Blessed with a Dark Turn of Mind: Gillian Welch's Spiritual Strivings

Paul Harvey

A few days ago I blogged a bit about Reinhold

Niebuhr and Gillian Welch, an unlikely but (in my view) apt combination of theologian and performing artist. In this short essay for Religion Dispatches, I develop my thoughts about her newest recording (and some of her previous recordings) at greater length, focusing especially on her musical relationship to the "hard religion" of the rural South whose music she recreates, rejuvenates, and reinterprets. We here at the blog await word from her publicist about the possibility of an email interview, but suffice to say if that happens (big if there) it will be awesome!!!! Scroll down a bit for a live performance of one of the tunes from the record.

Update! Alec Wilkinson for the New Yorker makes many similar points about the record, in this piece just out for the magazine. Cool, but I wrote mine early last week, so feeling ahead of the curve, even if I do live in a flyover state and famously conservative city!

A brief excerpt from the piece, and then follow the rest at the link:

“It is the best kind of record: one that lures you in and soothes you with harmonies and banjo, only to leave you wondering what the hell just happened.”
—Kitty Empire, review of The Harrow & the Harvest in The Observer, June 26, 2011

That’s a good question to ask of someone who sings of spending seven years with her companion

on the burning shore, with Gatling guns and paint,
working the lowlands door to door, like a Latter-day Saint.

And that’s before she’s turned out at the top of the stairs, by someone who took all the glory,that you just couldn’t share. Welch and her partner David Rawlings sing in haunting union:

I’ve never been so disabused, never been so mad
I’ve never been served anything that tasted so bad.

Listening to this song, “The Way It Will Be,” I too don’t know what the hell just happened, but it’s impossible not to complete the story, to fill in those gaps. We’ve all eaten that bitterness at some point. And that urge to figure out the details in the mysteriously unsettling story comes wrapped here in religiously-tinged narratives and imagery that historically have received their richest expression in the musical culture of the American South.

Welch’s Southern characters, though, emerge not from some imaginary version of God, country, and family, but from the spiritual strivings of folk who have seen plenty of hard times.

Continue . . . .

Here's a clip from one tune, "The Way It Goes," performed recently:

Call for Proposals, SHA 2012, Mobile, AL

Randall Stephens

Just received some more directions from Marjorie Spruill and Don Doyle on the 2012 SHA conference. They encourage those of us on the program committee to "help create a rich and broad program for 2012 by soliciting exciting proposals particularly in your field." My field, being your field, dear reader, so let's get at it!

Here's the general note about the Mobile conference:

The Program Committee for 2012 invites proposals on all topics related to the history of the American South from its pre-colonial era to today. In addition, for the 2012 meeting in Mobile, it extends a special welcome to proposals relating to:

~ Mobile and the Gulf South

~ International, transnational, or comparative approaches

~ 2012 as an anniversary of major historical events, publications, etc.

Any religious history anniversaries of note? How about the activities of Gulf South missionaries in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era? Religious responses to natural disasters? Religion and labor radicalism? Big Oil and the churches? . . .

Ain't No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Claude Ely

Paul Harvey

Here's a great radio story, courtesy of Radio Diaries and NPR, about the Rev. Claude Ely, Holiness/Pentecostal exhorter and singer from Kentucky and author of the classic "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down." Johnny Cash's recording of the song just before he died, and a huge internet mashup done to that recording, was the subject of a post of mine some time ago. A brief excerpt from the transcript of the radio show:

People would show up to revivals because they had heard about this country singer who sang like a black man. Brother Claude Ely would thrash his guitar, shake and gyrate from one part of the stage to the other. Young men would run up to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

Gladys Presley, Elvis' mother, was a fan of Brother Claude Ely's ministry, and some people remember Gladys and Elvis getting blessed at Brother Claude Ely tent revivals while Brother Claude Ely laid hands on them and prayed for them.

This story comes from the efforts of Macel Ely, Brother Claude's nephew, who encountered his uncle's music while traveling in Europe, and wondered how it found its way there. Evidently he is producing a full-length documentary on the subject. You can hear Ely's rendition of his song along with some photos here, and a CD compilation of Claude can be found here.

A final note: somehow those who prattle on about NPR's "liberal bias" somehow never get around to talking about stories like these, which took up most of the last segment of yesterday's show from that dreaded bastion of left-wing propaganda, All Things Considered -- never mind all the locally produced reporting such as the programs about Colorado which I have written about here, and the programs about the Ozarks which John Schmalzbauer has written about for Immanent Frame here.

Here's some more information on Macel Ely's book which came from his efforts to find out about his uncle's widespread influence, Ain't No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely (published by the wonderful Atlanta outfit Dust-to-Digital, compiler and publisher of the peerless six-CD set Goodbye, Babylon, and many other musical classics).

