Our Great Pantheist Epic

Paul Harvey

Here's a belated 4th of July post -- little power outage around here cut off my internet access so we're a little behind on posting. Anyway, in honor of the 4th, what better than Bruce Springsteen doing "This Land Is Your Land," the-song-that-should-be-our-national-anthem. "America the Beautiful" would also be a great national anthem, especially since it was inspired by my local landmark Pike's Peak, honors land, and the latter verses hail both "liberty" and "law." Either one of those would be great, and I'd put my hand over heart every time -- just ANYTHING but the unsingable, militaristic, bombast/drinking song we're stuck with presently.

In case you don't know, "This Land Is Your Land" was written as Woody Guthrie's angry response to the treacly patriotism of "God Bless America." Even Carl Lewis, who famously butchered our hideous national anthem, can sing "This Land."

And this one's for you too, Professor Fea. And for our national parks, under significant threats according to a just-released report which also recommends a number of actions to forestall their possible decline.

Only St. Jude Can Prevent Forest Fires

Emily Clark

This morning in Tallahassee was wonderfully pleasant in temperature due to storms passing through the area last night. However, the air quality was horrible, as smoke from nearby wildfires covered the city in a smelly haze. The Florida Division of Forestry has deemed wildfires an area hot topic, and a big part of the problem is a drought. Raised in south Texas, I view droughts not as occasional; they’re the normal environmental state of being. But isn’t Florida supposed to get enough rain? I mean, the Everglades and swamps are here. And Florida isn't the only state in a drought. The majority of Texas has been in a severe drought for months, with many places ranking at the highest severity level (exceptional).

When in need of rain, what can mere humans do? Apparently, pray. Just two months ago in April, Texas governor Rick Perry declared “the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas,” and “Texans of all faiths and traditions” were “to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.” Crop failure and wildfires are plaguing the state, and since (according to Perry) “Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer,” it only made sense to pray for rain. In the wake of a hopeless exceptional-ranking drought, prayer would be the answer. Move over Smokey Bear, enter St. Jude.


Perhaps it’s fitting that today I read Robert Orsi’s Thank You St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes as I prepare to take my doctoral comprehensive exams this December. I may not have been in Indy for the RAAC that I have so jealously read reports on from fellow bloggers, but Orsi has been on my mind too. If you haven’t read Thank You St. Jude, I highly recommend it. Personally, I like it better than Madonna of 115^th Street. In it, Orsi investigates the devotional worlds of women who have called upon St. Jude. In doing so, Catholic women (“the immigrants’ daughters”) have appropriated the saint, and Orsi explores how they use their devotions to regain their voices and how their appeals to Jude can also push them further into their state of hopeless despair. In analyzing the functions, results, and workings of the women’s devotions, Orsi in the end embraces the ambivalence of it all. Jude and the women who ask for his intercession live in unstable and “in-between” worlds. The questions of bracketing belief and passing judgments that seem to have come up again at this June’s RAAC (and reminiscent of the famous “Orsi-Prothero Smack-down” in the HDB) permeate the pages of Thank You St. Jude as well. When he laments how a woman asked Jude to keep her husband faithful instead of confronting the husband, is Orsi passing judgment on the oppressive nature of this woman’s devotion or he is simply embracing the “in-between ground” he endorses in Between Heaven and Earth? Truly, the intersubjectivity beloved by anthropologist Michael Jackson remains a blurry area hard to define when deployed in religious studies and American religious history – though it is a task and goal that I love and applaud Orsi and others for engaging.

After finishing Thank You St. Jude, I visited the website for the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago that begins Orsi’s narrative, and the shrine is in need of help. In his book, Orsi argues that Jude needs the devotion and sustenance of the women who call on him, just as the women who ask for his help need him. Both the women and Jude inhabit a space of vulnerability – the women at the edge of hopeless despair and Jude the long-forgotten saint who could slip back into obscurity. It seems Jude needs help more than ever right now. Upon opening the shrine’s website, one immediately learns that the shrine is $60,000 under budget and is in need of donations. The shrine is once again selling the healing St. Jude's oil, a product that was not available when Orsi was writing. Another possible way to donate is to electronically purchase a “virtual prayer candle,” which comes complete with a 3, 9, or 30 day novena. Though I am an immigrants’ great-great-granddaughter of German and Czech Catholic heritage, I haven’t purchased one yet. But, perhaps come late fall with a hopelessly large pile of comps reading still to tackle, I might take Jude up on that offer.

Pasquier on the Impact of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Randall Stephens

Mike Pasquier has been a busy guy. In addition to writing his rich study of Jesuits in late 18th and 19th century America, our fellow RiAH blogger has been collaborating with other LSU researchers who are studying the impact of the Deepwater Hoirzon oil spill. Ashley Berthelot at LSU Gold reports:

Michael Pasquier, assistant professor of religious studies and historian at LSU, has developed "Standard Lives: Visualizing the Culture of Oil in Louisiana." The goal of this project is to complement scientific investigations of the Deepwater Horizon disaster by documenting the cultural impact of environmental stressors on Louisiana's coastal communities.

"To do this, it's necessary to look at oil from 'the ground up,' so to speak," said Pasquier. "I knew we needed to take a long and unbiased look at Louisiana's relationship with the oil industry, and by extension, its effects on the everyday lives of refinery and offshore workers, as well as the businessmen, teachers, farmers, fishermen, mariners, homemakers and others with direct and indirect ties to petroleum-based services."

Pasquier started his project by delving into a photo collection at the University of Louisville that showcased in detail how the industry fundamentally transformed the social and environmental landscape of Louisiana at mid-century. . . .

"As a native of Louisiana, I grew up in a family and in communities with deep stakes in the oil industry, so I already had my finger on the pulse of a people economically and culturally invested in oil. Now, what I wanted to do was to find a way to look behind the typical photos of a literally oiled landscape to see the faces of people who are directly impacted by even the most subtle of economic and environmental changes," said Pasquier. "When we look at the photos of oily pelicans or an oiled coastline, we should also be trying to understand the backstory that was there long before the oil spill. We should also be looking for the everyday human story that isn't drenched in oil." . . .

