What Does This Map Tell Us?

Randall Stephens

The other day in my Religion and American Culture class we were covering mid-19th century America. I've found that asking questions about maps and looking at the demographics of the religious landscape can be a helpful in-class exercise. This map of Major Communal Experiments before 1860 comes from the old Mapcentral site, Bedford/St. Martin's. (Click to enlarge.)


(Students should not get the idea that every American sold his/her possessions, took up with the Shakers, and renounced sex. But still there certainly was quite a bit of communal/utopian action.) After we look at the above in class we ask: What accounts for the heavy presence in the North and the absence in the South? Why did utopian experiments thrive in this age? How did these influence society?

Some selected quotes might provide interesting context to the map and give the students something to ponder. (The two I cite here are not exactly representative, but could get the conversation rolling.) See, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who famously rhapsodized to his friend Thomas Carlyle in 1840:

We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.1 One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the State; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope.

From the southern end, have a look at James Henley Thornwell, or George Fitzhugh, who wrote this in Cannibals All! or Slaves without Masters (1857):

Mormonism had its birth in Western New York, that land fertile of isms--where also arose Spiritual Rappings and Oneida Perfectionism--where Shakers, and Millenarians, and Millerites abound, and all heresies do most flourish . . . . Abolition swallows up little isms, and Socialism swallows up Abolition.

Bedford/St. Martin's Make History site provides some of the best map and visual resources for free.

Guest Post: Social Media in the American Religious History Classroom

Today's guest post comes from John L. Crow, a graduate student at my alma mater, Florida State University, in American Religious History. John's interests lie in theosophical movements, but this post engages the question of how to use social media effectively in our classrooms.--Kelly

Social Media Tools for the Classroom

John L. Crow

We have all read the news about the ever expanding presence of Facebook and other social networking sites. Terms such as “Classroom 2.0” and “Social Learning Network” have been batted around within the larger discussion of how these tools can assist in the classroom. Yet, for religious historians, many of these tools are less than helpful. However, one relatively unknown tool actually could be of use to classrooms and add an interactive way to look at historical periods. Dipity.com is a social networking and group collaboration website that allows users to interactively create timelines. These timelines can be consist of any event at any time period. Each timeline entry contains a title, description, plus a place for an image and a URL. Signing up for the website is free and the timelines can be created and collaborated by any number of people. As an example of what can be shown, I have taken the static table from Appendix I of Mary Beth Norton’s In The Devil’s Snare, the cases heard by the court of Oyer and Terminer in 1692, and rendered it as an interactive timeline here.

One can zoom in and out of the timeline and begin to see the gaps in activity, the clustering in trials, accusations and executions. The timeline makes the intermittent nature of the trials more apparent than a table.

The interactive and open nature of the platform allows anyone to transport time based data to a dynamic, interactive chronology. Classes could share in the creating of timelines, cooperating in populating continuities that collectively illustrate time periods under study. The particulars of events or the overlapping and interrelated aspects of history become visually and animatedly apparent. The best part is that an instructor can create a blank timelines, have students sign up for free accounts and then they can create the timeline entries as parts of assignments and as study aids.

Social networking is a presence in classrooms, regardless if we like it or not. The persistence of laptops and smart phones allows instant access to Facebook and other sites. Dipity.com, though, allows for a more constructive use of social networking, one that engages the students and enhances the possibilities of their comprehension of the complex and dynamic nature of American religious history.

Gender and Religion in American Culture

Kelly Baker

For the spring semester, I am enjoying a rare privilege for lecturers, teaching a senior seminar. I am teaching Gender and Religion in American culture. This is basically a crash course for our majors and non-majors in the intersections between gender and religion, gender as analysis, and the complicated relationships between religion and sexuality in the U.S.. The course is reading heavy and requires a fairly substantial research project. Yet, it is only a sixteen week course, so I couldn't possibly cover all I might want to.

Here's a glimpse of the syllabus:

Description: This course covers the role of religion in lives of American women and men, gender as a category of analysis for the study of religion, the often-conflicted relationship between religion and sexuality, and perhaps most importantly, how religion and the religious construct, reconstruct and deconstruct gender norms. Religion informs gender, but gender also informs religious discourse. American men and women practice and live religion, and thus, religion cannot be separated from the sexed bodies we inhabit. Gender matters.

We will examine the pivotal role of religion in defining and constructing gender from Puritans to Salem Witch Trials to Spiritualism to muscular Christianity (including modern constructions of religion and sport) to contemporary debates over sexuality and abstinence to home birth to LGBTQ concerns to gender performativity. We will use historical and modern case studies to explore both the nature of femininity and masculinity in the religious lives of Americans.

