Another Blog of Interest: History of Christianity from the ASCH

Michael J. Altman

While we are all aflutter over this weekends' American Academy of Religion, I would ask us to take a moment and turn our attention to another scholarly society--the American Society of Church History. Earlier this month the ASCH launched its very own blog that is open to contributions from any of its members (ahem, AAR are you listening?) So far there has been some quite interesting content covering Christian history in America. Yesterday's post from W. Clark Gilpin, "Wanted: A New Chronology of American Religious History," especially caught my attention.

Gilpin points out that one of the central tasks of the historian is to track change over time and this requires some sort of chronology. How one builds that chronology, though, will depend on what one sees as the engine driving change.

In no small measure, decisions about periodization depend on the issues that a given author or group of authors have identified as the principal engines of change. Historians who link American religious history to immigration are likely to produce a different chronology from historians focused on the intersection of religion and politics, or the history of religiously motivated movements of social reform. And yet, a moment’s reflection will also suggest that these three sets of concerns display interesting chronological convergences, for example, with changes in U.S. immigration law and movements for civil rights during the 1960s.

The entire post is worth a read, but this point was especially interesting to me. As we think about the narratives we tell about religion in America, what are the engines driving our chronologies? What do they allow us to see? Where do they give us blindspots? For my current work I'd have to say "religious difference" drives the narrative. Gilpin names immigration, politics, and reform. Lately on the blog we've been talking a lot about the market. Are there other engines we've yet to put to use? Where could they take us?

ASA Religion Redux: Part 2

Here's the second part of our conversation: "What does American Studies reveal to us about religion in America?" Today, Mike and I pick up with discussions of the secular, American studies and religion, and why you all should be going to ASA in the future. Enjoy!

Kelly Baker (KB): Another point that I would like your opinion, Mike, is the emphasis on the secular and its relationship to religion. What do you make of these encounters with this loaded term?

Mike Altman (MA): I found an interesting discussion of secularism in Matt Hedstrom's (University of Virginia) paper analyzing the constitutional reform movement following the Civil War and its work to put God into the Constitution. Hedstrom pointed out that religious liberals stood on the front lines of the fight to keep the Constitution secular and further argued that the dispute over the secularism of the Constitution was actually a theological battle between conservatives and liberals and not a debate between the religious and irreligious. On that same panel Joseph Haker (University of Minnesota) presented a paper on postwar Ten Commandments monuments. Haker argued that these monuments were not religious like their contemporary Christian Right cousins, but instead were symbols for the American Way of Life, in a Protestant-Catholic-Jew sense. He claimed they were secular symbols. Here again we see the limits of contemporary discourse about secularism and its religious/irreligious dyad. In one case religious liberals and conservatives debated the necessity of a secular Constitution to the maintenance of religious freedom and in the other a religious symbol is deployed in the name of nationalism and a secular way of life.

Haker’s presentation included some great photographs of the monuments and the rabbis, pastors, and priests involved in installing them. These photographs pointed out what linked together these 19th and mid 20th century debates about secularism with today--whiteness. Here’s where I asked your “whiteness question” and what came to the fore for me was the ways the debates about seularism are largely white debates due in large part to the long Enlightenment, Protestant, and post-Protestant history of the argument. Talal Asad has pointed this out already but these two papers gave me new images and examples for thinking about it.

Related to this is a paper from another panel on religion and space in America from Nicolas Howe (Williams College). Howe told the story of Native American opposition to developments on the San Francisco Peaks because the peaks were considered sacred to various Native American nations. Specifically, native groups opposed the use of reclaimed sewage water to make snow for a ski area on one of the peaks. They argued that this would desecrate their sacred space. In a smart move, Howe argued that their arguments about desecration of sacred space mirrored secularist arguments about the ways various religious performances or materials “desecrate” secular public spaces. Howe further argues that the law has generally had problems dealing with both of these arguments because of their similar use of ideas of desecration or contamination.

So to answer you question, coming out of the weekend I’ve seen that the usual framing of secularity as secular vs. religious misses the multiple ways that these two discourses overlap, intertwine, and ape one another. They are not just two sides of the same coin. They are, in fact, the whole coin. (KB: yes, yes, they are!)

