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Four of us— Erin Bartram (University of Hartford), William Black (Rice University), Michel Sun Lee (University of Texas at Austin), and Moxy Moczygemba (University of Florida)—are excited to present part one of the 2018 book preview list! This post covers releases from January through April 2018. We’ve grouped the books according to which month they’ll be published. We’ve tried to include as many relevant and interesting titles as we could find, but are sure we’ve missed some worthy new books. Please feel free to use the comments to add to this list and we’ll update the post as needed. January Gary James Bergera, ed., Confessions of a Mormon Historian: The Diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971–1999 (Signature Books) From the publisher: “The honest, captivating, and unapologetic diaries of the ‘father of Mormon history’ and founder of the Mormon History Association.” John Corrigan, ed., Feeling Religion (Duke University Press) Pamela Klassen: “...shows how and why the study of emot...

By: Emily Clark and Lauren Turek In the middle of January, the wonderful Rachel Lindsey asked her Facebook community for their recommendations on songs for a playlist for her American Christianity course. This got Lauren and I (Emily) messaging each other about how we use music in our classrooms. Because we both believe in thoughtful teaching and collaborative work, we're posting together about the pedagogical value of music in the undergraduate classroom. Emily: I use music everyday in my undergraduate classes. I get to my classroom early and as students come in, I have a song playing (with song title and artist posted on the screen) that intersects with the day's topic. (Full disclosure: I stole this idea from Chip Callahan.) The song plays as they come into the room and get settled into their desks. Some students chat while the song plays, others sit and listen. I think of it as the class mood music that sets the tone for the day. And, as some of my students have remarked on...

Charles McCrary Last December, I defended my dissertation, “Sincerely Held Religious Belief: A History.” I’m now at work on the book, and one of my first tasks has been mercilessly chopping the fatty bits out of the manuscript. So, I present to you today one such fatty bit, a short prologue. I wrote it because I didn’t think anyone would believe that my dissertation truly was written in 2017 if it didn’t include some reference to Donald Trump. Enjoy! Promoting his then-forthcoming television show on Trinity Broadcasting Network, Mike Huckabee assessed the character of his first guest: President Donald Trump. Perhaps the president was a strange choice for Christian programming. Huckabee’s new show would incorporate politics—he had media experience as a Fox News host and political experience as a former governor of Arkansas—but he was a former Baptist pastor hosting a show on a Christian network. So, why Trump? “Nobody pretends that he would be an ideal Sunday-school teacher, to be fair,...

Stephanie A.T. Jacobe Stephanie A.T. Jacobe received her Ph.D. in history from American University in Washington, D.C. and also holds an M.A. in art history from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. She currently serves as the Director of Archives for the Archdiocese of Washington and as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Humanities at University of Maryland University College. Her dissertation, a biography of financier and Catholic philanthropist Thomas Fortune Ryan, is currently under revision. Her work has been supported by the Harvard Business School, the Cushwa Center , the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Center for the History of Collecting in America located at the Frick Collection in New York City. She was recently elected chair of the Elections Board of the American Catholic Historical Association, and also serves as the editor of H-Catholic, one of the H-Net networks. The annual meeting of American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA) began on...

I recently interviewed Matthew J. Cressler about his new book Authentically Black and Truly Catholic, published in 2017 with New York University Press. Matthew is no stranger to this blog -- he wrote regularly for RiAH for a few years -- and we are pleased to see his book in print. He is currently Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston.  PC: Your book tells the story of a profound transformation of what it meant to be Black and Catholic. Where does Authentically Black and Truly Catholic begin? MC: Though the introduction provides some background in Black Catholic history, the story really opens with encounters between Black southern migrants and white Catholic missionaries in the Gre at Migrations in the 1920s. It is hard to overstate the significance of Black migrations in the making of the twentieth-century U.S. Catholic history. Cities across the urban North were veritable Catholic metropolises at the start of the twentieth century. So when Black ...