Assignments: Research Project and Presentation, Gender as Analysis Paper (autobiographical paper on how gender impacts you), and a Field Visit.

Select Readings: Joan Scott, “Gender as a Useful Category of Analysis,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053-1075.

Ann Braude, “Women’s History is American Religious History” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas Tweed, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

Pamela Klassen, “Sacred Maternities and Postbiomedical Bodies: Religion and Nature in Contemporary Home Birth,” Signs, 26:3, (Spring 2001), pp. 775-809.

Marilyn J. Westerkamp, “Puritan Patriarchy and the Problem of Revelation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23:3, (Winter 1993), pp. 571-595.

Robert Orsi, “ ‘He Keeps Me Going’: Women’s Devotion to Saint Jude Thaddeus…” in Religion in American History: A Reader, eds. Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, (Oxford: 1998).

Bret Carroll, “The Religious Construction of Masculinity in Victorian America: The Male Mediumship of John Shoebridge Williams,”Religion and American Culture, 7:1, (Winter 1997), 27-60.

Krista McQueeny,"We Are God's Children, Y'All:" Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Lesbian- and Gay-Affirming Congregations, Social Problems, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Feb., 2009), pp. 151-173.

The full syllabus is available here.

For this course, I am relying upon experiential and autobiographical assignments, so I'll post later about what happens. This is a new practice for me, and I think perhaps a concept like gender might make more sense if students have to apply it analytically to themselves. I've already done this. Selfishly, I want to think more about the role of autobiography in scholarship, so I am testing this out on my students as well as myself.

For readers of the blog, what might you assign for a gender in American religions course? What am I missing? What might be added?

Just a quick note to say, I did rely upon articles rather than books to expose students to many styles of gender scholarship in differing subfields (history as well as sociology, etc.) and topics rather than taking a solely historical approach.

What to Do With God in America

Paul Harvey

While we're in catch-up blogging mode, I meant to link to this piece earlier, "What to Do with God in America," over at A Lively Experiment, David McConeghy's blog. McConeghy summarizes and provides links to various of the summaries/reviews/academic critiques of the PBS series, and then proposes an elaborate classroom exercise over a period of week in which students would examine the narrative of the film on their own, and get involved in making a proposed film of their own.

With all the discussion about PBS’ God in America series, it occurred to me that it might be possible to use the series as the basis for a course that privileges deconstruction of the (maligned) narrative that PBS built and therefore employ remixes as a way for students to create counter-narratives that explicitly engage the primary source. Perhaps the documentary would provide a shortcut allowing us to manage both content and technical mastery.

We had some discussion here earlier about the pros/cons of blogging, especially for younger scholars and graduate students. This kind of post certainly fits in the "pro" category, as it provides the kind of reflection on teaching and innovative proposal on classroom work that should be impressive to any search committee.

New Year, New You, New Books … Already?

by Edward J. Blum

We’ve only just begun the fall semester, but it won’t be long until book orders are due for the spring. So, as you’re putting in orders for old faithfuls like The Kingdom of Matthias (IBSN: 0195098358) or new loves like Freedom’s Coming (ISBN: 0807858145), you may want to consider the third editions of Major Problems in American History (ISBN: 0495915130). If you’re not familiar with my blog posts, then you need to know that most of them are self-promotional. If you are not familiar with this series, the Major Problems, then you should really get your hands on them. The collections match 8-10 primary documents from a given period or topic with 2-3 scholarly essays that debate the key points. I have used just about every one and students seem to love them. It’s high-quality one-stop shopping (more like Target than Walmart) for primary and secondary sources!

Sadly, the new edition for Major Problems in American History began with a loss. Just before revisions started, editor Jon Gjerde passed away, professor of history at UC Berkeley and author of some amazing books on the West, ethnicity, and rural life,. I joined my colleague Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman (author of the fantastic book on the Peace Corps, All You Need is Love) to edit the new editions. Professor Gjerde did an incredible job establishing the main contours for the first volume and it’s his strong architecture I built upon.

The two new volumes highlight the role of religion and culture in significant, entertaining, and critical ways. Volume 1 (through Reconstruction) now has poems from Anne Bradstreet and court testimony from Tituba; it follows the emergence of American civil religion with patriot songs from the Revolution and odes to Washington; it careens into the antebellum period with new doctrines from the Church the Church of Latter-day Saints and salacious exposés on the Kingdom of Matthias. It has prophetic visions from Native Americans, new biblical interpretations from feminists locating egalitarianism in the Bible, and heavenly images of emancipation. For secondary documents, Volume I now has snippets from David Hall’s Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment on the colonial era and Nell Painter’s Sojourner Truth on antebellum religion and reform, where Truth’s adventures are matched with the analysis of Finneyite revivalism in Paul Johnson’s Shopkeepers’ Millennium.

