This volume explores the myriad ways in which African American religions have encountered Jewish traditions, beliefs, and spaces. In contrast to previous works, which have typically focused on the social and political relationship between blacks and Jews, Black Zion places religion at the center of its discussion, thereby illuminating a critically important but little explored aspect of black-Jewish relations in America. The essays gathered here examine groups such as the Nation of Islam and the Hebrew Israelites, individuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Abraham Joshua...

This book explores a notable if unlikely undercurrent of interest in Mary as mythical Madonna that has persisted in American life and letters from fairly early in the nineteenth century into the later twentieth. This imaginative involvement with the Divine Woman -- verging at times on devotional homage -- is especially intriguing as manifested in the Protestant writers who are the focus of this study: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harold Frederic, Henry Adams, and T.S. Eliot. John Gatta argues that flirtation with the Marian cultus offered Protestant writers...

Religion is intrinsically social, and hence irretrievably organizational, although organization is often seen as the darker side of the religious experience--power, routinization, and bureaucracy. Religion and secular organizations have long received separate scholarly scrutiny, but until now their confluence has been little considered. This interdisciplinary collection of mostly unpublished papers is the first volume to remedy the deficit. The project grew out of a three-year inquiry into religious institutions undertaken by Yale University's Program on Non-Profit Organizations and sponsored...

This book offers a close-up look at theological education in the U.S. today. The authors' goal is to understand the way in which institutional culture affects the outcome of the educational process. To that end, they undertake ethnographic studies of two seminaries-one evangelical and one mainline Protestant. These studies, written in a lively journalistic style, make up the first part of the book and offer fascinating portraits of two very different intellectual, religious, and social worlds.

The authors go on to analyze these disparate environments, and suggest how in each case...

This comprehensive study represents the first effort by an historian to examine the relationship of the mainstream Protestant Churches to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The focus is on the National Council of Churches, the principal ecumenical organization of the national Protestant religious establishment. Drawing on hitherto little-used and unknown archival resources and extensive interviews with participants, Findlay reveals the widespread participation of the predominantly white churches in the efforts moving toward black freedom that continued throughout the sixties. He...

This book argues against the conventional idea that Protestantism effectively ceased to play an important role in American higher education around the end of the 19th century. Employing Princeton as an example, the study shows that Protestantism was not abandoned but rather modified to conform to the educational values and intellectual standards of the modern university. Drawing upon a wealth of neglected primary sources, Kemeny sheds new light on the role of religion in higher education by examining what was happening both inside and outside the classroom, and by illustrating that religious...

Since the 1980s, religion has been most visible in American public life when issues of sexuality and reproduction are at stake. Paradoxically, however, the voices that speak most loudly in the name of religion are often unschooled in religious history, world religions, theology, or ethics. As a result, religion in America is misrepresented as anxiously and obsessively concerned with sex, and as uniformly supporting the conservative agenda of "family values."
This volume corrects that distortion in American public discourse. Its thirteen previously unpublished articles introduce scholarly...

This book examines the debate over the connection between religion and public life in society during the fifty years following the American Revolution. Sassi challenges the conventional wisdom, finding an essential continuity to the period's public Christianity, whereas most previous studies have seen this period as one in which the nation's cultural paradigm shifted from republicanism to liberal individualism. Focusing on the Congregational clergy of New England, he demonstrates that throughout this period there were Americans concerned with their corporate destiny, retaining a commitment to...

A Controversial Spirit offers a new perspective on the origins and nature of southern evangelicalism. Most recent historians have focused on the differences between evangelicals and non-evangelicals. This has led to the perception that during the "Era of Awakenings" (mid-18th and early 19th century) American evangelicals constituted a united front. Philip N. Mulder dispels this illusion, by examining the internal dynamics of evangelicalism. He focuses on the relationships among the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists who introduced the new religious mood to the South between 1740...

The Ojibwe or Anishinaabe are a native American people of the northern Great Lakes region. 19th-century missionaries promoted the singing of evangelical hymns translated into the Ojibwe language as a tool for rooting out their "indianness," but the Ojibwe have ritualized the singing to make the hymns their own. In this book, McNally relates the history and current practice of Ojibwe hymn singing to explore the broader cultural processes that place ritual resources at the center of so many native struggles to negotiate the confines of colonialism.