"The change is not in itself, but in them"

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

“Look out at that ocean, that sky, the fish, the birds, wild and wicked out in the chaos. Is there a god that can deliver us from the chaos of nature?”

--Reverend Carlton in the film Glory at Sea

This is an appropriate question to ask on a day when the Army Corps of Engineers opens a floodway that will displace at least 2,500 people, devastate thousands of acres of farmland, and destroy hundreds of homes and businesses in order to avoid the same tragedy in more populated areas like Baton Rouge (my home) and New Orleans.

Morganza Floodway (under normal conditions)

Morganza Floodway (1973)

Glory at Sea, according to its creators, is a 30-minute film about "a group of mourners and a man spat from the depths of Hades [who] build a boat from the debris of New Orleans to rescue their lost loved ones trapped beneath the sea."

Glory At Sea! from Court 13 on Vimeo.

From my perspective, Glory at Sea is a film about religion. It is about living in a broken world, seeking order in chaos, and finding meaning in suffering. It is about a people in exile, a people lost at sea, a people without a home. Recently, students in my “Religion in Louisiana” course watched the film and wrote an essay relating its themes to several other books about life in Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta, including Brenda Marie Osbey's collection of poems All Saints, Tennessee Williams’ play Vieux Carré, and William Alexander Percy’s autobiography Lanterns on the Levee. They hated me for it. But they also got it.

What we’re watching along the Mississippi River is indeed about the chaos of nature, but it’s the kind that comes when we engineer nature in order to delivery us from chaos. William Alexander Percy knew a little something about the Mississippi River when he wrote, “The gods on their thrones are shaken and changed, but it abides, aloof and unappeasable, with no heart except for its own task, under the unbroken and immense arch of the lighted sky where the sun, too, goes a lonely journey. As a thing used by men it has changed: the change is not in itself, but in them.”

Religion and Humor

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

Josh Paddison, American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow at Indiana University, is an historian of religion in the American West. His manuscript, "American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California," will be published by the University of California Press in the not-too-distant future. He is also the editor of A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California before the Gold Rush (1999).

Like all scholars (I hope), Paddison does more than read, write, and teach. He also draws comics, in this case for the blog Occasional Religion, which serves as a kind of forum for "scholars and artists engaging the world." Paddison's latest installment in the series "Moments in U.S. Religious History" recounts a play performed by three Chinese immigrants at the Methodist Mission in San Francisco. You can see/read it here. In an earlier comic strip, Paddison portrays an 1859 interview between Horace Greeley and Brigham Young.

Good stuff! Thanks Josh!

Happy Mardi Gras from the Chaplain of Bourbon Street

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

“Mardi Gras is one mighty explosion of sin, stage-managed by the devil. I believe that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, if they could be resurrected and visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras, would by unanimous vote request that they be sent back to hell. I think that Mardi Gras is a time when even the devil is ashamed of his own followers.”

So proclaimed the Rev. Bob Harrington in his 1969 autobiography The Chaplain of Bourbon Street. Born in 1927 and born again in 1958 (both in the town of Sweet Water, Alabama), Harrington first encountered “the dives and strip joints of the [French] Quarter” while a Navy seaman during World War II. He returned in 1960 as a student at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, along with his first wife Joyce and their two daughters. He “was particularly thrilled by the lives of four great evangelists, Jesus, Roger Williams, who founded the first Baptist church on American soil, and those two great modern-day preachers, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham.” It didn’t take long for Harrington “to open a ‘Salvation Shop' in the heart of the French Quarter—the area that Billy Graham, during a visit there, had called ‘the middle of hell’.” Moreover, according to Harrington, “I wanted the sinners to see me coming from blocks away. I wasn’t going to pussyfoot around. To call attention to myself, I adopted the custom of wearing a red tie, red pocket handkerchief and red socks. And I carried with me everywhere a Bible bound in red leather. Those are my trademarks to this day.”

And the rest, as they say, is an In His Steps-esque tip-sheet for soul saving, but with a canned bluster (“No one had invited me—a sin-busting, devil-chasing young preacher—into the hellhole that was the French Quarter of New Orleans”) that came honest to an admirer of Billy Sunday, and with a voyeuristic gaze (“As far as I know, I’m the only man permitted free access to the backstage dressing rooms of the strippers”) that can only be (un)appreciated if you happen upon a copy of The Chaplain of Bourbon Street in your local Christian used bookstore. At the very least, check out his website: www.thechaplain.com

Here's a debate between Harrington and Madalyn Murray O’Hair (founder of American Atheists) on the Phil Donahue Show in 1970.

For our vinyl collectors...

And from the bombastic to the benign, here’s a two-sided card that my daughter caught at a recent Mardi Gras parade in Baton Rouge.

Front:

Back:

FSU's 10th Annual Graduate Student Symposium

February 18-20 marks the 10th Annual Graduate Student Symposium sponsored by the Department of Religion at Florida State University. Participants include many names that are familiar to our blog readers: Amanda Porterfield, John Corrigan, Sylvester Johnson, Kathryn Lofton, Amy Koehlinger, Arthur Remillard, and Kelly Baker, among others. Graduate students from 20 universities will be presenting their ideas about several topics, including the politics of conflict, ritual practice and community identity, issues of empowerment and subjugation, creation and preservation of sacred place and time, legitimization of power, divine authority, and roles of lay practice.

If you missed the CFP this year, you should definitely consider attending next year. I know I'm biased, having graduated from FSU, but this is an incredible graduate conference with all sorts of opportunities for professional development, friendship building, and good old-fashioned fun. Can I get a witness?!

For a conference schedule, click here.

