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Author: Jon Butler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674056015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in Europe where state churches battled dissenters, magic, and astonishingly low church participation. He charts the transfer of these difficulties to America, including the failure of Puritan religious models, and describes the surprising advance of religious commitment there between 1700 and 1865. Through the assertion of authority and coercion, a remarkable sacralization of the prerevolutionary countryside, advancing religious pluralism, the folklorization of magic, and an eclectic, syncretistic emphasis on supernatural interventionism, including miracles, America emerged after 1800 as an extraordinary spiritual hothouse that far eclipsed the Puritan achievement--even as secularism triumphed in Europe. Awash in a Sea of Faith ranges from popular piety to magic, from anxious revolutionary war chaplains to the cool rationalism of James Madison, from divining rods and seer stones to Anglican and Unitarian elites, and from Virginia Anglican occultists and Presbyterians raised from the dead to Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, and Abraham Lincoln. Butler deftly comes to terms with conventional themes such as Puritanism, witchcraft, religion and revolution, revivalism, millenarianism, and Mormonism. His elucidation of Christianity's powerful role in shaping slavery and of a subsequent African spiritual "holocaust," with its ironic result in African Christianization, is an especially fresh and incisive account. Awash in a Sea of Faith reveals the proliferation of American religious expression--not its decline--and stresses the creative tensions between pulpit and pew across three hundred years of social maturation. Striking in its breadth and deeply rooted in primary sources, this seminal book recasts the landscape of American religious and cultural history.
Author: Jon Butler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674056015
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Get Book Here
Book Description
Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in Europe where state churches battled dissenters, magic, and astonishingly low church participation. He charts the transfer of these difficulties to America, including the failure of Puritan religious models, and describes the surprising advance of religious commitment there between 1700 and 1865. Through the assertion of authority and coercion, a remarkable sacralization of the prerevolutionary countryside, advancing religious pluralism, the folklorization of magic, and an eclectic, syncretistic emphasis on supernatural interventionism, including miracles, America emerged after 1800 as an extraordinary spiritual hothouse that far eclipsed the Puritan achievement--even as secularism triumphed in Europe. Awash in a Sea of Faith ranges from popular piety to magic, from anxious revolutionary war chaplains to the cool rationalism of James Madison, from divining rods and seer stones to Anglican and Unitarian elites, and from Virginia Anglican occultists and Presbyterians raised from the dead to Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, and Abraham Lincoln. Butler deftly comes to terms with conventional themes such as Puritanism, witchcraft, religion and revolution, revivalism, millenarianism, and Mormonism. His elucidation of Christianity's powerful role in shaping slavery and of a subsequent African spiritual "holocaust," with its ironic result in African Christianization, is an especially fresh and incisive account. Awash in a Sea of Faith reveals the proliferation of American religious expression--not its decline--and stresses the creative tensions between pulpit and pew across three hundred years of social maturation. Striking in its breadth and deeply rooted in primary sources, this seminal book recasts the landscape of American religious and cultural history.
Author: Carl J. Richard
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742534360
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
The Battle for the American Mind brings together religion, politics, economics, science, and literature to present a compelling history of the American people. In this brief and entertaining book, noted historian Carl J. Richard argues that there have been three worldviews that have dominated American thought--theism, humanism, and skepticism. Theists put their faith in God, humanists in man, and skeptics have faith in neither god nor man. Each worldview has had an epoch of domination, leading to the present "Age of Confusion" where theists, humanists, and skeptics battle one another for control of American hearts and minds. By clearly explaining what Americans believed, exploring why they did so, and showing how that impacted the nation's development, Carl J. Richard presents a unique portrait of the United States--past and present.
Author: Jon Butler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199913293
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 573
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Book Description
"Quite ambitious, tracing religion in the United States from European colonization up to the 21st century.... The writing is strong throughout."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "One can hardly do better than Religion in American Life.... A good read, especially for the uninitiated. The initiated might also read it for its felicity of narrative and the moments of illumination that fine scholars can inject even into stories we have all heard before. Read it."--Church History This new edition of Religion in American Life, written by three of the country's most eminent historians of religion, offers a superb overview that spans four centuries, illuminating the rich spiritual heritage central to nearly every event in our nation's history. Beginning with the state of religious affairs in both the Old and New Worlds on the eve of colonization and continuing through to the present, the book covers all the major American religious groups, from Protestants, Jews, and Catholics to Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, Buddhists, and New Age believers. Revised and updated, the book includes expanded treatment of religion during the Great Depression, of the religious influences on the civil rights movement, and of utopian groups in the 19th century, and it now covers the role of religion during the 2008 presidential election, observing how completely religion has entered American politics.
