many Tonges, One Faith: A History of Franciscan Parish Life in the United States. Fr. Endres is Associate Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at the Athenaeum of Ohio where he also serves as Dean. He is also the hardworking  editor of the US Catholic Historian.


(1) Writing a history of Franciscan parishes is a huge undertaking. As you note, at the height Franciscan parish ministry in 1968, the order ran around 500 parishes and missions in the US. Tell the blog how you approached this challenge and why you settled on writing the history of fourteen specific parishes. 

Unlike the Jesuits and Dominicans, among other religious communities, there have been almost no studies of US Franciscanism to date. That was the impetus for the United States Franciscan History Project under the direction of Jeffrey Burns and the Academy of American Franciscan History: to bring together scholars to reflect on different aspects of the US Franciscan story. In addition to my book on Franciscan parishes, there has been one other monograph published in the project series: Ray Haberski’s Voice of Empathy: A History of Franciscan Media in the United States. Hopefully, additional forthcoming volumes will address other topics.




One 1950s survey of the Franciscans’ US presence blamed factionalization within the Franciscans on the lack of national or international studies that go beyond a given Franciscan province or branch of the order. He (a friar himself) lamented that he would never be able to please his confreres -- the Conventuals, Third Order Regular, and Capuchins would feel overlooked if he concentrated on the more numerous OFMs (Friars Minor) and all the priests and brothers would resent being chronicled along with the secular Franciscans and the numerous women’s branches.

I tried to keep some balance, and perhaps since I am not a Franciscan myself, I was a bit freer to shape the book around specific parishes – no matter the branch or branches of Franciscanism represented.  I looked for compelling stories that related to broader developments in the history of the Church and nation, but also attempted to provide a diverse representation of parishes – ethnically and geographically, large and small, active and now closed or merged. I knew that to tell such a large story, I had to be selective in choosing parishes to detail. The number “fourteen” was somewhat arbitrary, but I think it provides enough case studies to derive some general conclusions.

To achieve this diversity of place and kind, I made use of numerous archives. The archives of the St. Barbara Province in Santa Barbara, California and the St. John Baptist Province here in Cincinnati provided a wealth of information. Even though Cincinnati is 800 miles from New Orleans, friars from the Cincinnati province ministered in Louisiana (along with Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Arizona, and New Mexico) so archives helped extend my research reach. Other holdings were consulted in person or with the help of kind archivists and librarians.

(2) You show how Franciscans very much became tied to place in America. Tell the blog how the order was shaped by American realities. 

I think that too often scholars (who do not necessarily focus on religious history), see Catholic history in particular as not having much to do with the US historical narrative. But in addition to being tied into major developments in American Catholic history, the book, I hope, helps explore major demographic and social trends that transcend the US Catholic experience.

Those developments included the realities of frontier life, massive European immigration, and the emergence of ethnic-predominate cities. These geo-demographic shifts propelled Franciscans into pastoring parishes in the nineteenth century, though this was not part of their experience in Europe.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the Franciscans were again shaped by new American realities – the interstate highway system, growth of suburbia, the Baby Boom, feminism, and protest movements of the 1960s and beyond. All of these impacted parish life, affecting how Franciscans ministered and how they assessed their ministries.

By engaging some of these broader developments in American life and the American religious experience, I hoped to situate Franciscan parishes within the US historical narrative, not as an aberration, but as a nexus of local institutions and communities that help compose the “American story.”

(3) Many Tongues, One Faith is as much a global story as it is a national story. How does the story of the Franciscans compare to other orders? I'm thinking here of John McGreevy’s work on the Jesuits. Both orders were shaped by the secularization policies of Europe and their coming to the US, but did they respond in different ways? 

It is certainly a global story. The first Franciscans to the US – whether Irish, Italian, German, or Polish – all came from European provinces, bringing with them their own ideals and expectations about being Catholic, being Franciscan, and being ministers of the Gospel. This was not unique to the Franciscans, but I think that friars and religious sisters responded in different ways from the Jesuits and others, partly because of the distinctiveness of their charism.

In the conclusion of the book, I discuss the Franciscan charism: to be poor among the poor; to foster fraternity and community; to be ministers of reconciliation, healing, and peace; and to serve where there is the greatest need, often among those on the margins of society. Their charism, especially the commitment to ministering to the underserved, impacted the locus of their ministries. While the Jesuits had a lively Euro-American exchange of personnel among their colleges, the Franciscans were missioned to the frontier, or urban centers, or Native American missions. Though some returned home later in life, most stayed in America.  Consequently, their lives were significantly shaped by their local experiences of ministry and the people they encountered. More so perhaps than other orders, the Franciscans seemed to stay close to the people, identifying with them, no matter if their own ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic backgrounds were dissimilar.

The work of John McGreevy and others now provide some interesting possibilities for inter-“religious order” comparisons. The Jesuits, more so than the Franciscans, traveled to and from Europe – even after many years of ministry in America – and maintained a close connection to the Jesuit superior general in Rome. The order overall maintained a greater top-down, military model. Overall, my reading of the Franciscan story is that they were more decentralized in their identities and decision-making. The provinces and the semi-autonomous Franciscan “custodies” emphasized local governance. This helped them to respond to local situations and needs in ways different from other orders.

(4) Of the fourteen parishes you wrote about, do you have a favorite? 

Of those that I detail in the book, the one that has resonated most with me is the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Carey, Ohio, located about three hours north of my home. As a Marian shrine that remains popular among pilgrims, it is a place where the present is linked to the past. In Carey, an image of Our Lady of Consolation was imported from Luxembourg and brought in procession to its new home at the church in 1875. On the day of the procession, rain threatened on all sides but did not fall on the statue or procession. The safe passage of the statue through the storm was viewed as miraculous. At the same time, unbeknownst to those in the procession, a little girl whose family had taken part in the procession was healed from an incurable illness. It was the first of many miraculous healings, which many believe continue at the shrine today. Dozens of artifacts lining the shrine’s walls stand as testimony to the claims: crutches, casts, splints, and even a six-foot-long wicker basket.
The history of the shrine is full of fascinating stories – some of which are outside the scope of Many Tongues, One Faith or could only be discussed briefly therein. I am particularly interested in the healings said to have occurred there and how they were publicized, especially in the first decades of the twentieth century. The healings shed light on ethnic and devotional Catholicism and how “holy places” operated within the psyche of American Catholics. And as much as believers venerated the location as a place of special intercession by the Blessed Virgin Mary, the shrine also has been the target of anti-Catholicism: a Ku Klux Klan demonstration, an arson attempt, and a successful theft of the famous statue. The vacillations of belief and doubt provide an interesting lens to view religious devotion, reported miracles, and the advancement of science.

My study of the shrine has developed into a near book-length manuscript, “America’s Lourdes: Devotion and Healing at the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation.” I hope to further develop the topic over the coming years and ready it for publication.

(5) Your book builds on the social history tradition of Jay Dolan and Patrick Carey’s classic studies of parish life. One might say the parish is where “the rubber meets the road.”  Why is the parish still a great lens to use to study US Catholic history?

I am indebted to earlier scholarship that helped focus on lay Catholics and their involvement in parish life. Today, as in the past, most Catholics’ experience of the Church is at the level of the parish.  More so than any diocesan structure or specialized Church-run institution, the parish is primary to a community’s religious experience. The correspondence of bishops, their sermons, and financial ledgers readily available at diocesan archives tell part of the story, but only part of it. Getting beyond institutional records to tell the stories of communities is the challenge and also the benefit of researching parishes.

I attempted to use various sources to find the “voice” of friars, women religious, and lay Catholics, utilizing local and parish histories, newspapers, bulletins, and occasionally, interviews. My hope is that it has helped flesh out the lived experience of everyday “people in the pews.” Of course, a selective, case-study approach offers some insights into that experience, but also implicitly points to the need for further studies. If my research has provided an impetus or avenues for future research, it will have achieved part of the goal of the United States Franciscan History Project.

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New Books in American Religious History: 2018 Year in Preview, Part Two (May-July)

Four of us—Erin Bartram (University of Hartford), William Black (Rice University), Michel Sun Lee (University of Texas at Austin), and Moxy Moczygemba (University of Florida)—are excited to present part two of the 2018 book preview list! This post covers releases from May through July 2018.

Books are grouped by publication month. As always, feel free to leave a comment if you believe a book has been mistakenly overlooked by our editorial team.

