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We conclude our roundtable review on Kyle Roberts ' Evangelical Gotham  with a reflection from the author himself. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the conversation, and please do chime in below to continue the dialogue. by Kyle Roberts What a genuine pleasure it has been this week to have four thoughtful scholars of American religion share their journeys through Evangelical Gotham . I can’t think of better traveling companions. I have admired their scholarship and benefited from their conversation over the past decade. As with the best walks through a city, they have allowed me to point out the sites that most interest and excite me and, in return, have shared my enthusiasm, asked for clarification, and drawn my attention to things that I have missed. This book began as an excuse to get off the Amtrak at Penn Station during my regular commute in graduate school between Boston and Philadelphia. The books that intrigued me the most at that time (and which helped me while away t...

This next post in our ongoing roundtable review of Kyle Roberts'   Evangelical Gotham  comes to us from Christine Croxall . A scholar of the religious histories of the Mississippi River Valley at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Crozall is a postdoctoral research associate at the  John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her post is also the last in this series. Kyle Roberts' response will come tomorrow. by Christine Croxall Old St. Peter's Catholic Church Huzzah for visuals! In Evangelical Gotham Kyle Roberts not only gives us woodcuts, drawings, and paintings of the meetings houses that dotted early Manhattan, but he also provides seven maps plotting New York houses of worship for the years 1790, 1810, 1823, 1828, 1834, 1845, and 1856. These maps and the series of congregation and membership tables in the appendix, I suspect, will become definitive data for early New York religion.  The final chapter of Evangelica...

We continue our series on Kyle Roberts'   Evangelical Gotham  with a post from friend of the blog and assistant professor of history at Colgate University Monica Mercado. Where prior posts honed in on the how cities and spaces fit into Robert's analysis, Mercado highlights the ways in which these concepts both mask and reveal gender. by Monica L. Mercado During the first weeks of my lecture course “Women in the City,” I introduce my undergraduate students to the complex geographies of lower Manhattan, or what the historian Kyle Roberts calls Evangelical Gotham. Sitting in a classroom in upstate New York, our windows facing the hills and valleys that made up the nineteenth century’s infamous “Burned-Over District,” we scrutinize early engravings of Five Points and other images of men and women navigating urban space in antebellum America. The Five Points With Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 , Roberts reminds his readers that late eightee...

Today we continue our roundtable review of Kyle Roberts ' Evangelical Gotham  with a post from longtime RiAH  blogger Lincoln Mullen . You can see the rest of the posts in this series here.  by  Lincoln Mullen New York's churches 1845 from Roberts, Evangelical Gotham  In his elegantly written account, Kyle Roberts takes his readers on a tour of  Evangelical Gotham . The book has a strong chronological through line, explaining how evangelicals went through three distinct periods in bringing their message of conversion and reform to New York City (10--11). While the spatial organization of the book is less obvious from its table of contents,  Evangelical Gotham  is a book that is fundamentally organized around place. This may seem like an obvious point to make about a book that focuses on a single city, but my aim is to show how Roberts uses spatial concepts. Evangelical Gotham  is explicit in its debt to the concept of "crossing and dwelling"...

Cities have long haunted this history of American evangelicalism. They are sites evangelicals either fear or feel the need to control. But in Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Kyle Roberts highlights the ways in which evangelicalism was uniquely suited to urban forms of expression. Roberts, an associate professor of history and new media at Loyola University in Chicago, has long been a friend of the blog. He's written at length about his digital project on the development of America's Jesuit university libraries. So for this week, we're turning RiAH over to a roundtable reflecting upon Roberts' new book. Our first post comes from Catherine O'Donnell , an associate professor of history at Arizona State University. In her post, O'Donnell lays out what's at stake in writing an urban history of evangelicalism. Future posts throughout this week will hone in on other matters. And on Fri...

