Doubtful Serenity, An Occupational Hazard

Paul Harvey

Who wrote the Serenity Prayer? Reinhold Niebuhr, right? Yes, maybe, but then again, perhaps it's more of a pastiche? “He is a preacher. He is coming into contact with things and blending them,” Professor [Gary] Dorrien said, adding that for preachers, “it’s an occupational hazard.”

Obama-rama

Paul Harvey

Barack Obama is taking it on all sides for his version of faith-based initiatives. Here's a news flash: The Christian Right didn't like the speech, and doesn't like Obama, who apparently has "scorned man-woman marriage." Somebody ought to tell Michelle.

More interestingly, Faith in Public Life rounds up some reactions, and does again here, including those from former Bushies At the Boston Review, Lew Daly criticizes his policy for disavowing the rights of religious groups to hire their own. Irene Monroe warns of the dangers of the policy for the LGBT community:

In terms of which groups get picked for funding and which ones don't, LGBTQ activists and our allies have also shown the slim likelihood of queer faith-based groups like Metropolitan Community Church or Dignity getting funding, compared to conservative Christian groups.

Meanwhile, Ira Chernus defends Obama's ideas as being an improvement over the current regime because

Obama does not treat social problems primarily as individual faults the way “compassionate conservatism” does. He treats them as political problems. His record is not in urging spiritual reform, as Bush’s was when he ran for president. Obama’s record is in organizing in churches, helping people see that their problems come from systemic abuse by the wealthy and the powerful, and teaching them how to resist.

Randall Balmer calls for a policy more truly radical, and conservative. Or is he just calling the bluff?

So here is my radical/conservative proposal: Obama should use the moral capital of his candidacy to call on religious organizations of all stripes to reassume the responsibility of social welfare in this country—poor relief, job training, credit counseling and so on. However, and this is the crucial component of the proposal, they must perform these functions out of their own resources, taking advantage of their long-standing tax exemptions (which amounts to a huge government subsidy) to do so. This reallocation of responsibility would remove these tasks from government and from the bureaucrats and allow religious organizations to act on their avowed principles of care for the disadvantaged in society.

Meanwhile, Michael Leo Owens historicizes the debate in his new work God and Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America (University of Chicago Press). I had not run across this title previously; here's the author's brief description of the main argument:

Today, faith-based initiatives are underway in America's poorest Black neighborhoods. African American churches are central to them, but their involvement isn't always apolitical. There are political reasons why churches collaborate with government and vice versa. That's the biggest take-away. With an emphasis on the political causes, character, and consequences of African American churches collaborating with government to serve the poor, my central argument is that church-state partnerships are a means for Black clergy to reaffirm their political leadership and reposition moral authority in Black civil society. In making this argument, I examine how Black public opinion, fueled by enduring poverty and weak political representation in Black neighborhoods, pushes activist African American churches to collaborate with government. I also explain how government, as it changes the designs of social welfare policies to rely more on nonprofit organizations and voluntary action to deliver public benefits to the poor, pulls African American churches to collaborate with it.

Religion, Literature, and Race

Kelly Baker

H-Amstdy just published two reviews of note for American religious history. Finbarr Curtis reviewed Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption: Religion, The Secular, and American Literature (2007), a book mentioned a time or two on this blog. Curtis examines Fessenden's deft analysis of how the "secular" is deployed and contains religious mooring. He writes:

For many commentaries on American religion and politics, it is an axiom that the line that demarcates the religious from the secular is blurry. Many of these discussions presume that this normative and analytic blurriness comes with the difficulty of attaining neutrality on religious matters. Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption advances a subtle and nuanced set of interpretations of secular tropes in American literature that offers a more complex take on what is at stake in the rhetoric of religious neutrality. In this collection of perceptive and insightful essays on subjects that range from the colonial period to the twentieth century, Fessenden does not propose a new way to clarify the boundaries between religion and the secular. Rather, she considers the institutional and discursive conditions under which it is useful for powerful groups to be able to identify certain beliefs, practices, and forms of identification as religiously neutral. According to Fessenden, the potency of secular rhetoric is that it offers a privileged place from which to affirm public consensus about normative American identity. From this position, "others" may be tolerated, but in such ways as to render their commitments as distinctly religious over and against the neutrality of the mainstream. On this point, Fessenden's work stands within a body of postcolonial scholarship that has taken issue with sociological efforts to measure processes of secularization. From the point of view of postcolonial discursive analysis, the problem with head counts of the religious versus the nonreligious is that line between religiosity and secularity is itself part of the rhetorical game. ... One of the strengths of Fessenden's book is her ability to offer non-reductive interpretations of how secular rhetoric has shaped and been shaped by categories of race, sex, class, and nation. For example, the first two chapters assess the construction of American national identity in light the violent displacement of Native Americans. What interests Fessenden is the Puritan capacity to cast Native Americans as both threatening and irrelevant. The self-evidence of the equation of Puritanism and civilization did not justify violence so much as it made any justification unnecessary. Within a teleological narrative that legitimated Protestant suspicions of decadent religious institutions, middle-class attitudes toward property and work, Anglo-Saxon notions of racial superiority, and child-rearing practices that emphasized discipline and literacy, Puritans wove their religious and cultural ambitions into an American national imaginary.

