Project MUSE®: American Religion - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in American Religion.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2019) through current issueLatest Articles: American ReligionTWOProject MUSE®American Religion2643-92472643-9255Latest articles in American Religion. Feed provided by Project MUSE®A Case for Half-Lives: Ten Years after a Charleston Shooting
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979643
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On March 1, 2025, I drove into Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church’s parking lot for the biweekly Black History Class led by the church historian, Lee Bennett. A church stewardess soon arrived and parked nearby. Unsure if I was early, I approached her. She was holding her Sonic meal and cheerfully introduced herself, explaining she was there to help dress the Altar for First-Sunday Communion, a task usually assigned to respected senior women. After asking if I had breakfast (perhaps to determine whether she should share hers), she advised me to return to my car because unknown individuals were using the parking lot as a shortcut between Henrietta and Calhoun Streets. A few minutes later, her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallA Case for Half-Lives: Ten Years after a Charleston Shooting2026-01-11text/htmlen-USA Case for Half-Lives: Ten Years after a Charleston Shooting2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®388442026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11Notes on an American Pope
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979644
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In the lead up to the May 2025 conclave to elect a new pope, word on the street was that it would not be an American. Why not? The answer was that Americans had enough power. Well. The Holy Spirit seems to have felt differently. Or maybe we misunderstood the nature of a conclave? And what a pope is for? The new American pope does not seem to be in the model of the be-ringed and be-dazzled US bishops of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He is of mixed race. A missionary to the poor. A polyglot intellectual. Gentle and modest of demeanor. Quick to smile. Not immediately identifiable as an ugly American. Different apparently in every way from the American who is now dominating everyone’s lives and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallNotes on an American Pope2026-01-11text/htmlen-USNotes on an American Pope2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®211622026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11S. W. Hopkins’s “Gospel of Intelligent Industry”: The Industrial Religion of the Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979645
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On October 13, 1892, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Thomas Jefferson Morgan announced his solution to the so-called Indian problem: “We must either fight Indians, feed them, or else educate them. To fight them is cruel, to feed them is wasteful, while to educate them is humane, economic, and Christian.”1 Key to his plan was increasing the number of government-run, off-reservation boarding schools. These schools were modeled on Colonel Richard Henry Pratt’s experimental Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School (1879–1918). At Indian Industrial Boarding Schools, Native American children were separated from their families and communities in order to assimilate them into the dominant, white
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallS. W. Hopkins’s “Gospel of Intelligent Industry”: The Industrial Religion of the Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School2026-01-11text/htmlen-USS. W. Hopkins’s “Gospel of Intelligent Industry”: The Industrial Religion of the Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®1042942026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11Preacher Moss Sets the Tone: A New Genealogy and Anatomy of American Muslim Comedy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979646
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Preacher Moss once again starred in the 2023 edition of “The Super Muslim Comedy Tour,” an annual benefit tour organized by the Muslim charity Penny Appeal in the United Kingdom. In its advertising materials, the organization emphatically described the headliner as “the pioneer and O.G. of Muslim comedy.” Bryant Reginald Moss, better known by his stage name Preacher Moss, is regarded by many as the pioneer of Muslim comedy in the United States, and is recognized for his social activism and dedication to community empowerment. As with many other comedians in the Muslim circuit today, Moses the Comic was inspired by the trailblazing work of Preacher Moss. He says:When I first started, I was trying to find my voice
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallPreacher Moss Sets the Tone: A New Genealogy and Anatomy of American Muslim Comedy2026-01-11text/htmlen-USPreacher Moss Sets the Tone: A New Genealogy and Anatomy of American Muslim Comedy2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®1198182026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11Ethics and Entanglement: Nancy Hiller Teaches Religious Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979650
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This review essay is an effort to focus on a particular location for ritual practice and ideological formation and to do so with a particular author, Nancy Hiller (1959–2022), whose relationship to scholarly observation is nonstandard. The second edition of her first book, The Hoosier Cabinet in Kitchen History, occasions our reflections. For a forty-year period—from the late 1890s through the 1930s—the Hoosier Manufacturing Company sold an evolution of the baker’s cabinet called the Hoosier cabinet. A baker’s cabinet is a worktable with one or more bins underneath and usually a shallow upper section for storage. The Hoosier cabinet added a flour bin with a built-in sifter, a pullout counter to expand its enameled