Ain’t No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely is written as an oral, biographical history taken from the recorded interviews of more than 1,000 people in the Appalachian Mountains who knew Brother Claude Ely. Coined as the King Recording Label’s “Gospel Ranger,” Brother Claude Ely was well-known and loved by many in the earlier part of the 20th century as both a religious singer-songwriter and a Pentecostal-Holiness preacher. Few people, however, knew the personal details of his childhood, military service, and years of hard work in the coal fields of southwestern Virginia.

Now, decades after his legendary death, many fans still seem mesmerized and touched by this humble man’s quick wit and sincere desire to share the Gospel’s “Good News” with everyone who would listen to his message of hope and love. Having received popularity for his song, “There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” Brother Claude Ely passed along a musical and spiritual influence which can still be heard today like a mountain echo in those long, winding hollows and impoverished coal fields. Hollywood and the “King of Rock and Roll” also later acknowledged their admiration for and fascination with the late Brother Claude Ely. This book chronicles the life of one man who made an eternal impact on thousands of Appalachian dwellers. His simple sermons and folkloric songs are still providing assurance, hope, and faith to many mountain people

2012 Southern Historical Association Meeting

Randall Stephens

I'm serving on the program committee for the Southern Historical Association meeting, Mobile, Alabama, November 1-4, 2012. Paul tells me this will involve looking over an avalanche of proposals in a sealed bunker ten miles under the 2011 conference hotel. But he says it is fun, and I believe him. I'll do my utmost to get some good religion panels into the mix.

Here's the CFP:

SHA 2012, Mobile, Alabama:

The Program Committee invites proposals on all topics related to the history of the American South from its pre-colonial era to today. In addition, for the 2012 meeting in Mobile it extends a special welcome to proposals relating to:

* Mobile and the Gulf South
* International, transnational, or comparative approaches
* 2012 as an anniversary of major historical events, publications, etc.

The Program Committee accepts proposals for single papers but encourages session proposals that include two or three papers. Individuals interested in using the SHA website to organize a session with complementary papers may send an e-mail to Sheree Dendy with their name, e-mail address, and proposed paper topic. She will post this information on the SHA website, which others seeking compatible co-panelists may consult. Click here to view current postings of those seeking related proposals.

According to SHA policy, no one who appeared on the previous two programs, those at Charlotte and Baltimore, can be part of the program in Mobile.

Those submitting proposals should include suggestions of people who would be appropriate as commentators/chairs but not issue invitations. The Program Committee will select and invite a chair and usually two commentators. Note: this policy is new for the 2012 program.

No two people from the same institution can be on the same session.

See instructions for submitting proposals online, click here.

The deadline for proposals for the 2012 program is September 1, 2011.

Proposals in Latin American and Caribbean should be submitted to the section sub- committees. Click here.

2012 Program Committee Co-Chairs: Don Doyle and Marjorie Spruill University of South Carolina

Musical Monday: Larry Norman and Repurposing the Gospel Aura

Paul Harvey

A couple of musical posts to liven up your Monday. First, blog friend David Stowe, author of the very-soon-to-forthcome No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (which we blogged about a few weeks ago), has a guest post at the UNC Press blog based on a conversation in 2007 with Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman, shortly before he (Norman, that is) passed. The stories, full of musical celebrities, are fun. And he continues:

Were all these stories credible? Who knows. He told me he’d chatted in an airport lounge with a woman in a beautiful jacket who claimed that her husband was Bob Dylan. Andraé Crouch, who happened to be there with Norman, confirmed the woman’s story. Norman confirmed something that my ears had told me: that Dylan’s Grammy-winning single “Gotta Serve Somebody” was closely modeled on Norman’s song “Righteous Rocker,” released several years earlier.

This is a fun read, highly recommended.

As is Douglas Harrison, Repurposing the Gospel Aura, in today's Religion Dispatches, which takes the use of a gospel choir as a backdrop to Eminem's much-commented-upon Chrysler/Detroit commercial as a way of reflecting on how and why this music invites audiences "to imagine themselves as part of a colorblind fellowship of humanity bound together by the soulful sound of a black gospel choir." Harrison reflects on what is gained, and what is lost/missing, in that process. Black gospel is a "universal language of inspiration and transcendence that cuts across race, class, and history," but in the process, "the very real racial tension surrounding the struggle for equality of opportunity in America isn’t so much resolved or reconciled or even recognized. It is simply ignored in these digestible little pageants of musical and psychosocial harmony."

Thinking of this post at Religion Dispatches, it's a good time to congratulate our blog contributor Gerardo Marti, who has just finished his book manuscript, for Oxford, on a very similar theme: Worship Across the Racial Divide: Notions of Race and Religious Practice in Multiracial Churches, coming out with Oxford next year. Gerardo talks about how African American music comes to stand for authenticity in the churches he studies. And he talks about much else besides -- maybe we can entice him to do a little post here in celebration of mailing off the manuscript, telling us about his work a bit more? Let's hear it, ya'll.

