America's Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century - Softcover

Williams, Peter W.

3.61

51 ratings by Goodreads

9780252075513: America's Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century

Softcover

ISBN 10: 025207551X ISBN 13: 9780252075513

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2008

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

In this comprehensive survey, Williams offers concise descriptions of the background, beliefs, practices, and leaders of America's most influential and distinctive religious movements and denominations. Thoroughly revised and updated, this third edition of America's Religions incorporates the latest scholarship on religion and considers timely issues such as status of Muslims in the United States after September 11, 2001; the impact of religion on American politics, especially concerning the emergence of the Religious Right; and the intense battles fought within the Catholic Church and other denominations over the status of gay marriage and accusations of clergy members' sexual abuse. This edition also includes thirty-eight new illustrations of key persons in American religious history and notable places of worship.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Peter W. Williams is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and American Studies at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of Popular Religion in America and Houses of God.

From Publishers Weekly:

Over the past decade, scholars of American religion have undergone a crisis of narrative. Recognizing that earlier generations of historians have focused their work too narrowly on the experiences of white, male, middle-class Protestants, they have struggled to find a means of representing the incredible variety of spiritual expression that has always existed throughout an ever-diverse population. The solution offered here by Williams, a professor at Miami University (Ohio) and the editor of The Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience, is to abandon narrative altogether. The result, regrettably, is not altogether satisfactory. This volume is astounding in its breadth; 11 of its 55 chapters offer cursory surveys of the major religious traditions. The remaining chapters digest the progress, since 1492, of dozens of spiritual movements and hundreds of religious leaders across a wide spectrum of ethnic and regional identity. However, Williams's resolute dedication to pluralism comes at the expense of both coherence and balance he devotes almost as much space to Victorian Anglicanism as he does to the Second Great Awakening. Although Williams intends this as a college textbook, he takes pains to italicize and define even such familiar terms as "pope," and offers too many simplistic generalizations. His methodological framework, built on the assumption that each group has its own distinct tradition, prevents him from examining crucial processes of cultural contact and exchange. The final product resembles more a collection of brief, loosely related essays than a mature work of synthetic analysis.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.