Religion 304: History of Christianity in America

Religion 304: History of Christianity in America
Spring 2002

Comparative Book Review

Assignment: Choose two books on a similar subject and write a 10-15 page comparative book review that evaluates the contribution of each book to the study of Christianity in America.

Choosing the books: Consult the Bibliography on the course web page http://faculty.samford.edu/~drbains/relg304 and the bibliography in Williams (pp. 514-569). Skim through these bibliographies and think of topics and titles that might interest you. Discuss your ideas with me.

Note your books must both me historical monographs (i.e., a researched book of history on one topic, usually by one author). Almost all the works in the bibliography are of this sort, but some are anthologies of essays or primary.

Stage 1: Before March 15, Skim the bibliography on line and the bibliography in Williams. Develop ideas. See instructor for suggestions.

Stage 2: Due: March 15, Submit the following:

Titles (with complete bibliographic information) of the two books you propose to review.
A short paragraph on each book summarizing its topic
Another paragraph explaining why you want to write on these two books. Why will they make an interesting comparison?

Your titles are subject to approval at this stage. If they are not approved you will need to select different books and resubmit

Stage 3: Due: April 19, Turn in a report outlining the following information

Titles (with complete bibliographic information) of the two books you propose to review.

What is the thesis of each book. How does the argument of each book complement, contradict, or correct the other?
Differences and similarities in sources and methods in the two books
Differences and similarities in the organization of the books. (E.g., Are they organized chronologically or topically? How does the organization serve the author's goal?)
What are the strengths and weaknesses of each book as work of historical research.

Final Product: Due May 3, A well-written ten-to-fifteen page essay that addresses the above issues and in doing so assesses the contribution of each book to the study of their common topic.

Note: At all stages of this process it will be helpful to read book reviews on books in your area, including those you are writing about. This is an excellent way to determine what books you want to review yourself. Consult ATLA Religion Database or Academic Index for book reviews. Reviews in the following publications should be especially worthwhile: Church History, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion and American Culture, William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly, New York Times Book Reviews, New York Review of Books, Books and Culture: A Christian Review.

Include a complete bibliography of all works your have found helpful with each assignment.

Puritans

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad.

Bozeman, Theodore Dwight. To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritianism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Davies, Horton. The Worship of the American Puritans, 1629-1730. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.

Holifield, E. Brooks. The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Bercovitch, Savcan. Puritan Origins of the Self

Hall, David. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement (esp. good with Hambrick-Stowe or Holifeld)

Hambrick-Stowe, Charles. The Practice of Piety

Morgan, Edmund. Visible Saints

Other Colonial Religious Movements

Issac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790.

Endy, Melvin. William Penn and Early Quakerism

Religion and the Enlightenment

Gaustad, Edwin S. Neither King nor Prelate: Religion and the New Nation: 1776-1826. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993.

Gaustad, Sword on the Altar of God.

May, Henry. The Enlightenment in America.

Wright, Conrad. The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America

Bozeman, Theodore Dwight. Protestants in an Age of Science

First Great Awakening

Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America: 1740-1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989.

Williams, William H. The Garden of American Methodism.

Crawford, Michael. Seasons of Grace

Native American Christianity

Martin, Joel W. Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees' Struggle for a New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

McNally, Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion

Bowden, Henry Warren. American Indians and Christian Missions

McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries

African American Christianity

Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage, 1976.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness.

Manis, Andrew M. "A Fire You Can't Put Out": The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverand Fred Shuttlesworth. Tusaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999.

Marsh, Charles. God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion.

Frey, Water from the Rock

Second Great Awakening and allied movements

Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America: 1740-1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Eslinger, Ellen. Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.

Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism, Library of Religious Biography. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996.

Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989.

Mathews, Donald G. Religion in the Old South.

Mullin, Robert Bruce. Episcopal Vision / American Reality: High Church Theology and Social Thought in Evangelical America. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986.

Nichols, James Hastings. Romanticism in American Theology: Nevin and Schaff at Mercersburg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989.

Wentz, Richard E. John Williamson Nevin: American Theologian. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Williams, William H. The Garden of American Methodism.

Woolverton, John F. The Education of Phillips Brooks. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995.

Cross, Whitney. The Burned-over District

Holifield, E. Brooks. The Gentlemen Theologians

Howe, Daniel Walker. The Unitarian Conscience

Marsden, George. The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience

Sklar, Kathryn. Catherine Beecher

Smith, H. Shelton. Changing Conceptions of Original Sin

Smith Timothy. Revivalism and Social Reform

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Disorderly Conduct

Walters, Ronald. American Reformers

New Christianities in America

Shipps, Jan. Momonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition.

Brooke, John L. The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844.

Givens, Terryl L. The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy

Religion in the Gilded Age (including the Social Gospel)

Carter, Paul A. The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1971.

Handy, Robert T. A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform.

Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981.

Marty. The Irony of It All, 1893-1919. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986.

Moorhead, James H. World without End: Mainstream American Protestant visions of the Last Things, 1880-1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Shriver, George H. Philip Schaff: Christian Scholar and Ecumenical Prophet: Centennial Biography for the American Society of Church History. Macon, Ga.: Mercer, 1987.