Yes, Researchers Do Know Something About Teaching

Art Remillard

On the final day of FSU’s Graduate Symposium, I had the pleasure of joining Kelly Baker, Betsy Barre, Howell Williams, and Joseph Williams to talk about, "Life after Graduate School." A recurring theme was the difference between teaching and research schools. We outlined strategies for interviewing at such schools, and gave insights on what daily life is like as a teacher or researcher. We also emphasized that, despite outward appearances, folks at teaching schools take research seriously, and folks at research schools take teaching seriously. This point--that researchers strive to excel in the classroom--could use some publicity. Many of the best professors I've known are also productive scholars. They have an infectious enthusiasm about their subject, and give as much thought to their course designs as they do to any article or book. They are also creative, always looking for something new to enliven the classroom. Take our own Paul Harvey, for example. UCCS's Teaching and Learning Center featured Paul and his use of blogs in undergraduate courses. He also elaborated on his jazz-inspired teaching philosophy. No "teacher-centered" or "student-centered" approach for the good Professor Harvey.

I focus on a theme-and-improvisation model, that allows for the discipline and intellectual rigor of a theme while also encouraging soloing and improvisation. I find this model best fits the notion of learning as an active and dynamic process, that occurs for different students on varying levels. I have also found it works to make students feel they have a voice and that their participation is valued and drawn upon in course preparation, even while assuring them that discipline and intellectual rigor have not been sacrificed.

Blogging, jazz, intellectual rigor--very nice. How about some one-upmanship from Mike Pasquier, who has been collaborating with LSU’s Coastal Sustainability Studio to have his students conduct oral histories in Bayou Lafourche. Take a minute and listen to this podcast where Mike and his students discuss the project. The description:

Today’s show is an interview with one of the Center’s partners, Dr. Mike Pasquier, a professor here at LSU in the Religious Studies Department. Dr. Pasquier is working with the Center to establish the Bayou Lafourche Oral History Project. He and his students collected oral histories to gain a better understanding of the role of religion in everyday life among Bayou Lafourche residents. He’s also partnering with the Coastal Sustainability Studio here at LSU, and is using this material to garner a better understanding of how south Louisiana culture is being affected by wetland loss. He teaches courses in U.S. religious history, Christianity, and world religions and his research focuses on the history of Roman Catholicism in the American South, Catholic devotional culture, and religion in colonial Louisiana.

In this episode, the director will speak with him about his ongoing project in Bayou Lafourche, how he uses oral history in the college classroom, and how this research will be useful to a larger, interdisciplinary study assessing the impact of land loss on residents of the area. We’ll get to hear some clips from interviews recorded by some of his students with Bayou Lafourche residents. So join us today as we hear about men murmuring the rosary during Hurricane Betsy, about school children being punished for speaking French on state property, and about how the land and waters where people fish, work, and live is disappearing before our eyes.

The Mormon Menace

John Turner

Last fall, Ed Blum brought Patrick Mason's Journal of Southern History article on southern anti-polygamy campaigns to our attention. Those appetites whetted by Mason's article can now satiate themselves with his full-length treatment of anti-Mormonism in the late-nineteenth-century American South. [Note: Patrick is a former graduate school classmate of mine who helped kindle my interest in things Mormon, so I make no pretense at detachment in the below].

The Mormon Menace (released imminently by Oxford University Press) tells a largely unknown and remarkable story. Patrick's book is not a history of the Latter-day Saints in the South, but an analysis of southern anti-Mormonism. He might have subtitled the book Awash in a Sea of Baptist Haters but chose to not be so impolitic. At first glance, one might object that there were not all that many Mormons (or Mormon missionaries, for that matter) in the American South at this time. However, southerners were incredibly alarmed about the threat Mormon polygamy posed to innocent white women allegedly at great risk of being seduced by traveling elders. Patrick notes that vigilante attacks against Mormons "far exceeded the combined number of attacks against all other religious outsiders in the South, including Jews and Catholics, during this time period." Following the lead of R. Laurence Moore, Patrick suggests one can learn a great deal about the religious "center" of a society by examining the experience of the religiously marginalized.

One great strength of the Mormon Menace is its intelligent engagement with a variety of literatures. Rereading the introduction, I found insights about American vigilantism, southern politics, race, and religious difference. Patrick argues that "anti-Mormonism provided one set of bonds that helped reforge national unity after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and gave southerners common cause with northern reformers and politicians who had been their bitter enemies only a few years earlier." In short, this is first and foremost a book for historians of the American South, not a narrow offering for historians of Mormonism. I would recommend it as absolutely essential reading for anyone studying the place of religious minorities in the South or the history of American vigilantism.

A final note. Well-written and intelligently edited books are always a greater pleasure to read, even for historians. Patrick's book excels in this respect. The narrative is strong, and some of the illustrations are downright shocking (turn to pp. 138-39).