A Plantation and a Church on a Bayou

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

If you're going to be at this weekend's annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, please consider attending a roundtable discussion of the "The Future of Southern Religious History." I will be speaking about the peculiarity of place and the conceptualization of home in the American South. Specifically, I will take the audience on a brief tour of a plantation and a church on a bayou. If you'd like to know how this song relates to the photographs below, then join me and the rest of the panel on Monday, November 1, at 9am.

An Interest in Women: The Bellocq Brothers' Catholic New Orleans

Paul Harvey

At Killing the Buddha, our contributor Michael Pasquier has posted his first documentary production: "An Interest in Women: The Bellocq Brothers' Catholic New Orleans."

Killing the Buddha is an online religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the “spirituality” section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. Since it was founded by Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau in 2000, it has published uncommon commentary, journalism, reviews, fiction, art, and more about religion, politics, and culture.

American Religion and Digital Humanities

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

Recently, I’ve been collaborating with a small group of scholars on a digital humanities project. As is often the case, we’ve got lots of experience in the humanities—folks from across the disciplinary spectrum of the liberal arts—but hardly any grasp of the technical computer skills necessary to produce a website that meets the incredible standards of today. I’m the only historian of religion involved in the project, which, without getting into the details, focuses on antebellum America. Aside from the many things I’ve learned about xml-this and tangible-interface-that, I’ve also become familiar with the variety of digital humanities initiatives at universities, archives, libraries, and other academic organizations around the country. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to recognize the potential for digital scholarship to transform the way we conduct ourselves as historians in the not-too-distant future. And yet, from what I can gather, there aren’t many folks in the field of American religious history who are at the cutting edge, or even the margins of digital scholarship.

There are plenty of good explanations for why most historians of American religion (and most historians in general) don’t involve themselves in digital humanities projects. First, there is a rather wide disciplinary gulf between computer people and humanities people. Effective communication and working relationships are rare. Truly hybrid scholars are even rarer. Second, the costs for starting a digital humanities project are astronomical compared to the typical research budgets of individual scholars. An NEH Level-1 startup grant, for instance, runs upwards of $25,000, while a Level-2 grant reaches $50,000. But when you’re looking at hiring consultants, traveling to conferences, hosting conferences, and paying graduate students to do the “dirty” work of inputting data—all for a measly prototype version of the still-imagined final product—there’s really no way of knowing how much everything will finally cost. Third, there’s the question of tenure. The framework for peer-reviewing digital humanities materials isn’t quite settled. The online scholarly organization NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is one of the most respectable outlets committed to the production, collection, and dissemination of information about the digital humanities. For access to NINES’s scholarly projects, click here. For information on its review policy, click here. And for further readings on the digital humanities field, click here. You can also go to the website of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.

Below, you’ll find a short list of digital humanities projects out there. You’ll notice that some are more or less interactive than others; some resemble traditional archives while others incorporate more visualization tools; some are better suited for the classroom while others are strictly research oriented; some are prototypes and some are final products; some are free access and some require subscription; and some are already relevant to the study of religion in the United States. You’ll also notice how important it is for digital projects to have institutional and university support. Prepare to feel left in the dust.

University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities

Virginia Center for Digital History

Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative

French and Spanish Missions in North America (This is one of the few sites directly related to religion in America. Our very own Art Remillard was one of its creators!)

Dickinson Electronic Archive

The Walt Whitman Archive

The Ambrose Bierce Project

The Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection

The 19th-Century Concord Digital Archive

Virtual Jamestown

Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery

Sites of (re)Collection

Electronic Enlightenment

Digital Karnak

Florida State University Graduate Symposium

The program schedule for the 9th Annual Florida State University Graduate Symposium is now available. Thirty-nine graduate students from sixteen different institutions will meet February 19-21 in Tallahassee, Florida, where they will discuss matters related to the symposium’s theme, “Sects and Sexuality: Issues of Division and Diversity.” The list of respondents includes some of American religious history’s most notable scholars: Amanda Porterfield, John Corrigan, Amy Koehlinger, and Kathryn Lofton. Bernadette Brooten, the Kraft-Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University, will provide the keynote address on Friday evening, followed by the announcement of the Leo Sandon Best Paper Award. On Saturday, Professors Brooten, Corrigan, Lofton, and Nicole Kelley will conduct a roundtable discussion on the incorporation of gender in scholarship. Later, symposium participants will be invited to screen the documentary, “Fallen Angel: The Outlaw Larry Norman,” which recounts the rise and fall of Larry Norman, the father of Christian rock music.

Biased sidenote: To all the student readers of this blog, you would be hard-pressed to find a more professional and enjoyable graduate conference in the United States. Its strength as a place for conversation about American religion is obvious. What the program doesn’t say is that you will eat and drink, almost always for FREE, until your stomach is beyond content. If you missed this year, take heart in the fact that there’s always next year. If you’re already going… Well, I’m jealous. Go ReligioNoles!

God's Architects: A Documentary by Zack Godshall

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

I’m always looking for documentaries to screen in my classes. Zack Godshall’s latest film “God’s Architects” will definitely find a spot in my syllabus next semester. Godshall, currently writer-in-residence in LSU's Department of English, was recently named the 2009 Louisiana Filmmaker of the Year by the New Orleans Film Society. He’s also the co-writer and director of the film “Low and Behold” which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. DVDs of “God’s Architects” are available for purchase at the film’s website. Check out the trailer and read the synopsis and backstory below.



Synopsis:

God's Architects is a documentary that tells the stories of five divinely inspired artist-architects and their enigmatic creations.The film details how and why these oft-marginalized creators, with neither funding nor blueprints, construct their self-made environments.