So, one final question for you: what difference does it make to approach religion in America from American studies instead of from religious studies or history?

KB: This is a good question too. For better (or possibly worse), I attend ASA and AAR as my major conferences each year. At ASA, sometimes I feel like I have to cajole folks into paying attention to religion as a major component of American life. This seems like a silly thing to say, but religion often only pops up at predictable moments in ASA panels on topics like Civil Rights and suspiciously absent at other times. There was a panel a couple years ago at ASA, in which an audience member worried about using religion as a category of study because this might make religion “real.” As a fellow audience member, I wanted to respond that this was the wrong approach rather we should be paying attention to the reality of religion in the lives of Americans rather than getting trapped in this unending debate about autheniticity or reality. It struck me that American studies folks should be talking to religious studies folks more, and vice versa.

The theoretical and multi-disciplinary approach of American studies makes it an excellent pairing with the study of religion in American life, as you can probably tell from all the panels we’ve mentioned. Where else could you find panels like the ones we’ve discussed? The panels that I attended not only presented ethnographic case studies or historical studies but sought to make historiographical interventions and to renarrate religion in public life, past and present. These were bold, smart panels that really interrogated how we understand religion as embodied, artifactual, textual, ideological, and historical. Objects spoke in panels from Ben Brazil’s (Emory) “hippie vans” to Heather Curtis’s (Tufts) visual culture of pain. Fundamentalists were fictional for both myself and Tara McCellan (Mississipppi State) and historical, successful businessmen for our own Darren Grem (Emory).

And there’s an embrace of cultural analysis at ASA that leads to big questions about place of not only religion, but race, gender, sexuality, imperialism, and class (to name only a few) in modern life. What I like about ASA is the embrace of big questions as well as a theoretical eclecticism that I find useful and refreshing. Additionally, it is a nice space for anyone who works as an Americanist because it puts you in contact with other Americanists in fields beyond history and religious studies.

None of this should surprise you since my book is in an American studies series. American studies, and the ASA in particular, offered me the ability to negotiate some thorny issues with religious studies and history about method and a scholar’s positionality in a truly mutli-disciplinary way as I was beginning my work on the Klan (and as I finished it). Additionally, I find American studies very helpful as I begin new projects of cultural and religious history that involve unconventional source material (zombies, anyone?) because of the embrace of pop culture as evidence and plurality of methods.

Now, I wonder what your read on this is: how do you think American studies can benefit those of us working on religion in America?

MA: This was my first time at the ASA meeting whereas I have been to the AAR a handful of times in my graduate career and I have to say that I left the ASA much more motivated to get back to work than I have the AAR. That is not to say I don’t love the AAR, because I do, and but I think the difference comes down to the central categories of each organization and how they regard these categories.. The central category of the AAR is, unsurprisingly, religion, and so the folks at that conference appreciate religion in a very unique way. There are also those at the AAR who seem a bit protective of “religion” either in terms of disciplinary turf or its status as a sui generis category (whatever that may mean). The ASA’s central category is “American” and it seems that it is a bit tougher on the “American” than AAR is on the “religious.” What counts as American is constantly being pushed, stretched, questioned, and even beaten up on a bit. In a senese, “America” gets a lot less deference from research at the ASA than “religion” gets at the AAR. The reasons for this can obviously be found in divergent disciplinary histories.

I say all of that to point out that the ASA was refreshingly irreverent to religion--in a good way. Yes, there were two people in the audience who asked silly “why are American evangelicals so crazy?” questions and yes there are people who have read little in religious studies beyond Marx or Freud, but I’ll take that handful of people in exchange for some of the soft-pedaling that goes on within the AAR (KB: I second that too!). There are some great people at the AAR who are probing race, class, gender, bodies, sexuality, empire, power and all of those other wonderful categories with refreshing irreverence and the kid gloves firmly removed but there were more of them at the ASA--or at least a greater percentage of them among the religion panels this past weekend.