"This isn't about justifying our use of oil, or being pro-oil or pro-environment," Pasquier said. "It's about assessing the terrible consequences of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster by taking the time to focus on and understand the big picture, the realities that exist in everyday life for many Louisianans. This is about our history and our culture – this is about us and our future." read on >>>

Many of us heard Mike's preview of this tremendous work at the 2010 AAR. Can't wait to see the eight short documentaries that will result!

Reviews in American Religious History

Paul Harvey

The new issue of Reviews in American History -- to me, the single most helpful professional periodical that I read -- brings focus to a number of titles of interest -- some we’ve blogged about here before, others not.

In “The Cult of Domesticity, Southern Style,” our friend Charles Irons reviews Scott Stephan’s Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South, a book that has quite unaccountably escaped our notice here. This work focuses intensively on domestic piety among a fairly elite class of white southern women. The home was the site of “many of their most significant religious experiences,” and the women Stephan studies put their suitors through a gauntlet of domestic devotion trials, remaining reserved while their courters strutted their evangelical bona fides. In the end, Irons concludes, Stephan shows that “white evangelical women found the process of reforming their own households to be extremely fulfilling,” while “more work is required to evaluate whether and why these domestic reformers were so wary of shining their light outside of their homes.”

Since we've missed discussing this work before, here's just a bit more about it, from the book's website:

In the years leading up to the Civil War, southern evangelical denominations moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the American South. Scott Stephan argues that female Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians played a crucial role in this transformation. While other scholars have pursued studies of southern evangelicalism in the context of churches, meetinghouses, and revivals, Stephan looks at the domestic rituals over which southern women had increasing authority-from consecrating newborns to God's care to ushering dying kin through life's final stages. Laymen and clergymen alike celebrated the contributions of these pious women to the experience and expansion of evangelicalism across the South. This acknowledged domestic authority allowed some women to take on more public roles in the conversion and education of southern youth within churches and academies, although always in the name of family and always cloaked in the language of Christian self-abnegation. At the same time, however, women's work in the name of domestic devotion often put them at odds with slaves, children, or husbands in their households who failed to meet their religious expectations and thereby jeopardized evangelical hopes of heavenly reunification of the family. Stephan uses the journals and correspondence of evangelical women from across the South to understand the interconnectedness of women's personal, family, and public piety. Rather than seeing evangelical women as entirely oppressed or resigned to the limits of their position in a patriarchal slave society, Stephan seeks to capture a sense of what agency was available to women through their moral authority.

Sara Dwyer-NcNulty reviews our blog contributor Kathleen Sprows Cummings’ New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era (the link takes you to our previous post on Kathy's book). The review gives a thorough summary of the volume, and concludes with this reflection on Catholicism and gender: “The Catholic women under examination [the major figures studied by Cummings] did not seek to form an association of work together unless they had to. Gender was subordinate to religious identity. It appears, however, that rejecting gender was only required of women. For men, gender was (and is) paramount, and it was gender that guaranteed men’s access to power.”

Briefly, and off-topic, but interesting in conjunction with this: I can't help but compare those thoughts above with the interview with Sinead O'Connor on NPR today, who reflects on her famous television appearance in 1992 which was controversial then (ripping up a picture of the Pope, and all, you remember), but now appears prescient in terms of highlighting the issue of abuse. In the interview, she says,

"A lot of people misinterpret me and think I'm somehow anti-Catholic, and I'm not," she says. "I've acted out of a passionate love of the Holy Spirit and what is good about Catholicism. ... I have nothing but respect for any priest and nun that I've ever met. ... They've been disrespected and misrepresented. I think there's so much that's beautiful about Catholicism, but that has been clouded by the cover-up more even than the abuse."

She questions the beliefs of those in the church who would hide abuse: "[It's] as if they don't believe in God. They certainly don't believe in a God that is watching them or what they're doing."

To go on: Matthew Grow provides an assessment of a book we’ve discussed at length here before: Jared Farmer’s ON Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. Farmer's interview about his book, at Religion Dispatches, can be found here.

Finally, Julian Zelizer of Princeton University provides a long, thorough, and synthetic set of reflections on the various historiographical "waves" of the study of American conservatism. While focused mostly on policy debates and not religious history, Zelizer has a section dealing with conflicts and divisions within contemporary conservatism, including the disappointment felt by religious conservatives in recent years in the public policy arena; well worth checking out.

Is Anything Not a Sign of the Apocalypse?

Kelly Baker

These days, my brain alternates between at least two or three scholarly things/themes: the 1920s Klan and the apocalypse (and often vampires and religious intolerance, but that is for another day). The first, of course, is quite obvious. I am counting down the days until my manuscript is tied in a bow and shipped to my publisher. The second, however, started as a minor interest in apocalyptic scenarios in American culture more generally and in pop culture more particularly (see here and here for our other bloggers take on this topic), and it is possible that the apocalypse is becoming quite an obsession of mine. I am teaching a class on the Apocalypse in American culture in the fall, and I even have a Google news alert set broadly for apocalypse (what interesting things appear with that word in the title). According to bloggers, new pundits, and other various talking heads, almost anything is a sign of the apocalypse: Miley Cyrus, a myriad of commercial products, Americans in general, the environment, Obama, various political maneuvering, 2012, nuclear armament and disasters (natural or otherwise).

It is not surprising, then, that the BP oil spill would become one of the impending signs of Armageddon. Lisa Miller, over at Newsweek, reports that in some Christian fundamentalist circles the oil plume points to biblical prophecy come alive. She's a little light on the history of millennialism in America, but she pulls in the Millerites as a key example of the problem with predicting the end of the world. What is more interesting is that a part of the Christian blogosphere finds the oil plume in the Gulf

to be manifestation of Revelation. Miller writes:

Revelation 8:8–11[:]“The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea became blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed … A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.” According to Revelation, in other words, something terrible happens to the world’s water, a punishment to those of insufficient faith. The foul water, according to the New Oxford Annotated Bible, mirrors one of the plagues God called upon Egypt on behalf of his people Israel.

Though maybe it’s Revelation 16:3: “The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing in the sea died.”

Some interpreters are very sure: The oil spill matches biblical prophesy and is another predictor of the end. One commenter at Godlike Productions argues that the redness of the oil seen in pictures can be interpreted as blood. “The water is tinted red from the oil … it ACTUALLY looks like blood. coincidence??? NOT!!!!” On Facebook, at least two discussion groups are devoted to mining the parallels between events in the gulf and those predicted in the bible; and in a heart-rending interview with CBS, a Louisiana minister named Theodore Turner, whose congregation is one third fishermen, said he knew it to be so. “The Bible prophesized hardships,” he said. “If we believe the word of God is true—and we do—we also know that in addition to prophesying hardships he promised to take care of us.”