Backstory:

In the spring of 2005, Emilie Taylor, then a graduate student at the Tulane School of Architecture, received a travel grant to research and document self-taught and visionary builders around the south. After visiting and documenting a number of builders, most of whom professed some degree of divine inspiration, Emilie shared her findings with filmmaker Zachary Godshall. Immediately attracted by Taylor's stories, drawings, and photographs, Godshall decided to visit the builders himself.

And so in November 2005, Godshall set out from south Louisiana with a camera, tripod, and microphone to interview and document the work of Floyd Banks Jr., a divinely inspired castle builder living in the east Tennessee hill country.

Three years later, Godshall completed a feature-length film that both examines and celebrates the work of Banks along with four other solitary builders who have constructed similar monuments. Beyond the builders and their work, the film functions as a personal essay that explores the nature of inspiration and one's dedication to a creative project, no matter how absurd or mysterious the circumstances may seem.

Know Your Archives, Part VIII: American Catholic Archives Tip Sheet

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

As all red-blooded Protestants of the 19th century loved a good convent captivity narrative, so too do all blue-blooded historians of the 21st century love a good archival horror story. Sadly, I have no such tale to add to the genre. I spent the better part of six years in and out of archives specializing in the history of American Catholicism. I concentrated my attention on Catholics in the antebellum United States. And I came away with the impression that most archivists of Catholic institutions hardly resemble the image of the gruff guardian of the church’s secrets whose sole purpose in life is to foil the research agenda of even the most alter-boyish of academics. Perhaps this has to do with the apparent harmlessness of my research topic—French émigré priests in the trans-Appalachian West. Or perhaps it’s to do with the fact that, as someone once told me, when it comes to gaining access to the personal papers of Catholic priests, the deader the better.

At any rate, here are a few archives that may help someone out there interested in 19th-century American Catholicism:

Thanks to the collecting acumen of 19th-century librarian and historian James Edwards, the University of Notre Dame Archives (UNDA) has become a sort of clearinghouse for all-things-Catholic in the United States. UNDA’s commitment to the accumulation and dissemination of Catholic Americana made this former graduate student’s life a whole lot easier. One week I could concentrate on the Diocese of Bardstown, Kentucky, collections, and the next I could shift gears to the Archdiocese of New Orleans, finding time in-between to consult microfilm versions of archives previously accessible only in France and Italy. Side note: don’t remind the archivists and priest-historians of Louisville and New Orleans of your love for UNDA. A Louisville priest once told me about his plan to sue UNDA for “stealing” documents related to Kentucky Catholicism; fortunately, cooler heads have prevailed. And if you find yourself in the Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, you’ll notice that most 19th-century manuscripts are photocopied; that’s because an archbishop in the 1890s gave them to Notre Dame's Edwards for safekeeping. Let’s just say the New Orleans folks don’t brag about this fact.

Before you plan your trip to UNDA, look into applying for a Research Travel Grant from Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. You will not find an institution more supportive of American Catholic studies in the United States. I personally owe an incredible debt of gratitude to Timothy Matovina and Kathleen Sprows Cummings of the Cushwa Center for their kindness, generosity, and criticism. They are true ambassadors of the field.

If 20th-century American Catholicism is your thing, then the American Catholic Research Center and University Archives at Catholic University of America is a fine place to start. I consulted the papers of Peter Guilday and John Tracy Ellis (arguably the founding [ordained] fathers of American Catholic history) during my visit a few years ago. Manuscripts related to the Second Vatican Council are especially relevant to recent trends in the field of American Catholic studies. And CUA’s archivists have started to digitize some of their collections, including documents on the burning of the Ursuline Convent of Charlestown, Massachusetts, and the First Vatican Council (the 19th century, it should be said, is also well represented in CUA’s holdings). The archives also offer the Dorothy Mohler Research Grant to folks on an annual basis. Again, an all-around outstanding place to conduct research.

When it comes to regional archives (as opposed to the more national-oriented repositories at UND and CUA), I’d single out the Associated Archives of St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, Maryland. Located on the campus of, you guessed it, St. Mary’s, the Associated Archives include the collections of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, St. Mary’s Seminary and University, and the Sulpicians of the United States, effectively offering historians of the early American Catholic Church with no better place to get one’s sea legs. The facilities were recently renovated and the archivists are incredibly generous with their expertise as both librarians and historians.

Lastly, a word of caution to those interested in American Catholic studies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Historians of American Catholicism (myself included) are in the habit of focusing most (if not all) of their attention on Catholic-specific archives like UND, CUA, and St. Mary’s. There are very good reasons for this pattern, not the least of which is the practical appeal of one-stop-shopping. But my recent work in earlier periods of colonial American history—periods covered less thoroughly in the collections of American Catholic repositories—has made me realize just how much I may have missed in my 19th-century studies. Walking into a place like UNDA can be exhilarating—where to begin? when will it end? so much!—but it can also be suffocating.

Photo #1: Knute Rockne, University of Notre Dame
Photo #2: United Mine Workers of America, Catholic University of America
Photo #3: Altar Boy Procession, St. Mary's Seminary and University

FSU Graduate Student Symposium CFP

The Florida State University Department of Religion’s 9th Annual Graduate Student SymposiumThe Florida State University Department of Religion’s 9th Annual Graduate Student Symposium has partnered with the Society for Women’s Advancement in Philosophy’s 6th Annual Conference to present an interdisciplinary graduate student symposium to be held February 19-21, 2010 .

