Fall Reading

I am nearly finished with my summer reading and ready to begin tackling my list of books to read in the fall.

Next year, I want to teach "Religion in Southern Culture," either in the fall or spring. I taught this course during my first year at UTC, and it is time to offer it again. The last time I taught it, I had the students read Christine Heyrman's Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, Patrick Mason's The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South, and Paul Harvey's Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era. I made the mistake, however, of not lecturing at all, instead pushing the class to have discussions on the weekly required reading. Although my student evaluations for the course were overall very good, some people commented that I should have given some lectures. Reflecting on the course, I agree with that suggestion. So, throughout the year, and into the summer, I plan on putting together some lectures on religion and culture in the South.

For my lectures, I will be drawing from the following books:

Philip Mulder's A Controversial Spirit: Evangelical Awakenings in the South, Randall Stephens's The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South, Sylvia Frey's and Betty Wood's Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830, Cynthia Lynn Lyerly's Methodism and Southern Mind, 1770-1810, Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion: The 'Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South, E. Brooks Holifield's The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795-1860, Gregory Wills's Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, 1785-1900, Robert Calhoon's Evangelicals and Conservatives in the Early South, 1740-1861, Erskine Clarke's Our Southern Zion: A History of Calvinism in the South Carolina Low County, 1690-1990, Charles Reagan Wilson's Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis and Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, John Boles's The Great Revival: Beginnings of the Bible Belt and Black Southerners, 1619-1869.


For my project on Jonathan Edwards and transatlantic print culture in the eighteenth century, I am reading Edward Cook's The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England, Christine Heyrman's Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750, Bruce Daniels's The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635-1790, J. W. T. Youngs's God's Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750, A History of the Book in America: Volume 2, edited by Robert Gross, Gerald McDermott's One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards, Cedric Cowing's The Saving Remnant: Religion and the Settling of New England, Lisa Wilson's Ye Heart of a Man: The Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England, Lawrence Buell's New England Literary Culture: From Revolution Through Renaissance, William Gilmore's Reading Becomes Necessity of Life: Material Culture Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835, Carole Shammas's The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America, Michael Zuckerman's Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century, and David Copeland's Colonial American Newspapers: Character and Content.


And for "fun" reading, I recently ordered Andre Vauchez's Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, which will no doubt help me with my planned spring course, "Pivotal Moments in Christian History."