project directors

Laurie Maffly-Kipp has been at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1989. She received her B.A. from Amherst College in English and Religion, and completed the PhD in American History at Yale University (1990). She is now an associate professor in the Religious Studies department and holds an adjunct appointment in the American Studies Curriculum.  Maffly-Kipp's current research and teaching focuses on African-American religions, religion on the Pacific borderlands of the Americas, and issues of intercultural contact. In Religion and Society in Frontier California (1990) she explored the nature of Protestant spiritual practices in the gold-rush California. In articles on Mormon-Protestant conflicts in the Pacific Islands, African-Americans in Haiti and Africa, and Protestant outreach to Chinese immigrants in California, Maffly-Kipp has analyzed the religious contours of nineteenth-century American life. Along with her work on Christian practice, she is currently completing a second book project entitled African-American Communal Narratives: Religion, Race, and Memory in Nineteenth-Century America.

Leigh Schmidt is a professor in the Department of Religion at Princeton University.  His current Lilly-supported book project is on the making of American spirituality in the century after Emerson, which will appear in 2005 from HarperSanFrancisco.  He has written on Protestant revivalism, popular religion, ritual and the consumer culture, the history of perception, mysticism, and the history of the study of religion.  His specific essay for the History of American Christian Practice project is entitled: "'The Piety of the World':  Sympathy, Comparative Religions, and Nineteenth-Century Liberalism."

Mark Valeri is the E. T. Thompson Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia.  He has a Ph.D. from Princeton University and a M. Div. from Yale University Divinity School.  He previously taught at Lewis and Clark College, in Portland, Oregon.  He is the author of Law and Providence in Joseph Bellamy's New England: the Origins of New Divinity in Revolutionary New England (1994) and editor of Volume 17 in the Yale edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards (1999).  He also has written several articles in Puritanism and social thought in early America and on Jonathan Edwards.
 

plenary speaker

Grant Wacker is professor of church history at Duke University. His publications include Augustus H. Strong and the Dilemma of Historical Consciousness (Mercer, 1985), Heaven Below: Pentecostals and American Culture (Harvard, 2001), and, with Jon Butler and Randall Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short History (Oxford, 2002). He has co-edited, with James R. Goff Jr., Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders (Arkansas, 2002) and, with Daniel H. Bays, The Foreign Missionary Enterprise at Home: Explorations in North American Cultural History (Alabama, 2003). Since 1997 Wacker has served as a senior editor of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. A past president of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Wacker is currently researching a cultural biography to be titled, Billy Graham and Modern America and, with Harry S. Stout and Randall Balmer, a survey of religion in U. S. history designed for college, seminary, and university readers.
 

senior advisors

Dorothy C. Bass is Director of the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, a Lilly Endowment project based at Valparaiso University that sponsors a series of books and conferences aimed at developing theological, historical, and practical resources that will contribute to the authenticity and vitality of contemporary efforts in Christian education and formation. Dr. Bass is the author of Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time (Jossey-Bass, 2000), and she has edited or co-edited Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People (Jossey-Bass, 1997), Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Eerdmans, 2002), and Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens (Upper Room Books, 2002). She is a graduate of Wellesley College, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she earned a Ph.D. in American Civilization. The author of many essays on American religious history, she has taught in several colleges and theological schools.

Richard Wightman Fox is a Professor of History at the University of Southern California.  He has previously taught at Boston University, Reed College, and Yale University.  Educated at Stanford University, Fox specializes in 19th and 20th century U.S cultural and intellectual history.  His teaching and scholarship centers on the question of how ideas, beliefs, and cultural practices develop in relation to social structures and individual quests for meaning.  Fox’s publications include Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal (University of Chicago Press, 1999), Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (Pantheon Books, 1985), and So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California (University of California Press, 1978).  He has co-edited In Face of the Facts: Moral Inquiry in American Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 1998), A Companion to American Thought (Blackwell Publishers, 1995), The Power of Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1993), and The Culture of Consumption (Pantheon Books, 1983).

Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ as well as an American religious historian. After serving congregations in Maryland and Pennsylvania for 22 years, currently he directs the Doctor of Ministry program and teaches church history and courses on the practice of ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He received his degrees from Boston University (Ph.D.), Pacific School of Religion (M.A.; M.Div.), and Hamilton College (A.B.). Dr. Hambrick-Stowe is the author of two books on early New England religious experience, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982) and Early New England Meditative Poetry: Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor (Paulist Press, 1988), and a biography, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1996). Journal articles and book chapters include essays on Jonathan Edwards and other topics related to the Great Awakening. He has served as religion consultant for several television projects, most recently the PBS-BBC series Colonial House.

Albert Raboteau is the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion and Princeton University, where he has taught since 1982.  He is a specialist in American religious history. His research and teaching have focused on American Catholic history and African-American religious movements. He has written Slave Religion: The 'Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History, and most recently A Sorrowful Joy.
 

project participants

Catherine Brekus (Ph.D., Yale University) is an Associate Professor of the History of Christianity in the Divinity School and the Department of History at the University of Chicago.  Brekus is an American religious historian whose research focuses on the colonial, early national, and antebellum periods. She specializes in the history of women and religion, and is also interested in revivalism, slave religion, children, and popular religious movements. She is the author of "Strangers and Pilgrims:" Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845, and is currently working on a book entitled Sarah Osborn's World (1714-1796): Popular Religion in Eighteenth-Century America.

Anthea Butler is Assistant Professor of Theological Studies At Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. She holds the Ph.D. in religion from Vanderbilt University, and her areas of scholarly interest include African American religion and culture, American Religious history, and Evangelicalism.  Her current book project is Making a Sanctified World: Women in the Church of God in Christ, which will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2005. She has several articles forthcoming on various subjects including African American Catholics, African American women and migration, and Women’s Bible reading in the 19th Century.

