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the final conference

Schedule of Events     Speaker Biographies     Conference Registration
 

American Christian practices have changed dramatically between the eighteenth century and the present.  Yet, even as many people seek ways to reinvigorate and revitalize devotional life at the turn of the new century, they know little about historical precedents for what they see around them.  How new, in fact, is this kind of practical "seeking"?  How novel is the impulse to intensify spiritual experience, and to assume that Christians in the past have experienced their own faith in more coherent, and less complicated, ways?  What can a closer examination of devotional practices in the past—including prayer, contemplative practices, rituals of death and dying, and hymnody, among others—reveal to us about our current religious situation?

october 21 - 23, 2004

This conference is a public presentation of the work completed by the History of American Christian Practice Project, a four-year collaborative academic venture funded by the Lilly Endowment.  Featuring presentations by each of the project participants, this conference will attempt to summarize our communal research in the field of historical practice studies.  It was our project’s initiating contention that inadequate research had been done on Christian piety and practice in the modern period (for our purposes, the period stretching from the Enlightenment through the World Wars).  As a result, much of the narrative that did exist read as a relatively simple story of declension from Reformation practices of piety to modern secular habits in which Christian routines are sadly commercialized, privatized, and rationalized.

at the university of north carolina at chapel hill

The work of History of American Christian Practice Project participants challenges this traditional paradigm of decline.  Stories of improvised adaptation and continuity within change especially interested us.  At what points and for what reasons did Christians adopt new modes of devotion?  What, for example, explains the attractiveness of market freedoms or the allure of mysticism?  How were older patterns of piety reformulated in modern guise?  What challenges were posed to received practices of mission and evangelization as Americans encountered peoples of non-Christian, non-European background?  What new forms of community, devotion, and practice emerged?  This project sought to uncover the deeply embedded mental constructs and practical habits of the modern epoch that still very much shadow contemporary Christian lives.

Schedule of Events     Speaker Biographies     Conference Registration

For more information about our final conference, contact Kathryn Lofton (klofton@email.unc.edu).
 

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