In later chapters, Fessenden shows how anti-Catholic tropes have shaped American understandings of liberty. This has been especially evident in the way anti-Catholic denunciations of ecclesiastical tyranny have often served as rhetorical models for sexual, racial, and intellectual freedom. On this point, her analysis differs from other genealogies of secularism in that she does not posit an intrinsic secularity to Protestant voluntarism. Rather, Fessenden calls attention to the contested nature of the rhetorical claim that Protestant religiosity provides a neutral standpoint from which to model American liberties. This suggests that Catholic attempts to articulate an American identity were more complex than a simple capitulation to Protestant expectations of religious privacy. According to Fessenden, Catholics were grappling with how to imagine a distinctly Catholic secularity. But as she demonstrates in her chapter on F. Scott Fitzgerald, asserting an alternative secular Catholic identity could be fraught with anxiety and self-contradiction.

Curtis also questions her rendering of the secular and ponders what happens to the definition of the secular as unbelief:
In her conclusion, Fessenden suggests that the logic of secularity informs a post-9/11 American foreign policy in which underdevelopment is defined in terms of deprivatized religion. While I find her arguments generally persuasive, it is possible that her impressive facility with interpretive synthesis might begin to pose its own set of problems. Simply put, her interpretation of the secular runs a whole bunch of stuff together. What is the status of the old-fashioned sense of secularism as unbelief? Is there a meaningful difference between an atheist and a conservative Protestant like George W. Bush? This is particularly pressing if secularity is presented as the discursive logic legitimating contemporary American crusades to democratize the world. I think it is an open question whether an excess of secularity or liberalism is really the best way to describe the sources of the Patriot Act or Guantanamo Bay. After all, to the extent to which Culture and Redemption criticizes current American foreign policy, it does so as an excellent book by a secular liberal for secular liberals. (The entire review is located here.)

Sylvester Johnson reviewed Colin Kidd's The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000. Johnson delves into Kidd's presentation of race and its relationship with scripture as well as Kidd's vindication of the Enlightenment:

After having cleared the ground with this contextualization of modern racial taxonomy, Kidd in the second chapter dives into developing the question that lies at the heart of this book. How was racial discourse related to modern biblical views about human origins? More specifically, did monogenesis, the belief that all humans shared descent from the same ancestors, inhibit or mitigate the acerbic nature of modern racism? Did polygenesis, the mildly popular view that different races derived from different ancestors--promote a more malicious racial consciousness? Forging of Races takes up these questions through a subsequent chronological history of Enlightenment approaches to the Bible.

The third chapter examines ways that European interpretations of Genesis (especially of the Noah legend) were at once narrative templates for making claims about racial ideologies and discursive indicators of European Christian angst over the status of scriptural authority in light of advances in the sciences such as ethnology and early anthropology. Racial categories, Kidd argues, caused Europeans to question the Bible as a reliable and comprehensive source of authoritative knowledge about the empirical world because the Bible did not address the issue of race. With the expansion of European colonialism into the New World, furthermore, early modern writers had to explain why the Bible, which was supposed to be of universal applicability, never mentioned the Americas.

In chapter 4, Kidd defends the Enlightenment against two types of reductionist claims. Against the charge that the Enlightenment was simply racist, Kidd proffers instead that this intellectual movement among Europeans was more complicated, generating racist strategies of representation and also advancing a framework of natural rights whose ethical injunctions pertained innately to all persons. Second, Kidd rejects the secularism thesis, the common conception that the Enlightenment was fundamentally a rejection of religion. It was not; the secularizing strategies derivative of Enlightenment thought were not necessarily opposed to religion but rather enabled non-religious categories for conceiving of and participating in the world of human experience. At times, this might promote religious activity, a pattern that he demonstrates by discussing the growing trend among theologians who drew upon scientific studies of race, when convenient, in order to support the authority of scripture.

