Perspectives on American Religion and Culture

Williams, who teaches at Miami University of Ohio, has assembled a distinguished collection of essays by 27 American religious historians that deal with America's religious diversity and religion's relationship to American society. These include provocative pieces by Stephen Stein (religion on the margins), Amanda Porterfield (the Puritan legacy) and Paula Kane (20th-century American Catholic culture). The topics discussed range from the nature of present-day pluralism (Charles Lippy) to Christian responses to the body, specifically, fasting and body image (Marie Griffith), to snake handling (Bill Leonard). Albert Miller offers a particularly fine essay on African-American Evangelicalism. Almost all ethnic groups and many types of religious traditions--among them Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon and Evangelical--are given a voice here. The diversity of contributions makes it difficult to summarize the book; each essay, in effect, launches a new topic, and the various contributions are more united by their common methodologies of religious study than by mutual themes. The contributors show a sophisticated awareness of new directions in scholarship, such as attention to material culture and religion. Scholars will find this an informative and rich collection, although general readers may feel that individual essays require too much knowledge of American history and of particular religious traditions to be useful. (Sept.)