In the late 1800s, southerners were mostly unique in employing violence to ward off the "Mormon menace." Patrick's book prompted me to think about the contemporary nature of anti-Mormonism in the United States, especially in the South. LDS adherents remain a small minority in Dixie (the "real" Dixie, not southern Utah), comprising less than one percent of the population in all states of the former Confederacy save Virginia and Texas. I occasionally hear people talk about LDS growth in this region of the country but do not know whether it's true. Also, I often ask Latter-day Saints about their missionary experiences. Since Mormon missionaries are quite inured to rejection and unfriendly responses, I rarely hear complaints about anti-Mormon attitudes. The exception has been among former missionaries who served in the Deep South. Perhaps southern evangelicals retain their long-standing animus against Mormons, fortunately without the violence documented in The Mormon Menace. I also note a fair amount of theological anti-Mormonism (or simply generic anti-Mormonism, based on not very much) among my students. Since we began our annual summer pilgrimages to Zion, several well-meaning acquaintances in southern Alabama have expressed spiritual concern on our behalf, whereas our New England friends mostly worry about our access to coffee.

Sanctifying Social Struggles: From New Contributor Heath Carter

Paul Harvey

I'm very pleased to introduce our newest contributor, Heath Carter. Heath is a Ph.D. student at the University of Notre Dame, where he's working under Mark Noll and John McGreevy on his dissertation "Scab Ministers, Striking Saints: Christianity and Class Conflict in Chicago, 1865-1914." One piece from this, which I was privileged to read in manuscript, has been published recently: "Scab Ministers, Striking Saints, and Class Conflict in 1894 Chicago," American Nineteenth Century History 11, No. 3 (September 2010): 321-49. For his first contribution, Heath reflects on a panel he just attended at the 2011 AHA.

_____________________________________________

Sanctifying Social Struggles Panel

by Heath Carter

As Randall and others have noted, this year’s AHA more than made good on its theme, “History, Society, and the Sacred.” The conference schedule was packed with an unprecedented number of panels showcasing the latest scholarship on American religion. On Friday morning I attended one – entitled “Sanctifying Social Struggles across the Mid-Twentieth-Century South” – that tackled a theme near to my heart (and dissertation!): the relationship between religion and class. Chaired by Lisa McGirr, the panel featured papers by Alison Greene, Jarod Roll, and Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf, names that will be familiar to many readers of this blog. Both Greene and Roll recounted 1930s episodes in which religious ideals motivated social protest, with she focusing on tenant farmers in the Mississippi Delta and he on the fascinating figure of Claude Williams, who was at once a fundamentalist preacher, economic radical, and racial progressive. The Fones-Wolfs’ presentation underscored the strategic importance of religion on both sides of post-WWII labor battles, and included a riveting discussion of how corporations like Westinghouse and General Electric enlisted local preachers in their union-busting campaigns. The panelists earned well-deserved praise from commentator James Green, an eminent labor historian, who gracefully acknowledged having been remiss in neglecting religion in his own work. It was McGirr, meanwhile, who asked perhaps the most challenging question. She wanted to know whether the panelists thought their papers exposed the need for an overhaul of labor history as we have known it, or whether their arguments merely embellished older storylines. Far from settled, this line of inquiry should continue to generate much invigorating debate going forward. (Those interested in exploring some of these issues in further depth might start with the spring 2009 issue of Labor, which was devoted to the intersection of religion and class; also, be sure not to miss Roll’s prize-winning Spirit of Rebellion, published by U. of Illinois in 2010.)

Baptists and the Civil War

Paul Harvey

While we're on the subject of the religious history of the Civil War, here's a new resource of interest. I received an email today from Bruce Gourley, Executive Director of the Baptist History and Heritage Society, on a new site he has constructed on Baptists and the Civil War, featuring an abundance of essays, documents, daily journal entries, and other resources on that subject. He writes:

"Baptists and the American Civil War: In Their Own Words" is a day-by-day journal of the Baptist experience, North and South, during the Civil War. Each day a new journal entry is published, corresponding with that date 150 years earlier.

This digital project began as an outgrowth of research done for my dissertation-turned-upcoming book, Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia During the Civil War (due in the fall from Mercer University Press).

A quick survey of this website shows it to be a terrific resource for scholars working on all sorts of subjects, as well as those interested in Baptist history of the religious history of the Civil War, in particular. The daily journal features short bits of information and analysis on the events of that day 150 years ago -- this entry from Jan. 2, 1861, for examples, describes the process of voting for secession in Georgia.

Congratulations to Bruce Gourley on making his research and interests available in this wonderfully accessible way, and in incorporating the best scholarship in doing so.

Black Entrepreneurship, Religion, and Civil Rights

Paul Harvey

One of my favorite books over the last year or two was Suzanne Smith's To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death, which I blogged about previously here.

This morning, the author, Suzanne Smith (George Mason University), was interviewed on Morning Edition on NPR, talking about the black businessman A. G. Gaston, a figure pretty well known to civil rights historians but largely unknown outside of that. Check out the interview here.

