In this astounding account, a leading sociologist demonstrates that religion in America has become so tamed and softened that it hardly serves any of its original functions.

As recently as a few decades ago, most people would have described America as a predominantly Protestant nation. Today, we are home to a colorful mix of religious faiths and practices, from a resurgent Catholic Church and a rapidly growing Islam to all forms of Buddhism and many other non-Christian religions. How did this startling transformation take place? A great many factors contributed to this transformation, writes Amanda Porterfield in this engaging look at religion in contemporary America. Religious activism, disillusionment with American culture stemming from the Vietnam war, the influx of Buddhist ideas, a heightened consciousness of gender, and the vastly broadened awareness of non-Christian religions arising from the growth of religious studies programs--all have served to undermine Protestant hegemony in the United States. But the single most important factor, says Porterfield, was the very success of Protestant ways of thinking: emphasis on the individual's relationship with God, tension between spiritual life and religious institutions, egalitarian ideas about spiritual life, and belief in the practical benefits of spirituality. Distrust of religious institutions, for instance, helped fuel a religious counterculture--the tendency to define spiritual truth against the dangers or inadequacies of the surrounding culture--and Protestantism's pragmatic view of spirituality played into the tendency to see the main function of religion as therapeutic. For anyone interested in how and why the American religious landscape has been so dramatically altered in the last forty years, The Transformation of Religion in America offers a coherent and persuasive analysis.

In this closely argued philosophical study, theologian Richard Grigg claims that faith in the United States is changing as traditional religious ideas struggle to survive in a dynamic environment. Whereas a large percentage of Americans still report that they believe in God, Grigg shows that this belief can no longer mean what it used to mean: modern science has taken over much of the cognitive territory that used to belong to religion, and uniquely contemporary problems of theodicy threaten the believer's sense that God is in fact in his heaven, while all is right with the world. Increasingly, American religion survives only if relegated to the private sphere. And yet a God that is relegated to the private sphere cannot be the God that has formed the centrepiece of the major religions of the West. When God Becomes Goddess suggests that one way in which Americans may keep the traditional Western idea of God alive – paradoxically – is to embrace the Goddess of feminist theology. Collecting a variety of feminist theologies under the rubric of enactment theology, Grigg demonstrates how these theologies offer much more than a critique of patriarchy; indeed, her gender aside, Grigg suggests that the Goddess may create an avenue through which the concept of God might be rescued from the pressing forces of secularization.

"Hamm has simply produced the best book on Quaker history in recent years." -- Quaker History ..". will stand as one of the most important works in the field." -- American Historical Review

Winner of the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Best First Book Prize of the American Society of Church History Society for U. S. Intellectual History Notable Title in American Intellectual History The story of liberal religion in the twentieth century, Matthew S. Hedstrom contends, is a story of cultural ascendency. This may come as a surprise-most scholarship in American religious history, after all, equates the numerical decline of the Protestant mainline with the failure of religious liberalism. Yet a look beyond the pews, into the wider culture, reveals a more complex and fascinating story, one Hedstrom tells in The Rise of Liberal Religion. Hedstrom attends especially to the critically important yet little-studied arena of religious book culture-particularly the religious middlebrow of mid-century-as the site where religious liberalism was most effectively popularized. By looking at book weeks, book clubs, public libraries, new publishing enterprises, key authors and bestsellers, wartime reading programs, and fan mail, among other sources, Hedstrom is able to provide a rich, on-the-ground account of the men, women, and organizations that drove religious liberalism's cultural rise in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Critically, by the post-WWII period the religious middlebrow had expanded beyond its Protestant roots, using mystical and psychological spirituality as a platform for interreligious exchange. This compelling history of religion and book culture not only shows how reading and book buying were critical twentieth-century religious practices, but also provides a model for thinking about the relationship of religion to consumer culture more broadly. In this way, The Rise of Liberal Religion offers both innovative cultural history and new ways of seeing the imprint of liberal religion in our own times.

A provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic "The so-called Second Great Awakening was the shaping epoch of American Protestantism, and this book is the most important study of it ever published."—James Turner, Journal of Interdisciplinary History Winner of the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic book prize, and the Albert C. Outler Prize In this provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, Nathan O. Hatch argues that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene. Hatch examines five distinct traditions or mass movements that emerged early in the nineteenth century—the Christian movement, Methodism, the Baptist movement, the black churches, and the Mormons—showing how all offered compelling visions of individual potential and collective aspiration to the unschooled and unsophisticated.

When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today.,

Discusses the growing population of Hispanic-Americans worshipping in the Catholic Church in the United States.

The Oxford History of the United States is by far the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. In this Pulitzer prize-winning, critically acclaimed addition to the series, historian Daniel Walker Howe illuminates the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War, an era when the United States expanded to the Pacific and won control over the richest part of the North American continent. A panoramic narrative, What Hath God Wrought portrays revolutionary improvements in transportation and communications that accelerated the extension of the American empire. Railroads, canals, newspapers, and the telegraph dramatically lowered travel times and spurred the spread of information. These innovations prompted the emergence of mass political parties and stimulated America's economic development from an overwhelmingly rural country to a diversified economy in which commerce and industry took their place alongside agriculture. In his story, the author weaves together political and military events with social, economic, and cultural history. Howe examines the rise of Andrew Jackson and his Democratic party, but contends that John Quincy Adams and other Whigs--advocates of public education and economic integration, defenders of the rights of Indians, women, and African-Americans--were the true prophets of America's future. In addition, Howe reveals the power of religion to shape many aspects of American life during this period, including slavery and antislavery, women's rights and other reform movements, politics, education, and literature. Howe's story of American expansion culminates in the bitterly controversial but brilliantly executed war waged against Mexico to gain California and Texas for the United States. Winner of the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize Finalist, 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction The Oxford History of the United States The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multi-volume history of our nation. The series includes three Pulitzer Prize winners, a New York Times bestseller, and winners of the Bancroft and Parkman Prizes. The Atlantic Monthly has praised it as "the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship," a series that "synthesizes a generation's worth of historical inquiry and knowledge into one literally state-of-the-art book." Conceived under the general editorship of C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, and now under the editorship of David M. Kennedy, this renowned series blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative.

Challenging the traditional interpretation that the years between Reconstruction and World War I were a period when Blacks made only marginal advances in religion, politics, and social life, John Giggie contends that these years marked a critical turning point in the religious history of Southern Blacks.