Interestingly, Miller notes that there might be a problem with this interpretation because usually these catastrophes are punishment for very bad behavior, so what did the people of the Gulf do to deserve this? Nothing. Miller continues, "Yet through a biblical lens, it’s hard to see the oil spill as anything but God’s punishment for greed and a disrespect of Creation—and both of those sins fall mostly on the shoulders of the Republicans, who have been aggressively lobbying for more offshore drilling, without, obviously, ensuring that appropriate safeguards are in place. " Why I am not in the game of interpreting God's will, it is pretty clear that Miller's assessment might strike some as dead on.

I wonder what religion scholars in the Gulf region (here's looking at you, Mike Pasquier) think about Miller's assessment and the desire to place the oil spill in such a dramatic theological narrative. Watching coverage of the oil spill and BP's failures to stop the plume makes me feel ill and distraught because of the ecological and human consequences, but I am not sure I "see" the apocalypse. Yet, this scenario does feel more convincing as a one of many biblical disasters leading to the final days than teen pop star. Maybe there is too much geographic distance between me and the Gulf. More likely, it is because I have been reading so many articles, posts, etc. about the impending apocalypse. I can't help but wonder if anything can be a sign of the apocalypse, then maybe nothing is.

Weekend Update: Jared Farmer Interview, the Jewish Review of Books, and Empires of Sacrifice

Paul Harvey

Blogging's a little light on my end as I limp to the end of the semester, but in the meantime a little weekend roundup for you.

First, we have blogged here before about Jared Farmer's award-winning On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape. The author appears, in interview format, in Religion Dispatches, where he reflects further on his work. My favorite takeaway line: "There's no such thing as an innocent landscape." Take that, Frederick Jackson Turner.

Second, in today's NY Times, Mark Oppenheimer calls attention to a new journal, The Jewish Review of Books, which he compares to the New York Review of Books "but more Jewish, and intentionally so." The back page features a cartoon from Harvey Pekar (subject of the terrific film American Splendor), which reflects on R. Crumb's recent cartoon version of Genesis. Oppenheimer is himself a contributor to Books and Culture (make sure to check out its recently revamped website and podcasts), another analogue to the new Jewish Review.

Finally, our contributor Jon Pahl's new book is out: Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence. Somehow I doubt Jon's book will get much airtime on Fox News anytime soon, but it should get due attention elsewhere for the sheer range of subjects it covers, and its provocative thesis. I'll be dipping into this book soon and will blog more then, but in the meantime here's a little synopsis from Publisher's Weekly:

In this scholarly but generally readable monograph, Lutheran Theological Seminary professor Pahl traces the confluence of violence and religion in the United States. He argues with scholars who situate religious violence largely outside of American borders, claiming instead that it is a recurrent feature in the formation and development of the United States. Pahl emphasizes the ways in which, throughout U.S. history, the notion of sacrifice has rendered killing justifiable and even holy. Building on the work of theorists like René Girard and Mark Juergensmeyer, Pahl lays out four historical case studies—about youth, race, gender, and capital punishment—to develop his theory: Americans have found ways to consider blessed some rather brutal attitudes and behaviors... in patterns that are identifiably religious. His examination, in the epilogue, of the fusion of Christian symbols with military domination in the war on terror, while no longer a unique idea, is more extended and nuanced than most. Particularly helpful is Pahl's term innocent domination, describing a cultural attitude that champions violent systems while remaining convinced of its own virtuous intent.

The Scripture of Nature

Paul Harvey

In between bouts of obsessively (and increasingly hopelessly) checking my fantasy football team's stats tonight, I checked in on the first two hours of “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea," the newest Ken Burns documentary. It was about the most religious programming I've seen on television in a while. Watching the first 2 hours, entitled "The Scripture of Nature," John Muir appears as the central character, the "ecstatic holy man" who saw "nature's cathedral" and determined to teach the rest of America to see it as well. I was about to sit down and write a blog entry on the religious references in the film so far (and not just the fact that the tediousness of parts of it are a bit like the tedious parts of the Bible, and there are still 10 more hours to go), but Donald Worster, author most recently of a biography of Muir, (A Passion For Nature: The Life of John Muir), has
saved me the trouble.

In his reflections on the film, at the Oxford University Press blog, Worster analyzes the religious vision and language both behind the establishment of the national park system, and of the emphases of Burns's film. Incidentally, the Washington Post reviewer, who (like me) is a "great indoorsman," has some funny quips about the occasional sanctimony that makes the film drag a bit -- still, it's well worth watching, and makes me grateful again for Muir and his descendants. The alternative -- the religion of the marketplace and endless development -- would have produced a catastrophe in comparison to the vision of Muir and his twentieth-century acolytes, including Gary Snyder. There is a darker underside even in this vision, hinted at a bit in the film, in terms of the connection between the displacement of Natives and the establishment of the parks; but this was part of a broader history of the 19th century. Worster concludes:

I am convinced that democratic societies are especially open to the religion of nature, for it takes faith out of the hands of priests and gives it back to the people. As long as Americans hunger for religion and as long as they pursue democracy, the national parks will likely be treasured as places where the people can go to worship as they see fit.

Watching the film also reminded me of an email conversation I had some years ago with the former editor of the Colorado Springs Gazette, Sean Paige, who now heads Local Liberty Action. For years he railed against a small local tax we have locally (TOPS, the Trails and Open Space Tax) which funds the purchase of local parcels of open space; he once responded to a short letter to the editor I sent in with a several screen email rant-and-rave to the effect of "if you want a park, go buy one yourself, PROFESSOR Harvey." For years I used his rant in class writing exercises, asking students to take his execrable rough draft and rephrase his arguments in comprehensible terms.

In doing so, Paige served as the equivalent of those who railed against the role of "big government" in setting aside the national parks, blocking "development," and the like. It's remarkable to me that the scripture of nature is powerful enough to trump the otherwise libertarian instincts of my local populace, and those in the era of the establishment and growth of the parks system. That's some powerful religion.