I left the ASA really motivated to get home and get back to work on my own project. The research on religion in America presented at the conference was innovative and inspiring. It made me say “I can do something like that!” I haven’t felt that way after an AAR for whatever reason. I love the AAR because it is a place where religion matters and that is extremely important. But sometimes it’s nice to be somewhere where religion isn’t quite so special.

KB: Ditto everything you said here. I finished my panel on Sunday and thought now I can go turn this into an article, and like you, the conversations I had and the panels I attended were re-energizing because there aren’t “turf wars” you describe over what counts as religion or not. It is nice to sometimes avoid those discussions all together. Perhaps, religion studies folk at ASA find the atmosphere more conducive to this kind of interrogation and pushing boundaries than we might at AAR because the stakes do seem higher. The joy you describe is a feeling I come home with ever year after ASA, and I am glad you found a good space at this conference. Now, if only we can convince Paul Harvey to attend.

ASA Religion Redux: Part 1

Today's post is a conversation between Mike Altman and me (Kelly) about the place of religion at the American Studies Association meeting last week in Baltimore, Maryland. We reflect on the types of panels at ASA on religion as well as the lingering questions from these panels including issues like embodiment, race, science, and the secular. I'll post part two tomorrow.

What does American Studies reveal to us about religion in America?

Kelly Baker (KB): As a long time ASA attendee, I am still struck by the sheer interdisciplinarity of panels: literature, material culture, religious studies, history, media studies, critical race and gender theory, sociology, legal studies, and psychology. This means that discussions of religion in America occurs across a variety of disciplines, so that a term like “fundamentalism” gets analyzed and deployed differently depending on whether a scholar studying literature, history or someone like me trained in religious studies uses it. This variety leads to discussions that I might not be having at AAR.

I attended panels ranging from the production of conservative religious documentaries to discussions of religion and American nationalism to religious visual and material cultures to religion and consumer products to re-evaluation historiographies of race and religion to negotiations and case studies of terms like global religion. What was most striking was the attention to science, embodiment, race, and the “secular,” which emerged again and again in each panel. Sandra Garner (Miami University, Ohio), Rita Trimble (Ohio State University), and John-Charles Duffy (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) showcased how participation in scientific and social scientific discourse allowed conservative Mormon documentarians to present data about population stagnation, previous “lost” peoples in the Americas, and uplifting of traditional families. Participating in secularizing language became a way to legitimate one’s religious position, a mode of verification. Science authenticated religion, which is not often how this relationship is described.

Mike Altman (MA): So, I’ll pick up on a couple of the themes you mentioned because they jumped out to me too. First, the body. All weekend we were drawn back to bodies and while the question "where's the body in your project?" can seem like a theoretical gotcha (or a form of academic snarkenfreuden), nonetheless, bodies were central to much of the research presented on American religions. Our own Emily Clark (Florida State) offered an excellent paper on Moorish Science Temple teas and tonics meant to purify the body, a purity that paralleled the need for racial and religious purity. Jordan Wade (University of Kansas), who appeared on a panel with me focused around “global religions” in America and took us into the world of Bikram Yoga with her ethnography of a yoga center in Lawrence, Kansas. In Wade's telling, yoga emerges as a form of bodily discipline, rather than spa relaxation technique, tied up in a transnational network that spans Europe, India, and America.

All of the focus on the body in some papers prompted me to wonder where the body was in other papers. When we discuss Moorish Science or yoga it seems that we notice the body but in Friday's panel "Getting the Nation Right with God: American Politics in the Conservative Christian Imagination" I realized that we don't tend to think about Christian Right bodies--at least not in the contemporary discourse scholars and journalists are producing. We especially don't tend to think of politician’s bodies--well, unless you pick cover photos at Newsweek. The presentations on this panel from Sarah Posner, Eoin Cannon, and Karen Seat were all very well done but, for me, they highlighted an overarching problem with the way the Christian Right is imagined both in the media and by scholars. It's always about ideas. The GOP candidates are constantly trying to disembody themselves and represent themselves as pure ideology. How can we force them back into bodies? How can we take Christian Right ideas about the body and think through Christian Right bodies? Marie Griffith has offered us some glimpses of Protestant bodies but we need more on contemporary political religions.