Yet, Johnson critiques the author's evaluation to monogenesis and the belief that a narrative of common origins would make people behave more humanely:

Colin Kidd's is an ambitious work. The author promises an assessment of four centuries of discourse about race and scripture. Readers who are looking for a comprehensive history of interpretive strategies, Enlightenment religion, and a rich treatment of primary sources that foregrounds problems of modernity, cosmology, and racial consciousness will be rewarded. The work is not without its problems, however. Critical historians of race and colonialism will find troubling much of Kidd's explanation of the data about biblical interpretation that he so ably catalogues. Ultimately, Kidd's theoretical fluency is strangely inhibited by what at least seems to be a strident commitment to defending the deeply and perversely racist history of Christian monogenesis and the attending monotheism. There can be no honest assessment of monogenesis that concludes it ensures a gentler, milder version of white supremacy vis-� -vis polygenesis.

It is not clear why Kidd thinks that monogenesis necessarily inhibits racism and radical otherness. This is not true for sexism or classism. Why should it hold for racism? Native American and African religions, on the other hand, embraced a worldview comprising polygenesis and polytheism, yet they never produced racial violence on the scale of that by European Christians. Christians who embraced monogenesis, on the other hand, were primary agents in genocidal wars against Africans and Native Americans. The Americas, in fact, were the locus of the largest-scale episode of genocidal human destruction--over 95 percent of American Indians put to death, primarily by explicit execution of colonial and White nation-state policies of slavery, forced removal, and military campaigns of extermination (as opposed to disease, which accounted for a minority of these deaths). Millions of Africans were worked literally to death in the Americas. Where is the empirical basis for arguing that this destruction would have been worse if not for monogenesis? Not once does Forging of Races engage in a serious way the history of genocide that is interstitially instantiated in the history of White Christian colonialism. The closest the book comes to naming this violence is in chapter 3: "Theological orthodoxy and the narratives of sacred history underpinned notions of the family of man and the brotherhood of mankind, however much these notions were disregarded in practice in the imperial rush towards the possession of slaves and the dispossession of indigenous peoples" (p. 78).

It seems that what is decisive for Kidd is the superficial impression that if people believe in common origins, their interactions will be more humane. This assumption ignores the history of encounter between European Christian conquerors in the Americas and their Native and African subjects. It also ignores the analytical studies of scholars such as Itumeleng Mosala, Regina Schwartz, Keith Whitelam, and Jonathan Kirsch, who have demonstrated the linkages between monotheism and violence. What Kidd seems to assume, in other words, is actually a problematic ideal that lacks evidence. One is pressed to ask whether Kidd's theoretical [mis]handling of the history of scripture and race would look different if he had to respond to the material, historical relationship between biblical thinking and physical, psychological, and cultural violence and death that became a necessary part of European Christian colonialism--Itumeleng Mosala has addressed this very problem in his Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa (1989). Would Kidd's explanation of primary sources look the same if he included in his interpretive scope the deeply consequential and empirical religious hatred that defined encounters between monotheistic, monogenist Christian colonizers and their polytheistic victims?

Even the Enlightenment heroes--or, rather, especially these heroes--whom he so earnestly defends (his attempt to prove that David Hume and Thomas Jefferson do not deserve to be identified as racists is disappointing and unconvincing) should further prod him to recognize the extent of massive destruction of non-White peoples that is the context for the history of ideas he examines. Does a passionate defense of these victims' putative humanity ever become an imperative for explaining in critical terms "what happened"? Unfortunately, it does not in Forging of Races. Finally, Kidd joins a host of other writers when he incorrectly assumes that Black religious activists and thinkers only respond to Whites instead of also shaping and influencing the larger world of meanings that inform societal norms. Blacks are essentially unmentioned in his history of ideas until the latter chapter on "Black Counter-Theologies." What distinguishes Kidd's study, nevertheless, is not its problems--unfortunately, these are woefully familiar and plague numerous studies of European history and thought--but its strengths. Historians of race, religion, scriptures, and modernity most certainly cannot afford to miss what Kidd has to say; his meticulous research and generous notes will aid serious researchers for years to come. Furthermore, his clear and cogent explanation of race as a social system and his mapping of international relations of scripture and race will prove immensely valuable for teaching both graduate and undergraduate courses. (The full review is located here. The Journal of Southern Religion also hosted a roundtable review.)