The funeral business proved instrumental in the lives of a lot of ministers, including nineteenth-century minister-entrepreneurs who got in on the ground floor of modern undertaking, as "colored embalmers," and twentieth-century ministers who used their funeral business income to subsidize their activities in other areas, including the original sponsor of Mahalia Jackson's singing tours and radio performances.

From Prize-Winning Dissertation to...

Today I received a copy of Darren Dochuk's long-awaited From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton).

The book's amazon.com release date is December 13, just in time to find its places under the Christmas trees of RiAH blog readers.

Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize as a dissertation, Darren's book is an erudite and persuasive account of how southern evangelical migrants transformed California's culture and politics.

"Rather than an invention of Falwell and Robertson's Religious Right," he argues, "evangelicalism's politicization was a product of an earlier time made possible by an earlier generation, a generation that came of age on the West Coast during Roosevelt's time, not Reagan's." Until recent years, historians have paid relatively little attention to what one might call the pre-history of the Religious Right. That, however, is no longer the case, as books ranging from Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors, Dan Williams's God's Own Party to Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart all provide careful analysis of how evangelicals gradually came to embrace conservative politics and free-market capitalism. Darren's book is a thorough culmination of this trend.

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt explores the religious and political interchange between the South and Southern California from the 1930s through 1980. "Jeffersonian Democratic" migrants quickly opposed California's version of the New Deal Coalition, constructed their own subculture of schools and organizations, and eventually helped propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency.

Several aspects of Darren's book thoroughly impress me. First, he very sensitively -- without a trace of scholarly condescension -- includes the voices of "plain folk," many of whom he interviewed for the book. Second, Darren mines untapped and rich veins of archival sources. Few historians have visited both the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and the Pat Boone Headquarters. He also gained access to the private records of many southern California churches. Finally, the book benefits greatly from Darren's clear and eloquent prose. Both specialists and students will find From Bible Belt to Sunbelt engaging and thought-provoking.

Buy it, read it, assign it.

Southern Cultures Announcement and CFP

Paul Harvey

The following announcement from the journal Southern Cultures will be of interest to some of you here:

Southern Cultures, the award-winning quarterly from UNC's Center for the Study of the American South, has added several more essays and features to the section of our website that focuses of American religion, including content from our brand new issue. We'd also like to remind scholars of religion in the South--and related topics--that we're interested in your
submissions.

Over 58,000 readers in classrooms in over 60 countries have viewed our content online. To read our material on religion, please visit here. You'll also find our submission guidelines, content on other subject areas, and more information about our latest issue here.

I would just add that cruising through the journal's most popular articles and pieces from the last decade yields a lot of fun reading, including Michael Butler's "Sin, Salvation, and Southern Rock."

Open Friendship in a Closed Society

Paul Harvey

Robert Elder, a grad. student at Emory who has guest-posted here before, has an extended review just up at Books and Culture of Peter Slade, Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and the Theology of Friendship (Oxford, 2010). A brief excerpt:

In Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and a Theology of Friendship, Peter Slade braids together theology, history, and sociology in an examination of a remarkable organization working to reconcile black and white Christians in Mississippi. Slade began the book as part of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, and he shares this scholarly community's concern with how theological beliefs shape social action. His book is a meditation, grounded in the particulars of place and time, on the relationship between justice and reconciliation in the body of Christ.

The tension here is between the personal and the structural, as is often the case, and Elder's review explores the contrast between this book, which emphasizes the personal, and Michael Emerson's Divided by Faith, which stresses how the personal can allow the powerful to ignore the structural. Well worth reading.

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.

American Religious History at the AAR

Paul Harvey

The below is from the Historical Society blog; Randall there has helpfully summarized some of the main sessions on American religious history at the upcoming AAR in Atlanta, including my session I blogged on before, "The Future of Southern Religious History."

The first morning, Saturday, is the main panel presenting new research in African American religious history. Monday afternoon, for those of you who can stay around until then (regrettably, not including me), is a dream team scholarly lineup discussing how Robert Orsi's Madonna of 115th St has affected (or not) the study of religion. Saturday afternoon at 1:00 features a panel discussion of our friend Tisa Wenger's work We Have a Religion, which we blogged about before here featuring an interview with the author.

The full program is searchable here.