May

Devery S. Anderson, ed. Salt Lake School of the Prophets, 1867–1883 (Signature Books)
From the publisher: “Ministerial training was an early goal of Mormonism. The priesthood-led institution called the School of the Prophets, established in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833, was basically a divinity school for prospective missionaries. . . . Brigham Young re-established the school in the Salt Lake Valley in 1867; his successor, John Taylor, resuscitated it for a while in 1883. Young’s emphasis was theology, first as an appendage to Deseret University, and then as a separate institution. Presented here for the first time are all available minutes for the Utah period.”

Catherine R. Osborne, American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow: Building Churches for the Future, 1925-1975 (University of Chicago Press)
Paula M. Kane: “American Catholics and the Church of Tomorrow shows how by the mid-twentieth century, certain aspects of modernity began to affect the tradition-bound Catholic Church. The impact was seen in the Church’s changing outlook on church design and furnishing, on social issues such as psychedelic drug experimentation and civil rights activism, and on the sacred liturgy itself. Osborne’s book is accomplished, well-written, and thoroughly researched.”

Rani-Henrik Andersson, ed. A Whirlwind Passed through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance (University of Oklahoma Press)

Jeffrey Ostler: “Rani-Henrik Andersson has assembled by far the most comprehensive collection of primary sources on the Lakota Ghost Dance, including many he has skillfully translated from Lakota. His introduction and commentary provide excellent guidance into the diversity of Lakota voices that speak about this vitally important movement.”

Matteo Binasco, Roman Sources for the History of American Catholicism, 1763-1939 (University of Notre Dame Press)
Steven M. Avella: “The author and the Cushwa Center, which commissioned this project, have made a signal contribution to the desire to ‘transnationalize’ the history of American Catholicism.”

Melissa Daggett, Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The Life and Times of Henry Louis Rey (University Press of Mississippi)
Caryn Cossé Bell: “Melissa Daggett’s unrivaled grasp of a voluminous collection of French-language spiritualist texts makes Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans a must-read for anyone interested in the city’s multifaceted religious culture with its links to the North, the Caribbean, and Europe.”

Leilah Danielson, Marian Mollin, and Doug Rossinow, eds. The Religious Left in Modern America: Doorkeepers of a Radical Faith (Palgrave Macmillan)
Darren Dochuk: “Cutting across faith traditions and the entire twentieth century, glimpsing radical social gospels in local and global contexts, and political circumstances of sweeping significance, The Religious Left in Modern America is an important and timely reminder that a dynamic religious left has always operated at the heart of American life.”

Jessica Johnson, Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire (Duke University Press)

Susan Friend Harding: “Mark Driscoll's Mars Hill churches in Seattle took Calvinist insecurity to new levels, producing an everyday world of acute affective precarity. His church people lived in a slurry of shame, fear, threat, care, intimidation, hope, joy, and paranoia. Wives were exhorted to be their husbands' porn stars 24/7, and men—the victims of a nation ‘pussified’ by feminists—should man-up, have sex on demand with their wives, and pursue air and ground war campaigns of ‘riot evangelism.’ After nearly a decade of summary dismissals, shunning, demon trials, disciplinary interrogations, mass surveillance, and financial scandals, Driscoll's evangelical empire imploded. Jessica Johnson was there for the long haul and provides us with a theoretically rich and evocative reading of this traumatic episode of pastoral governance.”

Zach Mills, The Last Blues Preacher: Reverend Clay Evans, Black Lives, and the Faith that Woke the Nation (Fortress)
Victor Anderson: “Mills’s biography of the Reverend Clay Evans brings into cultural focus the sound, passion, and commitments of one of the most recognized voices in the history of black preaching and gospel musicology of the twentieth century. Rev. Evans reminded many of us growing up in Chicago every Sunday evening that ‘there is room at the cross for you.’”

Erin Michael Salius, Sacraments of Memory: Catholicism and Slavery in Contemporary African American Literature (University Press of Florida)
Katherine Clay Bassard: “Brilliant and insightful. Fills a gap in the study of African American literature and religion, which has traditionally assumed a Protestant theological and cultural landscape as the ground for discussions of religion and spirituality among the enslaved. Adds to our knowledge of how religious tropes, archetypes, and theological claims inform readings of African American literary texts.”

Michele Lise Tarter and Catie Gill, eds. New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650–1800 (Oxford University Press)
From the publisher: “. . . takes a fresh look at archival and printed sources from England and America, elucidating why women were instrumental to the Quaker movement from its inception to its establishment as a transatlantic religious body. This authoritative volume, the first collection to focus entirely on the contributions of women, is a landmark study of their distinctive religious and gendered identities. The chapters connect three richly woven threads of Quaker women's lives—Revolutions, Disruptions and Networks—by tying gendered experience to ruptures in religion across this radical, volatile period of history.”

Fred E. Witzig, Sanctifying Slavery and Politics in South Carolina: The Life of the Reverend Alexander Garden, 1685–1756 (University of South Carolina Press)
Thomas S. Kidd: “Fred E. Witzig’s Sanctifying Slavery and Politics in South Carolina delivers a much-needed biography of Alexander Garden, arguably the most prominent religious figure in the eighteenth-century lower South. But it also illuminates fascinating facets of colonial South Carolina’s religion, culture, and its ‘Great Anti-Awakening.’”

June

Steven M. Avella, The Catholic Church in Southwest Iowa: A History of the Diocese of Des Moines (Liturgical Press)
Timothy Walch: “Fr. Steven Avella has produced an exceptional history of Catholicism in the American heartland. Based on rigorous scholarly research and written in clear compelling prose, Fr. Avella tells the story of the Diocese of Des Moines during the ten tumultuous decades of the twentieth century. This book will be of value not only to academic historians, but also to general readers interested in the evolution of the Catholic Church in a diverse American diocese composed of small cities and big towns bound together by hundreds of bustling farms.”

Grant Brodrecht, Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era (Fordham University Press)
Mark Noll: “Grant Brodrecht’s illuminating study shows how highly northern evangelical Protestants exalted their idea of the national Union before, during, and after the Civil War. With deep research and absolute mastery of standard historical scholarship, Our Country explains why this evangelical commitment to the Union as a providential, Christian nation exerted such influence during the war. Even more impressive is Brodrecht’s account of how this evangelical vision of the Christian nation undercut the push for African American equality and hastened the end of Reconstruction. It is an unusually impressive book.”

Harold K. Bush and Brian Yothers, eds., Above the American Renaissance (University of Massachusetts Press)
Elizabeth Fenton: “This collection is the first to assess nineteenth-century American literature in this way, and it will be of tremendous use to both scholars interested in U.S. religious traditions, Christianity specifically, and those who study the writers examined here. Above the American Renaissance is also a timely and important reengagement with David Reynolds’s work, a text that has laid the groundwork for nearly three decades of scholarship.”

Joel Cabrita, The People’s Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Healing Movement (Harvard University Press)
Derek Peterson: “Drawing on archives in South Africa, Swaziland, Sweden, and Illinois, this remarkable book tells an altogether unlikely story. It features an Australian preacher who, in the late nineteenth century, established a Christian utopia in tiny Zion, Illinois, a town which was to be the launching pad for one of southern Africa’s leading Christian movements. The People’s Zion brings to light a whole network of textual, intellectual, and theological exchange that drew American midwesterners into close dialogue with co-travelers in southern Africa. In so doing, Cabrita places African Christians at the center of the history of global Christianity.”

Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (University Press of New England/Brandeis University)
Shaul Magid: “Dollinger’s illuminating book illustrates that many American Jewish leaders were not only sympathetic to Black Power but were supportive of it. Dollinger shows that the American Jewish turn toward issues of Jewish continuity owes a great debt to the Black Power movement and that Jewish leaders understood that early on. This book will significantly change how we view the American Jewish 1960s and their aftermath.”

Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Oxford University Press)
Mark Noll: “Christopher Grasso has pursued what other historians have considered by-ways in order to show that deism, skepticism, and religious doubt were anything but marginal in the formative decades of the United States.”

Daniel Judson, Pennies for Heaven: The History of American Synagogues and Money (Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England)
Beth Wenger: “Judson demonstrates not only the mechanisms used to fund synagogues but also what they reveal about American Jewish culture. A fascinating exploration of the complex junctures between American Judaism and the market.”

Elaine Allen Lechtreck, Southern White Ministers and the Civil Rights Movement (University Press of Mississippi)
From the publisher: “Based on interviews and personal memoirs, Southern White Ministers and the Civil Rights Movement traces the efforts of [white] clergymen who--deeply moved by the struggle of African Americans--looked for ways to reconcile the history of discrimination and slavery with Christian principles and to help their black neighbors.”