Graduate students are invited to submit proposals that engage this year’s theme:
Sects and Sexuality: Issues of Division and Diversity

Because we feel that constructive collaborative efforts are important to the advancement of the academic community as a whole, we encourage submissions from graduate students in all fields and levels with interdisciplinary interest in the study of Religion and Philosophy. We also welcome a variety of methods and approaches, particularly in regards to

(1) Religion, Ethics, and Philosophy;
(2) American Religious History;
(3) Religions of Western Antiquity;
(4) History and Ethnography of Religions (specializing in Asian, African, Mediterranean, and Western European Religions); and
(5) Philosophy dealing with Race, Class, Sexuality, and Gender.

This is an Open Call for papers. Possible topics may include, but are not limited, to: Celibacy and Asceticism, Issues of Inclusion and Exclusion, Notions of the Forbidden, Sectarian Conflicts, and Community Identities.

Presentations should be 15-20 minutes in length and will receive faculty responses at the conclusion of each panel. The Leo F. Sandon Award will be given for the best paper of the symposium.

Proposal submissions are due December 1, 2009, and should consist of an abstract (up to 800 words) including a list of key terms for review and a CV. Final papers must be submitted by January 15, 2010.

Proposals should be emailed to Brooke Sherrard, fsugradsymposium@gmail.com.

Please refer to the FSU Department of Religion website for more information.

Students, Masons, and Witches

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

It’s the second week of the semester, and already three students with questions about Dan Brown’s forthcoming bestseller The Lost Symbol. I tend to shrug off most references to the world’s most famous symbologist, Robert Langdon. “It’s certainly entertaining,” I’m apt to say, “and definitely more historical than ‘Ice Road Truckers’.” I’ll even admit to the student (or the odd friend or family member) that I read The Da Vinci Code during a beach vacation after a long year of graduate school. But that’s it… I’m not going there… Moving on…

Until now. Based on the recently released cover of The Lost Symbol, it looks like we’re in store for a rise in the number of queries about the influence of Freemasonry in American history and its lasting impact in the 21st century. Move over National Treasure Part One and Two (and Three?), there’s a new Grand Master in town.

Fortunately, there’re also a couple of books that can help us (or at least me) speak about Freemasonry without too much sarcasm and with at least a little confidence. Steven Bullock’s Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, 1730-1840 (UNC Press) is a good place to start. More recently, Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion associates Freemasonry with the likes of Mormonism, Universalism, and Transcendentalism because of their common preoccupation with the power of the mind and the democratizing effects of their respective societies. Here are a few more books on the subject, though I can’t vouch for their quality (I’m just the messenger): Corey Walker, A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (Univ. of Illinois Press); Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717-1927 (UNC Press); William Moore, Masonic Temples: Freemasonry, Ritual Architecture, and Masculine Archetypes (Univ. of Tenn. Press); and Clyde Forsberg, Equal Rites: The Book of Mormon, Masonry, Gender, and American Culture (Columbia Univ. Press).

However, if the new semester’s already got you down and you’re looking to avoid another rough read of the latest must-read monograph, then you might consider Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. Now, I’ll be the first to admit my guarded skepticism at the academic quality of any book to be reviewed in the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, and the Christian Science Monitor, not to mention a book with a trailer, an author interview on ABC’s Good Morning America, and a few weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Is it that I don’t trust popular taste? Or am I just jealous?

But here’s the kicker—Katherine Howe’s one of us. She’s a doctoral candidate in American and New England Studies at Boston University with a dissertation entitled (at least according to the program website) “Witchcraft in North America through Primary Sources.” Okay, so the dissertation doesn’t sound all that sexy (isn’t it a rule that dissertation titles are supposed to sound uninteresting?) But the first chapter of Physick Book is the scene of a Harvard grad student’s comprehensive examinations in history, during which, for a moment, I thought I saw a footnote to David Hall’s Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, John Demos’s Entertaining Satan, and Carol Karlsen’s Devil in the Shape of a Woman. Did I mention that Physick Book is about the Salem witch trials, a subject with a reputation for silliness that might even surpass that of masonry?

Howe writes Physick Book with one foot in the academic world and the other in the bookselling world. Those who’ve read the standard dozen or so books on Puritanism will know when Howe is waving the scholarly flag. There's even a bibliography for further reading on the Physick Book website. Grad students (and the recently graduated) might get a kick out of the main character’s confrontations with her dissertation committee members and source materials. And most everyone should be entertained. "But you don’t have to take my word for it…"

Where There Is Death, There Is Religion

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER


Two recent publications—Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (HUP 2008) and Amy Louise Wood’s Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (UNCP 2009)—pay close attention to the relationship between death and religion in the history of the Americas. Taking a cue from anthropologist Katherine Verdery’s claim that “Death is the quintessential cosmic issue,” Brown shows in terrible detail how death dictated life for Africans of Jamaica, the island at the heart of British colonial slavery during the seventeenth century. Wood advances to the twentieth century in her portrayal of the cultural practices associated with the spectacle of lynching in the United States and the ritual performances that resulted in thousands of deaths.

Whether in colonial Jamaica or the Jim Crow South, the connections between death and religion seem so pervasive, so obvious, so quotidian, that Brown and Wood hardly labor to unite the two experiences. Making sense of death, at least in these two cases, required rites and practices that rarely occurred in the institutional confines of churches or fell under clearly defined categories of denomination. As Wood demonstrates, the “symbolic power” of lynching was a consequence of the “deliberately performative and ritualized” actions of white mobs and “their sensational representations in narratives, photographs, and films.” Similarly, Brown tracks how “intense disputes about custom, authority, and religion play out within final rites of passage,” while at the same time capturing how “mortuary politics mediated group cohesion, property relations, struggles to give public influence a sacred dimension, contests over the colonial moral order, and efforts to politicize local geography and history.”

