Preview of Coming Attractions: Empires, Wars, Politics, and Murder Mysteries

Paul Harvey

So what can a poor blogmeister do, but sing in a rock-n-roll band, and grade endless end-of-term essays? Preview some coming attractions on the blog, to keep you coming back for more. Translation: my mind is in end-of-semester catatonia, so the best I can do is point you to good stuff that will be coming this way shortly.

First, I mentioned a couple of posts ago Jon Pahl's new book Empires of Sacrifce: Religious Origins of American Violence; I'll have a post up about his work soon, as well as an interview with the author, an esteemed contributor to the blog and a not-half-bad basketball player back in the day.

Next, our contributor Luke Harlow has been busy finishing his first year at Oakland University (in Rochester, Michigan, the single most confusingly named university in the country), and getting his book manuscript ready for Cambridge University Press. In the midst of that, I've convinced him to give us his thoughts on Scott Rohrer, Wandering Souls: Protestant Migrations in America, 1630-1865; the author has an interesting post about his book here, and Mark Noll has a short booknote about the work here.

As you longer-term blog readers know, it's dangerous for Ed Blum to get on a plane; he usually plows through several books and comes back with reflections on those books together with whatever new bands (Jonas Brothers or Death Cab for Cutie, anyone) and questionable pop songs he's been listening to or video games he's been playing lately. You can look forward to such a post a few weeks down the road, as Ed is going to be busy reading Jonathan Ebel's new book from Princeton University Press Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the First World War (Ebel's book comes with some blurbs from some heavy hitters on the back cover, such as Skip Stout and Stanley Hauerwas). He plans a joint post about that work together with another new book of note: Derek Chang's Penn University press production Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century. Chang brings together African American and Chinese American religious histories in innovative ways, and looks at how white evangelicals (especially the American Baptist Home Mission Society) conceptualized American citizenship vis-a-vis the "Negro problem" and the "Chinese question." Just how Ed will put all this together with whatever popular culture he's been consuming nowadays remains to be seen, but it should be a treat.

Meanwhile, one of our original contributors, John Fea, has been going great guns on his own blog (see, for example, his terrific piece "Those who Will Not Learn from History," about the recent great Texas Textbook Massacre, and more generally about the virtues of thinking historically); John has promised me a post down the road on another work I recently received: The Disappearing God Gap? Religion in the 2008 Presidential Election (Oxford University Press). We also have another guest poster down the road who may be commenting on that book.

A couple of weeks ago we added Michael J. Altman to our roll of contributors, who already has graced us with a couple of posts about Hinduism in American culture. We'll soon be adding another up-and-coming graduate student to our rolls as well: Janine Giordano, of the University of Illinois, who's going to tell us about this very intriguing new title: Sharon Davies, Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America.

Two other folks -- a historian, and a religious studies person -- may be joining our rolls soon as well; more on that soon. So, keep those clicks and emails coming.