The Religions in America Workshop explores the role of religion in American culture from the colonial period to the present. Our goal is to better understand the complex ways in which religious traditions, practices, and concerns shape and respond to the American experience. To that end, this interdisciplinary workshop will consider American religion’s relevance and relation to other categories such as race, gender, economics, politics, and literature. We will consider work from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives, in keeping with the most current trends in the study of religion in America.
While based at the Divinity School, the workshop welcomes scholars from a variety of academic disciplines and departments. Presentations by students, faculty and distinguished guest speakers take place in a discussion-oriented environment designed to further the research, inquiry, and knowledge of both presenters and participants alike. Our hope is to provide a vibrant intellectual community for students and faculty in the growing Religions in America subfield at the university, as well as to connect the burgeoning work in that department with the broader intellectual life of the university.
Faculty Advisors
Curtis Evans is an historian of American religions. His teaching interests are modern American religion, particularly since the Civil War, race and religion in US history, and slavery and Christianity. His first book, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008), was an historical analysis of debates about the role of religion in the lives of African Americans and the origins of the scholarly category of “the black church.” His research emphases are interpretations and cultural images of African American religion, examinations of religion as a force for and obstacle to social and political reform, and the question of how social problems become defined and addressed as moral problems at particular historical moments. More recently, his research on Billy Graham’s political and social views have led increasingly into teaching courses on and reading more deeply about the rise of the Christian Right and the emergence and history of conservative Protestantism in the US. His current work, A Theology of Brotherhood: The Federal Council of Churches and the Problem of Race (forthcoming) brings together a number of his research interests: the FCC’s attempt at social and racial change from the 1920s to the 1940s, the evolution of theological reflections on race, and the concrete and particular circumstances that shape historical actors as they wrestle with the constraints of their social worlds. This narrative is a critical historical evaluation of the FCC’s interracial work as a predominantly white Protestant and ecumenical organization, but also a reflection on the factors that illuminate the prominence of a certain strand of Protestantism in American public life in the early 20th century.
Matthew Harris is a scholar of race and religion in the United States and researches at the intersection of African American religion, Black radical traditions, and the politics of culture. He writes, always, with the aim of recovering histories of struggle to appreciate the theoretical and practical tools they offer to both reimagine the critical study of society and remake our world. His current project, Black Religion Under the Sign of Saturn, is a religious history of how outer space became the place of Black freedom dreams in the twentieth century. He received his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles and MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, and his PhD from the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Student Coordinator
Maggie Goldberger is a second-year PhD student at the University of Chicago Divinity School.