2nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture

Paul Harvey

The following conference announcement comes to us from Phil Goff, Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture in Indianapolis. The first Biennial Conference was hosted in Indianapolis in the summer of 2009; click here for our contributor Linford Fisher's report from that conference, and click here for the full conference proceedings from 2009. Full schedule and registration/hotel information for this conference in the first weekend of June is below. I'm looking forward to it already.

Second Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture

Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

Indianapolis, Indiana

June 2-5, 2011



We are pleased to announce the Second Biennial Conference on Religion and

American Culture, to be held at the new J.W. Marriott in downtown

Indianapolis, June 2 through June 5. The theme for this meeting is "change,"

focusing both on changes in religion in North America over time and changes

in how we understand the topic. Scholars from multiple perspectives will

serve on multidisciplinary panels. The conference schedule is given below.



Like the conference in 2009, the room will be set up in a circle with

audience members on risers around the central round table. This set-up

promotes more participation from the audience and deeper conversation among

the panelists and those surrounding them. The hotel is again conveniently

located in downtown Indianapolis among restaurants, museums, and public

parks - all very conducive to continuing conversations begun in sessions.



Thanks to a grant from Lilly Endowment, we have reserved a block of rooms at

the J.W. Marriott at the special rate of $74.50 per night. Once those rooms

have sold out, rooms will be $149, so please be sure to reserve your room

right away. Early registration rates are available until May 5. To reserve

your room, register for the conference, or print a copy of the schedule,

please go to www.iupui.edu/~raac/<http://www.iupui.edu/~raac/>. (Note: the

special hotel rate of $74.50 will not appear on the screen but will be

billed correctly.)



CONFERENCE SCHEDULE



Thursday, June 2



Arrival and Registration

Opening Reception



Friday, June 3



PART A: CHANGING WHAT "RELIGION" MEANS

"What are our academic assumptions about religion?"

Panelists: Penny Edgell (Sociology, University of Minnesota)

Robert Orsi (Religious Studies, Northwestern University)

Ann Taves (Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara)



"Revisiting the secularity/secularization question"

Panelists: Tracy Fessenden (Religious Studies, Arizona State University)

Paul Froese (Sociology, Baylor University)

Rhys Williams (Sociology, Loyola University Chicago)



PART B: CHANGING RELIGION IN A CHANGING CULTURE



"Religion's role in political identity"

Panelists: Edward Curtis (Religious Studies, Indiana University -

Purdue University Indianapolis)

Paul Djupe (Political Science, Denison University)

Clyde Wilcox (Government, Georgetown University)



"Religion's role in immigration and globalization"

Panelists: Gerardo Marti (Sociology, Davidson College)

Timothy Matovina (Theology, University of Notre Dame)

Fenggang Yang (Sociology, Purdue University)



Saturday, June 4



"Religion's role in personal identity"

Panelists: Sylvester Johnson (Religious Studies, Indiana

University-Bloomington)

Sally Gallagher (Sociology, Oregon State University)

Laurie Maffly-Kipp (Religious Studies, University of North

Carolina)



"Market models for understanding religion"

Panelists: Roger Finke (Sociology, Pennsylvania State University)

James Hudnut-Beumler (Vanderbilt Divinity School)

Kathryn Lofton (American Studies and Religious Studies,

Yale University)



PART C: CHANGES IN THE FUTURE, REAL AND IMAGINED

"Changes in the understanding and uses of scripture"

Panelists: Charles Cohen (History and Religious Studies, University of

Wisconsin)

Kathleen Flake (Vanderbilt Divinity School)

Charles Hambrick-Stowe (First Congregational Church, Ridgefield,

CT)



"The future of religion in America"

Panelists: David Daniels (Church History, McCormick Theological Seminary)

Mark Silk (Religion, Trinity College)

Julie Byrne (Religion, Hofstra University)



Concluding reception

What Does This Map Tell Us?

