The Tea Party is Unconstitutional
Posted: February 12, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American history, Constitution, Politics, tea party 5 Comments »David Sehat has a great opinion piece up at the Christian Science Monitor where he argues that the current Tea Party has more in common with the antifederalists that opposed the Constitution than they do with the Constitution’s federalist framers.
This argument is instructive, but not quite in the way that tea partiers imagine. Though the tea party’s philosophy is clear enough, it obscures a telling irony: Even though tea partiers appeal to the Constitution to support their position, they often sound more like Antifederalist opponents of the Constitution than the Constitution’s supporters.
This is because the original vision of the Constitution did not seek to keep the national government small and in its place, as the tea partiers claim. The Constitution sought, instead, to strengthen the national government in order to solve the problem of federal taxation.
Methodists and India: Mapping, Contact, and Travel in the Christian Advocate, 1860-1890
Posted: January 12, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 19th century, academia, American history, American Religion, American Society of Church History, Christianity, conference paper, Conference Papers, contact, gender, India, mapping, Methodism, Missions, Religion, travel 2 Comments »As I posted last week, this weekend I presented a paper on the topic of Methodist Media to the American Society of Church History at this year’s American Historical Association meeting. Below is my paper from the panel.
Methodists and India: Mapping, Contact and Travel in the Christian Advocate, 1860-1890
Michael J. Altman, Emory University
What could bourgeois Methodist readers have known about India and how could missionary work abroad have brought them this knowledge? Today, I will begin to answer these two questions through an analysis of The Christian Advocate in the late nineteenth century. The Christian Advocate, published in New York and the official weekly publication of the Methodist Episcopal Church, rose to a circulation of 63 to 70 thousand by 1879 and as one historian claims, “the paper became an icon of bourgeois America.”[i] The Advocate circulated among a growing middle class during the rise of the popular press in America and, therefore, the representations of India and Hinduism contained in its pages sparked the minds of a broad Evangelical readership.
I focus on three themes in the pages of the Advocate regarding India and Hinduism: mapping, contact, and travel. First, missionary reports mapped out India as a geographic and spiritual field for missions work. Second, women in America were especially recruited to join in the missionary effort and make spiritual and imaginary contact with Hindu women in India. Finally, in order to see the fruits of the Methodist mission work in India, writers sent letters and stories of conversions, conferences, and revivals that allowed American Methodists to travel to India and see the Holy Spirit at work. In all three cases, imagination brought India into American homes through the pages of the Advocate.
My “American Religious History” Exam List
Posted: August 16, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American history, American Religion, exam reading, exams, grad school, open access, Religion, religious history 1 Comment »Continuing where I left off on Friday, here’s the second of four exam lists. I think it’s important we help each other out with these sorts of things so that our doctoral programs can be as useful to us as possible. So, hopefully this is a help to some other struggling Americanist. It’s a bit more of an “old school” list than the theory one from last week.
Again, if anyone out there is interested in talking about or exchanging outlines of any of these either locally or via the inter-webs let me know.
American Religious History Exam List
Surveys:
Ahlstrom, Sydney E. 2004. A religious history of the American people. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Albanese, Catherine L. 2007. America, religions and religion. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Pub. Co.
———. 2007. A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religoin. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Evans, Curtis J. 2008. The burden of Black religion. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Holifield, E. Brooks. 2003. Theology in America: Christian thought from the age of the Puritans to the Civil War. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press.
McLoughlin, William Gerald. 1978. Revivals, awakenings, and reform : an essay on religion and social change in America, 1607-1977. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tweed, Thomas A. ed. 1997. Retelling U.S. Religious History. Berkley: University of California Press.
Tradition Focused Surveys:
Dolan, Jay P. 2002. In search of an American Catholicism : a history of religion and culture in tension. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
McGreevy, John T. 2003. Catholicism and American freedom: a history. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton.
Sarna, Jonathan D. 2004. American Judaism : a history. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Seager, Richard Hughes, 1999. Buddhism in America. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shipps, Jan. 1985. Mormonism : the story of a new religious tradition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Pre-20th Century:
Bonomi, Patricia U. 2003. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America, Updated Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brekus, Catherine. 1998. Strangers Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845. Chapel Hill.: University of North Carolina Press.
Butler, Jon. 1990. Awash in a sea of faith: Christianizing the American people, Studies in cultural history. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hall, David D. 1989. Worlds of wonder, days of judgment: popular religious belief in early New England. New York: Knopf.
