Historians and Books vs. Journal Articles

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Chris Beneke, a contributor to RiAH, has written an interesting piece on history publishing and gauging scholarly output. (I just posted it at the HS blog.) Beneke zeroes in on the significance of book publishing vs journal publishing and asks some questions about how historians could or should measure the weight of their work.

Chris Beneke, "The Journal Standard," The Historical Society, November 15, 2010

Historians are people of the book. We write piles of them—monographs, textbooks, and edited books, strictly academic books and books intended (usually with no foundation in reality) for the bestseller list. Some of our better books are histories of the book; some of our better historians are historians of the book. We cherish books dearly, not least for their narrative artistry. But we also value their utility within the academic world. At research universities and colleges with research aspirations, after all, the scholarly book serves as the elusive ticket to the vastly overrated world of the tenured, Associate Professor, and later to invitations to speak, comment, and publish still more books. . . .

In short, historians are producing, recognizing, and even celebrating work that runs sharply against the grain of research in other disciplines. To put it in the bluntest terms, we have a Book Standard; they have a Journal Standard. It’s not that we don’t value that other form of scholarly currency. We just don’t value it quite as much.>>>

Religion and American Culture Caucus Meeting at American Studies Association

RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE CAUCUS BUSINESS MEETING
Informal Business Meeting of the Religion and American Culture Caucus
ASA 2010, San Antonio, Texas

Grand Hyatt, Bar Rojo, at 5:30 pm on Friday, November 19, 2010

Members of the Religion and American Culture Caucus, please join us for an informal business meeting of the Caucus at Bar Rojo at 5:30 pm on Friday, November 19.

We will discuss possible sessions for next year, new directions for the Caucus and a celebration for our out-going chair, Matt Hedstrom.

Kelly Baker (kbaker27 (at) utk (dot) edu)
Chair, Religion and American Culture Caucus, American Studies Association

Transatlantic Tea Party Time?

Hilde Løvdal

Central figures in the right wing Christian media in Norway have expressed a deep admiration for conservative American Christians. Now, they want to put on the Tea Party mantel.

“We won America, now we must win in Norway.” So said a writer in Norge IDAG, a right wing Christian newspaper, in the aftermath of the American election earlier this month. Editor Finn Jarle Sæle has time and again stated his admiration for Sarah Palin, and the editorial from the November 8, 2010 on the election clearly expressed his admiration for Tea Partiers:

. . . They won America.

Now we must do the same in Norway. We must, like them, say that Jesus is the foundation of our laws. That’s what Norway’s first national legislation stated at Moster in 1024 and repeated in the Constitution at Eidsvoll in 1814.

The time has come to bring Norway back to the precious principles of our Constitution. Our nation needs a change based on the rule of law, which our fathers gave us. This is how they think in America. They quote George Washington. He said nobody can rule a nation with justice without God and the Bible. They quote the man who abolished slavery, the great Christian president Abraham Lincoln, who said the Bible is the foundation for the law of the land.

The Tea Party says no to socialism and no to secularization. They have said a strong yes to liberty. They elected a libertarian, Rand Paul, to the Senate. Because they know that ultimate freedom, or libertarianism, comes with finding Jesus Christ.

We know that only good, old Jesusland has freedom and prosperity. And we think that those who take away the philosophy of Christ and remove Jesus from our schools, kindergartens, and Constitution, take away our freedom and our prosperity. They surrender us to a controlling state unequipped to give us either freedom or benefits. As a last resort, the state tries to save itself with more and more taxes and more and more control.

So let’s stand up in the spirit of Henrik Wergeland. Norge IDAG wishes to inspire extra-parlamentarian opposition, small and big tea parties. Soon, we too will win elections. We cannot follow the traditional methods that, for a long time, have led to losses for Christians. We win because we no longer just sit on the sofa. We win when we understand our possibilities as Christians. We are the largest people’s movement besides those that have formed around organized sports.

Our first task is to turn each pessimist into an optimist. We will claim God’s blessings over Norway. As before, Deut. 27 and 28 shall be fulfilled. When we follow God’s laws, we are the richest nation in the world. Then, we will start winning Nobel Prizes just as Israelis do. He puts us higher than any other nation, the Bible says, when we keep the covenant from Moster and Eidsvoll, which built Norway. It has helped our country so far, despite the infiltration of socialism and secularization . . .

This is just an excerpt, but you get the picture.

At a time when the more moderate Christian Democratic Party (est. 1933) struggles with massive loss of popular support and strives to find its way back to political power, right wing groups are networking heavily and taking cues from conservative American Protestantism.

