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Practicing Protestants

Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965

edited by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri

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This collection of essays explores the significance of practice in understanding American Protestant life. The authors are historians of American religion, practical theologians, and pastors and were the twelve principal researchers in a three-year collaborative project sponsored by the Lilly Endowment.

Profiling practices that range from Puritan devotional writing to twentieth-century prayer, from missionary tactics to African American ritual performance, these essays provide a unique historical perspective on how Protestants have lived their faith within and outside of the church and how...

This collection of essays explores the significance of practice in understanding American Protestant life. The authors are historians of American religion, practical theologians, and pastors and were the twelve principal researchers in a three-year collaborative project sponsored by the Lilly Endowment.

Profiling practices that range from Puritan devotional writing to twentieth-century prayer, from missionary tactics to African American ritual performance, these essays provide a unique historical perspective on how Protestants have lived their faith within and outside of the church and how practice has formed their identities and beliefs. Each chapter focuses on a different practice within a particular social and cultural context. The essays explore transformations in American religious culture from Puritan to Evangelical and Enlightenment sensibilities in New England, issues of mission, nationalism, and American empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, devotional practices in the flux of modern intellectual predicaments, and the claims of late-twentieth-century liberal Protestant pluralism.

Breaking new ground in ritual studies and cultural history, Practicing Protestants offers a distinctive history of American Protestant practice.

Reviews

Reviews

Each of the essays in Practicing Protestants offers rewarding insights into some facet of American religion.

Thoughtful, thought provoking, well researched, well written, and engaging... A wonderful showcase of the scholarship of American church historians.

A unique perspective into a burgeoning field... Will undoubtedly provide a scholarly benchmark from which other historical and theoretical studies in practice theory can be examined.

Practicing Protestants is both comprehensive in its introduction to the study of religious practice and specialized in its consideration of many and varied subjects pertaining to religion in America. It is a book long overdue, and thus a starting point for more collaborative efforts to understand the complicated lives of American Christians.

A very readable and theoretically astute collection of essays that brings to light valuable conclusions drawn from original research. Readers will really appreciate the value of this volume for teaching and research.

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About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
376
ISBN
9780801883620
Illustration Description
23 halftones
Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Puritan and Evangelical Practice in New England, 1630–1800
Chapter 1. Writing as a Protestant Practice: Devotional Diaries in Early New England
Chapter 2

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Puritan and Evangelical Practice in New England, 1630–1800
Chapter 1. Writing as a Protestant Practice: Devotional Diaries in Early New England
Chapter 2. Forgiveness: From the Puritans to Jonathan Edwards
Part II: Mission, Nation, and Christian Practice, 1820–1940
Chapter 3. Assembling Bodies and Souls: Missionary Practices on the Pacific Frontier
Chapter 4. Honoring Elders: Practices of Sagacity and Deference in Ojibwe Christianity
Chapter 5. Nurturing Religious Nationalism: Korean Americans in Hawaii
Chapter 6. Re-Forming the Church: Preservation, Renewal, and Restoration in American Christian Architecture in California
Part III: Devotional Practices and Modern Predicaments, 1880–1920
Chapter 7. "Acting Faith": Practices of Religious Healing in Late-Nineteenth-Century Protestantism
Chapter 8. Observing the Lives of the Saints: Sanctification as Practice in the Church of God in Christ
Chapter 9. The Practice of Prayer in a Modern Age: Liberals, Fundamentalists, and Prayer in the Early Twentieth Century
Part IV: Liberal Protestants and Universalizing Practices, 1850–1965
Chapter 10. Cosmopolitan Piety: Sympathy, Comparative Religions, and Nineteenth-Century Liberalism
Chapter 11. The Practice of Dance for the Future of Christianity: "Eurythmic Worship" in New York's Roaring Twenties
Chapter 12. Taste Cultures: The Visual Practice of Liberal Protestantism, 1940–1965
Notes
List of Contributors
Index

Author Bios
Featured Contributor

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Ph.D.

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp is an associate professor of religious studies and American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Mark Valeri
Featured Contributor

Mark Valeri, Ph.D.

Mark Valeri is the E. T. Thompson Professor of Church History at the Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education.
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