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Shows that a religious understanding of illness and health persisted well into post-Enlightenment early AmericaThe COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the power of narrative during times of sickness and disease. As Americans strive to find meaning amid upheaval and loss, some consider the nature of God¿s will. Early American Protestants experienced similar struggles as they attempted to interpret the diseases of their time. In this groundbreaking work, Philippa Koch explores the doctrine of providence¿a belief in a divine plan for the world¿and its manifestations in eighteenth-century America, from its origins as a consoling response to sickness to how it informed the practices of Protestant activity in the Atlantic world. Drawing on pastoral manuals, manuscript memoirs, journals, and letters, as well as medical treatises, epidemic narratives, and midwifery manuals, Koch shows how Protestant teachings around providence shaped the lives of believers even as the Enlightenment seemed to portend a more secular approach to the world and the human body. Their commitment to providence prompted, in fact, early Americans¿ active engagement with the medical developments of their time, encouraging them to see modern science and medicine as divinely bestowed missionary tools for helping others. Indeed, the book shows that the ways in which the colonial world thought about questions of God¿s will in sickness and health help to illuminate the continuing power of Protestant ideas and practices in American society today.

"Though many see religion and race as separate public school issues, Ribovich reframes religion's role in twentieth-century American public education by using New York City as a window into how religion undergirded school policies and practices on race before and after school prayer and Bible-reading became unconstitutional"--

"Christian Imperial Feminism examines how ecumenical Protestant women's practices of pageants, prayer, and political activism sustained the Christian imperial feminism of the White women's missionary movement within an emerging Protestant-inflected postwar racial liberalism"--

In the midst of the Great Depression, punished by crippling drought and deepening poverty, hundreds of thousands of families left the Great Plains and the Southwest to look for work in California's rich agricultural valleys. In response to the scene of destitute white families living in filthy shelters built of cardboard, twigs, and refuse, reform-minded New Deal officials built a series of camps to provide them with shelter and community. From Dust They Came tells the religious history of the federal government's Depression-era effort to shelter, clean, convert, and redeem Dust Bowl refugees in agricultural California. Using the extensive archives of the federal migratory camp system, the volume explores the religious dynamics in and around the migratory farm labor camps established and operated by the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration. Jonathan H. Ebel makes the case that the camps served as mission sites for the conversion of migrants to more modern ways of living and believing. Though the ideas of virtuous citizenship put forward by the camp administrators were framed as secular, they rested on a foundation of Protestantism. At the same time, many of the migrants were themselves conservative or charismatic Protestants who had other ideas for how their religion intended them to be. By looking at the camps as missionary spaces, Ebel shows that this New Deal program was animated both by humanitarian concern and by the belief that these poor, white migrants and their religious practices were unfit for life in a modernized, secular world. Innovative and compelling, From Dust They Came is the first book to reveal the braiding of secularism, religion, and modernity through and around the lives of Dust Bowl migrants and New Deal reformers.Jonathan H. Ebel is Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and author of G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion and Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War. He is a past recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

73rd National Jewish Book Awards FinalistCharts how changes to Jewish education in the nineteenth century served as a site for the wholescale reimagining of Judaism itselfThe earliest Jewish Sunday schools were female-led, growing from one school in Philadelphia established by Rebecca Gratz in 1838 to an entire system that educated vast numbers of Jewish youth across the country. These schools were modeled on Christian approaches to religious education and aimed to protect Jewish children from Protestant missionaries. But debates soon swirled around the so-called sorry state of "feminized" American Jewish supplemental learning, and the schools were taken over by men within one generation of their creation. It is commonly assumed that the critiques were accurate and that the early Jewish Sunday school was too feminized, saccharine, and dependent on Christian paradigms. Tracing the development of these schools from their inception through the first decade of the twentieth century, this book shows this was not the reality.Jewish Sunday Schools argues that the work of the women who shepherded Jewish education in the early Jewish Sunday school had ramifications far outside the classroom. Indeed, we cannot understand the nineteenth-century American Jewish experience, and how American Judaism sought to sustain itself in an overwhelmingly Protestant context, without looking closely at the development of these precursors to Hebrew School.Jewish Sunday Schools provides an in-depth portrait of a massively understudied movement that acted as a vital means by which American Jews explored and reconciled their religious and national identities.

"This book shows how imperialism molded American religion-both the category of religion and the traditions designated as religions-and reveals the multifaceted roles of American religions in structuring, enabling, surviving, and resisting the U.S. Empire"--

"This book reveals contemporary vernacular religion expressed in gay Catholic spirituality, Father Divine's International Peace Mission movement, and material culture"--

A historical and ethnographic study of Haitian religion in immigrant communities, based on fieldwork in both Miami and Haiti.

Weiner's innovative work encourages scholars to pay much greater attention to the publicly contested sensory cultures of American religious life.

Mexican American folk and religious healing, often referred to as curanderismo, has been a vital part of life in the Mexico-US border region for centuries. This book examines the ongoing evolution of Mexican American religious healing from the end of the nineteenth century to the present.

Drawing on five years of research with pilgrims before, during and after their trips, this book offers a lived religion approach that explores the trip's hybrid nature for pilgrims themselves: both ordinary - tied to their everyday role as the family's ritual specialists, and extraordinary - since they leave home in a dramatic way.

Examines the religious dimensions of Ralph Ellison¿s concept of race Ralph Ellison¿s 1952 novel Invisible Man provides an unforgettable metaphor for what it means to be disregarded in society. While the term ¿invisibility¿ has become shorthand for all forms of marginalization, Ellison was primarily concerned with racial identity. M. Cooper Harriss argues that religion, too, remains relatively invisible within discussions of race and seeks to correct this through a close study of Ralph Ellison¿s work.Harriss examines the religious and theological dimensions of Ralph Ellison¿s concept of race through his evocative metaphor for the experience of blackness in America, and with an eye to uncovering previously unrecognized religious dynamics in Ellison¿s life and work. Blending religious studies and theology, race theory, and fresh readings of African-American culture, Harriss draws on Ellison to create the concept of an ¿invisible theology,¿ and uses this concept as a basis for discussing religion and racial identity in contemporary American life.Ralph Ellison¿s Invisible Theology is the first book to focus on Ellison as a religious figure, and on the religious dynamics of his work. Harriss brings to light Ellison¿s close friendship with theologian and literary critic Nathan A. Scott, Jr., and places Ellison in context with such legendary religious figures as Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Martin Luther King, Jr. He argues that historical legacies of invisible theology help us make sense of more recent issues like drone warfare and Clint Eastwood¿s empty chair.Rich and innovative, Ralph Ellison¿s Invisible Theology will revolutionize the way we understand Ellison, the intellectual legacies of race, and the study of religion.

Explores the deeper tension between the ideal of Puritan family life and its messy reality, complicating the way America has thought about its Puritan past

This compelling work examines classic and contemporary Jewish and African American children's literature