Kristenfolket (The Christian People, or just The Christians), a coalition inspired by the Moral Majority, tries to encourage Norwegian Christians to vote for conservative political parties based on a nice bouquet of issues such as support for Israel, defense of traditional marriage, and Islamophobia. In 2009, Kristenfolket and other conservative Christians gathered at Moster, where the first national law based on Christianity was signed, to reclaim Norway for Christ and pray for God’s blessings over Norway. (If God really listened to their prayers, he must be a left wing social democrat.)

Whether they have actual political power or not is hard to estimate. But judging from their economy, they’re on the rise. While the Norwegian State Church, to which about 80% Norwegians belong, struggles to raise enough funds to create a reality show about the life of an ordinary minister, Visjon Norge, a charismatic right wing TV station has a record high offerings and a loyal base of viewers who donate money to the station.

As American style historical fundamentalism seems to seep into Norwegian fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and charismatic wings of Norwegian Christianity, I cling to the fact that Norway is a nation of coffee drinkers. I hope that keeps most of us sober.

The American Catholic Revolution

by Kathy Cummings

My review of Mark Massa’s The American Catholic Revolution: How the ‘60s Changed the Church Forever (Oxford, 2010) appears in the most recent issue of America.

It’s a very positive review (I compared my level of excitement for a new Mark Massa book with that my daughter had towards new Harry Potter novels); it really is a great book that you should all read.

But I do make one critique in my review. Here it is, in an excerpt:

Scholars who follow Massa’s lead in the future would do well to apply his thesis more comprehensively to issues of women and gender. Alas, his book is indeed a “master narrative” in the sense that, with the notable exception of Mother Caspary of the I.H.M.s, all its protagonists are men. A discussion of women’s ordination or the abortion question would have enhanced the study. Strictly speaking, of course, both Roe v. Wade and the Women’s Ordination Conference belong to the 1970s, but they do fall within the purview of “the long ’60s,” a term most American historians use to limn the period. More significantly, though, both of these developments were undoubtedly rooted in the events Massa describes, and they were—and remain—quite central to any discussion of an “American Catholic revolution.”

So when I was writing this paragraph, I had conflicting emotions. On the one hand, I was worried about sounding like a broken record: “Here she goes again, harping on the absence of female subjects,” I imagined my phantom reader thinking. Am I becoming a cliché, I wondered?

But on the other hand, I was angry. Why SHOULD I have to point out time and again that it might be nice to include a few more women in your study/lecture/conference paper/whatever, not because it would fulfill some kind of politically correct quota but because it might actually help you strengthen or refine your argument? Too often I have heard people who ignore women defend themselves by saying that they are just not “interested” in women’s history. Well, who says it’s okay—let alone historically responsible--not to be interested in half of the human population?

Country Music Minus the Culture Wars

Paul Harvey

My piece reflecting on Ricky Skaggs' new recording Mosaic, and more generally on white southern country music's relationship with politics, is just up at Religion Dispatches. (For those interested, here is Ken Tucker's review of the record, from Fresh Air).

A brief excerpt of my piece is below, and then read the rest here:

On his newest record, Mosaic, Skaggs has taken a step back into themes familiar in the religious history of the South, and away from the culture wars. As the opening epigraph suggests, he hasn’t gone soft on his religious belief, and the apocalyptic message drawn from the book of Elijah on Mosaic suggests that premillennial imagery still exerts a hold.

But the message is fundamentally personal, not political. And that’s a good thing.

. . . {T]he more recent culture wars tie between country, religious fundamentalism, and a Tea Party civil religion is an invented tradition. Historically, it lacks any deep roots in the white Southern tradition of musical expression. . . . Historically, Southern music at its best—the bluesmen, the Carter family, Charlie Poole, and the corpus of the old, weird America—simply could not be tied down to any particular political message or program. This music was about a world beyond one’s control. Its occasional bromides or homilies were not nearly as convincing as its unforgettable portrayals of the darker difficulties of survival in a harsh and uncertain world.

"Things Do Things"

Emily Clark

Those of us who were in Atlanta for the AAR have had nearly a week to recover from our self-inflected wounds of staying up late and social networking over lagers and ales. We have also had a little under a week to digest the wide-ranging, quality panels and papers we had the opportunity to hear. One Saturday afternoon panel that continues to stick out for me was the Author Meets Critics panel for Thomas Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Though the book came out in 2006 and in 2009 the Journal of the American Academy of Religion published a review symposium, including a response from Tweed, this 2010 session in Atlanta drew quite a crowd. Based on his years in the field of religious studies and American religious history, Tweed defines religion as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing upon human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.”