Hatch, Nathan O. 1989. The democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jackson, Carl T. 1981. The Oriental Religions and American Thought: Nineteenth Century Explorations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
Kidd, Thomas S. 2007. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press
Morgan, Edmund Sears. 1963. Visible saints: the history of a Puritan idea. [New York]: New York University Press.
Orsi, Robert A. 1985. The Madonna of 115th Street: faith and community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Raboteau, Albert. 1980. Slave Religion: “The Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 2005. Restless souls: the making of American spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
Seager, Richard Hughes. 1995.The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago 1893. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Tweed, Thomas A. 1992. The American encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912 : Victorian culture and the limits of dissent, Religion in North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wilson, Charles Reagan. 1980. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.
20th Century:
Allitt, Patrick. 2003. Religion in America since 1945: a history, Columbia histories of modern American life. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chidester, David. 2005. Authentic fakes: religion and American popular culture. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.
Huthcinson, William R. 1976. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Marsden, George M. 2006. Fundamentalism and American Culture.Oxford.: Oxford University Press.
Marty, Martin E. 1986. Modern American Religion. 3 vols. Chicago.: University of Chicago Press. [SKIM]
McDannell, Colleen. 1995. Material Christianity: religion and popular culture in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Roof, Wade Clark. 1999. Spiritual marketplace: baby boomers and the remaking of American religion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Wacker, Grant. 2001. Heaven below : early Pentecostals and American culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Wuthnow, Robert. 1998. After heaven: spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Peter Berger, “Easternizing Spirituality,” and the Colonial Difference
Posted: August 3, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 19th century, American history, American Religion, Berger, Hinduism, Religion, religious history, spirituality Leave a comment »
In case you haven’t stumbled upon it yet, sociologist Peter Berger has a new blog, Religion Other Curiosities, at the American Interest Online. It’s a great blog and worth checking out on a regular basis. Berger has keen insights into Religion and culture and it’s great that he’s decided to jump into the blogosphere. (EDIT- See Stephen Prothero’s brief review of Berger’s blog here)
What caught my eye today was his post on Sai Baba and the spread of Eastern religions to the West. Berger rightly notes that Asian religions have tended not to missionize in the West, a few Buddhist groups and Swami Vivekananda aside, but rather that Asian religions have floated into Western culture through various means:
But the much more significant impact of Asian religiosity on the West has not come by way of missionary organizations. It has been much more diffuse, seeping into the culture through miscellaneous informal channels—books, periodicals, electronic media, small groups of friends and acquaintances, and last but not least through the influence of celebrities (“Hollywood Buddhism” and the like). The diffusion probably dates from the late 19th century, when the alleged wisdom from the East attracted wide interest in Europe and America. Later this trend grew into the so-called New Age movement, then burst into prominence with the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s, and today can be found in the many cases when people say that they are “not religious, but spiritual”.
The diffusion dates earlier than Berger notes-I would trace it to the turn of the 19th century-but his brief history sums things up nicely. It also points out the difficulties of trying to write a history of Asian religious influences in America. Catholics and Jews came to America in rather set patterns of immigration and brought institutions and communities with them. Asian religions, and specifically for me Hinduism, traveled through diffuse networks, across a myriad of media, and was represented and imagined in all sorts of ways starting in the late eighteenth century.
Berger then takes his post in a different direction than I had hoped, following Colin Campbell in his book The Easternization of the West, Berger sees the “Easternizing spirituality” as a challenge to the core beliefs of “the West.”
In think that Campbell is correct in seeing this last complex of ideas as offering the sharpest challenge to core Western values. If one goes back in history, everywhere, one comes on what may be called the mythic matrix of all human cultures—a worldview in which the individual is embedded in a community that includes humans, animals, nature and the gods. I think that Eric Voegelin’s philosophy of history has given the best descriptions of what he called “leaps in being”—ruptures in this fabric of cosmic unity. Two ruptures have been seminal for Western civilization—those of ancient Israel and ancient Greece—the exodus of the people of Israel from the mythic world of the surrounding cultures of the Near East—and the different but equally powerful force of Greek reason in challenging the compact universe of myth. Of course these two ruptures did not immediately bring about what we now call Western individualism. It took centuries for this to happen. Perhaps the best metaphor of the original rupture is that moment in Greek sculpture when individual human figures stepped out of the archaic friezes and stood free, by themselves. “Easternization” in all its forms implies the suggestion that we should step back into the frieze. This would be a far-reaching reversal of the entire course of our civilization. We should think very carefully before we recommend such a step.