Saturday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Location: Marriott Marquis - L405-406
Missionary Innovation: African-American Religion and the New South

Presiding
* Josef Sorett, Columbia University

Presenters
* Lerone Martin, Emory University
Selling to the Souls of Black Folk: Atlanta, the Phonograph, and the Transformation of American Religion and Culture, 1920–1941

* Elizabeth Jemison, Harvard University
Writing and Righting Race: Women’s Interracial Cooperation in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Episcopal Church, South

* Brandi Hughes, University of Michigan
(En)Gendering the Trans-Nation: The Missionary Sojourns of Black Womanhood from Atlanta through Monrovia

* Brandon Winstead, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
“We are Responsible to God”: Black Nazarene Women’s Theology of Evangelistic Responsibility and Its Relationship to Their Contributions to the Church of the Nazarene’s Gulf Central District, 1953–1969

Responding
* Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover E
Author Meets Critics: Thomas A. Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling (Harvard University Press, 2008)

Presiding
* Daniel Ramírez, University of Michigan

Panelists
* Richard Callahan, University of Missouri
* Marie Marquardt, Agnes Scott College
* Grant Wacker, Duke University

Responding
* Thomas A. Tweed, University of Texas

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover FG
Defining Religious Freedom: Reading Tisa Wenger’s We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

Presiding
* Ines M. Talamantez, University of California, Santa Barbara

Panelists
* Quincy Newell, University of Wyoming
* Greg Johnson, University of Colorado
* Kenneth Mello, Southwestern University

Responding
* Tisa Wenger, Yale University

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover C
The Lutheran Tradition: New Theological and Global Perspectives
Presiding
* Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg

Presenters
* Farisani Elelwani, University of South Africa
The Challenges Facing Lutherans in South Africa

* John Reynolds, Union Theological Seminary
The Heart in Sixteenth Century Physiology and the Role of Luther’s Theology in the Life of the Believer

* Hans Schwarz, University of Regensburg
Martin Luther’s Reception in Korea

* Cecilia Nahnfeldt, Karlstad University, Sweden
Lutheran Vocation and Gender Relations

Saturday 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Location: Marriott Marquis - L507
Seminar on Religion in the American West

Presiding
* Jane Naomi Iwamura, University of Southern California

Presenters
* Travis Ross, University of Nevada, Reno
Sectionalism in California’s Religious Periodicals: Place in Religious Rhetoric

* Jonathan William Olson, Florida State University
“Not Merely Asiatic but Pagan”: Religion, Chinese Exclusion, and the American West

* Barry Joyce, University of Delaware
Creating an Axis Mundi in the American Southwest: Religion, Science, and the Sacred at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park

* Brett Hendrickson, Arizona State University
Mexican-American Religious Healing and the American Spiritual Marketplace

Responding
* Tisa Wenger, Yale University


Sunday 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover AB
Keywords in the Study of North American Religion: Anthropomorphism, Agency, and Vernacular

Presiding
* Gary M. Laderman, Emory University

Presenters
* W. Clark Gilpin, University of Chicago
Anthropomorphism: Human Connection to a Universal Society

* Elizabeth Jemison, Harvard University
Writing Agency: Reconsidering Agency in the Study of American Religion

* Rachel Lindsey, Princeton University
The Light of the World: Vernacular Photography and American Religion, 1839–1910

Monday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Location: Marriott Marquis - M101
The Future of Southern Religious History

Presiding
* Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Panelists
* Alison Greene, Yale University
* Michael Pasquier, Louisiana State University
* Randall Stephens, Eastern Nazarene College
* Curtis Evans, University of Chicago
* Ted Ownby, University of Mississippi

Responding
* Lauren Winner, Duke University

Monday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Marriott Marquis - M103-104
How Has Orsi’s Madonna of 115th Street Affected the Way We Think about Religion?

Presiding
* David Harrington Watt, Temple University

Panelists
* Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University
* Stephen J. Stein, Indiana University
* Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
* Leigh E. Schmidt, Harvard University

Responding
* Robert Orsi, Northwestern University

The Future of Southern Religious History

Paul Harvey

Alright, ya'll going to the American Academy of Religion meeting in Atlanta, time to make your plans for "The Future of Southern Religious History," coming up the last morning of the conference, Monday morning, Nov. 1 in the Marriot Marquis in Atlanta. We'll have more to say about that here later, as the conference session will feed into an upcoming Journal of Southern Religion. Here's the lineup for the morning. I'm on the panel, but don't let that scare you away, as I'm just chairing, which means I just introduce everyone and then observe the proceedings. This will be a roundtable format, meaning we'll have informal presentations and then a lot of time for discussion and interaction. It's going to be fun, hope to see you there, Marriott Marquis M101 in Atlanta, Monday, Nov. 1, 9:00 - 11:00 a.m.

A1-105

• North American Religions Section

Monday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Location: Marriott Marquis - M101

The Future of Southern Religious History

In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of scholars began to rewrite our understanding of the religious history of the South. Samuel Hill, Donald Mathews, Albert Raboteau, and Mechal Sobel examined white and black religious traditions in the region, setting them in new contexts and reopening what had seemed to be a “closed” history of white evangelical dominance and black suppression. Since then, employing tools from a variety of disciplines, scholars have opened up numerous research avenues in a quest to understand both historically and in the present this most religiously Protestant of American regions.

