Gods in America : religious pluralism in the United States / edited by Charles L. Cohen and Ronald L. Numbers.

ISBN:

9780199931910

9780199345779

Title:

Gods in America : religious pluralism in the United States / edited by Charles L. Cohen and Ronald L. Numbers.

Author:

Cohen, Charles Lloyd, editor.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xviii, 386 pages) : illustrations

Contents:

Religious Pluralism in Religious Studies / Amanda Porterfield -- Religious Pluralism in Modern America : A Sociological Overview / John H. Evans -- Worlds in Space : American Religious Pluralism in Geographic Perspective / Bret E. Carroll -- Evangelicalism and Religious Pluralism in Contemporary America : Diversity Without, Diversity Within, and Maintaining the Borders / William Vance Trollinger, Jr. -- Pluralism : Notes on the American Catholic Experience / R. Scott Appleby -- Religious Pluralism in American Judaism / Deborah Dash Moore -- Muslims and American Religious Pluralism / Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad -- Buddhism, Art, and Transcultural Collage : Toward a Cultural History of Buddhism in the United States, 1945-2000 / Thomas A. Tweed -- Beyond Pluralism : Global Gurus and the Third Stream of American Religiosity / Joanne Punzo Waghorne -- The Impact of Religious Pluralism on American Women / R. Marie Griffith -- Popular Religion and Pluralism, or, Will Harry Potter Be Left Behind? / Peter W. Williams -- Finding Light through Muddy Waters : African American Religious Pluralism / Stephanie Y. Mitchem -- From Consensus to Struggle : Pluralism and the Body Politic in Contemporary America / Charles H. Lippy -- Piety, International Politics, and Religious Pluralism in the American Experience / Paul Boyer -- 'Courting Anarchy? : Religious Pluralism and the Law / Shawn Peters.

Subject Term:

Religious pluralism -- United States.

Geographic Term:

United States -- Religion.

Added Author:

Cohen, Charles Lloyd,

Numbers, Ronald L.,

Format:

Electronic Resources

Electronic Access:

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Publication Date:

2013

Publication Information:

New York, NY :

Oxford University Press,

[2013]

Available:*

Shelf Number	Material Type	Copy	Shelf Location	Status
200.973 23	1:E-BOOK	1	1:ONLINE	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Religious pluralism has characterized America almost from its seventeenth-century inception, but the past half century or so has witnessed wholesale changes in the religious landscape, including a proliferation of new spiritualities, the emergence of widespread adherence to ''Asian'' traditions, and an evangelical Christian resurgence. These recent phenomena--important in themselves as indices of cultural change--are also both causes and contributions to one of the most remarked-upon and seemingly anomalous characteristics of the modern United States: its widespread religiosity. Compared to its role in the world's other leading powers, religion in the United States is deeply woven into the fabric of civil and cultural life. At the same time, religion has, from the 1600s on, never meant a single denominational or confessional tradition, and the variety of American religious experience has only become more diverse over the past fifty years. Gods in America brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to explain the historical roots of these phenomena and assess their impact on modern American society.

Author Notes

Charles L. Cohen is Professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Ronald L. Numbers is Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

It is commonly stated--falsely, note editors Cohen and Numbers--that the US is the most religiously diverse country on earth. While that may not be the case, the variety of religious groups in the US undoubtedly is large, and has grown since the 1960s, when President Lyndon Johnson lifted the last of the isolationist anti-immigration policies instituted in the years following WW I. In Gods in America, the editors and 15 contributors examine how various religious groups and cultural sites have dealt with religious diversity through the trope of pluralism. As noted by Amanda Porterfield in her excellent opening essay, the notion of religious pluralism "imputes positive meaning to religion and encourages appreciative understanding of its many forms." Yet, as Bret Carroll's useful essay on space, geography, and pluralism suggests, religious diversity has been as much a cause for contestation as celebration in the American context. The chapters in this volume are consistently strong. They move beyond examining specific religious groups' attitudes toward pluralism to include cultural sites such as law, popular culture, art, and international politics. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers. S. McCloud University of North Carolina at Charlotte