Religion And The Culture Of Print In Modern America

Explores how a variety of print media—religious tracts, newsletters, cartoons, pamphlets, self-help books, mass-market paperbacks, and editions of the Bible from the King James Version to contemporary “Bible-zines”—have shaped and been shaped by experiences of faith since the Civil War

Mingling God and Mammon, piety and polemics, and prescriptions for this world and the next, modern Americans have created a culture of print that is vibrantly religious. From America’s beginnings, the printed word has played a central role in articulating, propagating, defending, critiquing, and sometimes attacking religious belief. In the last two centuries the United States has become both the leading producer and consumer of print and one of the most identifiably religious nations on earth. Print in every form has helped religious groups come to grips with modernity as they construct their identities. In turn, publishers have profited by swelling their lists with spiritual advice books and scriptures formatted so as to attract every conceivable niche market. Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America explores how a variety of print media—religious tracts, newsletters, cartoons, pamphlets, self-help books, mass-market paperbacks, and editions of the Bible from the King James Version to contemporary “Bible-zines”—have shaped and been shaped by experiences of faith since the Civil War. Edited by Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer, whose comprehensive historical essays provide a broad overview to the topic, this book is the first on the history of religious print culture in modern America and a well-timed entry into the increasingly prominent contemporary debate over the role of religion in American public life. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association

Discusses the Cold War, communism, Eisenhower, the civil rights movement, African-Americans and religion, Mormons, Vietnam, Catholics, feminism, cults, creationism and evolution, American Islam, home schooling, abortion, homosexuality and religion, and the Christian Right.

This volume reframes the narrative that has too often dominated the field of historical study of religion and politics: the culture wars. Influenced by culture war theories first introduced in the 1990s, much of the recent history of modern American religion and politics is written in a mode that takes for granted the enduring partisan divides that can blind us to the complex and dynamic intersections of faith and politics. The contributors to Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars argue that such narratives do not tell the whole story of religion and politics in the modern age. This collection of essays, authored by leading scholars in American religious and political history, challenges readers to look past familiar clashes over social issues to appreciate the ways in which faith has fueled twentieth-century U.S. politics beyond predictable partisan divides and across a spectrum of debates ranging from environment to labor, immigration to civil rights, domestic legislation to foreign policy. Offering fresh illustrations drawn from a range of innovative primary sources, theories, and methods, these essays emphasize that our rendering of religion and politics in the twentieth century must appreciate the intersectionality of identities, interests, and motivations that transpire and exist outside an unbending dualistic paradigm. Contributors: Darren Dochuk, Janine Giordano Drake, Joseph Kip Kosek, Josef Sorett, Patrick Q. Mason, Wendy L. Wall, Mark Brilliant, Andrew Preston, Matthew Avery Sutton, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Benjamin Francis-Fallon, Michelle Nickerson, Keith Makoto Woodhouse, Kate Bowler, and James T. Kloppenberg.

Facing Florida is the third volume of a series sponsored by the Academy of American Franciscan History and Flagler College exploring the Franciscan legacy in the Spanish Borderlands. This volume focuses specifically on early modern southeastern America. The volume's multidisciplinary approach, Dr. Kathleen Deagan notes in the introduction, provides us "with new multivalent scholarship that often challenges prevailing assumptions about motives, social relations and power structures in the mission systems." Despite the diversity of topics in the volume, several thematic threads run through the essays. One is a concern with locating belief, motive and intention in past actors. Eliciting thought and belief in the past is a notoriously murky undertaking, but one that is directly relevant to understanding the legacy of the Franciscan project in America. Another thread in the volume is a concern with language and meaning, particularly in the ways language has conditioned how we understand the past from written and iconographic sources. A third is "exemplars," with a meaning similar to that used by Franciscan friars in conversion. Many of the essays in the volume incorporate historical anecdote, but some of the contributors highlight the ways that foregrounding a particular individual or event can bring important but underrepresented issues into sharper focus. The result is an important new collection that explores innovative avenues in the study of southeastern American Indian culture and religion prior to the 1900s.

