Books & Culture Podcast on Historically Speaking

Randall Stephens

Last week over at the Books & Culture site John Wilson and Stan Guthrie did a podcast on Historically Speaking.  They discuss the new issue and highlight some of the contents.  Wilson praises our forum on Brad Gregory's new book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). (Alexandra Walsham, Bruce Gordon, Carlos Eire, and Euan Cameron offered comments.) Wilson sees the book as "one of the most interesting, provocative, learned works of history that I've read in the last several years and it's good to see that Historically Speaking is devoting attention to it." 

Gregory introduces his lead piece to the forum as follows:

The Unintended Reformation is a work of historical analysis that takes the present as its point of departure. . . . While disclaiming comprehensiveness, the book aims to be as explanatorily powerful as possible while making as few theoretical and methodological assumptions as necessary. Secondarily, the book addresses some major contemporary concerns based on its historical analysis. These remarks will speak mostly to the first ambition and briefly to the second.

I endeavor in The Unintended Reformation to answer a basic but very big question: How did contemporary ideological and institutional realities in North America and Europe come to be as they are? The book intends to characterize these realities matter-of-factly. Ideologically, they include an open-ended range of secular and religious truth claims made by individuals about matters pertaining to human meaning, morality, purpose, and priorities, including some religious truth claims articulated with great intellectual sophistication by theologians and philosophers of religion. Insofar as the present is the product of the past, any adequate history must be able to account for all these claims. The modern liberal institutions variously characteristic of all contemporary Western states permit this ideological heterogeneity through the legal and political protection of individual citizens to believe and live as they please so long as they obey established laws.   

Read more of the forum and the rest of the issue at Project Muse, or subscribe to the print version today.

David D. Hall on Why I Became a Historian

Randall Stephens

I first read David D. Hall's work when I was a grad student at the University of Florida. David Hackett taught a wonderful course on Religion and American Culture, which familiarized students with the big themes

in religious history.

Hall's study of the religious world of 17th-century American Puritans challenged my uniformed ideas of what it meant to be a "puritan." His writing on "lived religion," especially intrigued me. He described it as "a shorthand phrase that has long been current in the French tradition of the sociology of religion (la religion veçue) but is relatively novel in the American context." It was "rooted less in sociology than in cultural and ethnographical approaches to the study of religion and American religious history that have come to the fore in recent years." It involved "the study of 'daily life,' especially among Protestant laity [and a] reflection on 'practice' as the center or focus of the Christian life." (Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice [Princeton University Press, 1997], vii.)

Hall has edited and authored a number of books and articles on American religious history, including: The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Omohundro Institute, 1972); Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Harvard University Press, 1990); Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology (Princeton University Press, 2004); Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and, most recently, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Knopf, 2011).

Hall has had a major impact on the fields of religious history and religious studies in recent decades. As such, he's a great fit for the new HS blog series "Why I Became a Historian." I caught up with him last week at the American religious history group meeting at Boston University. In the video embedded here I ask Hall why he was drawn to history and he responds by describing his early interest in the past, his reading of history at a young age, and his later college and grad school pursuits.

Hall's comments make me wonder if most historians had an early affinity for history through family, location, and a curiosity about all those things that had come before us.

Building Bridges from "Muscular Christianity" to "The Tebow Thing"

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Art Remillard is an assistant professor of religious studies at St. Francis University in Loretto, PA. His book, Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era will be out this December with the University of Georgia Press. His current research looks at religion and sports in the American South from the Civil War through World War II. In this his first post for the H.S. blog, Art explains how his course on religion and sports offers a "bridge" for students to better understand broader themes in American religious history and theories of religion.

Building Bridges from "Muscular Christianity" to "The Tebow Thing"
Art Remillard

Before teaching my first college course, a friend recommended that I read Marilla Svinicki and Wilbert J. McKeachie's Teaching Tips. I recall taking to heart the book's repeated emphasis on developing learning strategies, "that help students to build bridges between what they already know or have experienced and what they are trying to learn." Once I started teaching, I found sports to be an effective "bridge." Truth be told, I'm not much of a sports fan (except for college football—then I get weird). But I follow closely enough so that, for example, I can compare the Steelers and Browns rivalry to that of the Dominicans and Franciscans. Trust me, it makes sense.