Randall Stephens

The other day in my Religion and American Culture class we were covering mid-19th century America. I've found that asking questions about maps and looking at the demographics of the religious landscape can be a helpful in-class exercise. This map of Major Communal Experiments before 1860 comes from the old Mapcentral site, Bedford/St. Martin's. (Click to enlarge.)


(Students should not get the idea that every American sold his/her possessions, took up with the Shakers, and renounced sex. But still there certainly was quite a bit of communal/utopian action.) After we look at the above in class we ask: What accounts for the heavy presence in the North and the absence in the South? Why did utopian experiments thrive in this age? How did these influence society?

Some selected quotes might provide interesting context to the map and give the students something to ponder. (The two I cite here are not exactly representative, but could get the conversation rolling.) See, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who famously rhapsodized to his friend Thomas Carlyle in 1840:

We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved to live cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book.1 One man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another of domestic hired service; and another of the State; and on the whole we have a commendable share of reason and hope.

From the southern end, have a look at James Henley Thornwell, or George Fitzhugh, who wrote this in Cannibals All! or Slaves without Masters (1857):

Mormonism had its birth in Western New York, that land fertile of isms--where also arose Spiritual Rappings and Oneida Perfectionism--where Shakers, and Millenarians, and Millerites abound, and all heresies do most flourish . . . . Abolition swallows up little isms, and Socialism swallows up Abolition.

Bedford/St. Martin's Make History site provides some of the best map and visual resources for free.

Creolization and Kreolization

Emily Clark

Academic talk of Native American-European cultural hybridity and cultural conflict immediately take my mind to the Caribbean world and major port cities like New Orleans or Santo Domingo. When authors write about “creolization,” I think of cultural intersections between French, Spanish, Native American, and African traditions in the American South. I don’t immediately think of Alaska. However, a new book I recently reviewed for Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction has widened the geographic spread I associate with creolization, or rather kreolization.

In the 1980s and 1990s, theorizing of the Atlantic World by historians such as Bernard Bailyn and later David Armitage placed the colonial Americas within a more nuanced, engaging, and dynamic framework. The Pacific World and its impact on the colonial Americas has yet to be as thoroughly explored as the Atlantic, but works such as historian Gwenn A. Miller’s Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America demonstrate the importance of expanding the view of colonial American encounters. With the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska in 1784, the Russian empire continued its eastward movement setting up its own business-oriented, colonial enterprise in the “new world.”

Together, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church and the education imparted by the fur-trading Russian-American Company offered government and trade officials a method to “civilize” the Alutiiq population and thus extend Russia’s imperial border. Miller’s micro-history of interactions between indigenous Alaskans, Russian fur traders, and missionaries on Kodiak Island elucidates how “a distinct Kreol colonial society” developed that “was neither wholly Russian nor wholly Alutiiq.” In a world of mutual dependence, intimate encounters between Russian fur traders and Alutiiq women led to a new Kreol generation of colonial subjects to be defined, controlled, and integrated into the imperial Russian enterprise. In their attempts to convert, Christianize, and “civilize” the Alutiiq people, the Russian missionaries demonstrate how interactions between Native Americans and their colonizers were fraught with complications on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. The British praying towns, the French Canadian seaways, and the American southwest were not alone. Though the situation in Alaska was less physically violent, it wasn’t necessary less culturally complex.

For a long-time, the gaze of American historians was that of the covered-wagon pioneers - westward. Miller is certainly not the first or only scholar to change the frame of reference. In her contribution to Thomas Tweed’s 1997 Retelling US Religious History, Laurie Maffly-Kipp elucidates how a narrative based in the Pacific Rim further illuminates typical historical account. Daniel Richter’s often cited Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America encourages historians to think about their narratives from the shoes – or moccasins – of “the other.” Miller’s book offers a colonial narrative far from the cities of Boston, New York, or Charleston that is both similar and different from the stereotypical westward European expansion model. For those of us interested in syncretism, cultural mixing, hybridity, colonial intersections, creolization, or whatever you want to call it, Kodiak Kreol provides another vantage point from which to theorize.