Our roundtable panel will assess, critique, and chart a future path for studies of religion in the South. We have chosen the panel/roundtable format to make our session one of dialogue between panelists and audience. To facilitate this dialogue, the comments from the panelists will be published via a blog which will both publicize the panel and get the panel “going” prior to the actual meeting itself.

Presiding

• Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Panelists

• Alison Greene, Yale University
• Michael Pasquier, Louisiana State University
• Randall Stephens, Eastern Nazarene College
• Curtis Evans, University of Chicago
• Ted Ownby, University of Mississippi

Responding

• Lauren Winner, Duke University

Business Meeting

• Rudy V. Busto, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Kathleen Flake, Vanderbilt University

Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster at OBU

Paul Harvey

From our Department of Self-Promotion, an announcement below which may be of interest to any blog readers we have in the great state of Oklahoma. I don't know for a fact that we have any, but just in case . . .

Celebrating Oklahoma Baptist University's Centennial

The Department of Anthropology, History and Political Science presents

Paul Harvey

1983 OBU Graduate

Professor of History, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Professor Harvey is a nationally recognized historian of Baptists and evangelicals in the South and commentator on present-day American religion and politics.

Tuesday, September 28

9:30-10:45 a.m. “Baptists and the American South” (Public Presentation; GC 220)

How have Baptists dealt with racial differences and other issues important in the South? Join Professor Harvey to reflect on this major problem in the American experience.

Noon-1:30 p.m. “History, Faith, and the Academy” (Open Lunch; GC 222)

Grab your lunch in the cafeteria and come to GC 222 for a rich

conversation! Cosponsored by the Faith and Disciplines Committee.

7-9 p.m. “Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South”

(Public Lecture; Bailey Business Building, Tulsa Royalties Aud.)

How do we explain the co-existence of the piously sacred and the violently

profane in the history of the American South? Through history, literature, music,

and film, this lecture explores four major archetypes of southern religious culture

from the 18th century to the present: Moses, Jesus, the Trickster, and Absalom.

Literary figures, cultural archetypes, and musical explorations have added layers

of complexity to what other wise might be seen as a solid South of evangelicalism.

The Journal of Southern Religion, Vol 12, 2010

Randall Stephens

The new volume of the Journal of Southern Religion is now on-line. Hurrah!! (Thanks much for all the hard work put in by Emily Clark, Art Remillard, and Bland Whitley.)

This is the last issue that we as current editors (Bland Whitley and Randall Stephens) will edit for the Journal of Southern Religion. We’ve been at it for some time now and we believe that it’s now the right moment for a new set of editors to take the reins. (I've has written about some of the things that the editorial team has “done and what we have left undone” here on the blog.) It’s been a lively, fulfilling endeavor for all of us.

But on to the future . . . Michael Pasquier (Religious Studies Department, Louisiana State University) will move in as editor, and Luke Harlow (History Department, Oakland University) will serve as associate editor beginning with the 2011 issue. We couldn’t be more pleased that these two rising stars in the field of religious history have agreed to take the JSR to the next stage. Both have considerable experience as editors. Along with their other work, Mike has edited a special issue of the JSR with Tracy Fessenden, and Luke has served as an editorial assistant with the Journal of Southern History and has edited a volume on American religion and politics with Mark Noll.

On other fronts, Lee Willis will be stepping down as book review editor, which Art Remillard will be taking over. Lee has done extraordinary work in that role, organizing feature reviews and getting a wonderful range of writers to contribute. His efforts are greatly appreciated. And we look forward to what Art has in store for the book review section. Art will also be stepping down as managing editor/web designer. Art has done herculean work over the years. We owe him a debt of gratitude for his attention to detail, tireless efforts, and labors in the Tron-like world of cyberspace. Emily Clark, Florida State University has agreed to join the JSR as our new managing editor/webmaster. We welcome her on board and are thrilled that she has agreed to take on this role.

We are encouraged that the future of the journal remains bright. As usual, the editorial team will be open to suggestions, queries, and the like. Thanks to our contributors and our readers for making this a rewarding, intellectually stimulating venture.

The Journal of Southern Religion, Vol 12 (2010)

What's in Store for the Journal of Southern Religion

Unintended Consequences: Southern Presbyterians and Interdenominationalism in the Late Eighteenth Century
WILLIAM HARRISON TAYLOR

Lecture
"Tell About the South: Why Are They So Religious?"
SAM HILL
The Inaugrual Sam Hill Lecture in Southern Religious History
The University of North Carolina Asheville, April 2009

Interview
Teaching Southern Religious History: An Interview with Charles Reagan Wilson
CONDUCTED BY RANDALL J. STEPHENS

Review Essay
Catholics and Jim Crow: Recent Scholarship on Southern Catholicism during the Civil Rights Movement
DANIEL HUTCHINSON

Author's Reflection
Graham at the Confluence
STEVEN P. MILLER

Featured Review
Barbara Dianne Savage. Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion
WILLIE JAMES JENNINGS
CHERYL J. SANDERS
JACOB S. DORMAN
Author's Response
BARBARA DIANNE SAVAGE

Panel Review
Randall J. Stephens. The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South
REVIEW EDITORIAL NOTE
JOSEPH WILLIAMS
LEWIS V. BALDWIN
CHARLES A. ISRAEL
Author's Response
RANDALL J. STEPHENS

Eleven Other Book Reviews and One Film Review >>>

Wading Back in the Troubled Waters

Paul Harvey

A few notes on Katrina, religion, and the weird trifecta coincidence of Katrina, MLK’s speech in 1963, and Glenn Beck’s picnic on the mall.