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallEthics and Entanglement: Nancy Hiller Teaches Religious Studies2026-01-11text/htmlen-USEthics and Entanglement: Nancy Hiller Teaches Religious Studies2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®640772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11The Delight Makers: Anglo-American Metaphysical Religion and the Pursuit of Happiness by Catherine L. Albanese (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979651
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Critical disassembly has been the order—not just of the day, but of the past several decades—among historians of American religion. The process has met critical needs, including the creation of space for a far more diverse constellation of religious subjects and a broader range of religious phenomena. At the same time, it has also greatly taxed the art of narrative and created another pressing need: to reconstruct and reintegrate the field. Few scholars working during this period have addressed both of these needs—for both the wrecking ball and structural renewal—so thoroughly as Catherine Albanese. Her involvement reaches back at least to 1981, the initial publication year of her sharply revisionist textbook
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallThe Delight Makers: Anglo-American Metaphysical Religion and the Pursuit of Happiness by Catherine L. Albanese (review)2026-01-11text/htmlen-USThe Delight Makers: Anglo-American Metaphysical Religion and the Pursuit of Happiness by Catherine L. Albanese (review)2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®113072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979652
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Take a moment and consider all the things that you have discarded over the course of your life. Consider every milk carton, foil wrapper, plastic container, Styrofoam packing peanut, cardboard box, ripped clothing item, scratched DVD, broken phone, and ask yourself: what happened to all those things? This is the question at the heart of Alexander Clapp’s ambitious book Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash.In searching for answers, Clapp embarked on several years of investigative reporting to trace the movement of trash across the world and expose the insidious history of the multi-billion-dollar global waste trade. Throughout the book, Clapp builds a compelling argument that the global waste trade is an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallWaste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp (review)2026-01-11text/htmlen-USWaste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp (review)2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®70872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites by Dana Lloyd (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979653
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Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites revisits the 1988 case Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association through the lens of Indigenous sovereignty. A scholar of law and religion, author Dana Lloyd re-examines the divergent understandings of land articulated in the Lyng decision to challenge the false binary at the center of the case: either land is sacred or it is property (25). The book traces five distinct approaches to land as they pertain to the High Country in northern California: land as home, as property, as sacred, as wilderness, and as kin. Finally, Lloyd concludes that understanding land as sovereign offers a more capacious understanding of kinship from the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallLand Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites by Dana Lloyd (review)2026-01-11text/htmlen-USLand Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites by Dana Lloyd (review)2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®107152026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11Golden States: How California Religion Went From Cautionary Tale To Global Brand by Eileen Luhr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979654
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In Golden States: How California Religion Went From Cautionary Tale To Global Brand, Eileen Luhr describes some of the fundamental transformations in modern American religion by focusing her analysis on Southern California. Forms of religious expression lampooned as “nonsense” by early-twentieth-century critics found footing in California’s new cultural milieu. Rather than see the Golden State’s spiritual experiments as outliers, Luhr’s skillfully crafted argument is that they demonstrate the central themes of contemporary religious life in the United States (1).In the first part of the book, Luhr concentrates on a series of “visionaries” and “pioneers” whose entrepreneurialism catered to the “emotional and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallGolden States: How California Religion Went From Cautionary Tale To Global Brand by Eileen Luhr (review)2026-01-11text/htmlen-USGolden States: How California Religion Went From Cautionary Tale To Global Brand by Eileen Luhr (review)2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®118142026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution by Eva Payne (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979655
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The history of twentieth-century prostitution in the United States often follows a familiar narrative that illuminates connections between “sexuality and statecraft” (7). Scholars have explored the relationship between regulation of sexuality and growth of the state through lenses of carceral power, surveillance, immigration, public health, and imperial ambitions, among others. In Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution, historian Eva Payne makes an important intervention: American exceptionalism was at stake in the way the state managed international and domestic prostitution policies. Centrally, the US’s ability to eradicate and resist prostitution demonstrated a particular “sexual
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallEmpire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution by Eva Payne (review)2026-01-11text/htmlen-USEmpire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution by Eva Payne (review)2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®86482026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display by Sally M. Promey (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979656