Volume II amped up its religious coverage as well. Lost Cause ministers lionize the South, Brigham Young battles anti-Mormon ballads, Mark Twain satirizes the Battle Hymn of the Republic, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson uses new technology to defend the old-time religion, Father Coughlin denounces FDR, Vance Packard laments the religion of America in the Cold War, and Jerry Fallwell calls for the nation to return to the Bible.

God in America, Coming to Your TV Soon!

Paul Harvey

Here's the press release for the much-anticipated PBS "American Experience" production for the fall, "God in America," to be premiered Oct. 11 - Oct. 13. Program summaries are available here.

Coming This Fall to PBS: God in America
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and FRONTLINE present six-hour documentary series

Monday, Oct. 11, 2010 - Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010, 9-11 p.m. ET

Boston, MA [April 14, 2010] -- How has religious belief shaped American history? What role have religious ideas and spiritual experience played in shaping the social, political, and cultural life of what has become the world's most religiously diverse nation?

For the first time on television, God in America, a presentation of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and FRONTLINE, will explore the historical role of religion in the public life of the United States. The six-hour series, which interweaves documentary footage, historical dramatization and interviews with religious historians, will air over three consecutive nights on PBS beginning Oct. 11, 2010.

God in America examines the potent and complex interaction between religion and democracy, the origins of the American concept of religious liberty, and the controversial evolution of that ideal in the nation's courts and political arena. The series considers the role religious ideas and institutions have played in social reform movements from abolition to civil rights, examining the impact of religious faith on conflicts from the American Revolution to the Cold War, and how guarantees of religious freedom created a competitive American religious marketplace. It also explores the intersection of political struggle and spiritual experience in the lives of key American historical figures including Franciscan Friars and the Pueblo leader Po'pay, Puritan leader John Winthrop and dissident Anne Hutchinson, Catholic Bishop John Hughes, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, Reform Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, Scopes trial combatants William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, evangelist Billy Graham, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell.

"The American story cannot be fully understood without understanding the country's religious history," says series executive producer Michael Sullivan. "By examining that history, God in America will offer viewers a fresh, revealing and challenging portrait of the country."

To extend the reach of the series beyond the television screen, God in America has formed strategic partnerships with The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, the Fetzer Institute, Sacred Space International and other organizations. An integrated multimedia campaign set to launch six months prior to broadcast will include community engagement activities, media events and an interactive God in America Web site. The campaign will deepen public understanding of religion and spiritual experience in the life of the nation by encouraging the public to explore the history of their own religious communities and their individual spiritual journeys.

"Americans are awash in a sea of faith, but their knowledge about religious faiths and religious history often runs as shallow as their commitment to religion runs deep," notes Stephen Prothero, chief editorial consultant for God in America, professor of religion at Boston University, and author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't. "A series like God in America can help correct that imbalance and provide the basis for a common understanding of the role religion has played in American public life."

God in America is an AMERICAN EXPERIENCE/FRONTLINE co-production, headed by series executive producer Michael Sullivan, series producer Marilyn Mellowes, series director David Belton, and producer/directors Greg Barker andSarah Colt. The executive producer for FRONTLINE is David Fanning. The executive producer for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE is Mark Samels.

Finishing the Columbia Guide to Religion in American History (I'll Drink to That!)

Paul Harvey

While some of you reprobates were out testing the new micro-beer selections on the 4th of July, some of us were putting our long personal nightmare (a book manuscript) finally to post and ready to be shipped out for its deployment -- at long last! (I tested out a new bottle of Old Raj gin, the best bottle of alcohol God ever invented, at the end of all this, so I'll have to join the reprobate category).

Our contributor John Fea was finishing up his book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction; and yes, John, finishing is a good feeling. Click on the link for a preview of the book and table of contents. Sounds like the publisher is going to get it out pretty promptly -- Feb. 2011.

On the home front, Randall, Ed Blum, and myself have been working on The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History for the last few years, and some of that has been, in the words of gospel great Thomas Dorsey, through the storm and through the night. I thought we'd be done with this a couple of years ago, but, you know, stuff happens. Anyway, the weekend was spent finishing up most of the last few details on the ms and ready to ship out pretty soon. Here's a preview below -- don't start camping out at the bookstore just yet, as it will be a good while before it gets from final manuscript to actual book, but several of our blog contributors are involved in this project, and others of you have asked me about it from time to time, so here's what it's going to look like once the priceless gem is in your hands (or, more likely, on the library reference shelf, as these Columbia Guide books can get a little expensive!).