Protestant Empires, Whiggish History, and Personal Religious Histories

Today we're happy to guest post again from Katherine Carte Engel, Professor of History at Texas A & M and author of a book we've blogged about here before, Religion and Profit: Moravians in Early America. Kate reflects on a pair of recent books, one academic and the other more personally reflective, that recast thinking about what constitutes "American religious history."
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Protestant Empires
by Katherine Carte Engel

Apropos of Charles Cohen’s comment that “Even by the capacious definitions of what constitutes early American history, Deseret makes for an unusual place in which to hold an Omohundro meeting,” -- as well as the other sessions of that excellent conference, at which that comment was referenced by those who have noted the hegemony of the east-coast-early-American-establishment -- two recent books have made me run around the circle, once again, of what I consider “American religious history.” My early Americanist self welcomes the publication of Carla Gardina Pestana’s timely and wonderfully readable Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World. My non-academic self finds Erik Reece’s musing and occasionally wrenching An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God intriguing and thought provoking.

Assuming from the title of the former that I would be hearing another foray into the question of a Christian nation that Chris Beneke raised a few days ago, I was quite surprised to find an actual pre-Revolutionary colonist, William Byrd, taking a prominent role as a religious thinker in Reece’s Gospel. Byrd’s patriarchal rage, treated in depth by Kenneth Lockridge, made quite an impact on my vision of early America as a graduate student, but I had never thought of him as a source of spiritual inspiration. Reece, an environmental writer most known for his depiction of strip mining in Kentucky, suggests the adoption of a new American theology more attuned with joy, peace, the natural landscape, and, most likely, locally-grown green leafy vegetables. He argues that Americans (including his own father and grandfather) have been too long dominated by a depressing and Puritanical religion that has accomplished the overwhelming task of dividing Americans from themselves and from all that is inspiring and holy in the world. This process (with some help from Alexander Hamilton) has led inexorably to desiccated cities and (in a wonderfully evocative phrase borrowed from Guy Davenport) the automobile, that “bionic roach.”

Reece’s Manichean jeremiad is heartfelt and his exploration of Walt Whitman is riveting. But his Gospel, rooted in Byrd, elaborated by Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman, and verified by modern science, offers an image of “American” religion that is hard to reconcile with Pestana’s detailed account of the early modern British Atlantic. (Pestana’s book provides a full elaboration of themes she began in the excellent collection, The British Atlantic.) She chronicles what early Americanists currently see as the central theme of the early modern era when, in the place of the European’s encounter with a virgin continent, she tells the complex tale of contact, conquest, conversion, and resistance that unfolded when post-Reformation Europeans and enslaved Africans landed in North America and the Caribbean. The dynamic consequences of human interaction and cross-cultural engagement take us from failed missions and lost opportunities to shattering clashes between world views. The overpowering reality of religious diversity in the Atlantic world remains a constant, however, as do people’s resolute desires not to be forced into conformity or to give up their deeply held beliefs.

It’s easy to pick apart Reece’s work from a historical perspective, but in all fairness he wasn’t trying to write a thorough history, even a literary one. His is a contemplation of men’s (and they are largely men) interaction with the land, and (white, privileged) American men’s often unsuccessful efforts to throw off the psychic constraints of generations of their fathers. But even as he decries American culture he feeds the Whiggish narrative that the United States, the political entity that sustains his gospel, offered some quintessential freedom to men who sought to recreate themselves. Pestana’s work reduces the United States to its proper historical context. It elaborates the very real political forces at work in religious history. As history, it is unquestionably more accurate. I am looking forward to using it to introduce my students to the early modern religious past, filling a gap in the literature that has long plagued the field. But Reece’s speaks to the “American” cultural soul in a way we early Americanists, who struggle to incorporate Deseret and demote the United States’ religious freedom to a matter of historical contingency, rarely do.

Wise Blood, and Killing for Coal Dust

Paul Harvey

You Flannery O'Connor fans unite and get on those Netflix accounts -- John Huston's excellent 1980 film adaptation of Wise Blood, based of course on the short O'Connor novel, is now out on DVD. I saw this twenty years ago or so, can't wait to see it again, as I recall it well capturing the astringent O'Connor at her best.

The same summer I saw Wise Blood, I viewed a number of short documentaries about religion and laboring lives in the extractive industries. Religion and labor remains a subject in need of much more exploration. I was pondering this most recently while reading this year's Bancroft prize winner in History, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, a work ostensibly about the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 but, in reality, about the transformational power of coal in Colorado and western history. Coal, the author Thomas Andrews argues, induced a worldwide migration that left the more fabled gold and silver migrations in the dust, literally and figuratively.

Coal was a God which made its presence felt on the environment, in people's lives and lungs, and in the bitterness of a class society which belied the aspirations and ideals of the Quaker founder of the idealistic colony of Colorado Springs, General William Palmer. Coal was essential to his vision, and coal destroyed his vision.

Thomas Andrews has written an astonishingly powerful book. In his synthesis of environmental and labor history, coal is a powerful god-like force, and the relationship of the colliers to their environment was one of respectful fear and awe (best seen in how the colliers used the mice they befriended as their own canaries in the coal mine; when the mice scampered away unexpectedly, the men know something was amiss).

I was hoping for a bit more in Killing for Coal about religion and the multiethnic labor force that descended on the southern Colorado coal fields -- not a criticism of the book, just something I missed. I'm therefore doubly grateful for Richard Callahan's new book Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust, which is featured as the book of the week at Books and Culture (review courtesy of our own K. Lofton).

Here's an excerpt from the review, which shows the promise of combining the forces of religious and labor history in a way that Thomas Andrews accomplishes with his synthesis of environmental and labor history:

Callahan offers a lively picture of everyday life in coal towns populated by a microcosm of early 20th century American demography, including Hungarians, Italians, Slavs, Poles, Mexicans, Russians, Syrians, and Romanians. Within this multicultural panorama a rough peace abided. For instance, according to one miner, "The Jews were very much hated people." Yet Jews managed many of the stores that defined the incoming modernism of that era. "Along with the commodification of labor and the ready availability of consumer items," Callahan writes, "coal towns also introduced new patterns of leisure time that larger company towns tried to structure through organized, often commodified, forms of entertainment." At the same moment when modernism and fundamentalism were embattled elsewhere, southern Appalachian religious leaders sought to civilize their flocks through increased domestic consumption and ritual diminishment. One modernist Baptist pastor, for example, discouraged the ritual of foot-washing. "Doing away with [foot washing]," Callahan explains, "was a sign of the distancing of modern Baptists from closely heeding to their physical body, and the bodies of others in the community, as rich sources of religious experience."