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I want to travel across America with Sally Promey, photographing the facades of churches we pass by on the highway, the historical signs we see along the road in small towns, and the majestic terrain of national parks. I’ll be ready to capture the unplanned roadway religion we see along the way—street preachers, trucks painted with New Testament verses, and cars adorned with the evolving feet of Darwin fish decals. Perhaps we will take a helicopter ride, giving us a bird’s-eye view of the ways that roads and zoning regulations have shaped this country to privilege white Christian Americans. Or maybe we’ll fly to Alaska and Hawai‘i, as we consider how colonization repressed Native peoples’ religions not only in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallReligion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display by Sally M. Promey (review)2026-01-11text/htmlen-USReligion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display by Sally M. Promey (review)2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®104192026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11The Jewish South: An American History by Shari Rabin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979657
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Shari Rabin’s The Jewish South argues that the southern states provide a too often overlooked view of Jews practicing responses to “modern questions: whether and how they should enact their identity as Jews” (xi). Readers will find a tightly organized, readable narrative of impressive scope through which the author traces “how Jews contributed to and navigated emerging systems of inequality and hierarchy across four centuries in the territory that would briefly—but significantly—become the Confederate States of America” (x).Rabin argues that Jewish contributions to and navigations of southern society were “inextricable from material conditions.” By focusing on the American South, she renders readers unable “to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallThe Jewish South: An American History by Shari Rabin (review)2026-01-11text/htmlen-USThe Jewish South: An American History by Shari Rabin (review)2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®96292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11Sovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History by Simon Rabinovitch (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979658
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In this fascinating new study, historian Simon Rabinovitch considers how “collective rights” intersect with and complicate the two keywords in his title: sovereignty, its most developed form, and religious freedom, where it would seem to have given way to individual rights. Indeed, this is the thrust of international law, which after World War II rejected an earlier model of “minorities treaties” in favor of universal human rights within nation-states. The reality, Rabinovitch argues, has been much messier.Sovereignty and Religious Freedom is a refreshingly global study that upends stark dichotomies and nationalist exceptionalisms. Rabinovitch explores the persistence of collective rights in places where Jews
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallSovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History by Simon Rabinovitch (review)2026-01-11text/htmlen-USSovereignty and Religious Freedom: A Jewish History by Simon Rabinovitch (review)2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®93012026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture by Caleb Smith (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979659
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So it’s March 2025, and I am trying to live each day by these words of Howard Zinn: “The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we believe human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” Caleb Smith’s Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture offers nineteenth-century writers and thinkers as partners in this work of living in and through the present, models of lives keenly lived amid assaults that might have dulled or defeated them. The list includes teachers, convicts, mystics, men and women of letters, and reformers of various stripes. What unites them is the great care each gives to the capacity for attention as a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallThoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture by Caleb Smith (review)2026-01-11text/htmlen-USThoreau’s Axe: Distraction and Discipline in American Culture by Caleb Smith (review)2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®128522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11American Koan: Imagining Zen and Self in Autobiographical Literature by Ben Van Overmeire (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/979660
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Koan, or enigmatic riddles pointing to enlightenment, are traditionally associated with Chinese Chan or Japanese Zen traditions of Buddhism. But what happens when koan appear in the autobiographical writings of American Zen practitioners? Ben Van Overmeire asks this very question in his book American Koan: Imagining Zen and Self in Autobiographical Literature. He argues that when American convert Zen Buddhists use koan in their autobiographies, “koan become American, and Americans become Buddhas” (1). More specifically, in the process of commenting on koan, these American authors assume a role that is traditionally reserved for a Zen master, and by so doing, they act as “living Buddhas” (178). Throughout his
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/825/image/coversmallAmerican Koan: Imagining Zen and Self in Autobiographical Literature by Ben Van Overmeire (review)2026-01-11text/htmlen-USAmerican Koan: Imagining Zen and Self in Autobiographical Literature by Ben Van Overmeire (review)2026-01-112026TWOProject MUSE®85792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-01-11