ASCH Spring Meeting Wrap-Up

By Heath Carter

While considerably smaller than the ASCH's joint meeting with the American Historical Association, this year's spring meeting in Grand Rapids nevertheless showcased a lot of exciting work, some from senior practitioners in the guild but much of it from up-and-coming scholars. The two panels that I attended on Saturday exemplified the trend.

The first was entitled "Religion, Class, and American Elites." Peter Williams, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and American Studies at Miami University (Ohio), kicked things off with a learned paper on Episcopalianism and the "gospel of art" in the Progressive Era. Then followed two presentations by recent graduates of the history department at Notre Dame. Thomas Rzeznik, now an assistant professor at Seton Hall, revisited the Scott Nearing case, arguing that the economist's infamous confrontation with the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania in 1915 was about far more than academic freedom. The trustees dispensed with Nearing, Rzeznik contended, because his radical ideas challenged the moral and religious framework that helped elite Americans - including U Penn's benefactors - justify their disproportionate wealth. Finally, Timothy Gloege looked at how Henry Parsons Crowell, head of Quaker Oats, became not only a major player within the Moody Bible Institute at the turn of the century but also a key agent in the production of the Fundamentals. Gloege is now revising a fascinating dissertation on fundamentalism's early years, in which he highlights connections to big business, casting the movement not as an anti-modern backlash but instead as the theological handmaiden of emergent consumer capitalism. Overall, the panel left me wondering - as has my own work on Chicago - whether standard histories of this period overstate the significance and reach of the social gospel. More on that in a future post.

The second panel was entitled "Race, Religion, and Civil Rights." David Komline, one of my current colleagues at Notre Dame, delivered a paper examining the work of a German Jesuit who traveled through the United States in the immediate postbellum years, encouraging Germans and African Americans alike to establish their own parishes. Komline went on to complicate white-black binaries by considering the role that concerns about ethnicity played in the emergence of segregated Catholic churches. Karen Johnson, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois (Chicago), then gave a very compelling talk on Arthur Falls and the roots of Catholic inter-racialism in Depression-era Chicago. I heard Johnson give a paper back in autumn, based on another chapter of what is shaping up to be a very impressive dissertation: her account underscores the power of the hierarchy with respect to racial questions but also highlights extensive and often countervailing activity on the ground throughout the long Civil Rights Movement.

All-in-all, then, a great meeting. The cherry on top: the 80 degree weather that made for a beautiful, windows-down ride back to Chicago on Sunday.

Whose Story is American Religious History?

By Heath Carter

I'm here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where I'm attending the American Society of Church History's spring meeting, organized around the theme of "Christianity and Migrations." There are any number of interesting panels and I hope to post another update before all is said and done, but for now a brief report on Rachel Wheeler's stimulating plenary address this morning entitled, "Whose Story is American Religious History? The Parallel Lives of Daniel Boone and Joshua, the Mohican." Wheeler is an associate professor of religious studies at IUPUI whose work has come up often on this blog [those interested in reading up on her first book, To Live Upon Hope, might check out fellow blogger Lin Fisher's conversation with her back in 2009].

Her talk today engaged big questions about how we should narrate the story of European-Indian encounter in the Americas, which has ramifications of course for how we tell the story of American religious history. She argued that the life of Joshua, an Indian convert to Moravianism, highlights the difficulties with both triumphalist and revisionist accounts of conflict on the frontier. The problems with triumphalism, a view summed up in Horatio Greenough's mid-nineteenth century sculpture, The Rescue, need not be elaborated here. There is a reason why the statue, an image of which Wheeler incorporated into her talk, was removed from the steps of the U.S. capitol building in the late-1950s.
But Wheeler persuasively showed that Joshua's story also complicates the revisionist narrative, which lacks the categories to see his conversion as anything other than collusion with the oppressor; and lacks, moreover, the flexibility to allow for Moravian missionaries who - unlike some of their Protestant counterparts in the late-18th century - were not virulently anti-Indian but were in fact open to some of the ways that Indian converts made Christianity their own.

In elaborating the fascinating comparison between Boone and Joshua, Wheeler followed themes of migration, war, and conversion. All of these will be central to her next book, a biography of Joshua which will put him belatedly on more religious historians' radar (I confess that before Wheeler's talk I had not heard of him). If her second book makes the same kind of splash as her first, it may be that we'll all soon be required to take what she called the "Joshua test" - do our accounts of American religious history shed light upon the experience of this Mohican-Moravian martyr, or will we continue to relegate those like him to the margins? For the profession's sake, let's root for passing grades for all.

My Notes from the 2011 AHA and ASCH meetings

By Michael J. Altman

I've seen more snow at home in Atlanta than I did up in Boston. Weird. I spent a whirlwind two days up in Boston for the meetings of the American Historical Association and its smaller, more religious cousin, the American Society of Church History. There was plenty of religious history goodness to be had, but alas, I was on a time crunch. I flew in early Friday, stayed the night and flew back late Saturday. Here are my random thoughts, observations, and notes from the various panels I attended and things I found to occupy my time drawn from scattered marginalia in my conference book.