Reid Neilson and Scott Marianno, eds., A Voice in the Wilderness: The 1888-1930 General Conference Sermons of Mormon Historian Andrew Jenson (Oxford University Press)
J. Spencer Fluhman: “Jenson's sermons offer windows into a largely forgotten Latter-day Saint past and remind us, again, how profoundly historical sensibility shapes the tradition.”

Anna M. Nogar, Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue, 1628 to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press)
John Morán González: “Thanks to Nogar’s clear style and ground-breaking research, this book provides a fascinating account of how one nun’s writings influenced the course of the Spanish colonial project even as she became a legend in the Americas despite never crossing the Atlantic.”

Seth Perry, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton University Press)
David Holland: “Early national Americans, [Perry] argues, used the Bible as an instrument of self-fashioning and for the construction of intersubjective relationships during the unstable period that followed the American Revolution. I will think about the early republic's processes of scripturalization differently and more profitably because of Perry's book.”

Arlene M. Sánchez Walsh, Pentecostals in America (Columbia University Press)
Paul Harvey: “. . . explores, describes, and interprets the almost infinitely varied and complex world of American Pentecostalism. The result is an impressionist painting of Pentecostalism in America, beautifully colored and bursting with vivid description and stimulating interpretations, both useful and delightfully interesting to read.”

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect: Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror (Rutgers University Press)
Moustafa Bayoumi: “Scholars of Muslim Americans have long needed a rigorous study of how Muslims get racialized during the War on Terror. Saher Selod has not only provided us with the answers we were seeking but importantly shows how this racialization is both profoundly gendered and deeply institutionalized into today’s surveillance state.”

July

Elisabeth Ceppi, Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England (University Press of New England)
Christopher Tomlins: “In this wise and subtle exploration of the culture of service in Puritan New England, Ceppi teaches us both the true depth of meaning in the familiar expression ‘work ethic’ and the centrality of mastering others to mastering oneself.”

Edwin S. Gustad, Heath W. Carter, and Mark A. Noll (eds), A Documentary History of Religion in America, 4th edition (Eerdmans Press)
Kate Bowler: “This updated collection of primary documents has been expertly pulled into a single volume to give a new generation of students access to a wide range of prominent religious voices. Beautifully narrated and carefully curated, these readings are thoughtfully chosen to showcase fundamental debates about the character of American religion.”

Forrester A. “Woody” Lee and James S. Pringle, A Noble and Independent Course: The LIfe of Reverend Edward Mitchell (University Press of New England)
From the publisher: “In 1828 Edward Mitchell was the first student of African descent to graduate from Dartmouth College, more than thirty-five years before any other Ivy League school admitted a black student. This book tells Mitchell’s life story with the help of a recently rediscovered trove of his college essays, notes on his religious conversion, and hand-copied versions of his sermons.”

David C. Posthumus, All My Relatives: Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual (University of Nebraska Press)
Philippe Descola: “In this superb ethnography of North American animism, David Posthumus paints a vivid and poetic picture of what it meant for the nineteenth-century Lakota Sioux to live in a world beyond the human that they shared with scores of animal persons and spirits. A remarkable achievement.”

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New Books in American Religious History: 2018 Year in Preview, Part One (January-April)

Four of us—Erin Bartram (University of Hartford), William Black (Rice University), Michel Sun Lee (University of Texas at Austin), and Moxy Moczygemba (University of Florida)—are excited to present part one of the 2018 book preview list! This post covers releases from January through April 2018.

We’ve grouped the books according to which month they’ll be published. We’ve tried to include as many relevant and interesting titles as we could find, but are sure we’ve missed some worthy new books. Please feel free to use the comments to add to this list and we’ll update the post as needed.

January

Gary James Bergera, ed., Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1999 (Signature Books)
From the publisher: “The honest, captivating, and unapologetic diaries of the ‘father of Mormon history’ and founder of the Mormon History Association.”

John Corrigan, ed., Feeling Religion (Duke University Press)
Pamela Klassen: “...shows how and why the study of emotions needs the study of religion. Characterized by the methodological and geocultural diversity that makes up the field, Feeling Religion puts affect theory and cognitive science in conversation with older theoretical—and theological—approaches.”

Sylvie DuBois, Malcolm Richardson, and Emilie Gagnet Leumas, Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720–1955: Linguistic Practices of the Catholic Church (LSU Press)
From the publisher: “Mining three centuries of evidence from the Archdiocese of New Orleans archives, the authors discover proof of an extraordinary one-hundred-year rise and fall of bilingualism in Louisiana. The multiethnic laity, clergy, and religious in the nineteenth century necessitated the use of multiple languages in church functions, and bilingualism remained an ordinary aspect of church life through the antebellum period. After the Civil War, however, the authors show a steady crossover from French to English in the Church, influenced in large part by an active Irish population. It wasn’t until decades later, around 1910, that the Church began to embrace English monolingualism and French faded from use.”

Robert Hunt Ferguson, Remaking the Rural South: Interracialism, Christian Socialism, and Cooperative Farming in Jim Crow Mississippi (University of Georgia Press)
From the publisher: “In the winter of 1936, two dozen black and white ex-sharecropping families settled on some two thousand acres in the rural Mississippi Delta, one of the most insular and oppressive regions in the nation. Thus began a twenty-year experiment—across two communities—in interracialism, Christian socialism, cooperative farming, and civil and economic activism.”

Robert N. Gross, Public vs. Private: The Early History of School Choice in America (Oxford University Press)
From the publisher: “In the late nineteenth century, American Catholics began constructing rival, urban parochial school systems, an enormous and dramatic undertaking that challenged public school systems' near-monopoly of education…. States quickly sought ways to regulate this burgeoning private sector and the competition it produced, even attempting to abolish private education altogether in the 1920s. Ultimately, however, Gross shows how the public policies that resulted produced a stable educational marketplace, where choice flourished. The creation of the educational marketplace that we have inherited today--with systematic alternatives to public schools--was as much a product of public power as of private initiative.

James Hudnut-Beumler and Mark Silk, eds., The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America (Columbia University Press)
Elesha Coffman: “With precision, clarity, and balance, these authors explore many facets of the well-known but less well understood mainline tradition. The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America offers facts, a guide to pertinent literature, a survey of history, and predictions about coming challenges and opportunities—all highly relevant to conversations about religion in American culture.”

Amanda Izzo, Liberal Christianity and Women's Global Activism: The YWCA of the USA and the Maryknoll Sisters (Rutgers University Press)
Ann Braude: "Amanda Izzo’s book is a revelation. Two intertwining stories--the Maryknoll sisters going from cold warriors to dissidents, and the YWCA as the target of anti-communist repression-- together demonstrate how faith in the power of love propelled Christian women’s political agendas on a world stage in the 20th century."

P. C. Kemeny, The New England Watch and Ward Society (Oxford University Press)
Peter J. Thuesen: “Attempts to dictate public morality are usually associated with the Puritans and later fundamentalists. But as Paul Kemeny shows, it was theological liberals who were among the most zealous crusaders against 'vice' in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His fine book is not only an indispensable contribution to our understanding of liberal Protestantism but also a cautionary tale about the perils of coercive tactics for achieving cultural consensus.”

Juan Francisco Martínez, The Story of Latino Protestants in the United States (Eerdmans)
From the publisher: “Beginning with a description of the diverse Latino Protestant community and a summary of his own historiographical approach, Martínez then examines six major periods in the history of American Latino Protestantism, paying special attention to key social, political, and religious issues—including immigration policies, migration patterns, enculturation and assimilation, and others—that framed its development and diversification during each period.”


February


Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Quakerism (Cambridge University Press)
From the publisher: “In a series of eighteen essays written by an international team of scholars, and commissioned especially for this volume, the Companion covers the history of Quakerism from its origins to the present day. Employing a range of methodologies, it features sections on the history of Quaker faith and practice, expressions of Quaker faith, regional studies, and emerging spiritualities. It also examines all branches of Quakerism, including evangelical, liberal, and conservative, as well as non-theist Quakerism and convergent Quaker thought.”

Marie W. Dallam, Cowboy Christians (Oxford University Press)
Joseph Laycock: "Dallam masterfully integrates archival research, quantitative data, and ethnographic thick description to shed light on a movement that has thus far been little known and inadequately understood. This is a must-read for anyone interested in 'muscular Christianity.'”