While illuminating much about the relationship between death and religion, Brown and Wood also demonstrate the interdisciplinary effectiveness of combining history and anthropology to make sense of the past. Wood puts the two methodologies to outstanding use in her chapter entitled “A Hell of Fire Upon Earth: Religion,” wherein she confounds the traditional distinction between the sacred and the profane in her description of the 1885 lynching of Harris Tunstal behind the Methodist Episcopal Church of Oxford, Mississippi. With comparable effect, Brown’s prologue begins with the story of a group of black women singing a song to Europeans arriving for the first time at Jamaica. The song went, “New-come Buckra/He get sick/He tak fever/He be die/He be die.” “Buckra,” it should be noted, meant both “master” and “demon” in West African usage. I could go on, or you can just read more for yourself. Suffice it to say that The Reaper’s Garden and Lynching and Spectacle capture both the ordinary and extraordinary dimensions of death in ways that blur definitions of religion and academic discipline.

Side note:
Check out these links for more on the history of lynching in America, many of which can be put to use in the classroom.

Amy Louise Wood, “They Never Witnessed Such a Melodrama,” Southern Spaces (Apr. 2009).

Mississippi Quarterly’s special issue on lynching and American culture, edited by Amy Louise Wood and Susan Donaldson (Winter-Spring 2008).

Donald Mathews, “The Southern Rite of Human Sacrifice,” Journal of Southern Religion (2000).

“Without Sanctuary,” an online gallery adapted from the book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America edited by James Allen, Jon Lewis, Leon Litwack, and Hilton Als, and reported about on NPR in 2004.

Luxury Condominium Catholicism

MICHAEL PASQUIER

Every Saturday I drive my daughter to swimming lessons in a town on the outskirts of Boston. And every Saturday I pass what was once St. Theresa Catholic Church and what is now Bell Tower Place Condominiums. St. Theresa’s was one of 65 Boston-area churches shuttered by Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley in 2004. The decision to close so many churches came in the aftermath of an $85 million legal settlement with 552 victims of sexual abuse in 2002. Crucial to the plaintiffs’ case was Cardinal Bernard F. Law’s admission that he covered up allegations of sexual abuse by reassigning accused priests to other parishes around the archdiocese. Law knew about John J. Geoghan’s attacks on young people as early as 1984, just a year before a small-town investigative journalist uncovered what he called “the veil of secrecy that surrounds the case of Gilbert Gauthe,” a priest who later admitted to similar actions in the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana. News of Gauthe’s guilt reached the pages of the New York Times and Time. It also received coverage in a 1985 issue of the National Catholic Reporter, which included the editorial comment that “the tragedy and scandal is not only with the actions of the individual priests—these are serious enough—but with church structures in which bishops, chanceries and seminaries fail to respond to complaints, or even engage in coverup.”

Since the mid-1980s theologians, historians, lawyers, journalists, teachers, parents—just about everyone—have thought about the behavior of priests and the institution of the priesthood. Scott Appleby, a historian of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, told American bishops in 2002 that they were accomplices in “a betrayal of fidelity enabled by the arrogance that comes with unchecked power.” Eugene Kennedy, a professor of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago, accused American bishops of suffering from “Pontius Pilate Syndrome, that unwillingness to learn, that fatal paralysis of judgment, that preferential option for passivity.” Indeed, “the real subject,” according to Kennedy, “is not the sex abuse scandal but the bishops themselves.” Historian Jay P. Dolan made a similar assertion in a postscript to the second edition of his book In Search of an American Catholicism, writing that “a celibate, male, clerical culture impervious to outside scrutiny has created the worst scandal in the history of American Catholicism.”

The statements of Appleby, Kennedy, and Dolan have not gone without criticism. I distinctly remember watching and listening to EWTN commentators reduce Appleby’s 2002 remarks at the Dallas conference of bishops to some kind of feminist rant laced with a liberal homosexual agenda. Read for yourself. That being said, the debate over the present crisis in the Catholic Church does seem to have escaped the scrutiny of most historians with the analytical tools necessary to unveil the many faces of the priesthood. To put it another way, historians have the ability to take what they’ve learned by studying “the people” and retrain their eyes on the priests. Case in point: Francois Raymond, diocesan priest of Opelousas, Louisiana, accused of raping a girl in 1862. Archival sources reveal a scared assortment of priests in the Archdiocese of New Orleans scurrying to cover up reports of Raymond and a pregnant girl, his regular meetings “in the woods with other women of bad reputation,” and his affair with an enslaved woman of African descent. Such "great scandals," according to a priest close to Raymond, produced a negative effect on the reputation of priests and threats of physical violence. The threats were so great, in fact, that one priest suggested that “for his health, to renew his morale, [and] to let dissipate all the commotion in its entirety,” Raymond should “take a retreat, that he go on a little trip,” and then return to another area of Louisiana when things had settled down.

But if history isn’t your thing, then look more closely at today’s changing Catholic landscape and tone of Catholic voices in urban, suburban, and rural America. Learn about how Catholic laypeople have held vigils in 5 “suppressed” (that’s canon law speak for “closed”) churches in the Archdiocese of Boston since their official closures in 2004. Think about the impact of widespread church closures throughout the United States just as the overall Catholic population rises, largely as a consequence of the growing number of Hispanic parishioners. And take seriously the words of laypeople who react to bishops acting like bishops. In response to the resignation of Cardinal Law, one woman had this to say: “This should teach a lesson to the people in charge, to someone like him. I think the church was really protecting themselves and they didn’t really care about the children. A lot of children got hurt because of that.” And in response to a visit by Archbishop O’Malley to a suppressed church in Boston, another woman had this to say: “That was utter hypocrisy to have him here to speak about the importance of having a community of worship in the very building he’s shutting down.”

