senior advisory board

Included in the leadership of the History of American Christian Practice Project is an advisory board of four senior scholars.  This board offers counsel on the historical and contemporary dimensions of our project.   Members of this board include Dorothy Bass of Valparaiso University, Richard Fox of the University of Southern California, Charles Hambrick-Stowe of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and Albert Raboteau of Princeton University.  In addition to his role as a senior advisor, Charles Hambrick-Stowe also serves as a advisor to the practical theologians with the Project.
 

associates

The scholars who have joined our conversation include Catherine Brekus of the University of Chicago, Anthea Butler, presently a fellow with the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, Heather Curtis, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University, Michael McNally of Carleton College, Rick Ostrander of John Brown University, Sally Promey of the University of Maryland, Roberto Lint Sagarena of the University of Southern California, Tisa Wenger, also a fellow with the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, and David Yoo of Claremont McKenna College.  As their projects develop, we will post updates on the participants' research.

practical theologians

We have invited three other consultants to join us for the January 2003 meeting in Miami and the final conference in October 2004 at Union Theological Seminary of Virginia.  These consultants are pastors and practical theologians interested in bridging the gap between the practice of contemporary Christianity and the historical study of Christian practice.  Participants include Rob Langworthy of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Long Beach, California; Kathleen Cahalan of St. John's University; and The Rev. Craig Townsend of St. James' Episcopal Church in New York City.
 

the directors and their projects

Aside from their shared management of the Project, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Schmidt, and Mark Valeri also intend to interrogate their own research questions through Project conversations.  Each has a research project aimed at further excavating the historical dimensions of American Christian practice.  Below, the directors speak to the relationship between their academic work and the Project's overall goals.
 

Laurie Maffly-Kipp, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Assembling Bodies and Souls: Comparative Religious Practice on the Pacific Frontier

This current project builds upon my ongoing interests in situations of cultural contact and negotiation, matters of increasing relevance in Christian life today.  How do Christians make sense of their beliefs and practices in the face of profound religious difference and diversity?  How and why are traditional modes of piety rejected or transformed?  In my first book, Religion and Society in Frontier California (1994), I examined attempts by Protestant evangelical missionaries to bring a New England-based style of Christian devotion to the thriving mining communities of gold-rush California.  In that instance, novel socio-economic realities, denominational politics, and cultural diversity necessitated a dramatic and unsettling adaptation of evangelical practices, including Sabbath observance, women's church fairs, and burial rituals.  Miners and missionaries, in different ways, attempted to preserve the "essence" of the Christian life in trying circumstances.  The study suggested that, rather than seeing mining communities as hopelessly immoral (as many observers claimed), examining the logic of religious choices in that setting explains a great deal about the later trajectory of Christian organizational life in the American West.

 Portrait of Thomas L. Johnson, b. 1836

My subsequent work continues this interest in the adaptation of Christianity in new cultural sites.  I am currently completing a book entitled African-American Communal Narratives: Religion, Race and History in Nineteenth-Century Life.  In that work I turn to the practice of narrating and writing religious history, and analyze the means by which African-American Protestants modified and rewrote sacred histories in an increasingly racialized situation.  The project examines sermons, Masonic histories, missionary accounts from Haiti and Africa, and, by the late nineteenth century, religious histories of the race, in which racial identity became a defining and enduring characteristic of the Christian story.  Throughout the book, close attention is paid to history as a form of religious practice; it highlights endeavors that enabled communal storytelling, such as new publishing ventures, parades that reenacted historical events, and missionary lecture tours.  The study argues that the narration of the Christian life is, in a significant sense, a type of devotional practice, but cautions that the historical contingencies of racial politics and ideology molded--and continue to determine--the particular expressions of that piety.
 

As part of this proposed project, I will return to the Pacific basin, a location of increasing importance to the future of our nation and, I would argue, to the future of Christianity itself.  The history of Christian missions has always concerned itself with the dissonance between religious precepts and local practices, and with the effort to adapt European (and later Euro-American) Christian ideals to new cultural realities.  This study places Christian missionary experience in a wider field of vision.  It will explore missionary life itself as a distinctive form of Christian practice, one among many conflicting kinds of spiritual rubrics that competed for cultural space in the emerging communities of the Pacific Rim during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The narrative places Catholic and Protestant evangelistic efforts alongside those of Mormons, eastern Orthodox, and even Buddhist migrants to the western part of North America (principally Hawaii, Alaska, California, Oregon, and Washington), and in doing so, focuses attention on how the colonial enterprise fostered new modes of living--including dress, bodily comportment, dietary habits, patterns of prayer and Sabbath observance--among inhabitants of these areas.  In doing so, it will lend much-needed historical depth to our understanding of the spiritual practices of the many "new immigrants" of the post-1965 period, as well as bringing to light the religious history of the western part of the continent.
 