First, the NYT has an interesting piece on the Katrina and black churches in New Orleans, focusing specifically on the Lower 9th. Of some 75 churches there before the storm, a great number have closed down, many likely for good. About a dozen struggle to remain, their tenuous hold a symbol for the tenuous hold of the recovery outside the touristed zones. Amid the more chipper pieces the paper ran on various pieces of good news about the recovery, this gives a piece of reality on the other side. The article chronicles the efforts of one pastor who is trying to fire up his congregation again, an uphill battle for sure. This article makes a nice accompaniment to the special issue of the Journal of Southern Religion, on religion through the storm. The issue includes (among many other goodies) Tulane professor Randy Sparks’s piece on religion and recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. And it gave me a nice reminder about perhaps the single most compelling video production I’ve seen on Katrina, Trouble the Waters, which we’ve blogged about here before. And I mean no disrespect to Spike Lee’s outstanding efforts there in When the Levees Broke and, more recently, his revisit to New Orleans, timed for the Saints to march in and BP to spill its guts out. When the Levees Broke is a great film, but for total immersion viewing it’s hard to beat Trouble the Waters (plus it’s giving me the title for a book I hope to start to work on next year).

On Katrina, politics, and religion, my thunder has been stolen by Tenured Radical’s post today Five Years After Hurricane Katrina, What Would Jesus Do?, which comes with the added bonus of a Johnny Cash clip from YouTube (always a good thing). “Looking back over the last five years,” she concludes, “we need less God and more politics: by that I mean not less faith, and all the forms of ethical community that faith can provide, but we need to end the lie that you can substitute faith for politics.” This and much else at the post is so much better than what I was struggling to come up with that I’ll just point you there. To her post, I would only add the point that the most effective use of religious rhetoric in twentieth-century America has been to provide the spiritual inspiration necessary to move recalcitrant political institutions (hence the connection between the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Bill; or social Catholicism and the New Deal). But presumably that is what she means by “all the forms of ethical community that faith can provide.”

I was thinking along these lines today as I’m in the midst of reading Alison Greene’s excellent dissertation “No Depression in Heaven” (recently completed at Yale, under Glenda Gilmore), a searching history of religion and politics in Memphis and the Delta through the Depression years. The hapless rhetoric of evangelicals through that era was especially resonant given the same vapid speechifying at the Glenn Beck picnic this weekend. Also fascinating in her work is to see the churches basically cede authority to NGO’s (the Red Cross in particular) and, as the New Deal progressed, governmental agencies. The evangelicals basically said 1) the Depression just shows that we need a revival – that the nation needs to “turn back to God”; 2) in the meantime, don’t look to us for relief, because we ain’t got any; if you need food, go someplace else, because there’s too many of you to serve; 3) only God, not politics, can save us; 4) but Jesus is coming soon anyway. Obviously this applies to only part of the diverse religious formations through that time period, not (for example) to the religious left, and actually not to some of the premillennialist Pentecostals who had another agenda going on. But at the very least, these evangelicals implicitly understood that, for all their rhetoric about turning back to God, ultimately governing authorities might have answers, not to mention indispensable resources, that they just didn’t have. Perhaps they might have even given an ear to Tenured Radical’s conclusion:

What would Jesus do? Throw Glenn Beck and every money changer like him out of the temple, that's what, and get back to what government is supposed to do: help people take care of themselves, make politics a vehicle for loving one's neighbor (not blaming him, or seeing if she needs to be deported) and protecting Americans from those who prey on the simple, the weak and the vulnerable. Until we do, the waters will keep on rising.

New Scholarship: Opposition to Polygamy in the Postbellum South

by Edward J. Blum

For those of you still living in the present, I know this is a hard and confusing time. Reports of President Obama as a Muslim, debates over Ground Zero, and the start of the semester can trouble our souls. Perhaps you need an intellectual refuge. If you do, grab the current edition of the Journal of Southern History and read Patrick Q. Mason’s fantastic article on anti-Mormonism in the South <“Opposition to Polygamy in the Postbellum South,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 3 (August 2010): 541-578)>. It’s a terrific study of how white southerners rallied against polygamy from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. Sure, it’s not a fun story (it involves murder and mayhem just like most aspects of American history), but the essay offers a lot to think about from the past.