D.H. Dilbeck, Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet (University of North Carolina Press)
George C.Rable: "An original and often moving account of a complex but endlessly interesting figure, a giant in his time who still speaks to Americans today. Dilbeck has treated Douglass's religious faith and prophetic character more carefully than any previous scholar."

Philip Hamburger, Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech (University of Chicago Press)
Ilya Somin: “While there are many books about the role of religion and politics and a large literature on the constitutional implications of tax exemptions and the regulation of nonprofits, none bring these topics together like Hamburger’s sophisticated, original, and compelling arguments. Hamburger persuasively argues that this seemingly modest provision in the tax code actually has important implications for constitutional law, religious freedom, and the development of American liberalism.”

Justine Howe, Suburban Islam (Oxford University Press)
Kecia Ali: “Ethnographically rich and analytically powerful, Suburban Islam explores how the upper-middle-class members of Chicago's Webb Foundation navigate and negotiate religious and national belonging in the post-9/11, pre-Trump era. Justine Howe analyzes racialized identieids, including whiteness, and shows how participants demonstrate their Americanness through commitments to the nuclear family, gender equality, and religious pluralism. Suburban Islam is essential reading for both scholars and students.”

Richard Moon, Putting Faith in Hate: When Religion Is the Source or Target of Hate Speech (Cambridge University Press)
Jamie Cameron: “There may be no greater challenge to freedom theory today than the triangulation of hate, speech, and religion. Professor Moon is Canada's foremost authority on religious and expressive freedom, and his newest book, Putting Faith in Hate, is at the forefront of timely and critical scholarship on the intersection of these values.”

Lucas Volkman, Houses Divided: Evangelical Schisms and the Crisis of the Union in Missouri (Oxford University Press)
John Patrick Daly: “...a vital and groundbreaking book that expands historical understanding of both evangelicalism and the entire Civil War Era. Through the microcosm of church schisms in Missouri, it illuminates the role of religious division in the ideological, economic, legal, social, and political changes that transformed America between 1830 and 1875. Rich in insights, its discussion of the schisms' role in Reconstruction is particularly original and brilliant."


March


Michael Doyle, The Ministers' War: John W. Mears, the Oneida Community, and the Crusade for Public Morality (Syracuse University Press)
Anthony Wonderley: "The first close-up examination of an interesting clash of moralities in central New York during the 1870s: a minister’s crusade led by Professor John Mears of Hamilton College against the nearby Oneida Community, a utopian commune infamous for free love."

Tracy Fessenden, Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press)
Judith Weisenfeld: “With beautiful prose and nuanced analysis, Fessenden navigates the reader through the religious landscape that shaped Holiday’s life and career and tunes our ear to listen for how the soundscape and spirituality of those religious sources shaped her artistry. What emerges is a rich and compelling portrait at the intersection of Holiday’s personal history, American Catholicism, blues and jazz culture, and the currents of race and gender in American life.”

Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, Heather R. White, eds., Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States (University of North Carolina Press)
Margot Canaday: "Hallelujah! Historians of sexuality and historians of religion are writing their entangled histories, and setting aside repression and rebellion as the primary frameworks for understanding as they do. This pathbreaking volume will spark conversation and spur research."

Katharine Gerbner, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press)
Jon Sensbach: "How and why did Christianity, seemingly built on spiritual emancipation and equality, give blessing to African slavery in the Americas? Christian Slavery is a powerful new interpretation of this question that will inspire scholars to rethink the connections between religion, race, and slavery in the early modern Atlantic world."

Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (Oxford University Press)
From the publisher: “...brings together a number of established scholars, as well as younger scholars on the rise, to provide a scholarly overview for those interested in the role of religion and race in American history. Thirty-four scholars from the fields of History, Religious Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and more investigate the complex interdependencies of religion and race from pre-Columbian origins to the present. The volume addresses the religious experience, social realities, theologies, and sociologies of racialized groups in American religious history, as well as the ways that religious myths, institutions, and practices contributed to their racialization.”

Samuel Goldman. God's Country: Christian Zionism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press)
Raymond Haberski: "A serious and substantial contribution to U.S. intellectual history. Samuel Goldman's careful reading of the relationship between American Protestants and a biblically grounded Zionism not only provides expert understanding of the deeply religious foundation of American Exceptionalism but also forces a reconsideration of the intellectual terrain."

Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (Oxford University Press)
Pekka Hämäläinen: “In this important and much-needed book, religion emerges as something quite surprising and new: as a tool of indigenous dispossession and as a means of preserving native sovereignty and cultural autonomy. The Gods of Indian Country uncovers the centrality of religion to what it meant to be a Native American in the 19th-century United States as well as the centrality of Native Americans to the history of religion in America.”

Sandra Jean Graham, Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry (University of Illinois Press)
Portia K. Maultsby: “Sandra Graham breaks new ground in her nuanced examination of the white-controlled spiritual or jubilee industry, and of claims for musical and cultural authenticity by black college and independent jubilee groups, as well as white and black performers of blackface minstrelsy, American folk music, and European classical traditions.”

Sarah M. Griffith, The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights: Liberal Protestant Activism, 1900–1950 (University of Illinois Press)
David Hollinger: “YMCA officials with experience as Protestant missionaries in Japan led the defense of Asian Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. Griffith illuminates several decades of anti-racist organizing and writing by a dynamic group of Y leaders, culminating in the group’s climactic and courageous defense of Japanese Americans during World War II. This is a substantial research achievement that broadens our understanding of ecumenical Protestantism and of the history of civil rights.”

Paul Christopher Johnson, Pamela E. Klassen, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State (University of Chicago Press)
Courtney Bender: “Ekklesia breathes welcome new life into arguments about “church and state,” offering fresh coordinates, frontiers, and observations with which to better understand the knotty and often violent hybrids of ‘churchstate’ relations throughout the Americas. Read separately and in comparison, its three provocative narratives and erudite opening chapter offer an important new path for understanding the enduring entanglements of religious matters in the shaping of sovereignty and peoplehood in American state formations.”

Ellen Lewin, Filled with the Spirit: Sexuality, Gender, and Radical Inclusivity in a Black Pentecostal Church Coalition (University of Chicago Press)
From the publisher: “Lewin examines the seemingly paradoxical relationship between TFAM and traditional black churches, focusing on how congregations and individual members reclaim the worship practices of these churches and simultaneously challenge their authority. The book looks closely at how TFAM worship is legitimated and enhanced by its use of gospel music and considers the images of food and African American culture that are central to liturgical imagery, as well as how understandings of personal authenticity tie into the desire to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Throughout, Lewin takes up what has been mostly missing from our discussions of race, gender, and sexuality—close attention to spirituality and faith.”

John Loughery, Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America (Cornell University Press)
Daniel Walker Howe: “Archbishop Hughes, a major player in nineteenth-century U.S. history, finally receives his due in John Loughery's fascinating, wide-ranging, richly informative, and insightful biography.”

Harvey Markowitz, Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916 (University of Oklahoma Press)
Frederick E. Hoxie: “Harvey Markowitz’s exploration of the dramatic encounter between Christians and indigenous people in Sioux country is a model of ethnohistorical scholarship. Rooted in a deep understanding of the two traditions that crossed paths on the Rosebud more than a century ago, Converting the Rosebud is a fresh and stunning work that teaches us a great deal about faith, culture change, and the rich religious history of America.”

Samira K. Mehta, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press)
Jodi Eichler-Levine: "Samira Mehta’s ethnographic study of Jewish-Christian intermarriage is thoughtfully contextualized within American religious history, sociology, and cultural studies, painting a powerful and nuanced picture of interfaith families from the mid-twentieth century to the present. I found myself fascinated by this book."

Damien Murray, Irish Nationalists in Boston: Catholicism and Conflict, 1900–1928 (Catholic University of America Press)
From the publisher: “During the first quarter of the twentieth century, the intersection of support for Irish freedom and the principles of Catholic social justice transformed Irish ethnicity in Boston…. Boston's Irish nationalists drew heavily on Catholic Church teachings such that Irish ethnicity came to be more clearly identified with the advocacy of both cultural pluralism and the rights of immigrant and working families in Boston and America.”

Emily Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (University of Chicago Press)
Jennifer Fleissner: “Marshaling a truly astonishing array of firsthand research, Ogden’s wonderful Credulity provides the first full-scale history of the fascinating phenomenon of mesmerism in the United States. Ogden not only offers elegant and innovative readings of major nineteenth-century novels and unjustly neglected works alike, but reframes some of the most hotly contested questions in contemporary scholarship: the status of modernity as a 'secular age,' the fate within it of ‘enchantment,' and the idealization of agency.”