Leigh Schmidt, Princeton University
Roads for Traveling Souls: The Making of American Spirituality

David Hume

The impact of the commercial revolution on religious practices was at the center of my second book, Consumer Rites:  The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (1995),  in which I examined such red-letter festivals as Christmas, Easter, New Year’s, and Mother’s Day and their relationship to the expanding consumer culture.  That project again tried to make Christian devotionalism fully part of cultural history, to place the ritual enactments of trade journals and show-window decorators right alongside those of ministers and Sunday School publications.  The book suggested again why it is so ill advised to abstract religious practices from the dense cultural contexts that shape them.  In my latest book, Hearing Things:  Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (2000), I have returned squarely to devotional practices, particularly prayer, scriptural meditation, and contemplation.  In this case, I have tried to fathom a core modern debate about religious experience and the senses. While Christianity had long cultivated an inward realm in which the “spiritual senses” were opened, Enlightenment philosophes made the discipline, refinement, and augmentation of the bodily senses a primary pursuit.  That learned enterprise of anatomizing the senses came at considerable expense to the Christian sensorium of contemplatives, pietists, and evangelicals.

These books, along with my involvement in David Hall’s project on Lived Religion in America:  Toward a History of Practice (1997), form the backdrop to my current research, which attempts to develop a history of American Christian spirituality in the axial period from transcendentalism through the social gospel.  The new project will dwell on a constellation of Christian devotional practices that were widely reimagined in the seventy-five years or so following the Civil War:  for example, the desert solitude of the Christian hermit, the meditative silence of Quakers, the asceticism of Catholic mystics, and the popularized Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodoxy.  The book will also pay close attention to the landscape of spiritual retreat, the emerging topography of contemplation in American culture, the intersections of place and practice, whether in monasteries, retreat centers, private getaways, or camp-meeting grounds.  Though a work of historical reconstruction, it will expressly attempt to provide a longer temporal perspective for the current sociology of a Baby-Boomer spirituality of seeking.
 

Mark Valeri, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia
Moral Discipline and the Market in Early American Protestantism

This study engages changes in Christian practices of moral discipline as they related to the emergence of a market economy in early America.  My interest in this topic began with my previous work on evangelical Calvinism and social affairs in eighteenth-century New England.  My Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy’s New England: The Origins of the New Divinity in Revolutionary America (1994) addressed the growing concern among New Englanders for a practical and social expression of piety-- a concern that expressed itself in political activism.  My long-term study of Jonathan Edwards, issuing in a volume in the Yale series of Edwards’s works (Sermons and Discourses, 1730-1733), convinced me that the moral challenges of the market also were central issues for eighteenth-century Christians.  A historical question emerged for me: how was it that Reformation-based Christian communities (e.g., New England Puritanism) were transformed from antagonists to proponents of a market economy over the course of the eighteenth century?

 John Trumball, The Reverend John Mayhew Wainright, 1820
I have approached this question by turning to a variety of sources: records of church discipline, merchants’ papers, sermons, and tracts.   I have already written several articles and essays exploring how English and American Protestants, especially merchants, came to see natural law as a substitute for corporate notions of moral discipline.  They began to understand Christian economic practice and social solidarity in terms of commercial laws.  My intention is to gather together my previous work, complete the research (especially on eighteenth-century commercial culture), and integrate it into a study that ranges beyond Puritan Boston to include Christian communities in Revolutionary New England, Philadelphia, and New York.

I hope that my work engages contemporary concerns as well.  Indeed, I have been struck by the fact that my theological students, fellow pastors, and parishioners in the world of business have expressed a great interest in the project.  They have raised many pertinent questions.  What is the relation between individual rights and spiritual discipline in a modern (which is to say, liberal) economy?  What role should a particular Christian community play in holding its individuals accountable to Christian standards of economic practice? How should we negotiate the conflict between a rational business acumen and mandates for charity, simplicity, or Sabbath keeping?  This project is designed to produce a book that examines the historical issue, and does so in a way that helps us to address these, and other, questions.