Charles McCrary How can scholars of American religion incorporate police and policing into our narratives? I have been kicking around this question for a while, and I have a few very preliminary ideas and suggestions. In recent years the field of American religious studies has continued to expand the purview of what counts as data. So, I doubt many readers would say that police and policing do not fit within our narratives. But the question remains—as it does with so many other topics—how to bridge these questions and data sets with our existing frameworks and narratives. What follows are some disorganized thoughts about what a sustained conversation about police and religion might look like. Scholars often study the police within the context of surveillance studies. Foucault’s ideas about policing have of course been influential here. I recommend Andrew Johnson’s piece on Foucault, the police, and neoliberalism. Johnson shows how Foucault moved from understanding the police as a stat...

The following comes from Chris Beneke and Christopher Grenda, editor of a new book series for Lexington Books. -- PH _______________________________________________________________ Lexington Books invites submissions for Religion in American History , a new book series that focuses on colonial and U.S. religious history, especially the history of religious tolerance, religious intolerance, and church-state relations. Monographs and edited volumes relating to all aspects of American religious history are welcome, provided they are written in an accessible and engaging style. Those that examine episodes of conflict, patterns of cooperation, and the evolving relationship between religion, state, and society will receive particular consideration. Series Editor(s):   Chris Beneke (Bentley University, cbeneke@bentley.edu ) Christopher S. Grenda (CUNY, Bronx Community College, csgmd1@aol.com ) Series Editorial Contact:   Brian Hill, Lexington Books ( bhill@rowman.com )   Series...

Mark Edwards Just a quick word to check out a recently completed  series on Christian nationalism  at Religions.  The eight marvelous essays cover topics ranging from the Native American preacher William Appess, Federalists, and West Point, to Richard Mouw, Donald Trump, the ecumenical movement, evangelical internationalism, and religious pluralism.  I'd like to thank all the contributors and reviewers for this collection.  We're also grateful for the wonderful support from the Religions editorial staff.  Happy reading, everyone!

Catherine R. Osborne While admittedly sometimes the very last thing I want is more sources -- there are so many sources , I lament as I trim redundant quotes out of my current manuscript -- I also can't help but be excited by how many digitization projects are out there. One with incredible potential, I think, is the Catholic News Archive , a project of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance . The CRRA has been working on preliminaries for this archive since 2011. Some helpful history and background on all their work is here . They've identified a list of diocesan and national Catholic papers as "priority papers" for their own digitizing. Fundraising is ongoing, but they've been able to open a test site for the archive, which is already really useful even though there are only seven titles; one of them is the National Catholic Reporter, and another is the Catholic News Service feeds. You can browse by date  (currently, 1920-1968) or by title . You can also do fu...

Elesha Coffman The recent Christianity Today story " Evangelical Leaders Challenge Trump's 'America First' Budget " immediately made me think of three things. One, so much for "compassionate conservatism," a phrase popularized by President George W. Bush. This old talking points sheet  unpacks some of what he meant by it: "It is compassionate to actively help our citizens in need." "We do not believe in a sink-or-swim society. The policies of our government must heed the universal call of all faiths to love our neighbors as we would want to be loved ourselves." "Compassionate conservatism places great hope and confidence in public education." "It is compassionate to increase our international aid." That was 2002, folks. Even the recent past is a foreign country. Two, the roster of signatories to the letter opposing Trump's budget provides an interesting look at what constitutes "leadership" in Americ...

The blog is pleased to welcome this post from guest contributor Dr. Michael Skaggs. Michael Skaggs recently defended his dissertation, "Reform in the Queen City: Religion and Race in Cincinnati in the Era of Vatican II," in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame. He vastly prefers Glier’s goetta over Queen City and Skyline over Gold Star. He hopes you’ll reach him at  skaggsmichaela@gmail.com  or on Twitter   @maskaggs . I've had occasion to read more broadly since defending my dissertation in December. I've also been grateful for the opportunity to reflect on my research interests and where they might fit into broader conversations moving forward. In the roundtable on food history published in the December 2016 Journal of American History, Mark Padoongpatt's observations on the pertinence of "the debate over whether food is valuable because it serves as an 'entrée' into more important themes in American history or if it is inhere...