Darel E. Paul, From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage (Baylor University Press)
Scott Yenor: "A new managerial elite has ascended to power in the American academy, learned professions, corporations, religious bodies, and government. Darel Paul not only charts how this elite has led the country to normalize homosexuality but also shows how the campaign for same-sex marriage constitutes this elite’s identity in our time. . . . From Tolerance to Equality is a must-read showing how our Culture Wars are the leading edge of factional conflict in America."

Amanda Porterfield, Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation (Oxford University Press)
Harry S. Stout: “This fascinating new study explores the overlapping terrain of Christianity and contract law from Roman antiquity to the twenty-first century world of Enron and global corporations. In bringing together the Pauline idea of 'corporate membership' with the evolving world of corporate America it has no equal in breadth of scholarship, grace of style, or acuity of interpretation. Nothing less than a scholarly tour de force."

James W. Sanders, Irish vs. Yankees: A Social History of the Boston Schools (Oxford University Press)
From the publisher: “... takes a new look at [a] critical period in the development of Boston schools, from 1822, when Boston officially became a city, to the Second World War. Framing the discussion around the Catholic hierarchy, he considers the interplay of social forces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that led to the political rise of the Irish Catholic over the native Brahmin and the way this development shaped Boston's schools.”

Randall J. Stephens, The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock and Roll (Harvard University Press)
David Hempton: “Stephens brilliantly explores the many enmities, ambiguities, adaptations, and constant braiding of rock music and conservative Christian youth culture as the electricity of rock music jolted and shocked parents and captivated teens and young adults. The fiercely fought battles over music, values and taste were indeed proxy wars for the soul of the nation.”

Daniel P. Stone, William Bickerton: Forgotten Latter Day Prophet (Signature Books)
From the publisher: “The previously untold biography of William Bickerton, founder of the third-largest Latter Day Saint denomination [the Church of Jesus Christ].”

Mary E. Stuckey, Political Vocabularies: FDR, the Clergy Letters, and the Elements of Political Argument (Michigan State University Press)
Denise M. Bostdorff: ““Mary Stuckey takes what appears to be a most conventional set of messages—letters written by religious leaders in response to FDR’s 1935 query on how the government might better serve their communities—and sheds extraordinary light on the New Deal realignment by analyzing its rhetorical markers in the form of competing political vocabularies offered by these clergy.”

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion (InterVarsity Press)
William J. Barber II: “So what happened to Christianity in America? This is the question my brother Jonathan faces head-on in this book. He follows this question to the heart of America's original sin, and he invites all of us to join him there and face another question: is our God greater than America's racism? This is a question we must answer, no matter the color of our skin. Slaveholder religion has infected every corner of the church in America—including the black church.”


April

Betty Livingston Adams, Black Women’s Christian Activism: Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb (New York University Press)
Judith Weisenfeld: “Well researched, engaging, and accessible, Adams’s work adds new dimensions to our understanding of the history of the black women’s club movement, their participation in interracial social reform and political organizing, and leadership in black churches. She has done a great service in restoring these women to a place of importance in the narrative of African American religious history.”

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear (University of California Press)
Naomi Klein: “Deftly pairing his deep legal expertise with a searching moral dialogue, Khaled A. Beydoun breaks down U.S. Islamophobia as the full-fledged system that it is—one with a very specific history, but tightly linked to other forms of white supremacy.”

Matthew Bowman, Christian: The Politics of a Word in America (Harvard University Press)
Grant Wacker: “Spanning American history from Reconstruction to the present, Bowman shows that the word ‘Christian’ has persistently borne political and cultural meanings that far transcend theological beliefs and religious practices. Elegantly written, deeply researched, and persuasively argued…”

Heather D. Curtis, Holy Humanitarians: American Evangelicals and Global Aid (Harvard University Press)
Darren Dochuk: “A stellar study of the popular Christian Herald and its outsized importance in the emergence of American evangelical media, philanthropy, and global engagement at the turn of the twentieth century.”

David J. Endres, Many Tongues, One Faith: A History of Franciscan Parish Life in the United States (Catholic University of America Press)
From the publisher: “The history of Franciscan parishes in the United States mirrors the social, religious and cultural shifts brought about by repeated waves of immigrants to the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study offers a glimpse into the struggles of Franciscan priests, sisters, and laity attempting to live out their faith amidst the challenges of the time: religious bigotry, racial and ethnic strife, and cultural and religious challenges. The Franciscan experience provides an important element in the tapestry of the American experience.”

John H. Evans, Morals Not Knowledge: Recasting the Contemporary U.S. Conflict between Religion and Science (University of California Press)
Elaine Howard Ecklund: “Evans argues that contemporary debate around religion and science in the U.S. public sphere assumes that religious people lack knowledge of science. In reality, most everyday Americans (even conservative Protestants) accept and uphold science. The kind of synthetic field-building work that Evans does is needed in this burgeoning area.”

Nancy A. Hewitt, Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds (University of North Carolina Press)
Carol Faulkner: “Radical Friend is a pleasure to read, offering a significant reinterpretation of nineteenth-century American reform as egalitarian, interracial, and defiant of social, political, and religious hierarchies.”

James Hudnut-Beumler, Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table: Contemporary Christianities in the American South (University of North Carolina Press)
Paul Harvey: “This rich, warm book wears its learning lightly, telling fascinating stories of diversity in the expression of contemporary Christianities in the South. The diversity here is very real—snake-handlers, Civil War reenactors, post-Katrina victims, megachurch attendees, Catholics, homeschoolers, LGBT-friendly congregations, creationists, and political figures ranging from right to left. While Christianity continues to dominate the culture of the southern states, Christianities represent many different kinds of people.”

Jon R. Kershner, John Woolman and the Government of Christ: A Colonial Quaker’s Vision for the British Atlantic World (Oxford University Press)
From the publisher: “John Woolman, a tailor, was a lay Quaker leader in religiously charged 18th century colonial America. Woolman attempted to shape the rapidly changing culture and economy of the midcentury according to his radical apocalyptic theology. Woolman's theological vision stemmed from his idealization of the Hebrew prophets, which led him to encourage social reforms and to critique the burgeoning trans-Atlantic economy, slavery, and British imperial conflicts…. Kershner argues that instead of the militant apocalypticism commonly associated with radical Christian groups, Woolman utilized Quaker and mystical sources to craft a spiritualized ‘apocalypse of the heart.’ This book describes Woolman's alternative vision for colonial society, and reveals the sources and social consequences of radical colonial theologies.”

Pamela E. Klassen, The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press)
From the publisher: “At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, a settler-mystic living on northwest coast of British Columbia invented radio mind: Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Retelling Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment, Pamela Klassen shows us how agents of colonialism built metaphysical traditions on land they claimed to have conquered.”

Benjamin R. Kracht, Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas: The Ghost Dance, Peyote, and Christianity (University of Nebraska Press)
Donald L. Fixico: “Benjamin Kracht enlightens us about how indigenous groups, once called the vanishing race, survived and rebuilt their nations. Through religious syncretism and their unique understanding of the sacred, the Kiowa people established a new Kiowa Way—combining traditionalism with external religions. This extraordinary scholarship explores the resilience of indigenous peoples and the reinventing of culture.”

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New Books in American Religious History: 2017 Year in Preview, Part Three (September-December)

Erin Bartram, William Black, Michel Sun Lee, and Moxy Moczygemba

Four of us—Erin Bartram (University of Hartford), William Black (Rice University), Michel Sun Lee (University of Texas at Austin), and Moxy Moczygemba (University of Florida)—are excited to present part three of the 2017 book preview list! This post covers releases from September through December 2017. Thank you, Paul Putz, for all your incredible work with the book lists thus far and for entrusting us with the reins. By the way, check out part one and part two if you missed them earlier this year.

As is the custom, here’s a little preface we’ve mostly borrowed from Paul: we’ve listed the books in roughly chronological order based on the month of their tentative release date. We’ve tried to include as many relevant and interesting titles as we could find, but are sure we’ve missed some worthy new books. Our reason may be that some publishers don't have updated information on their websites, or because we’ve simply missed it. Please feel free to use the comments to add to this list and we’ll update the post as needed.

We four each define "American” and “religion” a little differently. But for the purposes of these lists we follow Paul’s lead in adopting Kathryn Gin Lum's response in this IUPUI RAAC forum, where she articulated an understanding of "America" as the region that eventually became known as the United States. That definition does have problems, of course, which is why your contributions to this list—contributions which envision "America" differently—are more than welcome.