Friday afternoon's panel on cosmopolitanism and the religious left at the turn of the 20th century was very good. John Pettegrew (Lehigh University) offered an interesting argument for Mark Twain as a religious liberal and for Twain's belief in empathy as a force that bound humanity together. For Twain, argued Pettegrew, empathy was war's opposite and it allowed for a universal humanity. Emily Mace's paper (Princeton) analyzed some intriguing ritual festivals in the life of New York's Ethical Culture School. These festivals organized around civic values of democracy and equality, as respondent Leigh Eric Schmidt pointed out, were anything but Durkheimian collective effervesance. Nonetheless, Mace's point that we must not neglect ritual in the study of liberal religions is well founded. Finally, my favorite paper--if only because it was closest to my own research--was that of Ann Marie Kittelstrom (Sonoma State University). Kittlestrom traced the history of the National Federation of Religious Liberals in the wake of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religion. In the NFRL and its successors, Kittlestrom sees the beginning of a real cosmopolitan pluralism that appreciated differences while still holding onto shared universals. Leigh Eric Schmidt (Harvard University) responded to all three papers in turn but for me his big take away was the importance of sympathy--in contrast to Pettegrew's empathy. Sympathy, according to Schmidt, was a rich moral/social sentiment for bridging differences and imaging a cosmopolitan sensibility in the 19th century among religious liberals. Sympathy could be found in the subjects of all three of the papers presented

Friday night the American Society of Church History held a reception for graduate students at the Congregational Library on Beacon Hill. It is a beautiful library and it was a nice chance to talk to colleagues also along the graduate school path. Kudos to the ASCH for doing this! What was even better was that the ASCH arranged for a small group of graduate students to have lunch or dinner with some great historians on Friday and Saturday--for free! So, after the reception at the library a few of us went to dinner with the great historian of Mormonism Jan Shipps. We had a wonderful dinner and Jan was truly delightful to spend time with. She can tell some amazing stories. On Saturday lunch was arranged with Charles Lippy and dinner with Keith Francis. Again, kudos to the ASCH for setting up these meals. I wasn't able to take part in any of them on Saturday but they were great opportunities and only available within a smaller society like the ASCH.

By the way, I do love the smaller and more intimate setting of the ASCH in the midst of the glitz and glamor of the AHA. It's really the best of both worlds. Sort of like Mayberry and Manhattan at the same time.

Saturday morning, I got up and headed to a roundtable chaired by our very own Randall Stephens on "Bracketing Faith and Historical Practice." The panel featured Randall Balmer, Margaret Bendroth from the Congregational Library, Jon Roberts, Grant Wacker, and Lauren Winner. I won't say much in case Randall wants to post something later. The main question the panelists addressed was whether or not (or even if) historians should bracket their religious beliefs when practicing their craft. Balmer and Winner seemed confused that this was even a question. For them, it was impossible not to bracket one's faith and so historians should be upfront about where they are coming from. Roberts disagreed and argued for "norms" that guide the practice of history and call for objective "historical natuarlism." Grant Wacker offered what I thought was the best argument. Wacker pointed out that there is no hard and fast rule and that various political and social situations will guide a historians decisions about what to disclose and what to use in their interpretation of historical events and agents. Randall Stephens did a good job as chair in relating the various comments and furthering the conversation but I kept getting the sneaking feeling that Roberts and Balmer/Winner were just talking past one another and really arguing about the value of reflexive methodology and not the role of belief in history writing. It was a good conversation, however, and one that will hopefully continue.

After the roundtable I rushed over to the Westin, where the ASCH panels were meeting. It was my turn. I was part of a panel on Methodist Media. The panel began with a paper from Erika K. R. Hirsch (Boston University) who analyzed the role of worship in early Methodism. Hirsch argued that the personal experiences afforded in hymn singing and corporate prayer provided authentication of genuine piety. She tied this desire for authenticity to an early modern emphasis on empirism and verification by the senses. My take away from Hirsch was that we need to pay more attention to the role of practice in British and American Methodism. Elizabeth Georgian (University of Delaware) also emphasized the role of practice in Methodism in her paper on Methodist print culture in the early nineteenth century. Georgian argued that practice, not theology, was the source of debates between Methodists and Presbyterians in their respective periodicals. David Scott (Boston University) brought in a transnational element with his paper on Methodist educational missions in Asia during the nineteenth century. Scott argued that Methodist missions focused on education overseas because they were so focused on education already on the home front. Educational missions were a key part of Methodist identity at home and abroad. Finally, I kept the missionary theme going with my own paper on the Methodist Christian Advocate. I argued that the Christian Advocate allowed Methodist readers to map out the distant land of India, make contact with Indian Hindus (especially women), and travel to the mission field alongside missionaries. The full paper is available here. Russell Richey dispensed with the usual "5th paper" style response, as he put it, and instead posed some refining questions to each paper. Overall, I thought the panel went well but it's always hard to tell when you're the one up there.

After my panel I ate lunch at California Pizza Kitchen and headed to airport. A few final thoughts on the overall conference. As Tenured Radical has noted, it was weird going to a conference in a mall. There was also a ridiculous number of Starbucks shops within the bounds of the conference. I also struggled to find WiFi all weekend, but that could have been my own ineptitude. In the end, it was a fun trip that involved little sleep and a lot of running around in glass walled skywalks.