A “far-reaching reversal?” Berger invokes a standard piece of colonial discourse. There is the rational Hebraic-Greek West which has stepped out of the mythical world and then there is the mythic East that is still locked in the imaginative and dreamy land of myth where the individual is “embedded in a community that includes humans, animals, nature and the gods.” The Easternization of spirituality then becomes a backsliding by rational Westerners into the “frieze,” a euphemism for mythic life. Berger’s image of the mythic and spiritual East versus a demytholigized and individualized West draws on a series of Western contrasts built before and during colonialism to help the West make sense of itself and of its Others. Richard King outlines the properties of the West and East nicely in his Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and the Mystic East. The West: Public / Society / Science / Institutional Religion / Secular / Rational / Male and the East: Private / Individual / Religion / Personal Religion (Mysticism?) / Sacred / Irrational or Non-rational / Female. These essentialist distinctions were born in the Enlightenment and worked out in the colonies, especially in India. The “Easternization” of the West, or America, is a problem only insofar as the West imagines itself in these terms and in contrast to the East. The need for an Other against which America or the West could construct and imagine itself requires the East to remain mystical and irrational. To step out of the frieze we must keep the frieze in a museum somewhere.
Who is America’s God?
Posted: July 30, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American history, American Religion, Durkheim, God, Hauerwas, Religion, religious history 1 Comment »Stanely Hauerwas claims that America’s god is dying. The Duke theologian argues that the god of America is unique to American Protestantism:
That is why it has been possible for Americans to synthesize three seemingly antithetical traditions: evangelical Protestantism, republican political ideology and commonsense moral reasoning. For Americans, faith in God is indistinguishable from loyalty to their country.American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce an interesting atheist in America. The god most Americans say they believe in is just not interesting enough to deny. Thus the only kind of atheism that counts in America is to call into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
What jumped out to me, though, was the connection between Hauewas’ argument and this passage from Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life:[The totem] expresses and symbolizes two different kinds of things. From one point of view, it is the outward and visible form of what I have called the toemic principle or god; and from another, it is also the symbol of a particular society that is called the clan. It is the flag of the clan, the sign by which each clan is distinguished from the others, the visible mark of its distinctiveness, and a mark that is borne by everything that in any way belongs to the clan: men, animals, and things. Thus if the totem is the symbol of both the god and the society, is this not because the god and the society are one and the same?
What theories and theorists guide your work?
Posted: July 8, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: academia, American history, facebook, religious history, theory, us religion blog Leave a comment »The Religion in American History Blog has a discussion question on their Facebook page about theories that guide scholars work. Kelly Baker asked, “How do you all approach American Religious History? What methods, theories or theorists guide your work?”
I posted an answer there but I thought I’d copy it here as well. What about you? What are your guiding lights for your work, religious studies or otherwise?
Here are the three strands I try to pull together in my approach to American religious history:
1) Emile Durkheim: Those who know where I am and who I’m working with ought not be surprised here. The category of “the sacred,” for me, offers a chance to look at a whole host of things previously left unconsidered in American religious history. Burning Man, sports, and all the other usual examples are just the start. Recent work on Oprah points the way to more and more places we can reconsider “American Sacred History.”
2) Thomas A.Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling: I really like Tweed’s focus on positionality and his focus on the movement and motion of religions. I think it adds a dynamism to our study that has been lost in an under-theorized notion of culture and snapshot approach to religions.
3) Foucault, Said, and post-colonial theory generally:
In thinking about religions in American history I’m always wanting to find ways to rigorously account for power. In my current diss. research on representations of Hinduism in America I’m realizing more and more the ways “religion” as a category functioned in the deployment, maintenance and organization of power. I think religious historians are often wary of reducing religions down to “just power” without thinking about the ways religions function to channel power, resist power, and basically move it around and (dis?)organize it.
So, that’s my triparte answer. Wow, Kelly, really good question. I’ve never thought it through like this. Helpful.
Burning Man, Green Acre, and Ritual in U.S. Religious History (Cross-Post))
Posted: June 15, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American history, lived religion, Religion, Religion in American History, ritual, spirituality, us religion blog Leave a comment »This is a cross-post from the Religion in American History Blog.
