Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History - Hardcover

Raboteau, Albert; Manis, Andrew; Wilson, Charles Reagan; Harrell Jr., David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0820322970 ISBN 13: 9780820322971

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2001

Synopsis

Invoking the strong ties they sense between the courses of their lives and their careers, the sixteen historians of religion who have contributed to Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History share their thoughts and motivations. In these highly personal essays, both pioneering and promising young scholars discuss their work and interests as they recall how the circumstances of their upbringing and education steered them toward religious history. They tell of their own time and place and of their growing awareness of how religion ties into larger social issues: gender, class, and, most notably, race. Indeed, one essay begins, "I was asked to write about why I came to study religion in the South. It was then I realized that it was because my grandfather had been lynched." Lutheran, Jewish, Catholic, Methodist, and Episcopal viewpoints are represented as, of course, are Baptist. Some contributors have stood in the pulpit; others at least commenced their higher education with that aim. While some contributors were born and reared, and now work in the Bible Belt, others are outsiders—physically, philosophically, or both. Some came from intellectual traditions; others were the first in their family to attend college. Despite their common interest in its history, southern religion is anything but an intellectual abstraction for the contributors to this book. It is a potent force, and here sixteen men and women offer themselves as proof of its power to shape lives.

About this title

About the Authors

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON is director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and a professor of history at the University of Mississippi. He is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and author of Baptized in Blood (Georgia).

FREDERICK A. BODE is a professor of history at Concordia University and the author of Protestantism and the New South.

JEAN E. FRIEDMAN is an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia.

SAMUEL S. HILL is a professor emeritus of religion at the University of Florida. He is the author or editor of a number of books and essays, including The South and the North in American Religion, Southern Churches in Crisis, and The Encyclopedia of Religion in the South.

WAYNE FLYNT is a southern historian and educator who retired after teaching for decades at Auburn University, where he directed more than sixty graduate programs. He has lectured at Sichuan University in China, at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, at the universities of Newcastle, Oxford, Cambridge, and Sussex in Great Britain, at the Franklin Roosevelt Center in The Netherlands, and at the University of Vienna. He is the author of fourteen books dealing with Southern politics, history, white poverty, and culture (religion, art, music, literature). His numerous awards include the Rembert Patrick Award for Florida History, the Lillian Smith Prize for Nonfiction from the Southern Regional Council, the Alabama Library Association Award for non-fiction (three times), the C. Vann Woodward/John Hope Franklin Prize by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum Award for Excellence in Writing, a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize (1989), and the Alabama Governor's Award for the Arts.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0820322970
• ISBN 13: 9780820322971
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Boles John B.