KB: Mike, yes! I couldn’t agree more. Ideas become the fundamental evidence of religiosity for some groups, and bodies become the evidence in others. This division of ideas and bodies proves superficial and unhelpful (at least I think so) to our scholarship. Critical analysis of both race and gender necessarily lends itself to discussions of embodiment, so discussions of race and religion like Ed’s panel at 8 am on Thursday interrogate and engage embodiness, the bodily, and practice as well as the ideological and theological ramifications. Much like Emily and Jordan engaged both in their presentations to make clearly how the bodily impacts the more ephemeral renderings of spirit and purity.What becomes telling is where embodiness appears as a legitimate method of describing, documenting, or analyzing religious peoples, movements, and ideas and where embodiment is somehow not considered.

What I liked about Jason Bivins’ (North Carolina Sate) response to the Getting Right with God panel was his attempt to bring up embodiment as a legitimate method to interrogate the Christian Right and other politicitizations of religion. Why don’t we problematize, or heck, even engage, the bodies attached to these ideologies? I think it deeply matters that white male bodies are ignored in favor of their ideas and their rhetoric. They become soley progenitors of words, somehow absent from the fleshy reality that plagues the rest of us (even though there is attention, not analysis, of physical appearances). Embodiment matters, and I want to know why there is still hesitance to press bodily analysis on certain, dominant religious groups. Griffith does lead the way on this, and I think Martha Finch’s work, gets us closer to this kind of analysis. Why aren’t we analyzing white Christian bodies? Is it an assumption of invisibility and dominance? Or is there something more subtle and possibly insidious going on here?

I asked a variation of this question at quite a few panels to get at the question of the invisibility of whiteness as a racial classification. Didn’t you even call it my “whiteness question?” Judith Weisenfeld (Princeton University) pointed out the need for more analysis of assumptions of whiteness in her response to the conservative documentaries panel. By the end of the weekend, I felt a bit like a broken record. We need to think more about race as more than marked by difference but also unmarked categories too.

Continued here.

Hannah Adams' Intellectual Grandchildren; Or, Maybe It Was All Liberal Protestantism, After All?

By Michael J. Altman

Robert: I feel that an earlier generation of scholars of religion was willing to consider these questions. The answers may not always have been satisfying–but I think of William James here, or even the early theorists of crowd behavior. There were scholars interested in talking about how we think about these sorts of human events, but I don’t see it anymore.

Richard: James is the perfect example of it–

Robert: But in the end he’s too individualistic for me!

Richard: Very Protestant, maybe?

Robert: Yes. [Laughs]

Maybe it's just me, but it feels like it's a strange time in the field of religious studies. I've been hiding in my dissertation cave for the past few months so maybe that's part of it. Yet, every time I poke my head out I keep noticing things. Little things. Reports of unease in the rooms of that conference in Indianapolis here, a dialogue about "presence" and "abundant events" that seems to run out of vocabulary before it can get off the ground there. To me, these moments signal the slow death of liberal Protestant religious studies and the grasping about for whatever will come next.

Paul already mentioned James Turner's Religion Enters the Academy but I want to come at the book from a different angle.  Paul is right, William James is the hero of the book in the final chapter. But the first two chapters narrate the rise of the comparative and academic study of religion in America among liberal (mostly Unitarian) Protestants. In the first chapter, Turner brings Hannah Adams and Joseph Priestly to the fore as the early comparativists before 1820. Chapter two follows the growth of Unitarian and Transcendentalist interest in world religion from 1820 to 1875. This includes Thomas Wentworth Higginson's The Sympathy of Religions (1871), Lydia Marie Child's Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages (1855), and James Freeman Clarke's  Ten Great Religions (1871). Meanwhile, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton offered comparative religion as part of their ministerial training in the latter quarter of the century. The University of Chicago opened its doors in 1892 and quickly added a department of comparative religion. Then, a year later and in the same town, the World Parliament of Religions attempted to unite "all religion against all irreligion" with the help of many liberal Protestants. The long and the short of it--the history of religious studies is the history of liberal Protestantism.