This morning I came across an interview with Lee Gilmore at Religion Dispatches where she discusses her new bookTheater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (UC Press). The full interview deserves a read, especially the story of how she came upon the books title, but what jumped out to me were the following portions:
This decadent ritualism, which can be both sincere and satirical, casts the festival as a semi-religious cultural happening. Furthermore, many participants describe Burning Man as a “spiritual” experience, but deny that it constitutes a new religious movement as such. Organizers too explicitly hope that the event will “produce positive spiritual change in the world,” even while they also stop short of characterizing the event as “religious.” My work sought to explore the tension between “spirituality” and “religion” in the narratives of Burning Man participants in order to better understand how religio-cultural systems operate and adapt.
The popular term “spiritual but not religious” only goes so far in describing an event like this. I think Burning Man shows us the enduring importance of ritual as a vehicle through which humans connect with one another and as well as with a mysterious “more,” while also showing us how these expressions are increasingly displaced outside the bounds of the dominant Western cultural concepts of “religion.” Burning Man is on the vanguard of contemporary religious movements that resist easy classification by favoring eclecticism and hybridity. Yet in articulating a clear ethos that places a core emphasis on building and supporting community—both inside and outside the confines of the week-long event—Burning Man manages to be individualistic and idiosyncratic without being solipsistic.
I haven’t read Gilmore’s book, though I’m really excited about it after reading the interview, but it did remind me of something I had just finished re-reading. I’m in the midst of that wonderful summertime project known as “studying for comprehensive exams” and I just finished going back through Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Restless Souls: The Birth of American Spirituality. In that book, Schmidt has a great chapter on the Green Acre community founded by Sarah Farmer in Eliot, Maine. But when reading the chapter recently I was struck by what little material Schmidt gives on the ritual practice of the community There are a few mentions of morning walks on the dewy grass and meditation and a great narrative of the history of the community and its participants but I never got a picture of what life was like on daily basis within the commnunity. Perhaps that information just isn’t in the record and I don’t mean to take pot shots at an important book. Rather, I merely want to speculate that the same ritual life represented by Burning Man has antecedents in Green Acre. I bet Schmidt would grant that, as well.
But to push it further, as Lee makes the point above, certain rituals associated with the “spiritual not religious” challenge the notion of what counts as “religion” in American culture and, I would argue, push historians of religion to reconsider ritual as the central category for these post-non-Protestant forms of the sacred in America. The point that belief has been central to narratives of American religious history is worn out, but I think that as we begin to reconsider and write the history of religion in America during the latter half of the 20th century into the 21st we may have shift our consideration to ritual. Many people have done this and continue to do this. But the challenge is not to simply adopt existing definitions of ritual and write them into our histories, but rather to use the diversity of sacred phenomenon in American history to reconsider the category of ritual and its relationship w/ things like belief, myth, identity, etc.
Look out for more on this when I get my hands on Lee’s book.
Know Your [Digital] Archives
Posted: June 1, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American history, archives, digital humanities, Religion, Religion in American History, us religion blog Leave a comment »I have a new blog post up over at the Religion In American History Blog entitled “Know Your [Digital] Archives” that comments on the Making of America Collection at Cornell/U-Michigan and the 19th Century Schoolbooks Collection at U. of Pitt.
‘Juggernaut’ in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 1878
Posted: May 12, 2010 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American history, Conference Papers, Harper's Magazine, Hinduism, media, Religion Leave a comment »I gave the following paper at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion to the Religion and Popular Culture Group in November of 2008. This is the first in a series of old conference papers I’m putting on this blog in order to open the up to a larger audience. The full text of the article I discuss is available through the Making of America Collection by Cornell University here .
As many of you may know, this year’s AAR conference here in Chicago coincides with the 115th anniversary of the World’s Parliament of Religion held in this same city. And while there are probably papers being given this weekend championing the importance of the Parliament and what it meant for American religious history, I take a little different perspective. Contrary to the popular narrative that the Parliament served as America’s great introduction to Asian religions in America, my most current and ongoing research project has been to delve into sources prior to the World’s Parliament of Religion in order to build a history for Hinduism in America that precedes, and in some ways preconditions, the World Parliament of Religion.
Today, I would like to use one example from that research to explore two inter-related points regarding colonial knowledge, popular culture, and American religious history. First, as I have partly revealed, I challenge the “great event” history that locates the beginning of Hinduism in America with the World Parliament of Religion. Second, I explore how colonial knowledge seeps through leaks in the colonial project and finds its way into popular culture. I address these points through the example of an 1878 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article entitled, “Juggernaut.” So, I will begin with a brief background of Harper’s New Monthly . Next, I will move through a close reading of the article, and finally, I will conclude with some thoughts as to how this article addresses these points.