As you can see, we've got a nice list of contributors who have written excellent essays on time periods, movements, traditions, and themes in American religious history. The volume also has an extensive A - Z glossary of American religious history and a bibliography which includes books, articles, CDs, DVDs, films, and online resources.

Like I said the last time I did an edited book -- not going to do that again!

Here's a preview for you.

Columbia Guide to Religion in American History
Edited by Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum
Bibliographic Editor Randall Stephens

Table of Contents

Preface 1-8
Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum

Introduction 9 - 80
Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum

Colonial Encounters r 81 - 107
Linford Fisher

Native American Religions 108 - 135
Suzanne Crawford

Civil Religion and National Identity 136 - 156
Andrew Manis

Theology 157 - 179
Mark Noll

Evangelicals in American History 180- 198
Douglas Sweeney

Religion and Politics 199 - 222
Jason Bivins

Religion and the Law 223 - 24
Frank Ravitch

Religion, War, and Peace 245 - 271
Ira Chernus

Religion, Gender, and Sexuality 272 - 297
Anthony Michael Petro

Religion, Race, and African American Life 298 - 328
Edward J. Blum

Religion, Ethnicity, and the Immigrant Experience 329-350
Roberto Trevino

Asian American Religion 351 - 365
Timothy Tseng

Alternative Religious Movements 366 - 385
Stephen Stein

Religion and the Environment 386 – 403
Lynn Ross-Bryant

Religion and Popular Culture 404 – 417
Philip Goff

Conservatism and Fundamentalism 418 - 433
Margaret Bendroth

Catholicism in America 434 - 454
Leslie Woodcock Tentler

American Judaism 455 - 472
Alan Levenson

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints 473-489
D. Michael Quinn

Islam in America 490 - 509
Jane Smith

A-Z Glossary 510 - 572

Major Surveys, Textbooks, and Reference Guides 573 - 576

Bibliographies by Chapter Titles 577 - 634

Filmography 635 - 641

Discography 642 - 649

Electronic Resources 650 - 658

Know Your [Digital] Archives

Michael J. Altman

I wrote a blog post for the Hacking the Academy project last week where I argued that digital collections could change the way we think about graduate seminars because they allow for easier original research without having to leave campus. A while back Michael Pasquier wrote a great post on digital humanities and religious history.  Building on his list of sources I wanted to point out two more great online archives I've used in the past year to write seminar papers that will eventually make their way (in some form) into my dissertation.

First, there is the pair of Making of America collections--one at Cornell and one at the University of Michigan.  As the websites describe them, they are:

Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources in American social history primarily from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.

 The Cornell collection contains 267monographs and over 100,000 journal articles while the Michigan collection contains about 10,000 books.

The second collection is, I believe, a little less well known.  The University of Pittsburgh has a digital collection of 19th Century Schoolbooks that is fascinating to browse through.  It is a smaller collection, only 140 volumes, but there is some great stuff in there for folks interested in American civil religion throughout the century.

Both of these collections have titles and journals that deal with missions, religious education and other things of obvious interest to historians of religion.  However, the full-text searchability of these collections makes them even more useful.  In my own research I've turned up really interesting references to South Asian religions in places I would have never found in a traditional brick and mortar archive.  I also think these sorts of collections have a lot of potential in the classroom--both for teaching and as resources for original student research.  It's one thing to lecture on the tensions between North and South in the 1850s, but reading a southern schoolbook versus a northern schoolbook offers a very different feel for those tensions.

If anyone knows of other good digital collections for religious history let us know.

PBS's God in America Series

Randall Stephens

In fall 2010 PBS will broadcast what looks to be an epic 6-part historical documentary on the American religious experience. Called God in America the program will feature religious studies scholars and historians alongside dramatizations and loads of prints, photographs, and illustrations. Subjects include: Franciscan Friars and the Pueblo leader Po'pay, Puritan leader John Winthrop and dissident Anne Hutchinson, Catholic Bishop John Hughes, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, reform Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, Scopes trial combatants William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, evangelist Billy Graham, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell. (See the trailer and read more on the official site. Series producer Marilyn Mellowes also worked on critically acclaimed From Jesus to the Christ: The First Christians.) The companion website promises to be a useful resource for the casual viewer and student of religious history alike.

Best of all for cash-strapped libraries, church-mouse poor scholars, and pockets-turned-inside-out departments, the full 6 hours will be available on-line.

The creators summarize the project as follows:

How has religious belief shaped American history? What role have religious ideas and spiritual experience played in shaping the social, political, and cultural life of what has become the world's most religiously diverse nation?