It's not that early scholars of comparative religion happened to be liberal Protestants. Rather, Turner shows that comparative religion, and later religious studies, was a particularly liberal Protestant project. As he puts it, "Comparative religion during its first academic decades in the United States was thus a historically minded, text-based study, oriented toward articulated religious or ethical propositions. And the discipline's driving motive, stated or unstated, was t understand how non-European religions stacked up against Christianity" (65-66). It was a project by Protestants, for Protestants, using Protestant categories.

Enter our hero, William James. James shifted the categories in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Gone were texts. Gone were institutions. Gone were beliefs, creeds, and doctrines. James went after experience. James also threw out the hierarchy of "world religions" and placed religious experience on a level playing field, drawing on contemporary accounts of religious experience. James got rid of the Protestant categories, and took little interest in comparing Christianity to other religions. Turner ends the book noting that, in the end, William James won. Maybe. James is still taught in "Theory of Religion" courses. I even read Varieties in a graduate seminar a few years back. We don't read James Freeman Clark anymore.

But Robert Orsi's laugh takes all the wind out of Jamesian sails. Even William James is too Protestant--too individual. Religion for James was "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine." I imagine Cotton Mather in his private solitude meditating on the grace of God not a procession in Italian Harlem.

As I read work on Asian religions, mostly Hinduism, the argument against the term religion--and by extension religious studies--seems rather easy. It's a Western term that doesn't fit well with the realities of Indian culture. Fine. We can have the debate if you want. But what if it isn't an East / West problem? What if the unease of religious historians not knowing their Bible or not wanting to admit to it, the back and forth of Bushman and Orsi trying to find a way to account for "abundant events," and the liberal Protestant history of religious studies are all linked? What if religious studies doesn't fit well with the realities of American culture? Maybe the unease in Indy and the search for adequate language to describe religious experience are really the unease of our liberal Protestant history and the search for a way out of it.

The field has been trying to shed its history for a long time now. As a religious studies major in college I took the "Theory of Religion" course. We read Durkheim, Freud,Weber and other European thinkers important to the field. Other than James we didn't read any Americans until we go to the late twentieth century--Eliade, J.Z. Smith, Russell McCutcheon. We ignored the American history of the field and its liberal Protestant baggage--poor James Freeman Clark.

William James won. But is that enough?

Heaven is a place...

Michael J. Altman

So, with rapture week and its pet preparations behind us, what's next? It seems to me that we were all so worked up about the end that we forgot about what comes after the end: Heaven. In his new book Heaven in the American Imagination Gary Scott Smith outlines (mostly Protestant) American ideas about heaven from the Puritans to Michael Jackson's memorial. In the process, Smith effectively gives a narrative account of American Christian history by following heaven. By tracing the changing images of heaven in American minds, Smith narrates changes in American Christianity and culture.

Two questions about heaven recur again and again as Smith moves through American history and become the themes that tie the book together.

How do we get in?
Americans have had two major responses to this question. First, some have said that good people or people who do good things will make it to the place where "the streets have no name."  For others, only acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior will grant one entry through the pearly gates. While it is easy to cast liberal Christians or non-Christians on the good works side and evangelicals or conservatives on the other, Smith's account offers a bit more nuanced view. He notes that the Cotton and Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, and Charles Finney all lamented the number of Christians who thought they could rely on their good works for heavenly admittance in the life to come. The split, then, was not between liberals and conservatives or Arminians and Calvinists, but rather, it was between the pulpit and the pew. American preachers from Edwards to Billy Graham kept preaching salvation by faith in Jesus was the only airline to heaven because Americans consistently believed they could reach heaven by being good.

Scott also presents other beliefs about qualifications for celestial citizenship that didn't require Jesus. For example, many slaves believed that their suffering in this world was enough for admittance to heaven in the next. Also, during the Civil War both sides proclaimed that death in battle would send one to heaven. In the 20th century, according to Smith, the "be good" theory of heaven triumphed in American popular culture and, at the same time, the idea of hell lost most of its influence. Perhaps that's why everyone was so excited and self-assured in the past week--we all thought we were good enough to get into heaven and no one really considered the other option.