SEPTEMBER

James B. Bell, Anglicans, Dissenters and Radical Change in Early New England, 1686–1786 (Palgrave Macmillan)
Stephen Taylor: “...grounded on an unrivaled knowledge of the clergy serving in the American colonies in the century before the Revolution. The result is an important book, offering a rich and sophisticated account which reveals clearly the distinctiveness of Anglican experience and identity in New England compared both with the mother country and with the middle and southern colonies.”


Damon T. Berry, Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism (Syracuse University Press)
Hugh Urban: "A powerful, original, and extremely timely book. Tracing the history of white nationalism in the United States, Berry examines a series of hugely influential but today little known figures and movements, revealing their key role in the broader landscape of American religious, political, and racist discourses. Perhaps most importantly, Berry’s book also highlights the continuities between these twentieth-century racist currents and our own historical moment, with the rise of the alt-right movement, and the resurgence of white nationalism."


Tricia Colleen Bruce, Parish and Place: Making Room for Diversity in the American Catholic Church (Oxford University Press)
Nancy T. Ammerman:"Parish matters, but so too does diocese. This book brilliantly shows us how the Catholic Church as an institution has made decisions about how to respond to the diversity and voluntarism of American religion. Combining vivid ethnographic detail with astute organizational analysis, Parish and Place adds a critical piece to the puzzle that is contemporary religious practice."


R. Andrew Chesnut, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press)
Timothy Matovina: "Chesnut provides a much-needed analysis of the meteoric rise in devotion to La Santa Muerte, the saint of death whose appeal has attracted the attention of immigrants, jilted lovers, journalists, drug dealers, clergy, the infirmed, and a host of needy petitioners. This first book-length study of the devotion will be a foundational reference point for future researchers as the Santa Muerte phenomenon continues to evolve."


Arun W. Jones, Missionary Christianity and Local Religion: American Evangelicalism in North India, 1836-1870 (Baylor University Press)
Geoffrey A. Oddie: “...highlights two especially important sources of influence affecting the ethos and character of mission communities: bhakti ideas that were popular in the towns and countryside of North India and the influence of mid-nineteenth-century Princeton theology on the North Indian Christian leadership.”


Rosalyn R. LaPier, Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet (University of Nebraska Press)
Frederick E. Hoxie: “...guides us through the meanings the Blackfeet community has attached to the plants and natural phenomena that surround them and at the same time makes clear the boundless complexity and stunning beauty of this indigenous cultural tradition.”


Kathryn Lofton, Consuming Religion (University of Chicago Press)
Robert A. Orsi: “...probes the most cunning junctures of contemporary neoliberal religion. Ranging over corporate cubicles; the advertising industry; finance; the dark arts of the creation, promotion, and destruction of celebrity; and much, much more, Lofton shows how at the deepest levels of imagination, desire, and discipline the modern histories of neoliberalism and religion—and the contemporary practices of both—have been and remain utterly entwined.”


Elizabeth Schleber Lowry, Invisible Hosts: Performing the Nineteenth-Century Spirit Medium’s Autobiography (SUNY Press)
From the publisher: “... explores how the central tenets of Spiritualism influenced ways in which women conceived of their bodies and their civic responsibilities, arguing that Spiritualist ideologies helped to lay the foundation for the social and political advances made by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As public figures, female spirit mediums of the Victorian era were often accused of unfeminine (and therefore transgressive) behavior. A rhetorical analysis of nineteenth-century spirit mediums’ autobiographies reveals how these women convinced readers of their authenticity both as respectable women and as psychics.”


Carol A. Mortland, Cambodian Buddhism in the United States (SUNY Press)
From the publisher: “Cambodian Buddhism in the United States is the first comprehensive anthropological study of Khmer Buddhism as practiced by Khmer refugees in the United States. Based on research conducted at Khmer temples and sites throughout the country over a period of three and a half decades, Carol A. Mortland uses participant observation, open-ended interviews, life histories, and dialogues with Khmer monks and laypeople to explore the everyday practice of Khmer religion, including spirit beliefs and healing rituals.”


Max Perry Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (University of North Carolina Press)
Philip L. Barlow: “Racial issues, shifting though Max Perry Mueller shows them to be, remain a part of Mormon identity, self-understanding, and understanding of the world. Mueller’s book makes a significant contribution to our view of Mormonism and race and provides a rich and discerning look at the larger picture of race, religion, and American history.”


S. Brent Plate, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-creation of the World (Columbia University Press)
David Chidester: “Plate gives us the best introduction into the exploration of religion and film by brilliantly interweaving the worldmaking of religious myths and rituals, sacred times, and spaces, with the worldmaking of cinema.”


Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Beacon Press)
Gary Nash: “The unswerving eighteenth-century abolitionist Benjamin Lay, maligned when not ignored for many generations, has at last found his sympathetic biographer. In this captivating, must-read book, Marcus Rediker shows that Lay’s disfigured body contained a mind of steel and a heart overflowing with compassion for victims of the Atlantic slave trade. Lay’s place in the annals of American reform is now secure. If you’re ready to have your mind changed about received wisdom on the eccentric, lonely early abolitionist who blazed the way for later antislavery stalwarts, read this brilliantly researched and passionately written book.”


Joy Schulz, Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific (University of Nebraska Press)
Gary Y. Okihiro: “We understand that the normative, heterosexual family constitutes the nation-state. This remarkable, innovative study reveals the centrality of that family in ‘birthing empire’ through a history of childhood. Race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion intersect to advance U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and settler colonialism in Hawai‘i.”


Douglas Stark, When Basketball Was Jewish: Voices of Those Who Played the Game (University of Nebraska Press)
Ernie Grunfeld, president of the Washington Wizards: “The players and coaches chronicled in this book are not only important figures in Jewish basketball history; they played an important part in the history of the game. As a student of the game, a basketball lifer, and someone who is extremely proud of his Jewish heritage, I can appreciate the doors that they opened, and I’m glad that their stories are being told.”


OCTOBER

Barry M. Andrews, Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul (University of Massachusetts Press)
From the publisher: “American Transcendentalism is often seen as a literary movement—a flowering of works written by New England intellectuals who retreated from society and lived in nature. In Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul, Barry M. Andrews focuses on a neglected aspect of this well-known group, showing how American Transcendentalists developed rich spiritual practices to nurture their souls and discover the divine.”


Eugene Ford, Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia (Yale University Press)
Christopher Goscha: “...a pathbreaking study of how Thai Buddhists interacted with American attempts to use their church in the war on communism in Southeast Asia and how Buddhists transformed their faith, indeed their country, in so doing. Superbly researched and brilliantly argued, it places Thailand in the broader sweep of international history—right where it should be.”


Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (University of Chicago Press)
From the publisher: “...Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was manipulated by Columbus and others in the service of colonial appropriation.”


Hami İnan Gümüş, American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire: A Conceptual Metaphor Analysis of Missionary Narratives, 1820–1898 (Transcript-Verlag)
From the publisher: “...a metaphor-based analysis of the texts produced by the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in the Ottoman Empire from 1820-1898. It explores the conceptual metaphor networks inherent to official missionary discourse. The explication of these networks uncovers how the missionaries defined and depicted themselves and what they encountered.”


Adam Gussow, Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition (UNC Press)
James H. Cone: "Adam Gussow is an excellent interpreter of the blues. He has earned the right to speak. We should listen to him and be informed about one of the most important musical expressions in American history. I strongly recommend Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition."


John Hayes, Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South (University of North Carolina Press)
Paul Harvey: “...a powerfully epic evocation and analysis of the biracial religious world of ordinary southerners who encountered and struggled with God, life, and death through visions, dreams, oral poetry, and song more than they did in formal religious institutions. It's a beautiful work, and a landmark in the field of American religious studies."


David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press)
Kai Bird: “Hollinger tells an astonishing, counterintuitive story of how American Protestant missionaries went abroad armed with a radical egalitarian ideology and eventually came home to spread the gospel of multiculturalism, racial equality, and human rights. With verve and passion, he shines a brilliant light on their long-overlooked influence, showing how they transformed American society in ways we have not fully realized.”


Rachel McBride Lindsey, A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press)
Paul Gutjahr: “...opens up new avenues of investigation by linking photography to religious practice, demonstrating how religious views are shaped by the interaction between material objects and the beholder of these objects. With her sharp insight and impressive research, Lindsey accents, complements, and complicates the all-too-sparse scholarship on photography in nineteenth-century America."