Unfortunately Ivan Strenski (of University of California, Riverside) was unable to attend, but the three other respondents/“critics” led off an engaging discussion that ranged from scholarly moral obligation to the agency of “things.” Chip Callahan (University of Missouri) reflected on Tweed’s book in light of his current research on the religious lives and worlds of New England whalers. Callahan found Tweed’s work helpful because his use of dynamic water metaphors allows us to focus on the everyday lives of our actual subjects. Marie Marquardt (Agnes Scott College)’s reflections on Oscar, a Mexican migrant “outsider” living in the US who she met during her fieldwork, demonstrate how a theory or definition that is itself “on the move” resonates well with subjects who are on the move. Also recognizing Tweed’s dynamic definition, Grant Wacker (Duke University) spoke about the “positionality of the observer” and the “motility of data,” along with amusing anecdotes from his years of working with/near Tweed in North Carolina.

During his response and the Q&A session following, Tweed reflected on his past projects and his forthcoming book on the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. He spoke of the moral obligations we as scholars have to our subjects, living or dead. Both ethnographic work and archival work exists in a world of “moral entanglement.” Tweed also drew our attention to the significance of artifacts – for “buildings perform roles” and “statues have agency.” “Things do things.” Scholars of material culture have long called for the importance of stuff, but material culture can easily be overlooked by discussions of power and authority. Tweed’s short but poignant phrase “things do things” got me thinking about destroyed things. I’ve blogged before about Hurricane Katrina and Avery Gordon’s notions of haunting, as the absence of pre-Katrina buildings lends a ghostly presence to the Crescent City. Not only are dwellings important, the Q&A also prompted Tweed and the respondents to reflect on those who are excluded from home. In addition to looking at how/why some people are unwelcome from particular dwellings, destroyed dwellings and our subjects’ response to their destruction and absence is significant. Do they rebuild? Do they move? Do they forget? Or how do they remember? Non-things do things too.

Big Church

Randall Stephens

Big, bigger, biggest. Americans dig superlatives. I didn't know that as a kid when the Stephens clan attended the enormous College Church of the Nazarene in Olathe, Kansas. It was and still is one of the defining features of my home town. It looks a little like a massive brick wigwam, or an enormous brick-covered circus tent, or bricked mother ship, with docking stations, resting on the prairie. (When the main sanctuary was built around 1980 I don't think "megachurch" had yet entered the neologism lexicon.)

As a youngster, maybe I assumed that most other people, too, attended churches with 2,000-plus members. Our church had stadium seating and a passion play that brought acres of Jerusalem--hills, shrubbery, buildings, a tomb, the Last Supper tablescape--into our sanctuary. I did visit some Missouri Wesleyan and Nazarene churches out in the sticks that didn't have orchestras, so I suppose I did soon realize that not everyone was blessed with a sprawling church complex.

You could get lost in the basement halls of our church. (I still remember all the smells of that basement when we had to scurry down there in the late 1970s during a tornado. Odors of Play Doh mingling with mold, perfume, and Old Spice.)

I wonder what future generations of historians will have to say about the megachurch. (Surely, sociologists and suburban anthropologists have plenty to say about it now. So did Andrew Sullivan in his Conscience of a Conservative.) What does the megachurch tell us about religion in America in the last 20 years or so? What does the disdain that most critics have for them tell us? If we took a snapshot of American evangelicalism in the 1880s or the 1950s and compared that with the megachurch context of today, what contrasts would come into focus? (Matt Sutton found some roots of the phenomenon in Sister Aimee and Angelus Temple.)

An excerpt of an AJC piece on the ever-present megachurch:

Shelia M. Poole, "Megachurches: Supersizing Faith," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 6, 2010.

Rock climbing walls, kids' spaces that resemble small Disneylands, bookstores, state-of-the-art sound systems. It's church -- supersized. In metro Atlanta and elsewhere, the number of megachurches, which have long been defined as having a weekly attendance of 2,000 or more, are still drawing huge numbers of worshippers and receiving millions of dollars in the collection plate. "Megachurches have really succeeded because they service all needs of the community, the spiritual and the social," said Lerone A. Martin, an assistant professor of American religious history at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis. . . .

These religious behemoths have received greater attention of late after a flurry of well-publicized litigation against one of the most mega of megachurches, the 25,000-member New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia. New Birth is named as a defendant in five lawsuits, four of which allege that its prominent pastor, Bishop Eddie L. Long, coerced four young men into having sex.>>>