Dixie and "Demon Rum"

Art Remillard

If a newcomer to Southern religious history/historiography asked me for a short bibliography on the post-Civil War era, Joe Coker’s Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause would make my list. Here is the book’s description, courtesy of the University Press of Kentucky’s website…

The temperance movement first appeared in America in the 1820s as an outgrowth of the same evangelical fervor that fostered a wide range of reform campaigns and benevolence societies. Like many of these movements, temperance was confined primarily to the northeastern United States during the antebellum period. Viewed with suspicion by Southerners because of its close connection to the antislavery movement, prohibition sentiment remained relatively weak in the antebellum South.

In the decades following the Civil War, however, southern evangelicals embraced the movement with unprecedented fervor, and by 1915, liquor had been officially banned from the region as a result of their efforts. Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause examines how southern evangelical men and women transformed a Yankee moral reform movement into an ideology that was compatible with southern culture and values.

You may be wondering why a history on prohibition would appear on my list. (OK, you’re really wondering, “Why in the hell would anyone ask this guy for a bibliography”?). To be sure, Coker’s principal objective is revealing how Southern evangelicals brought prohibition from the margins of acceptability to the center. But in laying out his evidence, Coker shows how the movement infused with broader discussions of race, gender, politics, and honor. Also, (and this cannot be understated) Coker’s detailing of the historiography is nothing short of outstanding. This is particularly evident in his chapter on race, which alone makes the book worth purchasing.

So Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause makes my list because Coker's lively and compelling history of prohibition is also a lively and compelling history of Southern religion. But you need not take my word for it. As one sagacious historian/professor/cat owner/blogger wrote…

As thorough, careful, searching, and well-researched an examination of the rise and eventual triumph of the temperance and Prohibition movement in the South as exists in the scholarly literature. Coker shows how a social reform movement of distinctly Yankee origins became part of southern cultural and religious life, to the extent that southern states led the way toward national Prohibition in the early twentieth century.

Royalism and Savagery in the New Common-Place

By John Fea

The July 2008 Common-Place went on-line yesterday. There is not much on religion here, but two book reviews caught my eye. First, Kathleen DuVal reviews Peter Silver's Bancroft-Prize winning Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. This is the story of the violent relationship between the Scots-Irish (mostly) and native Americans on the Pennsylvania frontier. I have given the book a quick skim (perhaps I will give it my own review here when I eventually get around to reading it) and I think the readers of our blog might find it interesting. In many ways, the conflict on the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania frontier was a religious and racial war, with the white Presbyterians displaying savagery toward the Indians, and white Quakers suffering persecution for defending the natives and advocating for peace. Duval writes:

Silver's superb analysis and stunning prose create unsettling implications for other times of war. Lambasting Quakers' efforts at peace and toleration as "collusion with killers" (108) and accusing thoughtful people of being "tasteless" (85) for discussing context when white bodies had been damaged—these attacks on reason are hardly confined to eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. In Silver's skilled hands, they are both historically specific and frighteningly timeless.

The other review is of Brendan McConville's The Kings Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776. (See my coverage of the book on this blog and my HNN Review). Benjamin Irvin writes:

Readers who wish to burn their own golden calves must lace up their boots, for McConville ranges far and wide. His analysis of rough music and skimmington as rituals for the enforcement of early American gender norms ranks among the very best treatments of the subject. And yet not until a belated and maddeningly brief discussion of patriarchy and family roles does McConville relate those folk customs to the rise and fall of royal America. (Would that the Elizabethtown Regulars who flogged a notorious wife beater on his "Posteriors" had instead branded the royal arms on that same spot [183].) Similarly, McConville's chapter on imperial reform offers a fruitful exploration of the many imaginative proposals floated by imperial consolidators for the reorganization of Britain's eighteenth-century dominions. Aligning this book with a late renaissance in imperial history, this chapter points the reader toward a breathtaking vista of Albion and Indian what-might-have-beens. It further discloses certain colonists' willingness to resolve their political grievances within a constitutional framework, a testament to their thorough integration into the British Empire. And yet this chapter stands apart from the rest of the book in its detachment from the ceremonial and material culture by which British North Americans avouched devotion to the Crown.

