mortiz053

Charles McCrary A few weeks ago, at a dissertation defense, the discussion turned to the topic of voice. In his dissertation, as in many of his blog posts here at RiAH, Adam Park [1] wrote in a tongue-in-cheek, ironic, at times even sarcastic voice. But what does this voice imply or presume? This question exposed a central yet often under-discussed aspect of scholarly writing: Who is writing this? In Voice and Vision: A Guide to Writing History and Other Serious Nonfiction , Stephen Pyne defines voice as the “transtextual persona of the author” (48). What, or who, is this persona? What is your persona, scholarly writer? In this post I want to think through this question of voice, specifically ironic voice, and how it relies on readers’ and writers’ assumptions—and what this discussion might have to do with the injunction to “take religion seriously.” Scholarly personas commonly take on ironic voices. Pyne notes, “Irony requires distancing. Literary irony results from an incongruity, ...

Andrea L. Turpin Every semester I tell my history students the same bad joke: fundamentalism and feminism are actually a lot alike—they are both f-words that we hurl at our political enemies depending on which side of the spectrum we’re on. Which is to say that for the average American these words function not according to some dictionary definition but rather as a catch-all insult for someone too far to the right or the left, respectively. In fact, my informal polls of students, friends, and random people who will answer my questions indicate that there is no widely agreed upon definition of either word in common parlance. I am one of those relatively rare Americans who runs in both blue and red circles, so while my polls aren’t scientific, they do actually capture a bit of the breadth of perspectives on these concepts. So I’ve learned that when teaching my feminist-leaning students about fundamentalism or my fundamentalist-leaning students about feminism, I first have to cut through...

Shane Ulbrich Stephen Koeth, C.S.C. [This month's Cushwa post features an interview by Shane Ulbrich with Research Travel Grant recipient Stephen Koeth, C.S.C., about his work on the postwar suburbanization of American Catholics.  Stephen, a Holy Cross priest, is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Church and State  and U.S. Catholic Historian .] SU: Tell us about how your project developed.    SK: My dissertation explores the postwar suburbanization of American Catholicism by examining the creation and expansion of the Diocese of Rockville Centre in suburban Long Island, which throughout the 1960s was one of the fastest growing Catholic communities in the country. It describes how Catholic pastoral leaders grappled with the rapid exodus of the faithful from urban ethnic neighborhoods to newly built suburbs, and how Catholic sociologists and intellectuals assessed the effects of suburbanization in resha...

Elesha Coffman Apologies for the repost, but I thought that a pair of articles at Christianity Today might be of interest to readers of this blog as well. In the main piece, Steven Weitzman describes " The Theology Beneath the Trump-Comey Conflict ." In a companion sidebar , I offer five reasons why Reinhold Niebuhr continues to make headlines nearly 50 years after his death. Both articles feature links to other resources that take their ideas to a greater depth. Read up, and be the hit of your weekend barbecue!

Paul Putz There is only one rule when reviewing sport history books in a forum that is not focused primarily on sports: you must use a sports metaphor or allusion at some point. Allow me to check that box right off the bat (and no, that last phrase doesn't count): William J. Baker's  Of Gods And Games: Religious Faith and Modern Sports  (University of Georgia Press, 2017) is kind of like an end-of-the-season sports highlight show. Clocking in at about seventy-five pages, it provides a primer on a few of the key themes that scholars of sports and religion have explored, while at the same time offering a couple intriguing hints at what might be on the horizon next season. There. The painful part is done. No more forced sports comparisons, I promise. For historians doing the sport and religion thing, Baker is impossible to ignore. His 2007 book  Playing With God: Religion and Modern Sport  (Harvard University Press) stands as the single best volume on the history of s...

Jonathan Den Hartog The semester is winding down--there's just a stack of blue books in front of me, along with a few random essays and an independent study project. I almost begin to believe there is a summer break within reach. At this time of the semester, then, further reflection on recent teaching experience seems appropriate. Several years ago , I pointed to R. Tracy McKenzie's book The First Thanksgiving . At the time, I voiced appreciation for the book--it's excellent--but I wondered how I could work it into my teaching. This semester, I gave it a try. In the Spring Semester, I teach our History Methods class for majors and minors--usually freshmen and sophomores but an occasional upperclassman slips in, too. After spending the class talking about the issues of historical thinking, sources, and historiography, I deployed The First Thanksgiving as a way of "wrapping up" the course. For me, the book tied together all those themes. The value of the book for...

Peter Cajka The new release tables at Hodges Figgis – a three-story bookstore in downtown Dublin – greet frequent shoppers like me with a spate of fresh books on Luther, Reformation historiography, Calvin, and the Counter Reformation. As we mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, it may be useful to consider how the event gets interpreted by thinkers unconstrained by the rules of academic history. Modern thinkers, for or against, Protestant or Catholic, have never shied away from discerning the Reformation’s deeper meanings. A guest at a dinner party I attended a few months ago (we wondered briefly into a conversation on religion) called the Reformation “the first human rights movement in history.” Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst with ties to the Frankfurt School, pursues a much bleaker interpretation of the Reformation in Escape from Freedom , a book he published in 1941. The Renaissance and the rise of the market economy broke down the medieval world, began his argument, liberati...

Paul Putz It's time for part two of the 2017 book preview list! This one will cover books published from May through August. (If you missed part one check it out here ). Shout out to Hunter Hampton , who culled through the university press catalogs to help me put this list together. The usual preface: I've listed the books in roughly chronological order based on the month of their tentative release date. Although I've tried to include as many relevant and interesting titles as I could find, I'm sure that I left out some deserving books. Sometimes this is because publishers don't have updated information on their websites, and sometimes it's because I just missed it. Please feel free to use the comments to add to this list and I can update the post as needed. As for how I define what is "American" in American religion (to say nothing of what is "religion" in American religion), for the purposes of these lists I mostly follow Kathryn Gin Lum...