For the first time on television, God in America, a presentation of American Experience and FRONTLINE, will explore the historical role of religion in the public life of the United States. The six-hour series, which interweaves documentary footage, historical dramatization, and interviews with religious historians, will air over three consecutive nights on PBS beginning Oct. 11, 2010. >>>

Rival Revivals: Some Religious History at the OAH

Paul Harvey

Those of you going to the OAH in Washington, D.C., April 6-9, should find much of interest in religious history to select from. Just wanted to point you to a couple of sessions of particular interest:

Here's one on religion in the Great Depression, a subject which is undergoing a sustained re-examination in a number of recent works:

Thursday, April 8, 8:30 a.m. (in the Hilton Washington Headquarters Hotel -- does anyone know why the room locations of these sessions are not printed?)

Rival Revivals: Religion, Politics, and Labor in the Great Depression

Chair: Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University

Revival or Revolt: Religious Foretelling at the Dawn of the Great Depression

Alison Greene, Yale University

“The Gospel Sends You Home Mad”: Rebellious Religion and Rural Protest in the 1930s South

Jarod Roll, University of Sussex

Was FDR the Antichrist? The New Deal and the Rise of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism

Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University

Comment: Ken Fones‑Wolf, West Virginia University

I've read Matt and Jarod's stuff that they're presenting here, and word on the street is that Alison's dissertation is terrific, so this promises to be a great session on some of the best new work from this period.

Then, at 1:45 on Thursday April 7 somewhere or other in the Hilton, we're going to have some fun dissecting the concept of religious freedom in American history:

New Approaches to Religious Freedom in American History

Chair: Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University

History and Historiography in Church‑State Relations

Eric Mazur, Virginia Wesleyan College

Religion, Race, and Southern Ideas of Freedom

Paul Harvey, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Native Americans and the Dilemmas of Religious Freedom

Tisa Wenger, Yale University

Comment: Tracy Fessenden

Then, finally, very annoyingly scheduled for EXACTLY the same time (1:45 Thursday April 8), is a great-looking session on teaching religious history; maybe I'll draft the other Paul Harvey to read my paper above so I can sneak off to this session:

Teaching American Religious History:

Challenges and Strategies

Chair: Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

Laurie Maffly‑Kipp, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Deborah Dash Moore, University of Michigan

Rudy V. Busto, University of California, Santa Barbara

Rowena McClinton, Southern Illinois University

The full OAH program can be accessed here.

Religious Intolerance in America -- New Documentary History

Paul Harvey

This just in, from a flyer I received from University of North Carolina Press: John Corrigan and Lynn Neal, eds., Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History. Out in May in both hard and paper, and at 304 pp. very classroom usable.

The book's website all the details, and how exactly I had missed the fact that this work was soon to be in existence at all is beyond me. Anyway, this is the bailiwick of our associate editor Kelly Baker, so we hope she’ll have a chance to blog about this book more extensively down the road. In the meantime, here’s a brief description, and I look forward to delving much further into this work!"

American narratives often celebrate the nation's rich heritage of religious freedom. There is, however, a less told and often ignored part of the story: the ways that intolerance and cultures of hate have manifested themselves within American religious history and culture.

In the first ever documentary survey of religious intolerance from the colonial era to the present, volume editors John Corrigan and Lynn S. Neal define religious intolerance and explore its history and manifestations, including hate speech, discrimination, incarceration, expulsion, and violence. Organized thematically, the volume combines the editors' discussion with more than 150 striking primary texts and pictures that document intolerance toward a variety of religious traditions. Moving from anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan propaganda to mob attacks on Mormons, the lynching of Leo Frank, the kidnapping of "cult" members, and many other episodes, the volume concludes with a chapter addressing the changing face of religious intolerance in the twenty-first century, with examples of how the problem continues to this day.

Filmmaking Beyond the Film Classroom

Filmmaking Beyond the Film Classroom

by Everett Hamner

We're approaching the lovely season when department chairs start asking for next semester’s textbooks, and while the syllabi themselves may still be months away, it’s never too early to dream up something different. In the spirit of collegial inspiration, and partly to build on recent journalistic treatments of unusual teaching approaches in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times (not to mention Michael Pasquier’s post from Tuesday), I want to share a nontraditional seminar project I undertook this time last year. While few readers of this blog may work in bioethics, the methodology is easily transferable to American religious history, or whatever else rocks one’s boat.

On the first day of my Genetics, Ethics, and Narrative seminar last spring, I looked around the room at thirteen students and saw not only reasonably strong academic abilities, but also moderately high computer skills and levels of personal responsibility. One student worked part-time cutting video at a local television station; another had shared several short films with me during the previous semester. I had already planned for students to do some kind of creative work in the course alongside their major research papers, and my idea was simple: why not collaborate on a documentary film instead of doing individual projects?