In between my first teaching experience and now, I have taken a greater academic interest in sports, to the point where I have developed a course titled "Religion and Sports." Here, I use sports to investigate major trends in American religious history, while also touching on some theories of religion. I've taught it twice now, and student responses have been quite positive. Yet, many who enroll don't know what to expect. Some anticipate a course on what sportswriter Frank Deford has called "Sportianity," or when self-described Christian athletes, "endorse Jesus, much as they would a new sneaker or a graphite-shafted driver." Think: Kurt Warner. The course does mention the Sportians (via Deford's article), but I'm more interested in the creative ways that people have inscribed religious meaning on to athletic pursuits.

So on "opening day," I invite students to cross a bridge from their hometown YMCA to "muscular Christianity." I cite Luther Gulick, his efforts to institute athletics at the Y, and his lifelong quest to understand "the relation of good bodies and good morals." I then turn to his colleague, James Naismith. On January 20, 1892, the Presbyterian minister gathered eighteen young men at a YMCA gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, to play his newly invented game called "basketball." Practically, Naismith hoped that basketball would give restless young men a suitable indoor activity for the long winter months. More importantly, as theologian Michael Novak summarizes, "The idea behind the game was moral, Christian, and hygienic: active clean living through vigorous exercise." Right from the gun, then, students discover the religious roots of a familiar game. Later in the course, drawing mostly from Bill Baker's Playing With God, I locate Gulick, Naismith, and other "muscular Christians" within the social gospel tradition, and discuss how they sought to Christianize all corners of society, from the schoolhouse to the gymnasium.

Another bridge brings students to the land of religious pluralism. I reference Julie Byrne's O God of Players to show how the female Catholic cagers at Immaculata College invented religious practices to express their newfound role as athletes. Richard Ian Kimball's Sports in Zion helps me to define the contours of "muscular Mormonism." From Steven A. Riess's edited volume, Sports and the American Jew, I recall the fascinating careers of great Jewish athletes, from the championship boxer Benny Leonard, to the great slugger Hank Greenburg. To examine "seekers," I talk about Phil Jackson, whose Sacred Hoops adds to Naismith's game a spiritual soup complete with Buddhist and Native American flavors. As for American Muslims, I feature marathoner Khalid Khannouchi and his twin challenge of running 100 mile weeks while also observing the Ramadan fast.

Alongside the course's historical conversation, I build bridges to some basic theories of religion. This is actually easier than I had first anticipated. Most of my students are from western and central Pennsylvania. They have been in (or live in) houses with rooms devoted to the Steelers. They have seen (or own) trucks painted black and gold. And they have observed (or participated in) the curious tradition of wearing Steelers jerseys to church. So I try to make sense of these and other activities by using the intellectual resources developed by religious studies scholars. This semester, I might mention Tim Tebow—not as a Sportian—but rather, for his persona that one Denver Bronco recently labeled, "the Tebow thing." From what I can tell, Tebow's "thing-ness" matches with Max Weber's definition of charisma, "a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities."

The weeks always seem to pass too quickly and I never make it to every bridge that I had hoped to go over. Still, the bridges that we do cross transform students' understanding of how religion and sports fit within American history and culture. I hope that professor McKeachie would approve.

Dirty Words of the Academy

Randall Stephens

This past weekend I was down in Atlanta for the American Academy of Religion meeting. The sessions I attended on history were dynamic and produced some terrific discussions and debates.

The field of religious studies tends to be far more grounded in theory than history, as far as I can tell. (Is it true that all "studies" programs are theory driven? Peruse the conference programs of the AAR and the AHA. Do a word search for "performative" and "postcoloniality." See also the pluralization of concepts: "hybridities," "boundaries," "theologies.")

As I listened to several papers in various sessions at the AAR I thought about how scholars in the humanities employ certain words to discredit a range of views. So, I've compiled a list of dirty words. This list could certainly be extended.

Essentialist
Homogeneous
Dualistic
Static
Monocausal
Top down
Metaphysical
Teleological
Simple
Uncomplicated
Exceptionalist
Bianary

What does it mean that historians and humanists in other fields use these words almost always as code for bad or wrong?