Perhaps in reply to these modernist incursions, Holiness and Pentecostal movements enjoyed rampant success among the mining communities. Chapter 5 of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields supplies a "synthetic and speculative" discussion about Holiness religion's emergence and popularity in the coal fields. Due to the limited documentary material, Callahan relies upon Raymond Williams' cultural theory, along with studies of the Holiness movement where the record was stronger, to explain why Holiness found such a strong footing amidst the horizontal mines of eastern Kentucky. This is a moving chapter, especially in its explanatory reading of healing as a popular ritual among miners. "When I can feel him coming into my body," one southern Appalachian believer said, "I know God is real." The somatic repeatedly appears in Callahan's study as he seeks to recover the palpable and the felt aspects of religious lives. "The event of healing," he writes, "made the power of the Holy Ghost concrete and present to witnesses and the person healed." This was a "somatic form of knowledge of the material reality of divine power and its ability to transform the world physically." In short, the laboring affect may have been particularly conducive to Holiness effects.

From Mounds to Megachurches

Paul Harvey


Since I'm in the South today, here's an appropriately southern-themed blog entry, on a new work from the University of Georgia Press, From Mounds to Megachurches. In this short work, centered on Georgia, David Williams take us through the remarkably diverse history of religious practices, institutions, and groups in the Peach State. The book reminds me of Walter Conser's recent work A Coat of Many Colors: Religion and Society Along the Cape Fear River of North Carolina, in the sense of taking the largest themes of southern religious history and following them in a very specific locales over a broad expanse of time. The result is a picture of religion in the region that is at once more diverse and expansive, and at the same time more dependent on place and locale, than we get from stories (including my own work) that feature the evangelical synthesis as the defining principle of southern religious history. Good stuff from good senior scholars deeply immersed in the histories of their own regions. Here's a description from the UGA webpage for the work.


From Mounds to Megachurches: Georgia's Religious Heritage, by David S. Williams

In From Mounds to Megachurches David S. Williams offers a sweeping overview of the role religion has played in Georgia's history, from precolonial days to the modern era.

Williams shows that colonial Georgia was a remarkably diverse place, populated by mainline colonial congregations that included Anglicans, Roman Catholics, German- and Spanish-speaking Jews, Salzburg Lutherans, and Scottish Presbyterians. It wasn't until much later that evangelicalism triumphed and Baptists became the overwhelmingly dominant denomination. Williams uses the stories of such important figures as Tomochichi, John Wesley, Jesse Mercer, Henry McNeal Turner, Lillian Smith, Martin Luther King Jr., and Clarence Jordan to portray larger historical narratives and denominational battles.
Race and religion were intertwined not only in such key movements as abolition and civil rights but also throughout Georgia's history. "In order to fully grasp the religious heritage of Georgia," Williams says, "we must return again and again to racial matters." Recently, Georgians have seen racial, ethnic, and religious diversity grow as Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Baha'i, and other communities have settled in the state. Williams explores how Georgians have dealt with contemporary issues of tolerance and how, at times, the state has taken center stage in our nation's culture wars.

Firmly rooting religious history in a social, cultural, and political context, Williams presents a representative and balanced account of Georgia's religious heritage. From Mounds to Megachurches sheds new light on what it means to be a Georgian by exploring an issue that remains central to life in the Sunbelt South.

David S. Williams is director of the Honors Program and Meigs Professor of Religion at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author of two previous books in religious studies.
October 2008

ISBN 0820331759 cloth • $26.95240 pp. • 6 x 9 in. • 16 b&w photos

"I know no other book that covers such a range of material, with such chronological sweep, in such short compass, for any southern state. Georgia and its citizens will be privileged to have such an accessible survey of their religious heritage available."—John Boles, William P. Hobby Professor of History, Rice University, and author of The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt

"David Williams has written a masterful and remarkably concise synthesis of Georgia's religious odyssey. His title is no mere artifice of alliteration, for he does indeed take us from thousand-year old moundbuilders to modern megachurches, and from Moravians to Muslims as well, reminding us of a persistent strain of religious diversity while placing the emergence and evolution of a Protestant evangelical ethos at the center of Georgia's historical experience."—James C. Cobb, author of Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity

The Devil Comes Here and Sighs

Paul Harvey

Continuing from yesterday's post on the special issue of the Journal of Southern Religion: it's up. Click here for After the Storm: A Special Issue on Hurricane Katrina, courtesy of our guest contributor Tracy Fessenden and our contributing editor Michael Pasquier. With her permission, below is Tracy's introduction to the issue, which will double as her guest post here. Thanks to Tracy and Mike for their hard work, passion for the city, and scholarly skill in pulling all this together in such a short time.
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There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment . . . Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades, 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful double-pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds . . . One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs.

—Bob Dylan, from Chronicles, Part One (2004)

Mike Pasquier and I began discussing the possibility of a special JSR issue focused on Katrina in late 2006. We both had spent a lot of time in various archives in New Orleans—Mike's Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionary Priests and the Transformation of American Catholicism is forthcoming from Oxford, and I had written about the Sisters of the Holy Family, an African-American order of nuns in New Orleans, with plans for returning to that project just as the storm hit. Beyond the connections forged on our respective research trips (or "research" trips, as was the case with some of mine) each of us has personal ties to the city and a deep, widely shared appreciation for the peculiar densities—historical, musical, spiritual, literary, culinary, and otherwise—that make New Orleans unlike any other place. So it's far more than a blow to scholarship we've been coming to terms with since August 29, 2005, when Katrina ravaged the Gulf coast and the breaching of the city's levees put most of New Orleans under water.

