A Brief History of American Protestantism

Pray TV ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Steve Bruce
Keyword(s):  
American Protestantism ◽  
History Of

From Arbor Day to the Environmental Sabbath: Nature, Liturgy, and American Protestantism

1991 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-323
Author(s):  
Leigh Eric Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
John Muir ◽  
Rachel Carson ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
American Churches

In the past two decades considerable theological energy has been expended in the construction of various ecological theologies and spiritualities. Process theologians, ecofeminists, and theologians of creation, earth, nature, ecology, and land have been elucidating religious perspectives that they hope will help transform human attitudes toward nature and the environment. These writers have sought to reorient Christianity away from anthropocentric views that claim human dominion over nature, premillennial expectations that embrace the destruction of this world, soteriological preoccupations that focus on individual salvation, and otherworldly assumptions that foster alienation from the earth and nature. Some sanguine observers have seen this recent ferment as the greening of American theology or even the greening of the American churches. At the same time, intellectual historians have paid increasing attention to the history of Western ideas about nature and have debated at length the impact of Christianity's theological heritage on the environmental crisis. Specifically, a number of historians have constructed a genealogy of American conservationist and preservationist thought by tracing out a line that includes, among others, George Catlin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson.

Forum on Antebellum American Protestantism

2015 ◽  
Vol 84 (3) ◽  
pp. 608-609
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Church History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Traditional Church ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
Theoretical Developments

At the 2015 Winter Meeting of the American Society of Church History, the panel “Futures of the American Religious Past” examined two of the most provocative and influential recent analyses of antebellum American protestantism—Mark A. Noll's America's God and John Lardas Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America. In one sense, the pairing is odd. The two books appear drastically different, stylistically and methodologically. Modern's highly original monograph constructs a genealogy of antebellum American secularism, illuminating ways in which this cultural force haunted the historicity of American protestantism. His analysis interweaves the theoretical and discursive approaches of cultural studies and religious studies. Noll's book, on the other hand, constructs a more traditional, though deeply creative, history of protestant religious ideas, attentive to the agency of individual thinkers and institutions. Both books are brilliant, yet they exist at two opposite disciplinary poles in the study of American religions. Their juxtaposition embodies what Laurie Maffly-Kipp in her 2013 American Society of Church History Presidential Address called our “transitional moment” in American religious history, as theoretical developments of religious studies confront traditional church history paradigms.

Christian Fundamentalism in America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Bendroth
Keyword(s):  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
American Christianity ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Bible ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Specific Meaning ◽  
The 1960S

Fundamentalism has a very specific meaning in the history of American Christianity, as the name taken by a coalition of mostly white, mostly northern Protestants who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, united in opposition to theological liberalism. Though the movement lost the public spotlight after the 1920s, it remained robust, building a network of separate churches, denominations, and schools that would become instrumental in the resurgence of conservative evangelicalism after the 1960s. In a larger sense, fundamentalism is a form of militant opposition to the modern world, used by some scholars to identify morally absolutist religious and political movements in Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and even Hinduism and Buddhism. While the core concerns of the movement that emerged within American Protestantism—defending the authority of the Bible and both separating from and saving their sinful world—do not entirely mesh with this analytical framework, they do reflect the broad and complex challenge posed by modernity to people of faith.

A History of Lectionaries: From the Synagogue at Nazareth to Post-Vatican II

1977 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-130
Author(s):  
John Reumann
Keyword(s):  
Vatican Ii ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
History Of

The story of the lectionary runs from the pre-Christian synagogue to the new Roman Catholic Ordo and its variants in American Protestantism. Across the centuries those who fashioned lectionaries were seeking to provide inclusive, appropriate, and crucial sequences of readings from Scripture which opened its richness to the congregation.

Is There a Center to American Religious History?

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 380-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Vance Trollinger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious History ◽  
American Religious History ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Protestantism ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
Martin Marty

Over the past few years I have been dealing with a narrow version of this question, as it has applied to the history of Protestantism in the twentieth century. In our book, Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present, Douglas Jacobsen and I argued that the two-party model of Protestantism in the United States—conservative vs. liberal, fundamentalist vs. modernist, and so on—does not take into account the remarkable complexity and diversity of the Protestant religious experience in America, and in some sense presents distorted picture of that reality. There were scholars—including Martin Marty, who generously contributed a dissenting essay to our volume—who felt that we had overstated our brief against the two-party paradigm. More relevant for our purposes this evening, there were a number of reviewers who agreed with our critique of the two-party paradigm, but who also expressed disappointment that we provided only the barest outlines of a new or better metaphor or model to explain twentieth-century American Protestantism. While I had not gone into this project thinking that we would end the day with a new interpretive paradigm, I certainly was not surprised by this critique. The very first time I gave a paper on some of our preliminary findings, there was a scholar of U.S. religious history in the audience who squirmed throughout the entirety of my remarks; when I finished, before I had the chance to ask for questions, she blurted out: “I find your argument pretty convincing, but if you can't give me a new model to replace the old one, how am I supposed to teach my course on the history of American Protestantism?” Well, we broaden the topic from Protestantism in the United States to religion in the United States, it would seem that, in many ways, this is the issue we are addressing this evening.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document