I have been spent the last week or so in the archives reading the letters of Anglican priests. The combination of Irvin's review and my own findings has reminded me that there was a very vibrant religious royal culture in early America. But the concerns of Anglican clergymen about those pesky "Dissenters" also suggests that this culture was constantly under attack. Whatever the case, McConville's work will serve as a staring point for some of my own work.

(Also of note: Lloyd Pratt reviews Matthew P. Brown's The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading and Book Culture in Early New England).

People of Paradox

Kelly Baker

One of the advantages of being a book review editor is the reading reviews on books that I haven't yet had time to read. Seth Perry just reviewed Terryl Givens's People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture for H-Amstdy, which is on top of my ever-expanding reading lists. Givens is a foremost scholar of Mormonism, and he was, in my humble opinion, the best commentator on Mormon experience for the recent PBS documentary. Seth explains the centrality of Givens's work to understanding this oft marginalized religious movement. The review follows.

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Amstdy@h-net.msu.edu (July 2008)

Terryl Givens. _People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture_. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xvii + 414 pp. Plates, illustrations, index, notes. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-516711-2.

Reviewed for H-Amstdy by Seth Perry, University of Chicago Divinity School

Terryl Givens, professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond, has distinguished his study of Mormon cultural expression with two remarkable accomplishments. The first is that Givens has derived his discussion of Mormon culture from the details of Mormon theology, uniting the practical and theoretical elements of religious life with a sincerity and seamlessness rarely achieved in academic study. Second, rather than elude or attempt to explain away the contradictions inherent to Mormon theology (as much as to any), Givens situates them as the core of the book. Part 1 sets the scene with an exploration of "four especially rich and fertile tensions" in Mormon thought, while parts 2 and 3 comprise the engaging discussion of Mormon culture that is the author's true aim (p. xiv). From dancing and theater to literature and architecture, he describes nearly two centuries of development in Mormon intellectual and artistic expression, material that has almost certainly never been so carefully presented to a non-Mormon audience.

Implicit in a study such as this, of course, is the assertion that there _is_ a distinct Mormon culture. Recognizing a need to define what exactly that means but justifiably wary of getting bogged down in defining "culture," Givens merely asserts three general meanings invoked by the term--a culture is "a general habit of mind, the intellectual development of a society, and its general body of arts" (p. xiii). "Peoplehood" is a status that Mormons have sought in various metaphorical and literal ways, since the church's beginning, and scholars inside and outside the faith debate the extent to which it has been achieved. Givens answers the question by emphasizing an agonistic view toward the origins and engines of cultural expression: tension and conflict are some of the most important motivators of cultural expression, he states, and Mormonism has plenty of those. "Mormonism, a system in which Joseph Smith collapsed sacred distance to bring a whole series of opposites into radical juxtaposition, seems especially rife with paradox--or tensions that only appear to be logical contradictions"(p. xiv).

As with his definition of culture generally, Givens spends little time making plain the connection between tension and expression, and, here, a more substantial theoretical introduction may have been in order; brief references in this text and in Givens's other work make clear that he is fluent with the relevant theory. The way tension is applied throughout the book as an organizing trope makes the connection plain enough: cultural production is, in part, a process of elucidating a given set of beliefs and historical experiences, and it takes a sufficiently complicated set of beliefs and experiences to produce a viable, distinct "culture." Mormon culture, as explored by Givens, suggests that Mormonism constitutes such a fertile field.

Givens organizes his study organically around four distinct clusters of tension, and spends a chapter highlighting the theological and historical sources of each. The first of these is "the polarity of authoritarianism and individualism" (p. xiv). In formulating his theological framework, Smith exalted individual ability. Joining a widespread tendency in his day toward repudiating Calvinist determinism, he empowered each soul to choose his or her own salvation and even to accede to godhood, in part, by virtue of his or her own works. At the same time, the church that Smith founded demands obedience to authority--the counsel of the Prophet and the various levels of priesthood is understood as divinely inspired, in many ways equating disobedience to leaders with disobedience to God. The insistence on individual freedom and its restraint exist side by side in Mormonism.