Perhaps because we're both so invested in New Orleans, we deliberately cast a wide net when coming up with a CFP for this special issue. We encouraged potential contributors to consider religion in any period or region and from any methodological vantage point, as long as they engaged in a rethinking of U.S. religious history in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. How might the historical plotlines shaping the field, we wondered, come in for new scrutiny, be rendered less helpful or telling, take on unexpected curves and angles? How might the federal response to Katrina shed light on the vexed role of the Gulf South within the national imaginary? How, for example, does a hemispheric narrative of colonialism and slavery, to which the Gulf South more centrally belongs, trouble a national narrative of freedom and progress, to which it has never been easily assimilated? How might the very American myth of self-recreation—of packing up and starting over elsewhere, seemingly without loss—impede recovery projects on the scale of those undertaken in Europe: the rebuilding of bombed-out cities after WWII, for example, or the massive construction of the Dutch levee system after the flood of Amsterdam in1953? What can now be said—or no longer be said—about the unifying power of "civil religion" in moments of national crisis? How has religion, however construed, come to aid or to obstruct the rebuilding of the Gulf South?

We began distributing the CFP a year ago, to coincide with the second anniversary of Katrina. And as much as we'd tried to push potential contributors to consider religious history after Katrina in the broadest of regional, national, and transnational contexts, it became clear over the next several months of responding to submissions and inquiries that this would still be a special issue about New Orleans, after all. With the exception of artist Lynda Frese's mixed-media images of Hindu deities in ravaged Gulf towns, which take their cue from the more familiar Catholic/vodun shrines of Louisiana, every contributor featured here and many more we were unable to include saw the special issue as a forum for reflection about New Orleans, not about the Gulf South as a region, about hemispheric narratives or new directions for American religious history. The near-exclusive focus on New Orleans tells us that a great deal remains to be done to integrate Hurricane Katrina, its historical conditions and aftermath, into the America we study as American religious historians. Likewise and perhaps more importantly, however, it tells us that the devastation of an irreplaceable city cannot simply be taken up into this or that new scholarly frame, and that the confrontation with loss undertaken by the essays and other forms of expression collected here necessarily remains ongoing.

Grief and rage at their starkest animate Anthea Butler's 2008 revisiting of the September 2, 2005 essay she published in The Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion and the Press, whose editors praised the unfit-for-mainstream-media jeremiad as "language appropriate to atrocity." Essays by Randy Sparks, Richard Newman, Elizabeth Goodine, and Karla Goldman engage responses to atrocity by various faith communities in New Orleans, all of which powerfully reclaim the meaning of "faith-based" from the Administration that Butler calls so blisteringly to account.

JSR has long encouraged a range of scholarly contributions in addition to standard research articles. For this special issue we made a decision to extend the scope of possible contributions even further to honor the distinctive culture of New Orleans and environs. Thus Lynda Frese and Lynda Doussan Rosamano present mixed-media assemblages; Rebecca Carter looks at houses and spiritual dwelling; Peter Cooley and John Gery give us poetry, Heather Nicholson and Zada Johnson review movies; Cynthia Hogue, Rebecca Ross, and the musician Kid Merv collaborate on an interview-poem, and Mike Pasquier shares a conversation with filmmaker Peter Entell. That generic diversity is matched by the religious diversity of the lives examined here. The distinctive dynamics of New Orleans's overlapping African-American and Catholic communities come in for sustained attention, but so too do Lutheran Oktoberfests, Jewish tzedakah, Hindu altars, and countless other traditional and nontraditional ways of making and sustaining spiritual connection in times of crisis, displacement, and loss.

We didn't think to invite musical contributions when planning the issue, but no doubt the generosity and expertise of our crack team of editors would have made even a library of MP3s possible. This is an unpecedented, "off-calendar" issue of JSR, and the long hours put in by Randall Stephens, Bland Whitley, and webmaster Art Remillard far exceeded the call of duty. Members of our editorial and advisory boards refereed all submissions; for additional advice on particular submissions we thank Greg Miller, Brent Plate, and Cammy Thomas.

We hope that the diversity of materials presented here pays fitting tribute to the place that inspires them. On the morning of August 30, 2005, I'd gone to bed after midnight to helicopter footage of parts of New Orleans submerged to the rooftops and woke to the shaky voice of Governor Kathleen Blanco on my clock radio, telling reporters that there was "no choice but to abandon the city." (These may not have been her exact words; I was deranged.) Soon enough I realized she was saying that those who were still in New Orleans now had no choice but to evacuate—the hows of course were still forthcoming—but for those few impossible seconds the image I had was of New Orleans entirely buried by the storm, lost to the world like Atlantis. This issue of JSR presents a blessedly different picture. It's much too early still to say laissez les bon temps rouler. But together with a number of new books suggesting that, as Mike puts it, New Orleans might in fact be more central to American religious history than the reigning narratives let on, the energy, passion, and resilience demonstrated by the contributors to this special issue insist that, national neglect be damned, New Orleans isn't going away.

—Tracy Fessenden

Katrina's Sheep Without a Shepherd

Paul Harvey

As the anniversary of Katrina nears, dwarfing (for me) all the patter of presidential politics, the Journal of Southern Religion is about to release its special Katrina issue (link will be up soon, as soon as everything is finalized). I wanted here to put up a couple of brief teasers, today and to be continued, to entice as many of you as possible to check out the issue. Originally we blogged about this project here.

We'll start with two pieces from Anthea Butler, our friend and editor of the North Star: A Journal for African American Religious History. Shortly after Katrina, Anthea issued this memorably blistering jeremiad for The Revealer.

Three years later, Anthea reflects further on her original piece for the Journal of Southern Religion -- and in case you're wondering, while she finds some reasons for hope, she's still righteously pissed off.

Three years after writing "As Sheep without a Shepherd" for the online journal The Revealer you might wonder if I am still just as angry about the response to Hurricane Katrina as I was back in early September of 2005. Have no fear, I still am. My anger has turned into disgust and bitterness tempered with occasional glimmers of hopefulness. Since the fateful landfall of Katrina and the breaching of the levee, the lives of thousands of people in New Orleans are changed. Some have not returned to the Crescent City. Others have, only to become discouraged with crime, poor living conditions, and the sadness that seeps around residents as they try to preserve a semblance of their lives in a town that will never be the same.

Anthea concludes by remembering the President's speech at the St. Louis Cathedral:

What stays with me now is the image of President Bush on the Square, in a city without electricity, the St. Louis Cathedral lit up with generators like a Disneyworld castle in the background. Not far from that spot is the port of New Orleans, where the slave ships rolled in. In the news footage of Bush's shameful performance, the strangely lit cathedral, beautiful in its own right, looked to me like a whitewashed tomb. And the darkness was deep behind it. To the slaves that came in on the boats, the church perhaps looked the same way. Then as now the promise of light seemed to beckon beauty, but the reality was a kind of death.

