Covering the period from roughly the Civil War to World War I, a collection of scholars explores how minority faiths in the United States met the challenges posed to them by the American Protestant mainstream. Contributors focus on Judaism, Catholicism, Mormonism, Protestant immigrant faiths, African American churches, and Native American religions.

Theatrical Liberalism offers a comprehensive history of the role of Judaism in the creation of American entertainment, reexamining the distinction between the secular and the religious, providing a new way of understanding both modern Jewish culture and liberalism, as well as their crucial contributions to a pluralist society.

This edited collection gathers together the principal findings of the three-year RELIGARE project, which dealt with the question of religious and philosophical diversity in European law. Specifically, it covers four spheres of public policy and legislation where the pressure to accommodate religious diversity has been most strongly felt in Europe: employment, family life, use of public space and state support mechanisms. Embracing a forward-looking approach, the final RELIGARE report provides recommendations to governance units at the local, national and European levels regarding issues of religious pluralism and secularism. This volume adds context and critique to those recommendations and more generally opens an intellectual discussion on the topic of religion in the European Union. The book consists of two main parts: the first includes the principal findings of the RELIGARE research project, while the second is a compilation of 28 short contributions from influential scholars, legal practitioners, policy makers and activists who respond to the report and offer their views on the sensitive issue of religious diversity and the law in Europe.

This collection of essays from a special issue of American Quarterly explores the complex and sometimes contradictory ways that religion matters in contemporary public life. Religion and Politics in the Contemporary United States offers a groundbreaking, cross-disciplinary conversation between scholars in American studies and religious studies. The contributors explore numerous modes through which religious faith has mobilized political action. They utilize a variety of definitions of politics, ranging from lobbying by religious leaders to the political impact of popular culture. Their work includes the political activities of a very diverse group of religious believers: Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. In addition, the book explores the meanings of religion for people who might contest the term—those who are spiritual but not religious, for example, as well as activists who engage symbols of faith and community but who may not necessarily consider themselves members of a specific religion. Several essays also examine the meanings of secular identity, humanist politics, and the complex evocations of civil religion in American life. No other book on religion and politics includes anything like the diversity of religions, ethnicities, and topics that this one does—from Mormon political mobilization to attempts at Americanizing Muslims in the post-9/11 United States, from César Chávez to James Dobson, from interreligious cooperation and conflict over Darfur to the global politics surrounding the category of Hindus and South Asians in the United States.

How American Protestant missionaries created a new worldwide religious network Among a wide spectrum of American Protestants, the horrors of World War II triggered grave concern for Europe’s religious future. They promptly mobilised resources to revive Europe’s Christian foundation. Saving the Overlooked Continent reconstructs this surprising redirection of Western missions. For the first time, Europe became the recipient of America’s missionary enterprise. The American missionary impulse matched the military, economic, and political programs of the U.S., all of which positioned the United States to become Europe’s dominant partner and point of cultural reference. One result was the importation of the internal conflicts that vexed American Protestants – theological tensions between modernists and traditionalists, and organisational competition between established churches and independent parachurch associations. Europe was offered a new slate of options that sparked civic and ecclesiastical responses. But behind these contending religious networks lay a considerable overlap of goals and means based on a shared missionary trajectory. By the mid-1960s, most Protestant American agencies admitted that the expectation of a religious revival had been too optimistic despite their initiatives having led to an integration of Europe in the global evangelical network. The agencies reconsidered their assumptions and redefined their strategies. The initial opposition between inclusive and exclusive approaches abated, and the path opened to a sustained cooperation among once-fierce opponents.

After Redemption fills in a missing chapter in the history of African American life after freedom. It takes on the widely overlooked period between the end of Reconstruction and World War I to examine the sacred world of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the region more densely settled than any other by blacks living in this era, the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta. Drawing on a rich range of local memoirs, newspaper accounts, photographs, early blues music, and recently unearthed Works Project Administration records, John Giggie challenges the conventional view that this era marked the low point in the modern evolution of African-American religion and culture. Set against a backdrop of escalating racial violence in a region more densely populated by African Americans than any other at the time, he illuminates how blacks adapted to the defining features of the post-Reconstruction South-- including the growth of segregation, train travel, consumer capitalism, and fraternal orders--and in the process dramatically altered their spiritual ideas and institutions. Masterfully analyzing these disparate elements, Giggie's study situates the African-American experience in the broadest context of southern, religious, and American history and sheds new light on the complexity of black religion and its role in confronting Jim Crow.

The National Shrine in Washington, DC has been deeply loved, blithely ignored, and passionately criticized. It has been praised as a "dazzling jewel" and dismissed as a "towering Byzantine beach ball." In this intriguing and inventive book, Thomas Tweed shows that the Shrine is also an illuminating site from which to tell the story of twentieth-century Catholicism. He organizes his narrative around six themes that characterize U.S. Catholicism, and he ties these themes to the Shrine's material culture--to images, artifacts, or devotional spaces. Thus he begins with the Basilica's foundation stone, weaving it into a discussion of "brick and mortar" Catholicism, the drive to build institutions. To highlight the Church's inclination to appeal to women, he looks at fund-raising for the Mary Memorial Altar, and he focuses on the Filipino oratory to Our Lady of Antipolo to illustrate the Church's outreach to immigrants. Throughout, he employs painstaking detective work to shine a light on the many facets of American Catholicism reflected in the shrine.

"The Encyclopedia of Christianity is the first of a five-volume English translation of the third revised edition of Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon. Its German articles have been tailored to suit an English readership, and articles of special interest to English readers have been added. The encyclopedia describes Christianity through its 2000-year history within a global context, taking into account other religions and philosophies. A special feature is the statistical information dispersed throughout the articles on the continents and over 170 countries. Social and cultural coverage is given to such issues as racism, genocide, and armaments, while historical content shows the development of biblical and apostolic traditions."--"Outstanding reference sources 2000", American Libraries, May 2000. Comp. by the Reference Sources Committee, RUSA, ALA.

Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans examines a difficult chapter in American religious history: the story of race prejudice in American Christianity. Focusing on the largest city in the late-nineteenth-century South, it explores the relationship between churches--black and white, Protestant and Catholic--and the emergence of the Jim Crow laws, statutes that created a racial caste system in the American South. The book fills a gap in the scholarship on religion and race in the crucial decades between the end of Reconstruction and the eve of the Civil Rights movement. Drawing on a range of local and personal accounts from the post-Reconstruction period, newspapers, and church records, Bennett's analysis challenges the assumption that churches fell into fixed patterns of segregation without a fight. In sacred no less than secular spheres, establishing Jim Crow constituted a long, slow, and complicated journey that extended well into the twentieth century. Churches remained a source of hope and a means of resistance against segregation, rather than a retreat from racial oppression. Especially in the decade after Reconstruction, churches offered the possibility of creating a common identity that privileged religious over racial status, a pattern that black church members hoped would transfer to a national American identity transcending racial differences. Religion thus becomes a lens to reconsider patterns for racial interaction throughout Southern society. By tracing the contours of that hopeful yet ultimately tragic journey, this book reveals the complex and mutually influential relationship between church and society in the American South, placing churches at the center of the nation's racial struggles.

The Providence of John and Abigail Adams -- John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams at prayer -- Charles Francis Adams on pilgrimage -- The cosmopolitan Christianity of Henry Adams -- Higher than a city upon a hill.