The other tensions--between epistemological certainty and continuing revelation; the intermingling of the sacred and the everyday; and insularity and universality in church teaching and growth--are similarly developed, with Givens tracing the theological and historical underpinnings of each. These early chapters are not intended to be a full-scale history of the early church, but rather a topical introduction to threads in Mormon history and thought that have had an impact on how it has grown and been experienced by generations of Mormons. Brief and yet thorough, though, these early chapters could stand on their own as a nuanced introduction to the background that informs the contemporary Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The threads of theology and history persist in Givens's exploration of Mormon expression in parts 2 and 3; the tensions elucidated in the opening chapters are never far from his discussion. He remarks that the architecture of the Salt Lake Temple "succeeded in conveying the twin inclinations toward militant solidity and otherworldly intimations," for instance; and he describes the work of novelists, poets, and filmmakers who have plumbed the difficulties of nineteenth-century polygamy, the paradoxes of divine action in everyday life, and the challenges of living the commandments of God and church leaders (p. 111). A Latter-day Saint himself--Givens provided a large amount of insider commentary in the recent PBS documentary _The Mormons_ (2007)--he approaches sensitive issues with a rare grace and humor, giving equal emphasis to such "official" church expressions as architecture and hymnody as well as the work of individual artists and thinkers who sometimes challenge church norms.

In a purely practical sense, the book is a valuable resource for those looking to understand a rich and fascinating subculture that can often seem bewildering to outsiders. Such twentieth-century Mormon thinkers as Eugene England and Hugh Nibley and such writers as Carol Lynn Pearson and Levi Peterson are household names in Mormon culture, referenced so commonly and casually that it can take an outsider unfamiliar with their work quite a bit of effort to keep up in conversation. Givens covers all of these figures and many others, providing outsiders with an eloquent view into a recognizably distinct culture that is often overlooked.

Of Summer and Spiritual Staycations

By Phillip Luke Sinitiere

With four young, growing children and a dissertation to finish--in addition to high gas prices as well as other expenses, I'm all about staycations. According to Wikipedia, a staycation is "a period of time in which an individual or family stays at home and relaxes at home or takes day trips from their home to area attractions."

So, inspired by Kelly's recent thoughts about Roadside Religion and summer vacation, Randall's previous reflections on "religious travelouges", and Mike's post on traveling through New Orleans, I wondered what a spiritual staycation might look like in Houston.

With limited funds, half a tank of gas (although my car does have a/c, a nice comfort for sweltering gulf coast summers), and a stack of Mapquest directions, what religious sites could I tour in Houston to get a sense of the city's spiritual offerings? Where might I take a first-time visitor to see some of the landmarks of Houston's religious landscape?



One place I'd go is to the Rothko Chapel. Built in 1971, it is home to religious services, spiritual ceremonies, and showcases art as well as other local events. I'd then travel the short distance into downtown Houston, stopping at the Islamic Da'wah Center, once home to Houston National Bank and co-founded by former Houston Rockets basketball star Hakeem Olajuwon. While in downtown I'd swing by Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal congregation founded in 1839 and still very active. The last stops in downtown before heading out to see the spiritual life of suburban Houston would be the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, recently renovated and (re)dedicated, and consecrated by one of Houston's religious superstars Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, and St. John's Downtown Church, a vibrant justice-oriented (Methodist) congregation led by the tireless service of Rudy and Juanita Rasmus.

Heading out to the suburbs and braving the dense Houston traffic, I'd stop at all 3 locations of Dr. Ralph West's Church Without Walls, billed as "a church that is not restricted by geographical location or sociological background, but limitless in God’s possibilities. It also represents a church where anyone is welcome." I'd then spend some time at the massive Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, Houston's newest Hindu temple, and heading back toward the city stop at Masjid Al-Farooq Islamic Center, where I was once a guest at Friday prayer (or "khutbah").





Other highlights of a summer spiritual staycation would take me to Congregation Brith Shalom, where Hasidic hip-hop, reggae artist Matisyahu once performed, and all 5 locations of Houston's Second Baptist Church (one of the earliest "multi-site" churches). I'd end the staycation with a stop at Lakewood Church, reported to be the nation's largest and fastest growing church and home of rising religious superstar, the "smiling preacher" Joel Osteen--and Marcos Witt, pastor of Lakewood's Hispanic congregation and winner of 4 Latin Grammy awards.


There are of course many other places to visit in Houston, but this would perhaps be a good start.
If you went on a spiritual staycation in your city or town, what what would fill the pages of your "religious travelogue"?