Religion in American Life

I finished revising my lecture notes for my annual fall course, "Religion in American Life." I absolutely love American religious history, and look forward to teaching this course each fall. Admittedly, it is overwhelming though, in terms of the amount of material to cover, from the period of exploration to the present, while doing justice to various denominations, people groups, race and gender, and non-Christian religions. 
 
The students will be using two required texts for the course:

• John Butler, Grant Wacker, and Randall Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short History, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2011)
• R. Marie Griffith, American Religions: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2007)

The students will be taking weekly online quizzes from both texts, and I hope to reserve a significant portion of one day each week to discuss questions that I have developed from the primary sources in Marie Griffith's edited volume.

For my lectures, I have pulled the most information from the following books:

• Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, Religion in American History: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 1998)
• John Corrigan and Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America, 8th edition (Pearson, 2010)
• John Fea, Was American Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction (WJK, 2011)
• Charles H. Lippy, Introducing American Religion (Routledge, 2010)
• Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Eerdmans, 1992)
• Amanda Porterfield and John Corrigan, eds, Religion in American History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

 I look forward to the start of the fall semester next week.