Turner, James. Without God, Without Creed.

May, Henry. Protestant Churches and Industrial America

Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Hobbs, June Hadden, 'I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent': The Feminization of American Hymnody, 1870-1920. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.

Fundamentalism and Liberalism

Ammerman, Nancy Tatom. Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religous Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

Brown, Charles C. Niebuhr and His Age: Reinhold Niebuhr's Prophetic Role in the Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1992.

Carpenter, Joel A. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997.

Cauthen, Kenneth. The Impact of American Religious Liberalism. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

Fox, Richard Wightman. Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987. Use latest edition available

Griffith, R. Marie. God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Handy, Robert T. A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions, 1987.

Hutchison, William R. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture.

Marty, Martin E. The Noise of Conflict, 1919-1941. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

McAvoy, Thomas T. The Americanist Heresy in Roman Catholicism.

Meyer, Donald B. The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919-1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.

Miller, Robert Moats. American Protestantism and Social Issues, 1919-1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958.

Miller, Robert Moats. Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Moorhead, James H. World without End: Mainstream American Protestant visions of the Last Things, 1880-1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Smith, Christian. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Turner, James. Without God, Without Creed.

Warren, Heather A. Theologians of a New World Order: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realists 1920-1948. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997.

The Holiness - Pentecostal Tradition

Anderson, Robert Mapes. Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Blumhofer, Edith L. Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Griffith, R. Marie. God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Sanders, Cheryl J. Saints In Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.

Religion in Modern America

Ellwood, Robert S. The Fifties Spiritual Market Place: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Ellwood, Robert S. The Sixties Spiritual Awakening: American Religion Moving from Modern to Postmodern. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

George, Carol V.R. God's Salesman: Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.

Herberg, Will. Protestant–Catholic–Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1960.

Hudnut-Buemler, James. Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945-1965. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1994.

Marty, Martin E. Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960. Vol. 3, Modern American Religion. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996.

Miller, Donald E. Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Neuhaus, Richard John. The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984.

Roof, Wade Clark. Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Roof, Wade Clark, and William Mc Kinney. American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Smith, Christian. American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Tabor, James D., and Eugene D. Gallagher. Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995.

Voskuil, Dennis. Mountains into Goldmines: Robert Schuller and the Gospel of Success. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983.

Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Fatih Since World War II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Wuthnow, Robert. After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Women and Gender in American Religion

Brekus, Catherine A. Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America: 1740-1845. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Coburn, Carol K., and Martha Smith. Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Griffith, R. Marie. God's Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Orsi, Robert Anthony. The Madonna of 115th St.

Orsi, Robert A. Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996.

Cott, Nancy. The Bonds of Womanhood

Hill, Patricia. The World Their Household

Putney, Clifford. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Hobbs, June Hadden, 'I Sing for I Cannot Be Silent': The Feminization of American Hymnody, 1870-1920. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997.

Religion and Higher Education

Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994.

Kemeny, P.C. Princeton in the Nation's Service. New York: Oxford Univ., 1998.

Sloan, Douglas. Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestnatism and American Higher Education. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994.

Bozeman, Theodore Dwight. Protestants in an Age of Science

Turner, Without God, Without Creed.

Howe, Daniel Walker. The Unitarian Conscience

Brereton, Virginia Lieson. Training God's Army: The American Bible School, 1880-1940.

Catholicism

Coburn, Carol K., and Martha Smith. Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836-1920. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Huff, Peter A. Allen Tate and the Catholic Revival: Trace of the Fugative Gods. New York: Paulist Press, 1996.

Kane, Paula M. Separatism and Subculture: Boston Catholicism, 1900-1920. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Marx, Paul B. Virgil Michel and the Liturgical Movement. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1957.

McAvoy, Thomas T. The Americanist Heresy in Roman Catholicism.

McGreevy, John T. Parish Boundaries.

Orsi, Robert Anthony. The Madonna of 115th St.

Pecklers, Keith F. The Unread Vision: The Liturgical Movement in the United States of America: 1926-1955. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1998.

Visual Culture & Worship

Dillenberger, John. The Visual Arts and Christianity in America: From the Colonial Period to the Present. New York: Crossroad, 1989.

Tucker, Karen B. Westerfield. American Methodist Worship. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Ivey, Paul Eli. Christian Science Architecture in the United States, 1894-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Marx, Paul B. Virgil Michel and the Liturgical Movement. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1957.

McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995.

Morgan, David. Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Morgan, David. A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Moriarty, Michael. The Liturgical Revolution: Prayer Book Revision and Associated Parishes: A Generation of Change in the Episcopal Church. New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1996.

Pecklers, Keith F. The Unread Vision: The Liturgical Movement in the United States of America: 1926-1955. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1998.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Mission

Hutchison, William R. Errand to the World American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions, 1987.

Hill, Patricia. The World Their Household

Wildcards

Flynt, Wayne. Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998.

Holifield, E. Brooks. A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salavation to Self-Realization. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983.

Hudson, Winthrop. The Great Tradition of the American Churches. New York: Harper and Row, 1953.

Lewis, James W. The Protestant Experience in Gary, Indiana, 1906-1975: At Home in the City. Knoxville: University of Tennesse Press, 1992.

Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Social Sources of Denominationalism.