Read the whole piece here, and stay tuned for more in this series of posts on Katrina and the special issue of JSR.

Wicca and Paganism Text

Paul Harvey

Here's an offbeat choice for a course text: Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (AltaMira Press, 2007). From the book's website:

The history of any religious movement can get murky. But the history of American Paganism--with so many invented lineages, so many solitary practitioners, so much resistance to staid definition, so much hiddenness--is especially hard to decipher. But here in Her Hidden Children Chas Clifton tells many never-before-told stories of the origins of Paganism and Wicca in the United States. The people, publications, and organizations that allowed Paganism and Wicca to set roots down in American soil and become "nature religion" are revealed in delicious detail. With a timeline, glossary, and photos of important figures,Her Hidden Children is compelling and important for any student of Paganism or American Religion.

Sean McCloud, author of Divine Hierarchies, has reviewed the book for H-AMSTDY. He writes:

In seven chapters, Clifton utilizes primary source books and magazines, personal interviews, and secondary scholarly works to produce a historical narrative of Wicca's (particularly) and Paganism's (secondarily) modern births and transformations. Though not explicitly fronted in his book, Clifton's narrative suggests a persuasive three-part historical periodization. First, in the 1950s and 1960s, the American movement reflected its debt to English occultism by presenting itself as an ancient mystery craft of the British Isles. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wicca's American branch came to view itself as an earth-based "nature religion." The decade of the 1970s saw the influential rise of American feminist Wicca, which combined with the new nature religion identity and moved back across the Atlantic to shape British Wicca and Paganism. In this manner, the small occult tradition became the rapidly growing new religious movement.

The history of alternative religious traditions is booming, including the new book by Molly McGarry on Spiritualism recently noted here on the blog, and encapsulated as well in Catharine Albanese's synthesis on America's metaphysical religions and Leigh Schmidt's recent work on American spiritualities. I wonder if this bespeaks something of a response to, or even backlash to, the dominant evangelical synthesis that has been so influential in American religious history in the last generation?

Happy Earth Day! (And the Count Down to the Eco-Apocalypse)

Kelly Baker

With local radio stations handing out saplings for Albuquerqueans to plant, various emails on list-serves this morning proclaiming how to reduce my carbon footprint, and my terribly guilty conscience over driving a small SUV, I feel like Earth Day has hit me full force this year. One of the campuses where I teach has started a film series on the environment, and another has started a huge recycling campaign on campus. What has proved most interesting for the start of the Earth Day was a great article by Rebecca Onion at Slate on what she aptly calls "Envirogeddon." Onion explores the fascination of many environmentalist writers about Armageddon, eco-style, which would require the surviving humans to be kinder to the planet and her resources. The beauty of Onion's piece is that she traces this "wish" for an apocalypse back to eco-literature from the 1970s until today to show this continuing vein of thought. She takes on James Howard Kunstler's new novel, World Made by Hand, which examines the lives of survivors of calamitous events and their attempts to live in a ravaged world. Onion writes:

World Made By Hand takes place a couple of decades in the future, after a series of rolling catastrophes has left people without electricity, communications, or transportation infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands of others have died of the "Mexican flu." Despite their burdens, the men and women of this imaginary world seem to have pretty good lives. Robert has lost his wife and children, but now he lives in an Arts and Crafts bungalow and makes his living as a carpenter—having been rescued, by the apocalypse, from an emasculating job as a software-marketing guy. The townspeople replace the suburban infrastructure with ever-more creative and beautiful houses and hold lively square dances. A beautiful and much younger widow, needing protection, falls into Robert's bed and makes him chicken stew with new potatoes and peas for dinner. (Kunstler's post-apocalyptic women have given up trying to be involved in government for their true roles as cooks and sex partners.) Even the occasional bouts of violence are cleansing, putting hair on Robert's sunken chest. In short, thanks to the world's upheaval, Robert becomes a true man while the people around him become a true community.

Onion renders these apocalyptic tales as an attempt a new frontier story, in which the humans start over in various, earth-friendly endeavors. She opines:

This equation of emptiness with rebirth and human freedom was a new kind of frontier story—predicated not on distance from civilization but on the wholesale death of civilization itself. As such, it also forms the basis for Kunstler and Weisman's utopian visions. While the enviros of the 1970s worried about population, we worry about climate change, but the possibilities for post-crisis humanity remain rosy. Kunstler's glorious images of ripped-up strip malls and catamounts in empty houses echo Weisman's regenerating landscapes, and both recall the new eco-orders of Abbey and Wiley. In the perfect green apocalypse, population reduction leaves a world in which everybody wins—birds, bees, and people.


Her concern is that in many of these tales, the "green apocalypse" can only occur with annihilation of humans to recover the damage. The haunting visions of a planet stripped of humanity and the stunning comeback of nature brings to mind the film, I am Legend. The main character played by Will Smith is the sole survivor of epidemic that kills most humans and turn some into light-sensitive zombies. Alone with only his dog, Sam, in New York City, he hunts for deer in an overgrown Times Square and fishes in the remnants of a reflection pool. A city, once densely populated, appears eerily quite in the day, but of course, the zombie-like beings hunt for humans to dine on at night. The movie's premise is that the population has been almost decimated by a vaccine, which proved to have disastrous results. The "green apocalypse" echoes religious visions of the end, but also provides a damning critique of human relationship with the environment. The film gives a glimpse of how the world might appear after such an event. (In an effort of full disclosure, the film proved to be quite disturbing to me, so I am not quite sure I can recommend it. My spouse liked it, but the isolation and despair of the film proved haunting.) The film provides visual impact to the words of various Envirogeddon writers.

If any of blog readers have come across scholarship on environmental visions of the Armageddon (and comparisons with other apocalyptic groups), please post the references in the comments section. This topic proves to be a fascinating distraction from grading and other work. Happy Earth Day!