Religion and Sports in American Culture explores the relationship between religion and modern sports in America. Whether found in the religious purpose of ancient Olympic Games, in curses believed to plague the Chicago Cubs, or in the figure of Tim Tebow, religion and sports have been and are still tightly intertwined. While there is widespread suspicion that sports are slowly encroaching on the territory historically occupied by religion, Scholes and Sassower assert that sports are not replacing religion and that neither is sports a religion. Instead, the authors look at the relationship between sports and religion in America from a post-secular perspective that looks at both discourses as a part of the same cultural web. In this way each institution is able to maintain its own integrity, legitimacy, and unique expression of cultural values as they relate to each other. Utilizing important themes that intersect both religion and sports, Scholes and Sassower illuminate the complex and often publicly contentious relationship between the two. Appropriate for both classroom use and for the interested non-specialist, Religion and Sports in American Culture brings pilgrimage, sacrifice, relics, and redemption together in an unexpected cultural continuity.

Millions of Americans take the Bible at its word and turn to like-minded local ministers and TV preachers, periodicals and paperbacks for help in finding their place in God’s prophetic plan for mankind. And yet, influential as this phenomenon is in the worldview of so many, the belief in biblical prophecy remains a popular mystery, largely unstudied and little understood. When Time Shall Be No More offers for the first time an in-depth look at the subtle, pervasive ways in which prophecy belief shapes contemporary American thought and culture. Belief in prophecy dates back to antiquity, and there Paul Boyer begins, seeking out the origins of this particular brand of faith in early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings, then tracing its development over time. Against this broad historical overview, the effect of prophecy belief on the events and themes of recent decades emerges in clear and striking detail. Nuclear war, the Soviet Union, Israel and the Middle East, the destiny of the United States, the rise of a computerized global economic order—Boyer shows how impressive feats of exegesis have incorporated all of these in the popular imagination in terms of the Bible’s apocalyptic works. Reflecting finally on the tenacity of prophecy belief in our supposedly secular age, Boyer considers the direction such popular conviction might take—and the forms it might assume—in the post–Cold War era. The product of a four-year immersion in the literature and culture of prophecy belief, When Time Shall Be No More serves as a pathbreaking guide to this vast terra incognita of contemporary American popular thought—a thorough and thoroughly fascinating index to its sources, its implications, and its enduring appeal.

In this astounding account, a leading sociologist demonstrates that religion in America has become so tamed and softened that it hardly serves any of its original functions.

While Americans still profess to be one of the most religious people in the industrialized world, many aspects of American culture have long been secular and materialistic. That is just one of the many paradoxes, contradictions, and surprises in the relationship between Christianity and American culture. In this book George Marsden, a leading historian of American Christianity and award-winning author, tells the story of that relationship in a concise and thought-provoking way. Surveying the history of religion and American culture from the days of the earliest European settlers right up through the elections of 2016, Marsden offers the kind of historically and religiously informed scholarship that has made him one of the nation’s most respected and decorated historians. Students in the classroom and history readers of all ages will benefit from engaging with the story Marsden tells.

Winner of the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Best First Book Prize of the American Society of Church History Society for U. S. Intellectual History Notable Title in American Intellectual History The story of liberal religion in the twentieth century, Matthew S. Hedstrom contends, is a story of cultural ascendency. This may come as a surprise-most scholarship in American religious history, after all, equates the numerical decline of the Protestant mainline with the failure of religious liberalism. Yet a look beyond the pews, into the wider culture, reveals a more complex and fascinating story, one Hedstrom tells in The Rise of Liberal Religion. Hedstrom attends especially to the critically important yet little-studied arena of religious book culture-particularly the religious middlebrow of mid-century-as the site where religious liberalism was most effectively popularized. By looking at book weeks, book clubs, public libraries, new publishing enterprises, key authors and bestsellers, wartime reading programs, and fan mail, among other sources, Hedstrom is able to provide a rich, on-the-ground account of the men, women, and organizations that drove religious liberalism's cultural rise in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Critically, by the post-WWII period the religious middlebrow had expanded beyond its Protestant roots, using mystical and psychological spirituality as a platform for interreligious exchange. This compelling history of religion and book culture not only shows how reading and book buying were critical twentieth-century religious practices, but also provides a model for thinking about the relationship of religion to consumer culture more broadly. In this way, The Rise of Liberal Religion offers both innovative cultural history and new ways of seeing the imprint of liberal religion in our own times.