Some may respond, “Why not take your students on a field trip every week and drive them for ice cream, too?” Sure, this is beyond-the-call-of-duty stuff, and it requires that a professor generally likes her students and is willing to deal with surprises. It also helps if one’s institutional context welcomes rather than frowns upon innovation. Given these criteria, though, there are excellent reasons to risk such an unorthodox endeavor. Paramount for me was the way it motivated my students’ curiosity about the subject matter. Knowing they would be screening the film for their peers at an end-of-semester reception, they wanted it to be good, and they had to understand the subject matter well for that to happen.

How does one begin such an undertaking? Fearlessly. Confidently. Even when one feels grave doubts. It is amazing what students can achieve when their professor believes in them. I also think they respond well to a professor working not just in front of them, but also beside them. Too often we hide the boundaries of our expertise, expecting students to collapse in dismay if there is something we do not know. Watch what happens in class, though, when the learning direction occasionally reverses, even in casual chats outside of class time. When my students have a minute to instruct me on the finer points of motorcycle engines, the logic of a baseball trade, the experience of raising children while a spouse is stationed in Afghanistan, or the going rate at local egg donation centers, we become people to each other, not just roles. They begin to care what I think rather than merely submitting to my authority for a time.

There must be a downside to such creative collaboration. Indeed: time. The investment here can be immense, especially on a first go and insofar as one cares about the result. I did, and though the final cut of our film retained minor flaws, it was accurate and cohesive. I moderated discussions, distributed tasks, and signed off on most components. According to my email client, this involved more than five hundred messages. Even so, my students owned the project: they parsed the relevant ethical questions, arranged and conducted interviews, wrote more than ten screenplay drafts, created five times more footage than we used, researched copyright laws and acquired the rights to soundtrack music, completed several edits of the whole, and advertised the screening at nearby campuses.

I’ll add one other thought: even if the final product had self-destructed after the screening, the project would have been worthwhile for its impact on the more traditional academic aspects of the course. When students work together on something they think is cool, it significantly strengthens the course’s more ordinary components. Having decided to look each other and their professor in the eye, it is no longer an option not to do the reading or just to phone in the research paper. Not every essay submitted for the course achieved all it could, but almost. .

For those who would like to view the result, here is our fifteen-minute claim to fame, Imagining Genetic Enhancement. You’ll notice how extensively bioethics and questions of American religion intersect, and that while the future is the explicit focus, past contexts remain inescapable. Whatever decisions we make about testing or modifying human genomes, we need to do so in light of the history of science and technology. And for better and worse, whether we are discussing eugenics or stem cell research, cloning or IVF, these debates have almost always involved American religion.

For those interested in the pedagogical minutiae, I’m happy to provide further details. I’d especially enjoy hearing other ways people have used collaborative or individual art in “non-creative” courses; conversely, I’d welcome skepticism about its ultimate value. Perhaps I’ll follow up in the months ahead with a post on the less time-intensive but still promising creative project I’m trying this semester.

Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, Pt 1

Randall Stephens

My wife, our border collie, and I were up in Vermont over the weekend. (Visited the Enfield Shaker Village and will have a Religion in American History TV spot on that soon.)

While on the road we always buy loads of books at thrift stores, antique malls, library book sales, what have you. We went wild at the Quechee Gorge Village antique mall. (Ok, I use the word "wild" here in strictly nerd-bibliophile terms.) Earlier on the trip I picked up the gorgeous, large Hammond Atlas of World Religion. To that I added an autobiography of George Harrison, a Herbert Asbury book, Temple Grandin's classic on how animals think . . . .

I also got this amazing book, Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation, 1776-1914. It includes the musings of historians and others on famous, infamous, or unknown travelers to the states.

One chapter in particular stuck out. (It serves as the first installment in a series, "Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources," I hope our other contributors will add to.)

Nakahama Manjirō (John Manjori/John Mung), was an unlikely sojourner. A young, poor Japanese fisherman, he was lost at sea in 1841 and marooned on a deserted island. An American vessel picked up Manjirō and his shipmates and sailed east to Honolulu and then America.

Manjirō spent part of his teen years in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, under the care of Captain William H. Whitfield. Eating beans and stewed cod, presumably. Manjirō received an American education and was one of the few from his country to take in the outside world in this era.

He did not receive a hero's welcome back in Japan, where he returned in 1851. Officials viewed Manjirō with suspicion and interrogated him for months. "What were Americans like?" his examiners wanted to know. . . .

