PhilipGoff, ed.: The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America. Chichester: Wiley‐Blackwell, 2010; pp. xv + 729.

This text provides an up-to-date compilation of review essays dealing with North American religious history. Written by some of the leading experts within their respective fields, each chapter addresses a distinct topic or group, such as gender, Anabaptists, or Islam. While the essays typically focus upon summarising and analysing important historical works, they also often address relevant scholarship from other disciplines, such as sociology or theology. The book opens with an introductory essay by the editor that describes other attempts, both older and more recent, to synthesise scholarly work in American religious history. Most of these other works have focused upon Christianity or tend to be more theological than historical in nature. After Goff's opening survey section, the following forty-three chapters each address specific topics. There are numerous essays dealing with the major issues and groups one would expect to see in such a collection, such as race and ethnicity, American Indians, and Evangelicalism. Some of the more creative and specialised chapters address how historians have analysed religion in relation to film, popular culture, or science. Religious traditions of contemporary and/or historical significance that have often escaped the attention of historians, at least until recently, also receive treatment, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Pentecostalism, and Lutheranism. Indeed, the only topics conceivably missed in this collection are Canadian religious history and how people of various age groups, such as youths or older adults, have experienced religion in North America. Surprisingly, there is only a relatively small amount of overlap in coverage among the various chapters. Even in separate essays on women and gender, the authors mention few, if any, of the same sources and restrict their analyses only to their specific topic. Likewise, the chapters dealing with the Black church and race and ethnicity avoid unnecessary replication or repetition. In a rare case of repetition, three of the essays summarise the advent of Pentecostalism, but this is understandable given the tremendous historical importance of this development and its far-reaching significance in terms of race, gender, theology, and other relevant issues. Numerous essays also appropriately describe the influence of the Civil Rights and Women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s upon scholarly trends. Most of the essays provide helpful definitions of key terms and historical overviews of their topic, in addition to reviewing the relevant literature. For example, Michael McClymond's essay on revivals presents scholarly definitions of the term, quickly describes various “awakenings” that have occurred in North America, and then sets out to analyse some of the most recent literature on the subject. Those chapters that deal with complex or unfamiliar issues especially take great care to provide adequate definitions and background, so that concepts or groups, such as “civil religion” or “Anabaptists,” are clearly described before the analysis of the scholarly literature is presented. In a few cases, such as the chapters on Protestant liberalism, missionary work, and the media, there is relatively little historiographical analysis and more historical overview. Regardless, virtually all of the essays provide useful information regarding their topic and are excellent introductions to key elements of American religious history. One of the great strengths of the essays in this book is the authors' collective ability to connect changes in historical context with developments in scholarly writing over the years. For example, when discussing how historians have addressed religion and economic issues, James Hudnut-Beumler points out that as the influence of socialism and communism declined by the 1990s, scholarship focused increasingly upon the power of markets in shaping religious affiliation. The essay on Lutherans, by Susan Wilds McArver, carefully addresses how historic developments in terms of ethnicity, immigration, and synodic divisions have affected interpretations of this group. The authors of several essays, including those on Islam and Buddhism, also analyse how recent immigration trends have fueled interest in the history of these religious groups in the United States. Nearly all of the authors raise important questions for future scholars to consider. However, one of the more helpful and unique contributions made by some of the essays is to include descriptions of relevant primary document collections for a given topic. Tracy Neal Leavelle's excellent essay dealing with American Indians, for example, not only carefully addresses the complexities of Indian spirituality but also identifies numerous useful methodologies and document collections for future researchers to consider using in future work. Likewise, David Whittaker's analysis of Mormons describes helpful resources that are currently or soon-to-be available, such as the Joseph Smith papers, missionary records, and the LDS Biographical Encyclopedia. Overall, the historical synopses, literature reviews, and bibliographic listings contained in the essays of this volume should all prove extremely helpful to serious students of American religious history. Graduate students and scholars alike will find this book to be an accessible and useful entry point into this field of study.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.