Religion on the Ground (At 35,000 Feet)

BY ED BLUM

Airplane Space-Invaded Reflection on Courtney Bender, Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver and Omar McRoberts’s Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Neighborhood

With Super Tuesday gone and still months from the actual election, I must admit that I’m tired of politics. I know it gets just about all of the media attention (along with some bits on pop culture); I know that our nation’s selection of the next president is crucial. But sometimes it wears me out. I find myself irritated by watching the $400 haircuts, the perfect suits, the photo opportunities, the sound bites. Romney, Obama, Clinton, Huckabee, and McCain – all of them fascinate me. Yet I cannot help but ask: do they really influence my day-to-day life? Would I look that beautiful at 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 if I had a personal trainer, nutrionist, and a team of make up experts? (if anyone wants to comment ‘yes,’ please feel free to do so).

So as I prepared to travel at 35,000 feet once again, I search for books about American religion that bring me back to the ground. I wanted to find some books that carried me to the nitty-gritty everyday life, where women and men, children and adults, search for meaning amid bills and bullies, clothes and cartoons, taxes and traumas. For me personally, my religious life is deeply connected to the individuals I know and interact with each day (not the celebrities or politicians I see on the television); my emotions and feelings are linked to the communities I see in person, that I touch with real hands, that I smell with real nostrils. So I grabbed two books from the library on everyday, lived reality of religion in the United States – Courtney Bender’s Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (which I had thumbed through previously) and Omar McRoberts’s Streets of Glory: Church and Community in a Black Neighborhood. I could have selected a host of other books to get me on the street with “common,” everyday people. I could have selected books from Gerardo Marti, for instance, a wonderful young sociologist who has written several books on multiracial congregations. Perhaps I’ll blog about his work another time, but for now, I’m traveling in my mind to New York City and Boston.

In reality, I read these books while traveling to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, perhaps the antithesis of Boston or New York. Rural and significantly homogeneous, most residents of Oshkosh would probably feel culture shock with the individuals in Heaven’s Kitchen or Streets of Glory. But I love those kinds of juxtapositions and all of the cognitive dissonance that goes with it. I was on my way to speak before a wonderful crowd of folks at the Institute for the Study of Religion, Violence and Memory. I had a fabulous time, discussing W. E. B. Du Bois and the redemption of lynching. Clearly, the faculty at Wisconsin, Oshkosh had dolled out the extra credit in heaps, because the place was teeming with undergraduates. But back to New York. (incidentally, the airplane film was Dan In Real Life, an awful Steve Carell movie but the theme of real, everyday life was a nice reminder for my reading).

Before delving into the book, I want to applaud Bender for the title. An obvious play off of “Hell’s Kitchen,” a neighborhood in New York where a young Walter Rauschenbusch served as a minister. Bender’s title borders on too cute, but doesn’t go over the edge. It’s not, to me, as clever as How the Other Half Dies (perhaps my favorite book title of all time), but it’s nonetheless a creative play. Heaven’s Kitchen is a marvelous study of a nonprofit, nonreligious organization named God's Love We Deliver. It’s a fascinating name, especially since volunteers rarely discuss God. The organization prepares home-cooked meals for people with AIDS. Bender spent more than twelve months working there. With the other volunteers, she spent day after day preparing hundreds of meals: washing vegetables; peeling potatoes; packaging chicken; cleaning utensils – all that stuff celebrities don’t have to worry about. I felt guilty reading about their efforts as I complained internally about the person sitting next to me. I guess my airplane partner thought we were playing a game of Space Invaders; he won. As I read Bender’s work, I was amazed that she was able to have any analytical powers while working so feverishly to get the meals out on time.

And what Bender found is illuminating. Even though God’s name is in the title of the organization, most sacred entities went unmentioned. Bender found that God, Jesus, Buddha, or Muhammad were rarely, if ever discussed. Moral, ethical, and religious beliefs were often unspoken or purposefully avoided, Bender observed. It was the absence of God-talk that was so interesting. Bender showed that it was in their ordinary actions (the cooking of food), in their simple conversations (questions about loved ones), and in their silences (when perhaps they were praying or thinking about the rest of the day) that volunteers made religious meaning. What is so inspirational about Bender’s narrative is that she found moral ideas and worldviews at work in places that media outlets would miss, where pollsters would skip, and where the latest fashions and vogues would be insignificant. This was my kind of religion; I’m just thankful I didn’t have to peel the potatoes to comprehend it.

While Bender’s is a study of individuals within one organization, Omar McRoberts’s is a study of organizations within one small area. He is curious to know why Four Corners in Boston, roughly one half square mile made up mostly of African Americans, had almost thirty churches as of 1999 (that’s about one church per 500 individuals in the neighborhood). McRoberts wants to know why a poor neighborhood like Four Corners would have so many churches; he wants to know how these churches are similar and different; he wants to know what role these organizations play in group action (or how do they fail to aid collective activity). At base, McRoberts wants to understand the role of these churches within their urban environments – how the environment shapes the churches and how the churches shape the environment.

Historically, McRoberts tells a story of religious revitalization amid economic catastrophe. In the 1960s and 1970s, as Four Corners experienced massive economic disinvestment, the number of churches rose substantially. The two were connected in some ways. As businesses left, their structures could be used to house churches. The rise of churches was also connected to the Great Migration of African Americans to northern cities between World War I and World War II. Church growth, McRoberts claims, was part of the process whereby churches constituted “particularist spaces of sociability” where, pardon the phrase, birds of a feather could flock together.

McRoberts has the ability to analyze statistical data and cultural forms. Just as he examines the locations of the churches and their niche marketing, he also searches out the cultural systems within each church. McRoberts looks closely at how different churches helped elaborate cultural differences between various groups of African Americans in Four Corners. He then looks at ideas of “the street,” which should remind any reader of Robert Orsi’s amazing study of the “theology of the streets” in his first book. For some of the churches in Four Corners, the street was an evil outsider; for others it was recruitment ground; for others it was a place to demonstrate concern for social issues. The street was a place of peril and possibility, of reform and regret. Finally, McRoberts examines how churches competed and cooperated. While they struggled against one another for resources, members, and power, they also aligned in many cases to improve their neighborhood.

So as we vote and debate about for whom we vote (and the religious implications of it all) and as we watch Britney Spears and mock her or adore her or both (and question the morality of media presentations of her), I hope we can still find time to remember religion on the ground, religion in the words spoken and unspoken, in the churches built and torn down, in the nitty-gritty world of the everyday. That’s where I find religion in my own life so why not as a scholar too. And that’s where I found my mental nourishment on my way to and from Oshkosh. Now off to Atlanta.