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Deborah Dash Moore

The urban origins of American Judaism began with daily experiences of Jews, their responses to opportunities for social and physical mobility as well as constraints of discrimination and prejudice. Deborah Dash Moore explores Jewish participation in American cities and considers the implications of urban living for American Jews across three centuries. Looking at synagogues, streets, and snapshots, she contends that key features of American Judaism can be understood as an imaginative product grounded in urban potentials.

Jews signaled their collective urban presence through synagogue construction, which represented Judaism on the civic stage. Synagogues housed Judaism in action, its rituals, liturgies, and community, while simultaneously demonstrating how Jews Judaized other aspects of their collective life, including study, education, recreation, sociability, and politics. Synagogues expressed aesthetic aspirations and translated Jewish spiritual desires into brick and mortar. Their changing architecture reflects shifting values among American Jews.

Concentrations of Jews in cities also allowed for development of public religious practices that ranged from weekly shopping for the Sabbath to exuberant dancing in the streets with Torah scrolls on the holiday of Simhat Torah. Jewish engagement with city streets also reflected Jewish responses to Catholic religious practices that temporarily transformed streets into sacred spaces. This activity amplified an urban Jewish presence and provided vital contexts for synagogue life, as seen in the captivating photographs Moore analyzes.

University of Georgia Press

George H. Shriver Lecture Series in Religion in American History Ser.

Urban Origins of American Judaism

William J. Baker

That Americans take to sports with a spiritual fervor is no secret. Athletics has even been called a civil religion for how it permeates our daily lives as we chase our own dreams of glory or watch others compete. Few would deny our national devotion to sports; however, many would gloss over it as all of a piece. To do that, as William J. Baker shows us, is to miss the fascinating variety of experiences at the intersection of sports and religion—and the ramifications of such on a national citizenry defined, as Baker writes, “by the team they cheer on Saturday and the church they attend on Sunday.” With nods to modern and ancient history, Baker looks at the ever-changing relationship between faith and sports through vignettes about devout athletes, coaches, and journalists.

Of Gods and Games offers an accessible entrée into some of the larger issues embedded in American culture’s sports–religion connection. Baker first considers two Christian athletes who have engaged sports and religion on fundamentally different terms: Shelly Pennefather, one of the dominant women’s basketball players of the late 1980s, who left the sport for life as a cloistered nun; and Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow, who has used his college and pro football careers as a platform for evangelizing. In discussing basketball coach Dean Smith (University of North Carolina) and football coaches Steve Spurrier (University of South Carolina) and Bill McCartney (University of Colorado) Baker looks at how each strove to honor faith amid sometimes complicated personal lives and ever-crushing professional demands. Finally, Baker looks at how faith inspired such sportswriters as Grantland Rice, who sprinkled his stories with religious allusions, and Watson Spoelstra, who struck a deal with God at his daughter’s deathbed (she recovered) and subsequently devoted his off-hours and retirement years to charity work.

Of Gods and Games: Religious Faith and Modern Sports

Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

With An Uncommon Faith Eddie S. Glaude Jr. makes explicit his pragmatic approach to the study of African American religion. He insists that scholars take seriously what he calls black religious attitudes, that is, enduring and deep-seated dispositions tied to a transformative ideal that compel individuals to be otherwise—no matter the risk. This claim emerges as Glaude puts forward a rather idiosyncratic view of what the phrase “African American religion” offers within the context of a critically pragmatic approach to writing African American religious history.

Ultimately, An Uncommon Faith reveals how pragmatism has shaped Glaude’s scholarship over the years, as well as his interpretation of black life in the United States. In the end, his analysis turns our attention to those “black souls” who engage in the arduous task of self-creation in a world that clings to the idea that white people matter more than others. It is a task, he argues, that requires an uncommon faith and deserves the close attention of scholars of African American religion.

An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion

Paul Harvey

Religion in the American South emerged as part of a globalized, transnational movement of peoples from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Ironically, it then came to be seen as the most localized, provincial kind of religion in America, one famously hostile to outside ideas, influences, and agitators. Yet southern religious expressions, particularly in music, have exercised enormous intellectual and cultural influence. Despite southern religion’s provincialism during the era of evangelical dominance and racial proscriptions, the kinds of expressions coming from the American South have been influential across the globe.

With this book Paul Harvey takes up the theme of southern religion in global contexts through a series of biographical vignettes that illustrate its outreach. In the first segment he focuses on Frank Price, the Presbyterian missionary to China and advisor to Chiang Kai-Shek. In the second he focuses on Howard Thurman, the mystic, cosmopolitan, preacher, intellectual, poet, hymnist, and mentor for the American civil rights movement. In the third he looks to the musical figures of Rosetta Tharpe, Johnny Cash, and Levon Helm, whose backbeat, harmonies, and religious enthusiasms contributed to much of the soundtrack of the world through the second half of the twentieth century.