Forum: The Religious Situation, 1968 (Part 1) (original) (raw)
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Religion and American Culture Forum: The Religious Situation, Vol. 29, Issue 2 Summer 2019
Religion and American Culture, 2019
Forum As a regular feature of Religion and American Culture, the editors invite scholars to comment from different perspectives on an issue or problem central to the study of religion in its American context. The FORUM format is designed to foster the cross- disciplinary study of religion and American culture and to bring to the readers of the journal the latest thoughts of scholars on timely, substantial topics. Contributors to the FORUM are asked to present brief essays or “thought pieces” instead of carefully documented articles. This FORUM is a little different from those in the past. First, we decided to run a series of essays on a single topic through two issues in 2019. Second, we asked Ari Y. Kelman and Kathryn Lofton to serve as guest curators, assembling authors from different disciplines and perspectives to engage with a remarkable text from five decades ago, but with themes that still resonate today. The Religious Situation, 1968 (Part 2) This FORUM uses a volume published in 1968 to reflect on the religious situation today. The Religious Situation: 1968 announced its intention to be “The First in a Series of Annual Volumes.” As it turned out, only one additional volume was published, in 1969. The 1968 collection reprints famous essays (such as “Civil Religion in America” by Robert Bellah and “Religion as a Cultural System” by Clifford Geertz) and issues for the first time many more, including reports on South India and Japanese peace movements; reflections on idolatry, secularization, and secularity; and updates on Jews, Catholics, and Mormons. There is not a single female author; only one author is a person of color. Every essay speaks with enormous diagnostic confidence about its designated subject and with differing sensitivities toward the significant cultural and political tumult that have come to be associated with 1968. There is not a lot of mirth or irony. In other words: This is a volume very much of its time. Any historian would recognize many contextual elements that indicate its specific moment. Authors generally agree that church attendance is on the decline. Contributors see Vatican II as an inevitable liberalization of the Catholic Church. The Protestants think ecumenism is on the rise. Cold War fears about Russia and the Global South unite several essays, and Cold War glee about American exceptionalism define the tenor of optimism about religious freedom throughout. Nobody mentions the 1965 Immigration Act, and none of the authors sense the Silent Majority that will soon fuel the rise of evangelical voices in the public sphere. So why return to this volume? Because its authors seek to describe their religious moment and diagnose what their futures might be. This exercise is something of a scholarly ritual, and one we thought it valuable to revisit, with the perspective of fifty years since the original publication. What emerged was less a reflection on “the religious situation” in 1968, and more of a collection of perspectives on how things have changed and how they have not. We asked scholars to reflect on a specific essay, and answer two questions: Does the essay’s argument stand the test of time? What do you think is the status of its subject today? We don’t assume anyone has read all of the essays in The Religious Situation: 1968, so we encouraged the contributors to be inspired by, but not defined by, those original essays. We hope readers can use these essays to think about the status of certain perennial subjects in the study of American religion.
Expanding the study of U.S. religion: Reflections on the state of a subfield
Religion, 2010
The study of U.S. religion, which dates from the 19th century, expanded its sources, methods, and scope during the last quarter of the 20th century, as specialists offered more inclusive historical narratives. That methodological expansion never went far enough, however, and the impulse toward narrative inclusiveness has been restrained in recent years. The subfield, I argue, now faces a number of challenges that also confront other specializations in the study of religion—contraction, overspecialization, fragmentation, and parochialism. After a focused overview of the subfield’s history, I discuss those challenges. Proposing a tentative response, I suggest that specialists celebrate methodological diversity and theoretical sophistication, encourage comparative and translocative studies, and increase collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and national borders. Finally, I suggest that we expand the subfield’s temporal span and geographical scope and reframe the study of U.S. religion in terms of the Atlantic World, the Pacific World, and the Western Hemisphere.
Review: \u27Religion in America Since 1945: A History\u27
2004
Anyone who has taught a course in U.S. religious history knows the daunting challenge of adequately dealing with the riotous diversity of religion in America. This challenge moves from daunting to nearly overwhelming when one gets to the years after World War II. But now comes along Patrick Allitt, professor of history at Emory University, who, in Religion in America Since 1945, has managed to create out of this apparent chaos a lucid, compelling narrative of recent U.S. religious history. Of course, and as Allitt observes in his introduction, in order to “prevent the book from taking the form of a mere list or set of encyclopedia entries” he is forced to give only passing attention to “vast areas of American religious history” (p. xiii). Readers will be thankful that the author chose to be selective, as the result is a coherent, graceful account. It thus may be the worst sort of academic quibbling to suggest that the book could have benefited from more attention to mainline Protest...
The Study of American Religion: Looming through the Glim
Religion, 2012
The study of American religion has been expanding to include new perspectives, previously neglected characters, and new geographic insights, driven by critical reflection on the assumptions and ideologies that historically have shaped the field, such as its focus on institutions, doctrines, and texts, its nationalistic westward-expansion historical narrative, and its Protestant biases. The past two decades have seen illuminating work emerge on race and gender, popular culture, class, and the marketplace. But we need to push beyond filling in gaps in the historical record to engage methodological and theoretical concerns in the academic study of religion. Exploring the develop- ment of theories of religion in the context of global networks of exchange shaped by 19th-century seafarers is one example of how Tom Tweed’s recent call in this journal for a geographic and temporal expansion of the study of religion in America might raise new questions and perspectives for the field.
The Heythrop Journal, 2018
Perhaps it was unintentional. In 2011 the atheist Steven Pinker wrote a book (The Better Angels of Our Nature) about the history of violence, but contended our world was becoming less violent and so may obliquely offer various indications of God's ongoing presence in our world. Brad Gregory, a Catholic historian espousing a more somber awareness of the negative effects of the Reformation on modernity and promoting a renewal of theology in the university, writes in 2012 the present work that sees moral failure and aimlessness vainly grasping after panaceas (human rights), thereby sabotaging their own hope of re-establishing a purified Christianity or of establishing a shared moral foundation and commitment. How and why did things go so horribly wrong? Gregory contends that the 16 th century Reformation unintentionally contributed to our hyper-pluralist, obsessively consumer-oriented, and morally and politically fractured contemporary society. Such a society, Gregory laments, has removed any substantial public God-talk and marginalized or devalued the essential investigation of Life Questions (Why are we here? What is our purpose? Is there a higher, unifying Good or principle? Is there a God?).