Lynne Marks, Infidels and the Damn Churches: Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia (University of British Columbia Press)
Callum G. Brown: “This is the finest historical study yet done on the culture of atheism and non-religionism in the late modern Western world. It explores the origins of modern secularity in the most secular part of North America. Marks excels in moving from the micro study of individual families and small communities up to cities and the nation. This is a path-breaking work.”


Deborah Dash Moore et al., Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (NYU Press)
Robert W. Snyder: "Jewish New York deftly combines crisp writing, sharp analysis and sophisticated discussions of visual images to explore the evolving relationship between a world city and its Jews. Reaching from the seventeenth century to the present, and weaving together big themes and illuminating lives, the book delves into topics as varied as religion, politics, popular culture and gender. Essential for understanding both Jewish experiences and the broad contours of New York’s history."


Candida R. Moss & Joel S. Baden, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby (Princeton University Press)
Eric H. Cline: "Absolutely riveting. Without exaggeration, this is one of the most interesting books I have read in years. Moss and Baden have embedded a searing indictment within a compelling detective story that ranges from academic intrigue to divinely inspired business acumen, with a driving narrative and a cast of characters worthy of Hollywood, except that this is real life. Bible Nation should be required reading for anyone even thinking of visiting the Museum of the Bible."


Gary B. Nash, Warner Mifflin: Unflinching Quaker Abolitionist (University of Pennsylvania Press)
Thomas P. Slaughter: “...brings the Quaker abolitionist from the historical shadows and into the blazing light of his moral courage and singular efforts to right the terrible wrongs of American slavery and racism. The story may be an old one, but Mifflin's is as important for our own times as it is for our understanding of the Revolutionary era."


Mark J. Rozell and Gleaves Whitney, eds., Religion and the American Presidency (Palgrave Macmillan)
Raymond Tatalovich: "A commitment to religion has persisted across American history regardless of whether the president was a Federalist like Washington, a Jeffersonian like Madison, a Republican like Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan, or a Democrat like Truman, Carter, and Clinton. Religion and the American Presidency is a scholarly benchmark in the presidency studies, and a pioneering new perspective on the highest office in the land."


Julius H. Rubin, Perishing Heathens: Stories of Protestant Missionaries and Christian Indians in Antebellum America (University of Nebraska Press)
From the publisher: “...tells the stories of missionary men and women who between 1800 and 1830 responded to the call to save Native peoples through missions, especially the Osages in the Arkansas Territory, Cherokees in Tennessee and Georgia, and Ojibwe peoples in the Michigan Territory. Rubin also recounts the lives of Native converts, many of whom were from mixed-blood métis families and were attracted to the benefits of education, literacy, and conversion.”


David Tavárez, ed., Words and Worlds Turned Around: Indigenous Christianities in Colonial Latin America (University Press of Colorado)
Felipe Fernández-Armesto: “These intriguingly rich papers help show what happened on some of the most daunting frontiers of cultural exchange, where distinctive forms of Catholicism emerged. Creative misunderstandings, tense collaborations, fruitful contention: every type of encounter is represented here, with vivid evocations.”


Ula Yvette Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (UNC Press)
Tera W. Hunter: “While much has been written about the Nation of Islam, male-centered narratives of the most controversial and high-profile leaders have predominated. And yet, as Taylor demonstrates, without the work and foresight of women, the NOI would have been a far-less-effective organization. This study moves the women of the NOI from the periphery to the center to unveil layers of insight into the politics of black intimacy. It combines compelling storytelling of individual biographies and deft analysis of the larger cultural and political forces impacting the lives of ordinary black people using a rich treasure trove of archival records and interviews. This is a stellar contribution to gender studies, African American studies, and late twentieth-century U.S. history.”


Tisa Wenger, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (UNC Press) 

Sylvester Johnson: "Tisa Wenger has crafted a riveting account of how the Western deployment of religious freedom emerged within the immanent frame of empire. As she examines transnational networks of race, colonialism, and religion, Wenger elucidates the historical and theoretical conundrums of civilizing missions, Indigeneity, democratization, subaltern agencies, and modern terrors that have rendered freedom of religion as a global formation. This is surely the high-water mark of interdisciplinary scholarship on religious freedom, and it sets a new standard."

NOVEMBER

Eliyana R. Adler and Sheila E. Jelen eds., Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades (Wayne State University Press)
Antony Polonsky: "This path-breaking and moving volume examines how American Jewry, now the largest Jewish community in the world, reacted in the postwar years to the decimation of East European Jewry in the Holocaust. It investigates how American Jews absorbed the influx of East European survivors, commemorated the destruction of what had been for many centuries one of the main centers of Jewish life, and sought to intervene to defend the still-existing Jewish communities in the area. It is essential reading for all students of modern Jewish history and of the postwar world.”


Wallace D. Best, Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem (NYU Press)
Edward J. Blum: “With close readings of Langston Hughes's poetry and with finely tuned arguments about the place of religion during the early twentieth century, Wallace Best provides what none has offered before: he shows the beautiful mind of Langston Hughes as a 'thinker about religion.' Langston's Salvation heralds a new day, perhaps even a renaissance, not only in the study Hughes and his poetry, but also of liberal religion in the United States.”


John Corrigan, ed., Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press)
From the publisher: “Focusing on four domains that most readily reflect the importance of Atlantic world spaces for the shape and practice of religion (texts, design, distance, and civics), these essays explore subjects as varied as the siting of churches on the Peruvian Camino Real, the evolution of Hispanic cathedrals, Methodist identity in nineteenth-century Canada, and Lutherans in early eighteenth-century America. Such essays illustrate both how the organization of space was driven by religious interests and how religion adapted to spatial ordering and reordering initiated by other cultural authorities.”


Matthew J. Cressler, Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (NYU Press)
Judith Weisenfeld: “...offers an original and insightful portrait of Chicago’s Black Catholics from the community’s early years through the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements and sheds new light on the dynamic relationship between race and religion in twentieth-century America. With Chicago at the center of the broader story of a 'revolution in Black Catholic identity,' this well-researched and engaging study reveals the complexity and texture of Black Catholics’ religious lives and negotiations of what it meant to be committed to both Black solidarity and community life and to the Roman Catholic Church. Cressler advances the study of Black Catholic history in exciting ways and makes an invaluable contribution."


Paul J. Croce, Young William James Thinking (Johns Hopkins University Press)
James T. Kloppenberg: “This book sets out to solve the deepest and most enduring problem in studies of Williams James: through a developmental biography, Croce has put back together a multi-dimensional thinker who has been taken apart in the multiple, self-contained literatures produced by scholars in every one of the now-distinct disciplines in which James did path-breaking work. Croce’s innovative book brings into focus the multiple efforts James made to combine science and religion, psychology and philosophy, religion and art.”


Julia Duin, In the House of the Serpent Handler: A Story of Faith and Fleeting Fame in the Age of Social Media (University of Tennessee Press)
Ralph Hood: “In the House of the Serpent Handler unfolds in ways that could not have been predicted. Julia Duin intimately recounts the story of serpent handlers raised in an Appalachian religious tradition where their ritualistic expression of faith is more ridiculed than understood. When she began her journey, little could she have known that pastors Mack Wolford and Jamie Coots would suffer fatal bites, and their deaths would lead to the story of a young handler, Andrew Hamblin, who proves to be a tragic figure of youth, social media, and a fall from grace. In the shadow of two deaths, Hamblin’s collapse is doubly sad, but his story sheds a modern light on a misunderstood religious practice.”


Paul Gutjahr, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America (Oxford University Press)
From the publisher: “This Handbook is designed to address a noticeable void in resources focused on analyzing the Bible in America in various historical moments and in relationship to specific institutions and cultural expressions…. This Handbook brings together a number of established scholars, as well as younger scholars on the rise, to provide a scholarly overview—rich with bibliographic resources—to those interested in the Bible's role in American cultural formation.”


Sarah Ruth Hammond, God’s Businessmen: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War, ed. Darren Dochuk (University of Chicago Press)
Kevin M. Kruse: “Well-researched and well-argued, God’s Businessmen builds well on the recent literature on the intersection of religion, business, and politics and advances the field in important new directions. Equally well-written, it will appeal not just to interested academics but to educated general audiences as well. It is, in short, a triumph.”


