Beginning with the legacy of Roger Williams, who in 1633 founded the first colony not restricted to people of one faith, The Lively Experiment chronicles how Americans have continually demolished traditional prejudices while at the same time erecting new walls between belief systems. The chapters gathered here reveal how Americans are sensitively attuned to irony and contradiction, to unanticipated eruptions of bigotry and unheralded acts of decency, and to the disruption caused by new movements and the reassurance supplied by old divisions. The authors examine the way ethnicity, race, and imperialism have been woven into the fabric of interreligious relations and highlight how currents of tolerance and intolerance have rippled in multiple directions. Nearly four hundred years after Roger Williams' Rhode Island colony, the "lively experiment" of religious tolerance remains a core tenet of the American way of life. This volume honors this boisterous tradition by offering the first comprehensive account of America’s vibrant and often tumultuous history of interreligious relations.

In this lucid and learned book one of America's outstanding historians shows the development of the thought and institutional life which characterize Christianity in America. He explains this religious development in terms of the emergence of religious freedom and the physical fact of the frontier. As he enlarges upon many aspects of his main theme, Dr. Mead traces the parallel growth and creative tension of Christianity and democracy.Dr. Mead discusses:The American PeopleFrom Coercion to PersuasionAmerican Protestantism during the Revolutionary EpochThomas Jefferson's Fair ExperimentAbraham Lincoln's Last, Best Hope of EarthWhen Wise Men HopedDenominationalismAmerican Protestantism Since the Civil War I. From Denominationalism to AmericanismAmerican Protestantism Since the Civil War II. From Americanism to ChristianityThe Lively Experiment is an unusually interesting and timely study that will appeal to every reader concerned with the religious, social, intellectual, and cultural history of America.

This volume explores the impact and import of the provocative and challenging work in this generation's most notable French feminists. Despite the growing influence of the French feminists in the humanities (especially in literary criticism, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis), American religionists have only recently begun to utilize their approaches and theories. The volume introduces the characteristic concerns and themes of the leading French feminists (particularly Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva), assesses their work against the very different orientations and impulses of North American feminism, and gauges the potential of their ideas for both hermeneutical explorations and for feminist theologies. In the process contributors shed important light on such issues as the normativity of women's experience, the character of subjectivity, and structural dimensions of oppression. For those who would join this critical conversation, Transfigurations will be the indispensable entree. Contributors include: Ellen T. Armour Rebecca S. Chopp Elizabeth Grosz Amy Hollywood Serene Jones Cleo McNelly Kearns Francoise Meltzer Sharon D. Welch

Are the denominations really dying? Two experienced church "watchers" who have lived the question on a daily basis provide statistics, insights, and hope that the rumor is premature.

The eighteen essays collected in this book originate from a conference of the same title, held at the Wingspread Conference Center in October of 1993. Leading scholars were invited to reflect on their specialties in American religious history in ways that summarized both where the field is and where it ought to move in the decades to come. The essays are organized according to four general themes: places and regions, universal themes, transformative events, and marginal groups and ethnocultural "outsiders." They address a wide range of specific topics including Puritanism, Protestantism and economic behavior, gender and sexuality in American Protestantism, and the twentieth-century de-Christianization of American public culture. Among the contributors are such distinguished scholars as David D. Hall, Donald G. Matthews, Allen C. Guelzo, Gordon S. Wood, Daniel Walker Howe, Robert Wuthnow, Jon Butler, David A. Hollinger, Harry S. Stout, and John Higham. Taken together, these essays reveal a rapidly expanding field of study that is breaking out of its traditional confines and spilling into all of American history. The book takes the measure of the changes of the last quarter-century and charts numerous challenges to future work.