Perhaps Luxury Condominium Catholicism isn’t the right way to describe the current state of American Catholicism after all. Maybe it’s a euphemism for Angry Catholicism. Either way, or in completely different ways, the deep historical and cultural roots of the Catholic priesthood are losing their mysterious qualities. Mystery is bound to fade as long as people like Father Donald McGuire of the Archdiocese of Chicago go to prison for the abuse of minors. McGuire, supposedly a respected confidante of Mother Teresa, admitted during sentencing earlier this week that “Tears are frequent for me these days.” A father of two boys had this to say: “Give me 30 minutes in a locked room with him and a baseball bat—with no repercussions in this or the next life—and I’m ready to call it a day.”

The State of the Humanities

MICHAEL PASQUIER

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences recently released the Humanities Indicators Prototype, which is the result of a decade-long collaborative study of the state of the humanities in the United States. In a nutshell, the Academy “hope[s] that the Humanities Indicators Prototype will equip researchers and policymakers, universities, foundations, museums, libraries, humanities councils and other public institutions with better statistical tools for answering basic questions about primary and secondary humanities education, undergraduate and graduate education in the humanities, the humanities workforce, levels and sources of program funding, public understanding and impact of the humanities, and other areas of concern in the humanities community.”

Here are a few of the findings based primarily on 2004 statistics:

Overall, between 10% and 12% of all B.A. degrees are in the humanities, behind the social sciences and business.

2.6% of B.A. degrees in the humanities fall under the category of Religion. English was the highest with 31.7%. History posted 17.7%.

Over 70% of all B.A. degrees in the humanities go to “white/non-Hispanic” students.

Over 60% of all B.A. degrees in the humanities go to women.

Over 40% of all undergraduate students take U.S. History survey courses. 15% take General/Comparative Religion courses.

Average GRE scores for humanities majors: 554 verbal/567 quantitative. For Religion majors: 556/594. For History majors: 542/554. Classics and Philosophy majors posted the highest scores.

Less than 5% of all master’s degrees are in the humanities. Less than 9% of all doctoral degrees are in the humanities, the second from last among all fields ahead of the arts.

Of all master’s degrees, 3.4% are in Religion, 11.8% in History, and 36% in English (high); approximately 65% go to white/non-Hispanic students.

Of all doctoral degrees, 5.1% are in Religion, 20% in History, and 28% in English (high); approximately 65% humanities doctoral degrees go to white/non-Hispanic students (2,384 white/non-Hispanic, 156 African American, 175 Hispanic, 138 Asian or Pacific Islander, 222 Other/Unknown, and 594 Temporary Resident).

Just over 60% of all master’s degrees in the humanities go to women. Just over 50% of all doctoral degrees go to women.

9.7 years is the median number of years for completion of doctoral degrees in the humanities (highest overall). All Fields is 8 years.

Over 28% of humanities graduate students rely on their own resources to pay for education, compared to Physical Sciences at 5.3% (lowest) and Education at 60.3 (highest).

4% of humanities-related jobs are in post-secondary education, compared to 37% in primary/secondary education.

56% of all those awarded Ph.D.’s in the humanities leave university with a definite job commitment.

Humanities faculty has increased 24% since 1999. History faculty has seen a slight but steady increase over the last decade, while Religion and Philosophy faculties have seen a slight decrease in the last 5 years.

Roughly 5% of humanities faculty are categorized at Hispanic, 5% as African American, and 5% as Asian or Pacific Islander, all substantially lower than most other fields.

40% of tenured humanities faculty are women.

Humanities full-time faculty receive the lowest salaries of all fields with a median income of $61,852, compared to overall median of all fields with $70,414 and Engineering (highest) with $89,878.

I could go on. Suffice it to say that this is a highly informative study that everyone in the academic profession should consider. For graphs and explanations and much, much, much, much more, go to http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/. To read the press release, click here.

Religion and the Louisiana Purchase

MICHAEL PASQUIER

In 2004 over twenty scholars of religion in the Americas gathered at the University of Missouri-Columbia for the conference “Moving Boundaries: American Religion(s) through the Louisiana Purchase.”  Richard Callahan, chief organizer of the conference and assistant professor of religious studies at UM, has spent the last few years editing a selection of essays devoted to understanding the complex religious dimensions of a territorial purchase that linked the cultures of the nascent United States, Spanish and French colonial empires and the circum-Caribbean world on an enormous and perhaps unprecedented level in American history.  The result of Callahan’s innovation and diligence is the book New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008).  Like Thomas Tweed’s groundbreaking book Retelling U.S. Religious History, Callahan’s edited collection of essays is a reformulation of the relationship between religion and place in the United States as manifested in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.  Or, to use the words of Callahan in his introductory remarks, it is an opportunity to examine how “Native Americans, Africans, African Americans, and others competed and at times cooperated with the new nation, as space, authority, and identity were refigured into the story of the United States.”

Contributors include Peter Williams, Amanda Porterfield, Charles Long, Paul Christopher Johnson, Michael Zogry, Douglas Henry Daniels, Carole Lynn Stewart, Elaine Lawless, and John Stewart.  Topics include religious landscape and architecture, sex and violence, Indian removal, jazz, Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the Deep South roots of Pentecostalism, Mardi Gras, the cultural history and representation of New Orleans, and the integral role that Vodou played in the Louisiana Purchase.