Author: Jon Butler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674006674
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America.
Author: Jason S. Lantzer
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814753310
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198
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Book Description
Since the Revolutionary War, Mainline Christianity has been comprised of the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism—the Congregational Church, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the American Baptist Convention, and the Disciples of Christ. These denominations have been the dominant cultural representatives since the nineteenth century of how and where the majority of American Christians worship. Today, however, the Seven Sisters no longer represent most American Christians. The Mainline has been shrinking while evangelical and fundamentalist churches, as well as non denominational congregations and mega churches, have been attracting more and more members. In this comprehensive and accessible book, Jason S. Lantzer chronicles the rise and fall of the Seven Sisters, documenting the ways in which they stopped shaping American culture and began to be shaped by it. After reviewing and critiquing the standard decline narrative of the Mainline he argues for a reconceptualization of the Mainline for the twenty-first century, a new grouping of Seven Sisters that seeks to recognize the vibrancy of American Christianity.
Author: Hartmut Lehmann
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271043104
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
This volume brings together essays by leading German and American historians on the subject of German emigration in the eighteenth century when Germans were moving to a variety of destinations: Russia, Prussian Lithuania, and various other German territories as well as North America.What drove men and women from different regional and social backgrounds to leave their homes during this time? Some migrations were forced, as for the Mennonites, the Salzburger emigrants, and the French Huguenots; some were voluntary and determined by the wish for one's own land and greater social and economic opportunity. In all groups, religion was a prominent motivator and primary element of social identification and cohesion. Inevitably, migrants carried with them traditional skills and other indispensable cultural "baggage." A key strength of this book is that contributors emphasize the mutual exchanges that occurred among cultures.
Author: C. Scott Dixon
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 140515084X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania, 1517-1740 presents a comprehensive thematic history of the rise and influence of the branches of Christianity that emerged out of the Protestant Reformation. Represents the only English language single-volume survey of the rise of early modern Protestantism from its Lutheran beginnings in Germany to its spread to America Offers a thematic approach to Protestantism by tracing its development within the social, political, and cultural context of early modern Europe Introduces innovative argument that the central dynamic of Protestantism was not its struggle with Catholicism but its own inner dynamic Breaks from traditional scholarship by arguing that the rise of Reformation Protestantism lasted at least two centuries Unites Old World and New World Protestant histories
Author: Daryl C. Cornett
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
ISBN: 0805444394
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
A point-counterpoint discussion about Christianity's proper social and political relation to the United States-whether the nation is distinctly Christian, distinctly secular, essentially Christian, or partly Christian.
Author: David Hein
Publisher: Church Publishing, Inc.
ISBN: 0898697832
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 377
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Book Description
The story of Episcopalians in America is the story of an influential denomination that has furnished a large share of the American political and cultural leadership. Beginning with the Episcopal Church's roots in sixteenth-century England, The Episcopalians offers a fresh account of its rise to prominence. Chronologically arranged, it traces the establishment of colonial Anglicanism in the New World through the birth of the Episcopal Church after the Revolution and its rise throughout the nineteenth century, ending with the complex array of forces that helped shape it in the 20th century and the consecration of Gene Robinson in 2003. The authors focus not only on the established leadership of the church but also to the experience of lay people, the form and function of sacred space, the evolution of church parties and theology, relations with other Christian communities, and the evolving ministries of women and minorities.
Author: Dee E. Andrews
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400823595
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
The Methodists and Revolutionary America is the first in-depth narrative of the origins of American Methodism, one of the most significant popular movements in American history. Placing Methodism's rise in the ideological context of the American Revolution and the complex social setting of the greater Middle Atlantic where it was first introduced, Dee Andrews argues that this new religion provided an alternative to the exclusionary politics of Revolutionary America. With its call to missionary preaching, its enthusiastic revivals, and its prolific religious societies, Methodism competed with republicanism for a place at the center of American culture. Based on rare archival sources and a wealth of Wesleyan literature, this book examines all aspects of the early movement. From Methodism's Wesleyan beginnings to the prominence of women in local societies, the construction of African Methodism, the diverse social profile of Methodist men, and contests over the movement's future, Andrews charts Methodism's metamorphosis from a British missionary organization to a fully Americanized church. Weaving together narrative and analysis, Andrews explains Methodism's extraordinary popular appeal in rich and compelling new detail.
