Bücher der Reihe Religion in America

Examines the debate over the proper connection in society between religion and public life, that took place in the fifty years following the American Revolution. This book challenges the conventional wisdom, finding an essential continuity to the period's public Christianity.

This book offers a comprehensive examination of Methodist practice, tracing its evolution from the earliest days up to the present. Using liturgical texts as well as written accounts in popular and private sources, Karen Westerfield Tucker investigates the various rites and seasons of worship in Methodism and examines them in relation to American society.

No American denomination identified itself more closely with the nation's democratic ideals than did the Baptists. Yet paradoxically no denomination wielded religious authority more effectively than they did. Wills traces this dichotomy to two rival strains within the Baptist church - moderates who emphasized personal religious freedom and tolerance, and fundamentalists who preached discipline.

Nineteenth-century American writers frequently cast the Mormon as a stock villain in various genres of popular fiction. The Mormons were depicted as a violent and perverse people. Applying the methods of literary criticism, Givens shows how the image of the Mormon as a religious and social `Other' was constructed.

This is a study of Cuban-American popular Catholicism, focusing on the shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami, which is the sacred centre of the Cuban community in exile. Tweed uses historical and ethnographic methods to discover why the shrine attained so much importance and attracts so many visitors, and what it can tell us about larger issues of religion, identity, and place.

Longfield explores a bitter theological controversy that wracked the Presbyterian Church in the 1920s and 30s. By examining the lives and thought of six of the major protagonists he seeks to provide a fuller understanding of the religious and cultural issues in the struggle.

"A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren". So reads Noah's curse on his son Ham, and all his descendants, in Genesis 9:25. In this work, Stephen Haynes examines the history of the American interpretation of Noah's curse, turning to the ways in which the curse was appropriated by American pro-slavery and pro-segregation interpreters.

By identifying a historic fight within Anglo-American Protestantism, and how it related to major contemporary political developments in the early American republic, Sam Haselby explains the origins of the distinct language and means of combining political and religious authority that characterizes American nationalism.

In a wide-ranging collection of articles, a distinguished set of commentators on American religion examine the denomination's past and present roles, its definable nature, and its evolution over time.