All that said, what follows is a very intriguing primary source: the transcription of Manjirō's remarks on religion. Manjirō was careful to distinguish American Protestants from Catholics, who were viewed with intense hostility in Japan. Lee Houchins, who summarizes Manjirō's experience in Abroad in America, notes that Manjirō "purposely left his personal copy of the Bible behind in Fairhaven, and none of the books or other objects which he brought back with him could be considered as religious."

Nakahama Manjirō, transcribed interview, 1851, in Abroad in America, p. 100.

the kurishitan [Catholic] religion hardly exists in America. There are a few kurishitan temples with sacred images inside, so the kurishitan religion is not actually prohibited, but people don't become kurishitans because they are very practical and can't be bothered with something as strange as that. The ordinary structures are very large and have a clock tower two or three hundred shaku [one shaku being nearly one foot] high. There are no Buddha-like figures inside. I hear that they worship the one who made this world on each seventh day. This ceremony is called the shandei shabasu [Sunday service], and it is also conducted aboard ship. There are many seats inside the temple. All those attending the Shandei shabasu bring their [prayer] books. The one who presides stands on a high place holding his book. He asks them to open their books to certain places; then they all read together; then they listen to his explanation; and then they all leave together.

Their funeral ceremony is generally the same as ours. The corpse is put in a casket and buried in the ground. Sometimes something like Buddhist sutras are read by the priest, but this man is different from a Buddhist priest, since he has a wife and children. They erect tombstones and occasionally go there to weed [around the grave], but there is no ancestor worship in America, and no special mourning costumes.

Risk, Wisdom, and Education

Paul Harvey

Earlier this week I was reading through files for colleagues at my university coming up for their 2-year, 4-year, and tenure reviews. The files here include a complete record of student teaching evaluations, and (contrary to the propaganda generally dispensed about higher education) teaching is taken very seriously as a part of regular faculty reviews.

Reading through these evaluations is always a fascinating exercise in seeing how students think about teaching, and teachers, in various disciplines. Going through the file for one colleague who is very obviously a superior scholar and teacher, I was struck by one set of teaching evaluations which complained, sometimes kindly and sometimes bitterly, about “having” to read material which “is personally offensive to My Lord,” as one student put it. I think this student was referring probably to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or maybe Howl, both of which were on the syllabus for a particular class. Or maybe something else, I’m not sure. With the kind of mindset of these students, it’s pretty hard to read anything without getting offended somehow -- all those Greek gods having sex, all that love poetry in the Bible and in medieval literature, all those n- words in Huckleberry Finn, all those nasty deaths in All Quiet on the Western Front, and don’t even get me started on William Faulkner or Queequeg in Moby-Dick.

It’s not unusual to hear about these kinds of complaints, yet it always amazes me that these same students would not balk at “having” to read the Old Testament, with its graphic details of rape, pillage, incest, and human sacrifice, not to mention some erotica that makes Howl seem pretty tame by comparison.

In this particular case, I think I only took notice because there were about 6 or 7 student evaluations in a row that demanded there be “alternative” reading assignments, or that students not be “forced” to read material that somehow offended them. These were not offered as suggestions, but with more insistence: when a piece of literature crossed some of their personal religious values, they felt it their right to demand that they not have to encounter it, at a public university. I’m paying your salary, after all (actually about 8% of my salary, but that’s a subject for a different post). It's a strange sense of entitlement, indeed, to demand not to be educated in literature, in a class on literature.

It’s easy enough for me to brush this stuff off. I don’t get a lot of that in my classes; history books tend to be dry enough that I count myself lucky if students read them at all, and "offensive" material is understood to be just bad sinful stuff that people did in the past. Some years ago, though, I had a student complain about the great novel Invisible Man; in fact, she just refused to read it after an early scene in the book which portrays (with great humor and satire) an obviously allegorical dream that involves some incest. The student persuaded herself that she could read no further, never mind that Invisible Man is surely one of the cleanest (and most hilarious) books in all of American literature. Her loss, I thought, and moved on.

I also didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the evaluations for this one colleague earlier this week, whose sterling record spoke for itself. But I did think about it tonight, reading our own blog contributor John Fea’s nice short blog essay What is a Liberal Arts Education? Risk and Wisdom.

John draws from Mark Schwehn’s Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America., a kind of ur-text of the Lilly Fellows Program. John’s students at Messiah College evidently share a lot with students everywhere. John writes:

Unfortunately, too many students today are unwilling to engage in the kind of risk-taking that is essential to education. Many of the students I teach at Messiah, and especially their parents, do not understand what education at a liberal arts institution is all about. They think that college is a place where "cherished beliefs" should be not be challenged, but affirmed. They want to have a four year experience in which they are told that everything they have ever believed about life, God, society, etc... is true. If this is what college is about, then what is the point? Students can participate on championship sports teams, make friends, have meaningful social experiences, find a spouse, play in the band, or learn certain specialized and technical skills, but I wonder: will they really be educated? Why not just send students to vocational schools so they can gain the necessary knowledge needed to do this or that job and live a comfortable middle-class life.

