Edited by John Corrigan (NHC Fellow, 2014–15) The contributors to Feeling Religion analyze the historical and contemporary entwinement of emotion, religion, spirituality, and secularism. They show how attending to these entanglements transforms understandings of metaphysics, ethics, ritual, religious music and poetry, the environment, popular culture, and the secular while producing new angles from which to approach familiar … Continued
By Jonathan M. Hess (NHC Fellow, 1999–00) In the analysis of the debates in Germany over Jews, Judaism and Jewish emancipation in the late 18th and 19th centuries, Jonathan M. Hess reconstructs a crucial chapter in the history of secular anti-Semitism. He examines not only the thinking of German intellectuals of the time but also … Continued
By Gretchen Murphy (NHC Fellow, 2018–19) Drawing on literature, correspondence, sermons, legal writing, and newspaper publishing, this book offers a new account women’s political participation and the process of religious disestablishment. Scholars have long known that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American women wrote pious, sentimental stories, but this book uses biographical and archival methods to understand … Continued
By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (NHC Fellow, 2006–07) More than the citizens of most countries, Americans are either religious or in jail — or both. But what does it mean when imprisonment and evangelization actually go hand in hand, or at least appear to? What do “faith-based” prison programs mean for the constitutional separation of church and state, … Continued
To create a holy commonwealth and a godly society, the founders of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut instituted religious establishments—arrangements by which the civil government favored one church and penalized anyone who dissented from its teachings. The view that government had no business meddling in religious matters gained momentum throughout the Anglo-American world during the eighteenth … Continued
Designating the appropriate role of religion in the early republic’s civic life presented a challenge. Most of the Founders believed that religion would promote public morality, which in turn would strengthen both republican society and government in the United States. That being the case, what constituted an appropriate inclusion of religious ideas and rituals in … Continued
In recent decades, the role of deism in the American founding has become highly charged. Evangelical and/or “traditional” Protestants have claimed that Christianity was central to the early history of the United States and that the nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Secularists respond that large fractions of the principal founding fathers were not Christians … Continued
Contrary to what many observers predicted in the 1960s and early 1970s, religion has remained as vibrant and vital a part of American society as in generations past. New issues and interests have emerged, but religion’s role in many Americans’ lives remains undiminished. Perhaps the one characteristic that distinguishes late-twentieth-century religious life from the rest … Continued