The breadth and importance of this book is only matched by the academic credentials of its contributors.  New Territories, New Perspectives also begs the question: to what extent have historians taken seriously Tweed’s call for new narratives of American religion?  Have historians followed the example of those who contributed to Retelling U.S. Religious History over ten years ago?  Is the field of American religious history sufficiently “reoriented,” “recentered,” and “retold”?  If so, then what’s next?  If not, then what happened?  To begin answering these questions, I suggest you read Callahan’s New Territories, New Perspecctives.

Tourist-Pilgrim-Professor

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

Recently, my family and I took a day trip to Walden Pond and the town of Concord, Massachusetts. I snapped a few photographs of the autumnal landscape and the New England townscape and sent them to some friends and relatives. I received this email response from one of my cousins who happens to be a high school English teacher.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

No commentary. No personal reflection. Just the words of Henry David Thoreau. I should also mention that I telephoned an aunt of mine that same morning (she, too, a high school English teacher) to tell her of my impending trip, and she literally cried; she wanted to be there so badly. “Oh, you have to tell me all about it,” she insisted. “You have to take pictures! You have to remember to visit Nathaniel and Ralph and the rest of them for me!”

And so we entered the frenzied clutter of cars and pedestrians and cyclists that is Concord’s Main Street on a perfect weekend in October, plopped the two-year-old in the stroller, and started for Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. It seemed that all signs pointed to our destination—Authors Ridge. After maneuvering toddler and stroller over cracks and roots and rocks and cobble, we reached the summit and paused in front of the modest stone markers placed over the remains of great writers made into myths. Several people had already paid their respects by leaving various mementos of their journey to what Louisa May Alcott once pseudonymously called “this modern Mecca” (she used her nickname Tribulation Periwinkle).

Little did Alcott know—or perhaps she knew quite well—that she would be visited by similar sorts of pilgrim-tourists who flocked to Concord in the 1860s and who, in the words of Alcott, “roost upon Concordian fences, chirp on Concordian doorsteps, and hop over Concordian fields and hills, scratching vigorously, as if hoping to unearth a new specimen from what is popularly believed to be the hot-bed of genius.” I wonder how much today’s roosting, chirping, hopping, scratching, and hoping resemble that of the nineteenth century. I wonder how much the myth has changed since the The Scarlet Letter (1850) became THE book to study for the English AP test. I wonder when high school English teachers started crying over the Transcendentalists. And I wonder why I felt so happy to be there.

So to all you college professors who teach courses on religion in America—the next time you’re covering the Transcendentalists, don’t just spend the hour situating this or that author within the larger movement of romanticism or placing this or that idea within the larger tradition of liberal Protestantism. Instead, remember your audience. Hell, remember yourself. Reflect upon how this ridiculously quotable, glaringly tiny group of American thinkers became so pervasive in American culture and so interesting or boring but nonetheless known to you and your students. Heaven knows they’ve never heard of old John Winthrop, who, by the way, you can also visit next time you’re in the Boston area at the King’s Chapel Burying Ground.

And to all you folks who plan to visit the site of Thoreau’s shed and remains, watch out for the high school cross country teams at Walden Pond and skateboarders at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. They’re courteous, but many.

For a few recent books on Transcendentalism and other related matters, see Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism: A History (Hill and Wang 2008); John Matteson’s Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (W.W. Norton 2007); Dean Grodzins’ American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (Univ. of North Carolina 2007); Sterling Delano’s Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Belknap/Harvard 2004); and David Robinson’s Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism (Cornell 2004). For a 2002 NPR report on Thoreau’s Walden, go to this link.

One Million Catholics Skip Mass

MICHAEL PASQUIER

It’s just a guess, but I think a good guess, that approximately one million Louisiana Catholics skipped mass last Sunday. Over 95% of the population of South Louisiana, or around 2 million people, spent the Sabbath packed into automobiles, queued at gas stations and Home Depots, laying on cots and loitering in parking lots of public shelters, or stuffed into the homes of relatives and hotel rooms in anticipation of Hurricane Gustav’s landfall, to say nothing of the thousands of National Guardsmen and women, medical first-responders, law enforcement officers, and other civic leaders who stayed behind to oversee the evacuation and emergency response. Diocesan officials cancelled masses and urged their parishioners—about half the population of South Louisiana—to heed the advice of state and local governments to leave areas in the path of Gustav. No doubt, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were on the minds of everyone.

In the weeks and months leading up to Hurricane Gustav’s arrival on the morning of September 1, 2008—just three days after the third anniversary of Katrina and three weeks before the same anniversary of Rita—Catholic massgoers throughout the state recited a prayer to Our Lady of Prompt Succor, the Patroness of Louisiana, which read, “Our Father in heaven, through the powerful intercession of Our Lady of Prompt Succor, spare us from all harm during this hurricane season and protect us and our homes from all disasters of nature. Our Lady of Prompt Succor, hasten to help us. Amen.” The same prayer was recited in Catholic churches unaffected by evacuation orders on the day before Gustav landed, sometimes within eye-shot of highways and interstates streaming with many carloads of Catholics skipping mass.

Suffice it to say that Catholics living in Louisiana, from your regular churchgoer to the so-called lapsed variety, know that Our Lady of Prompt Succor is the Mary you pray to during hurricane season. Hear a story about the feastday celebration of OLPS on NPR here. It’s just one of those things that Louisiana Catholics do, like abstaining from the consumption of meat on Friday’s during Lent and gorging instead on crawfish, shrimp, and cheap beer. It’s also safe to say that most Louisiana Catholics—and historians of American religion for that matter—know very little about the history of the cult of Our Lady of Prompt Succor. I should know, I wrote a boring article on that very subject in the book Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World. Rebecca Carter’s article on “spiritual dwelling” in post-Katrina New Orleans in the Journal of Southern Religion is a better place to start thinking about personal devotions to Our Lady of Prompt Succor.