Heather Curtis is a doctoral candidate in the History of Christianity at Harvard University.  Her areas of specialization include religion in the North America, Christian spirituality, and gender in American religious history.  Her dissertation, entitled “’Acting Faith’: The Devotional Ethics of Religious Healing in Late-Nineteenth-Century Protestantism," investigates how Protestant women and men in late-nineteenth century North America and Great Britain employed devotional practices as a means for negotiating the various gender norms, scientific theories, and Christian theologies that influenced their experiences of pain, illness, and health. Curtis is currently a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation fellow, and a Dissertation Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University.  She served as the Assistant Head Tutor for the undergraduate program in the Comparative Study of Religion at Harvard from the fall of 2001 through the spring of 2003.

Michael McNally is Assistant Professor of Religion at Carleton College.  He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in American Religious History, and has trained in Ojibwe language and culture with Minnesota's Ojibwe communities.  He is author of Ojibwe Singers: Hymns Grief and a Native Culture in Motion (Oxford, 2000), editor of The Arts of Tradition: Sacred Music, Dance, and Myth of Michigan's Anishinaabe 1946-1955 (Michigan State University Press, forthcoming), and a number of articles on the practices  of Native American Christianity, including contributions to David Hall's Lived Religion in America (Princeton) and Colleen McDannell's American Religion in Practice (Princeton). He is current at work on a book exploring the cultural history of aging and eldership in Ojibwe religion.

Sally M. Promey (Ph.D., History of Culture, University of Chicago) is Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, and Affiliate Faculty Member in the Department of American Studies, at the University of Maryland.  She teaches and publishes on American art and visual culture from the seventeenth century to the present, with a research specialization in relations among images, objects, and religions in American culture.  Her publications include two award winning books: Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library (Princeton University Press, 1999; pbk 2001) and Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Indiana University Press, 1993) as well as The Visual Culture of American Religions, co-edited with David Morgan (University of California Press, 2001) and Exhibiting the Visual Culture of American Religions, with David Morgan, (exh. cat., Brauer Museum of Art, 2000).  She is currently at work on a history of the public display of religion in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present.

Rick Ostrander currently serves as Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of History at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, AR.  He has researched and written in the areas of American Protestant spirituality, fundamentalism and liberalism, and history of higher education.  Ostrander's first book, The Life of Prayer in a World of Science: Protestants, Prayer, and American Culture, 1870-1930 (Oxford, 2000), explored the attempt by turn of the century Protestants to articulate a meaningful and coherent ideology of prayer amid the intellectual and social changes of the day.  His most recent book, Head, Heart, Hand: John Brown University and Modern Evangelical Higher Education (University of Arkansas, 2003), analyzes John Brown University as a case study in the changes to Protestant higher education over the course of the twentieth century.  As a Fulbright Scholar, Ostrander will spend the spring 2004 semester teaching and writing at the University of Wurzburg in Wurzburg, Germany.

Roberto Lint Sagarena (Ph.D./M.A. Princeton University, B.A. University of California at Santa Cruz) is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California.  He is currently at work revising a history of the how religious historical tropes have worked to define place in Southern California.

Tisa Wenger received her Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University, and specializes in nineteenth and twentieth century American religious history. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies in 2002-2003, and is now Acting Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. She has published essays in the Journal of Feminist Studies of Religion and the Journal of Southwest Studies, and is now writing a book titled Defining Religion: The Pueblo Dance Controversy and American Representations of “Primitive Religion.” Her research interests include the cultural history of the study of religion, religion and dance, and the history of Christian missions in America.

David K. Yoo is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of History, Claremont McKenna College, and Core Faculty Member, Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at the Claremont Colleges.  He is the author of Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture Among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-1949 (2000) and editor of New Spiritual Homes: Religion and Asian Americans (1999).  His current research projects include a book project on the early history of Koreans in the United States as well as a co-edited volume on Korean American religion and spirituality.  Yoo received his education at Claremont McKenna College (B.A.), Princeton Seminary (M.Div.), and Yale University (Ph.D.)
 

practical theologians

Kathleen A. Cahalan is associate professor of theology at Saint John's University School of Theology and Seminary.  She received her doctorate in practical theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School and currently teaches courses in practical theology and ministry.  She is the author of Formed in the Image of Christ: The Sacramental-Moral Theology of Bernard Häring (Liturgical Press, 2004) and Projects that Matter: Successful Planning and Evaluation for Religious Organizations (Alban, 2003).

The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy presently serves as pastor of the Covenant Presbyterian Church in Long Beach, California, a multicultural church in the most multicultural city in America. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale University and his M.Div. at Princeton Theological Seminary. Formerly a professor at Monmouth College in Illinois, his academic interests lie in the area of the philosophy of religion, comparative religion and practical ethics. He is married to the Rev. Adele K. Langworthy.

The Rev. Craig D. Townsend, an Episcopal priest, has been Associate Rector at St. James' Church on Madison Avenue in New York City since 1997.  His focus is teaching and providing programming for an extensive adult education program.  One current project is a two-year course entitled, "The Rest of the Week: Learning and Living the Christian Faith," which integrates in-depth study of basic Christian theology with analysis of stories - our own, and those of others - to develop the ability to do theological reflection on our own experiences.  Townsend earned his Ph.D. in American Religious History at Harvard University.
Integrating Faith: Black and White Episcopalians in Antebellum New York City, a re-working of his dissertation, will be published by Columbia University Press in 2005.