What's it like up there?
Through the first three chapters of Smith's chronological narrative heaven remains fairly stable. With some variations of emphasis, clergy and theologians from the Puritans through the early national period all thought of heaven theocentrically. That is, heaven centered around the Triune God. The saints would worship the father, enjoy communion with Jesus, and experience the joy of the Holy Spirit. Jonathan Edwards emphasized God's heavenly love while Charles Finney focused on heavenly rewards, but until the Victorian era American clergy agreed that heaven was about humans being with God.

American Christians had always looked forward to meeting biblical heroes like Abraham and the Apostle Paul in heaven, but they soon began to look forward to meeting each other. As the American home became more important through the emergence of the cult of domesticity and the cult of True Womanhood, heaven became less about eternity spent with God and more about eternity spent with loved ones. Heaven became the perfect peaceful and loving Victorian home where all the family would be together again and the home became a place where one could experience heavenly love in this world. As American's lost sons, brothers, and husbands in the Civil War this notion of heaven gained in power.

As Americans became busier their ideas of heaven shifted again. A place of eternal dwelling with the presence of God seemed boring. It seemed like a place where nothing ever happens. Smith narrates how the rise of industrialization, the reforming furry of the Progressive age, and the fast pace of the 20th century prompted Americans to imagine heaven as place of activity.  For Christians in the Gilded Age heaven was a place of joyful work. For Progressives it was a place of service and ministry. By the twentieth century various groups imagined heaven as a place of worship, work, growth, or play. And by the twenty first century it was "the ultimate playground" of celestial bliss. Americans continually remade heaven in the image of the desires of their earthly lives.

Smith does an admirable job of covering a lot of ground in the book--as the breadth of material shows. However, his narrative of American understandings of heaven is embedded within a larger narrative of American religious history that is a bit too Puritan. We start with the Mathers and proceed through the usual cast of white male clergy (Edwards, Whitefield, Finney...). Indeed, mainstream Protestant clergy and theologians are the central subjects of the book. There's little mention of laity or of outsider groups like the Shakers or even the Ghost Dance (which would add much to the discussion of heaven as a place of family reunion.) Furthermore, there is an underlying back-and-forth between "liberals" and "conservatives" in the narrative where the liberals are most often "assaulting" orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the book provides a remarkable example of how one can tell a history of religion in America by picking one theme and tracing it out over the centuries. The shifts from theocentric, to domestic, to workaholic heavens reveals larger shifts in American culture and values. Also, the moments where Smith is able to bring in views of heaven that depart from the mainstream, such as the New Age or his analysis of Michael Jackson's memorial service, are fascinating and provocative. It is an accessible book that would be worth experimenting with in the classroom, perhaps as a parallel reading (or even a replacement) for the usual survey text in the "Religion in America" survey course.

Going Straight to Hell on a Crazy Train

By Michael J. Altman

Combining Paul's post of a Sarah Palin version of a classic song and Kelly's post about zombies, I bring you the best parody of Ozzy Osbourne ever. This comes courtesy of Westboro Baptist Church, the church that loves Jesus but probably hates you:




That's right, WBC is protesting Ozzy Osborne--a few decades late, if you ask me--making it official: "God hates Ozzy Osborne!"

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.

The Tea Party and Catholic Schools

Michael J. Atman

In case you missed them, here are two posts that our readers might find interesting.

The first comes from Thomas Kidd over at Patheos. He offers a brief review of Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. He writes:

To be fair, there's a lot of interesting history interspersed with these gratuitous fulminations. But Lepore's rant against the Tea Party is at once predictable and ironic. Predictable because Lepore fulfills the stereotypical reaction that one would expect from a liberal (I do not say "far left") Harvard professor, who cannot fathom what could motivate these Tea Partiers other than racism and religious fanaticism. The Whites of Their Eyes is ironic because it perpetuates exactly the sort of angry political feuding that Lepore ostensibly deplores. Because of the book's tone, there's no chance that anyone affiliated with the Tea Party will read this book and be chastened by it. About the only thing this kind of book is guaranteed to do is to make left-wing readers feel good about themselves.

The second comes from Religion Dispatches, where Marian Ronan discusses Timothy Dolan, John Hughes, and Catholic schools in New York.