At any academic gathering I attend where teaching is discussed, we all have our own “war stories” that reprise some variation of the theme John describes above. John continues to hope that education in its truest sense can happen at liberal arts colleges:

Having said that, I think it is essential that this kind of education--the kind of learning that truly transforms--happen in a safe environment where students can work through this transformative time in their life with caring professors who love them and want to walk alongside of them. This, it seems to me, is the genius of a small, residential, liberal arts college. For the students who come to Messiah College, it is what makes their college experience "Christian."

Those of us at state universities (if you can call an institution which is 8% supported by state tax dollars a "public" institution, and it's only at that high a level thanks to the temporary infusion of stimulus dollars) can sometimes experience a bit of this as well. A few years back, attending a reunion for those fortunate enough to have been Lilly Fellows in Humanities and the Arts at Valparaiso University (1993-95 for me), I gave a short talk for this gathering entitled “On Being a Scholar of Religion in the Historical Guild at the Public University Amidst a Charged Atmosphere of Religion, Politics, and War.” I was referring to Iraq then, in the title; obviously I could be referring to Afghanistan today (some of my students are on their way there, very shortly). I reflected in that talk on the virtues of academic guilds (whatever their faults) in providing some space for the life of the mind in the midst of the prevalent propaganda about higher education.

Our students at a public university obviously won’t have a college experience designed to be “Christian,” but I’ll walk alongside any of them who want to take some risks, and ideally gain some wisdom. I laughed when I read the narrow and ridiculous evaluations of my colleague’s class; they liked this colleague as a teacher, but they wouldn’t even risk thinking about the reading material (including some classics of American literature) that was assigned. Today, thanks to John’s post, I laughed less and contemplated more about how to pursue my vocation when cherished beliefs are only to be affirmed and not even questioned, much less challenged or deepened.

A Trip to NYC and an Interview with Randall Balmer on Teaching American Religious History

Randall Stephens

So, I took the train down to NYC last week. Not to see Abraham Lincoln's Big Gay Dance Party (which looks hilarious), but rather to present my work to the Columbia University Seminar on Religion in America. (I love trains and seminars. Better than plains, rowboats, and/or webinars any day.) The seminar, founded over ten years ago, “explores the role of religion in American society from cross-disciplinary perspectives, including history, anthropology, literature, sociology, theology, and material culture.” In a posh faculty house that looked like a country club, minus the golfers, I talked about my paper, “‘A great many theologians’: Premillennial Authorities and Modern American Evangelicalism.” I benefited tremendously from some wonderful critique and q and a. The questions that historians and religious studies scholars ask can be quite different. So, it’s always a plus to take in the advice of those in other, related fields. Some wanted to know how representative are the evangelicals my co-author and I focus on. Others wondered about what makes a given leader an “expert” or an “authority.” Was all very good food for thought. Dinner afterward—food for stomach—offered a nice chance to get to know those in attendance. (One of them, Daniel Vaca, a PhD student at Columbia, was a fantastic host.)

While in NYC, I also had some time to catch up with a close friend who works at Cooper Union and pop into McSorleys. In addition I had the pleasure of attending Randall Balmer’s survey course on American religious history at Barnard College. If you teach American religious history, you probably don’t have too many opportunities to bounce ideas off others who teach the same, or get new light on old topics from colleagues in the field. (Though, this is one of the most amazing benefits of the Young Scholars in American Religion program.) I

enjoyed hearing and seeing how Balmer conducts his class. It was filled with about 100 students from Barnard and Columbia. He covered the rise of utopian communities in the 19th century, bringing in the Shakers and the Oneida Perfectionists (the Shakers’ polar opposite? I wonder if any Shakers ever went over to John Humphrey Noyes’s unbuttoned camp). Then he concluded by showing part of Ken Burns's elegiac classic, The Shakers.

After the class, I sat down with Balmer in his office to ask him some questions about teaching the American religious history survey and to pick his brain about other courses he's offers. The interview here is divided into two parts (part 2 is here). Balmer speaks about drawing students into the story. He also describes some new courses he’s taught in recent years and focuses in on what he’s learned from a new course on Mormonism. His comments got me thinking a little bit about how teaching new courses can lead to surprising, new research interests. My course on America in the 1960s has certainly led me in some surprising directions. (I still have not perfected my plans to teach that class on Rosicrucian Trapeze Artists in Late-19th-Century Pennsylvania. There's always next year!)