Felix Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (University of Chicago Press)
Elaine Frantz: “In a time when white supremacy was widespread and unapologetic, the Ku Klux Klan was enormously popular….Klannish Americans played songs like ‘Onward Christian Klansman’ and ‘Daddy Swiped our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan’ on their phonographs and radios...Klan baseball teams and basketball teams were widespread, and sometimes sensationally competed against Catholic, Jewish, and African-American rivals. While Harcourt shows that many found the Klan profoundly un-American, it was very much present at the creation of, and influenced the shape of modern popular culture.”


Rachel Kranson, Ambivalent Embrace: Jewish Upward Mobility in Postwar America (University of North Carolina Press)
From the publisher: “This new cultural history of Jewish life and identity in the United States after World War II focuses on the process of upward mobility. Rachel Kranson challenges the common notion that most American Jews unambivalently celebrated their generally strong growth in economic status and social acceptance during the booming postwar era. In fact, a significant number of Jewish religious, artistic, and intellectual leaders worried about the ascent of large numbers of Jews into the American middle class.”


Mark Massa and Catherine Osborne, American Catholic History: A Documentary Reader, Second Edition (NYU Press)

Julie Byrne: "The documents collected in the first edition topped the list of best resources for teaching the diversity and complexity of US Catholic history, and now this revised edition is even better. From mission manager Eulalia Pérez in California in the 1800s to Pope Francis addressing Congress in 2015, the varied voices summon an astonishing story of solace and conflict in the Roman church, in the American nation, and in the human heart."


William L. Portier, Every Catholic An Apostle: A Life of Thomas A. Judge, CM, 1868–1933 (Catholic University of America Press)
David O’Brien: “...will be of great interest to scholars interested in the history of American religion and theologians and religious studies professionals interested in the laity, vowed religious life and social movements.”


Ronit Y. Stahl, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press)
Darren Dochuk: “Cutting across a century of perpetual war, shifting its analytic gaze from bureaucratic functions of the state to the people of faith who served, from mainline denominations to religious movements on the rise, Ronit Stahl’s study of the military chaplaincy brilliantly recasts our understanding of church-state relations in the modern era. Stahl vividly shows how the military chaplaincy has offered the means for Washington to encourage proper religious expression in a pluralist society, and for faith communities to earn political legitimacy in the eyes of their peers. An essential book for students of American religion, politics, and history.”


Harry Stout, American Aristocrats: A Family, A Fortune, and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books)
Grant Wacker: "Using the story of one multi-generational family as the narrative thread, Harry S. Stout weaves the economic, social, and cultural history of 19th century America into a saga of relentless quest for land. Stout is a master stylist, and his prose is crisp, elegant, and, often enough, both witty and poignant. American Aristocrats gives erudition new dimensions of meaning. It draws readers not only to think about, but also to wrestle with the moral complexities of the building of the nation."


Jim Towns, The Legacy of W.A. Criswell (Stephen F. Austin University Press)
From the publisher: “Towns’s book examines selected speeches from 1956 to 2002, revisiting events that provoked the rhetorical situations of the era and exploring speaker-leader propositions and perspectives.”


Wylin D. Wilson, Economic Ethics & the Black Church (Palgrave Macmillan)
From the publisher: “...The book features unheard voices of individuals experiencing economic deprivation and the faith communities who serve as their refuge. Thus, this project examines the economic ethics of black churches in the rural South whose congregants and broader communities have long struggled amidst persistent poverty."

DECEMBER

Michael R. Cohen, Cotton Capitalists: American Jewish Entrepreneurship in the Reconstruction Era (NYU Press)
Jonathan D. Sarna: "This model study exposes the previously unknown Jewish ethnic network that filled a critical niche in the southern cotton trade during the second half of the nineteenth century. A major contribution with broad implications for students of economic history, Jewish history, and the history of the American South."


R. Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books)
From the publisher: “From the 1920s onward, a once-solid Christian consensus regarding gender roles and sexual morality began to crumble, as liberal Protestants sparred with fundamentalists and Catholics over questions of obscenity, sex education, and abortion. Both those who advocated for greater openness in sexual matters and those who resisted new sexual norms turned to politics to pursue their moral visions for the nation. Moral Combat is a history of how the Christian consensus on sex unraveled, and how this unraveling has made our political battles over sex so ferocious and so intractable.”


April E. Holm, A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era (LSU Press)
From the publisher: “...provides the first analysis of the crucial role of churches in border states in shaping antebellum divisions in the major evangelical denominations, in navigating the relationship between church and the federal government, and in rewriting denominational histories to forestall reunion in the churches. Offering a new perspective on nineteenth-century sectionalism, it highlights how religion, morality, and politics interacted—often in unexpected ways—in a time of political crisis and war.”


P. Allen Krause, To Stand Aside or Stand Alone: Southern Reform Rabbis and the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Mark K. Bauman with Stephen Krause (University of Alabama Press)
Jonathan D. Sarna: “In 1966, Rabbi Allen Krause conducted frank interviews with Southern rabbis concerning Jews and the American civil rights movement. Now, fifty years later, transcripts of these precious interviews have finally been unsealed. The results—some of them explosive, some disturbing, and all of them illuminating—form the core of this book. It makes a unique contribution.”


Todd LeVasseur, Religious Agrarianism and the Return of Place: From Values to Practice in Sustainable Agriculture (SUNY Press)
Paul B. Thompson: “The blend of empirical sociology and philosophical/religious ethics is impressive. I found the book not only interesting but valuable for my own scholarship.”


Thomas R. McKibbens, ed., Baptists in Early North America—First Baptist Church, Boston, Massachusetts, Volume IV (Mercer University Press)
From the publisher: “The records span the time from the founding in 1665 until the death of Samuel Stillman in 1807. They reflect the extraordinary times in which the church grew and flourished, including a vivid description of the day in March, 1679, when the little congregation discovered that the Puritan authorities had sent a marshal to nail shut the doors of their place of worship.”


Jamie L. Pietruska, Looking Forward: Prediction and Uncertainty in Modern America (University of Chicago Press)
From the publisher: “...Pietruska uncovers a culture of prediction in the modern era, where forecasts became commonplace as crop forecasters, 'weather prophets,' business forecasters, utopian novelists, and fortune-tellers produced and sold their visions of the future.”


Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797, Revised Edition (University of Arizona Press)
From the publisher: “For decades, Stafford Poole has stood at the forefront of scholarship on the historicity of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon that serves as one of the most important formative religious and national symbols in the history of Mexico. Poole’s groundbreaking first edition of Our Lady of Guadalupe was the first ever to examine in depth every historical source of the Guadalupe apparitions. In this revised edition, Poole employs additional sources and commentary to further challenge common interpretations and assumptions about the Guadalupan tradition.”


Peter Kerry Powers, Goodbye Christ? Religion, Masculinity, and the New Negro Renaissance (University of Tennessee Press)
From the publisher: “Despite the proliferation of criticism on the cultural work of the Harlem Renaissance over the course of the past two decades, surprisingly few critics have focused on the ways in which religious contexts shaped the works of New Negro writers and artists during that time. In Goodbye Christ? Masculinity and Christianity in the New Negro Renaissance, Peter Kerry Powers fills this scholarly void, exploring how the intersection of race, religion, and gender during the Harlem Renaissance impacted the rhetoric and imagination of prominent African American writers of the early twentieth century.”


Shari Rabin, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America (NYU Press)
Lila Corwin Berman: "For far too long, historians of American Jews have glossed over most of the nineteenth century, as preamble for the truer or more interesting histories of twentieth-century American Jewry. Rabin offers a deeply researched, beautifully rendered case for the centrality of the nineteenth century to how we understand American Judaism. By looking toward ethnographic models, material culture, and narrative techniques, she argues that the provisionality, the instability, and the mobility of nineteenth-century Judaism created new modes of Jewish life suitable to endure in the American environment. Following in the footsteps of Robert Orsi, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Kathryn Lofton, who all expertly wed ethnography to deep historical inquiry, Rabin allows the reader to understand the human contours of Jewish life in motion."


Anthony Wonderley, Oneida Utopia: A Community Searching for Human Happiness and Prosperity (Cornell University Press)
From the publisher: “...seamlessly combines the evidence of social life and intellectual endeavor with the testimony of built environment and material culture. Wonderley shares with readers his intimate knowledge of evidence from the Oneida Community: maps and photographs, quilts and furniture, domestic objects and industrial products, and the biggest artifact of all, their communal home. Wonderley also takes a novel approach to the thought of the commune’s founder, examining individually and in context Noyes’s reactions to interests and passions of the day, including revivalism, millennialism, utopianism, and spiritualism.”

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