After evacuating from my residence in South Louisiana and as I enjoyed the company and hospitality of friends and family 200 miles inland, I couldn’t help but think how inconsequential my historical knowledge of the cult of Our Lady of Prompt Succor was to what was going on in the minds of millions of Catholics and non-Catholics as they worried about running out of gas, finding and then paying for a hotel room, feeding and sheltering their children, and when they would be able to return to their homes that may be destroyed. It’s hard to imagine even the most devout Catholic grandmother from Plaquemines Parish—the southeastern most parish (county) of Louisiana lined by the levees of the Mississippi River—focusing intensely on the Mary that was supposed to protect her home and family from disaster. It’s hard to imagine anyone keeping attuned to what scholars generally consider “religious” concerns in the heat of the moment.

It’s this “religion-in-the-moment” that is perplexing for scholars like me who were raised on books like Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street and Thomas Tweed’s Our Lady of the Exile, perhaps the two most influential studies of Marian devotionalism in America. The evidence and data used in these sorts of books, however magnificent, are usually disconnected from immediate experience, when devotees are pressed to fill out questionnaires, contrive quotes for inquisitive interviewers, or send anonymous petitions to shrine newsletters. I have a difficult time thinking of ways to situate the religious experiences of hurricane evacuees in historical, social, and cultural contexts. The circumstances just seem too aberrant, too disjointed from ordinary time and space, to capture the religious experiences of the moment. Scholars of religious studies, myself included, tend to use phrases like “lived religion” and “extraliturgical religion” to describe religion outside the carefully scripted confines of “official religion” or “institutional religion.” But these categories seem only to get at the before and after the storm; the now remains elusive. I can’t help but think—actually, I know—that I’m missing something. The scholar in me wants to know what it's like, but every other part of my being never wants to know.

What is it about the devil?

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

Click here for After the Storm: A Special Issue on Hurricane Katrina in the Journal of Southern Religion
What is it about New Orleans that brings the devil to mind? A Baptist preacher by the name of James Raynoldson arrived at New Orleans in 1816 and promptly retreated from what he called “the stronghold of Satan.” A Catholic priest by the name of Michel Portier arrived at New Orleans a couple of years later and remarked how “it would be more consoling to go throw oneself among the savage and ignorant nations, to go freeze in the Canadian and Illinois woods than to work in… the cesspool of the universe.” During the twentieth century, Tracy Fessenden reminded us of Bob Dylan’s description of the Crescent City as a place where “The devil comes here and sighs.” Flannery O’Connor once commented that “If I had to live in a city, I think I would prefer New Orleans to any other—both Southern and Catholic and with indications that the Devil’s existence is freely recognized.” And then there are those organizations like the American Family Association that correlate the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with God’s wrathful desire to remove Satan from the streets of New Orleans.

The repulsion and attraction of something called “the devil” has quite a history in New Orleans. It also has quite a staying power, as photographer Mary Lou Uttermohlen captured in her piece “The Devil,” shown a year ago at New Orleans’s Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in the exhibition “No Dead Artists.” Scholars have exhibited great eagerness to uncover the layers of meaning behind conceptions of Satan in premodern and early modern societies (see John Putnam Demos’s Entertaining Satan and Fernando Cervantes’s The Devil in the New World). But it was different then, right? People really believed in that sort of stuff. But what about now? Where are the academic types when you need them? Maybe it’s just me, but it appears as though the artistry and imagination (among other things) required to conceive of such a supernatural entity—or to grasp those who conceive of something so seemingly foreign to the modern world—makes most scholars (myself included) more than a tad uncomfortable.

And that’s why I will leave such questions to people like Peter Entell, director of the documentary film “Shake the Devil Off.” Set in New Orleans six months after Hurricane Katrina, Entell documents how the community of St. Augustine Parish opposed the decision of Archbishop Alfred Hughes to close one of the oldest African American Catholic churches in the United States. At a particularly poignant moment in the film, after the forced removal of their African American pastor Jerome Ledoux, parishioners begin singing the spiritual “Shake the Devil Off” during a mass celebrated by the archdiocese’s new appointee overseeing the closure of St. Augustine. The replacement priest leaves the altar to the applause, singing, and dancing of the parishioners. In this case, the devil is the church and the people doing the shaking are also the church. It all makes for a compelling story, one that can help students and scholars of religion decipher another brushstroke in a larger portrait of the devil in modern America. For more on “Shake the Devil Off,” you can read Zada N. Johnson’s review or my interview with the director in the Journal of Southern Religion. Or you can watch the film's trailer.

It’s worth noting, if it weren’t already obvious, that the devil in the minds of the parishioners of St. Augustine contrasts with most conventional representations of “evil.” I was reminded of this discrepancy as I drove down Interstate-10 this afternoon through the rainy aftermath of Tropical Storm Fay over the Atchafalaya Basin in south-central Louisiana. I was listening to the radio program American Routes when Nick Spitzer started playing Eddie Bo’s rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Speaking of his hometown for the PBS series River of Song, Bo said, "There's that mysticism, that little extra beat that you can always tell comes from New Orleans. It's an extra beat inside the beat that we can't seem to explain to people. We call it a stutter step, that extra step that the second liners do. We incorporate that from when we are children, and when you hear it, then you know it, 'cause there's only one set of people that's able to bring that forth, to incorporate that extra little thing that's going on in there. Mister, you can tell New Orleans anywhere you go."

Hell yeah.