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This is the third entry in our review round table on Tisa Wenger's  Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal  (2017). For previous entries, see reviews by  Kime  and Zubovich . Anna Su Wenger’s Contested History is the first to examine holistically the history of religious freedom within the United States largely outside the confines of the history generated by the Religion Clauses of the U.S. Constitution. Among others, it serves to bridge existing scholarly conversations on the critique of secularism, religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy, and religion in U.S. history. Those familiar with the works of Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan on the disciplinary inclinations of religious freedom would find much fodder in this book for support. In many ways, it lays out a rich new canvas with which to look at the questions raised in those aforementioned conversations. For instance, in what ways did religious freedom talk emanci...

Lauren Turek I recently came across this call for applications for an exciting looking summer school intended for graduate students working on Jewish history and cultural studies, broadly defined: Out of This World The Supernatural in Jewish History and Culture Advanced Summer School for Graduate Students in Jewish Studies June 24–28, 2018 in Philadelphia Presented by the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in partnership with the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Hebrew University of Jerusalem “Out of This World” is devoted to the magical, the miraculous, and the monstrous in Jewish history and culture. Its subjects include humans gifted with supernatural powers—miracle-workers, magicians, and messianic saviors—as well as superhuman beings like ghosts, golems, and God. The week will range across disciplines, including history, anthropology, literary study, and the study of religion, with the goal of modeling various ways to m...

This is the second entry in our review round table on Tisa Wenger's Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017). For previous entries, see here . Gene Zubovich One of the big stories of the twentieth century is the transition from empires to nation-states as the basis of world order. In less than a hundred years, the majority of the world’s peoples went from living under colonialism to living under nation-states. The number of countries in the world grew from about 50 in the year 1900 to over 200 by the end of the century. Today, the nation-state, whether in fact or in aspiration, is nearly universal. Tisa Wenger’s  Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal  is a welcome and timely addition to a growing body of literature that helps us connect the world of empire to the world of the nation-state (1). It does so by looking at the role of religious freedom in undergirding American empire and the dissent religious freedom inspired. Th...

This essay kicks off our review roundtable on Tisa Wenger's recent book, Religious Freedom The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017).  Over the course of this week, we'll hear from a number of scholars about their response to the book before concluding with Wenger's response. Our first review is from Bradley Kime, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is working on a history of wealth transfers, secular governance, and religious undue influence.  Bradley Kime If I was stuck on a desert island and could only read one book on American religious freedom, this would probably be it. Rather than quantifying religious freedom’s realization—as if we already know what (religious) freedom is—Tisa Wenger investigates the politics of its historic invocations: “who appealed to religious freedom, for what purposes, and what it meant to them” (1). This is an increasingly familiar and important move. Wenger extends it to the...

Andrea L. Turpin Undergraduate students actually want a liberal arts education—when presented with the arguments for it. How do I know? First, some background: this year the College of Arts & Sciences at Baylor University approved a unified core curriculum for all of its students, from physics majors to English majors. Like all human products, this specific core has its strengths and weaknesses. But I love working for an institution that values the liberal arts enough to require a large proportion of its students to take courses across a fairly broad range of subjects. In fact, several of the courses in the core are straight-up required—all students must take exactly those courses. The rest of the core consists of the more common “distribution list” system whereby students select courses from among several options in each area. After fulfilling the core requirements, A&S students complete their degree with a combination of electives and additional requirements for their partic...

Benjamin J. Wetzel Gabrielle Guillerm is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Northwestern University. Her dissertation will examine French Catholicism in the early American west. She was awarded a 2017 Cushwa Center Research Travel Grant to pursue work on this topic at the Notre Dame archives. What follows is the first of several questions I recently asked Guillerm about her work.  Read whole thing at the Cushwa Center website ! BW Can you briefly describe your project for us? GG My dissertation, "The Forgotten French: Catholicism, Colonialism, and Americanness on the early trans-Appalachian Frontier," focuses on the Midwest and Kentucky and aims to recover the French Catholic story of the early United States. I posit that, compared to the colonial period, French Catholic cultural influences strengthened in the west over the early republican period even as the proportion of Francophone Catholics in this former French territory diminished. The development of these new French Cath...

The Center for Religion & American Culture announced its 2018 Young Scholars in American Religion . Religion in American History would like to give a hearty congratulations to the new cohort: Joseph Blankholm , Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara  Melissa Borja , Assistant Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan Chris Cantwell , Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Matthew J. Cressler , Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston Sarah E. Dees , postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University Jamil Drake , Assistant Professor in the Religion Department at Florida State University Katharine Gerbner , Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota Samira K. Mehta , Assistant Professor at Albright College Shari Rabin , Assistant Professor of Jewish studies and Director of the Pearlstine/Lipov Center for Southern Jewish Culture at the C...

Jonathan Den Hartog I may have been reading the wrong publications, but I was shocked to find out at the start of this year that Fr. Thomas Buckley, S.J. had passed away late last year (announcements here and here ). Fr. Buckley's death is a great loss to American religious history. Fr. Buckley, from the Western Province of the Jesuits. Fr. Buckley's greatest historical contribution came in our understanding of religious disestablishment, especially in Virginia. His work Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia became the standard work for understanding both the process and the ideas involved in Virginia's disestablishment. Fr. Buckley combed the archives, and he knew early national Virginia's religious sources better than anyone. Fr. Buckley helped historians understand that although Jefferson and Madison mattered--including Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance"--the evangelical dissenters of Virginia also deserved much attention. Their numbers and wil...