About Prayer in America
Thought Provoking books, many recommended by the makers of the documentary, “Prayer in America“
Al-Hibri, Azizah Y., Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Haynes, Charles C., and Marty, Martin E., Religion in American Public Life: Living with Our Deepest Differences. (2001)
From Publishers Weekly: At a time when conflicts are increasingly litigated rather than discussed, forums in which diverse Americans seek common purpose deserve special celebration. This book represents one such forum: the background papers, final report, and call to action of the American Assembly’s second gathering, which was dedicated to the role of religion in American public life. For three days, leaders from many sectors and faith-based organizations worked together on policies and actions concerning religion’s intersection with education, social services, the media, and other arenas. And yet, as the book’s subtitle suggests, this religiously diverse gathering did not achieve consensus on intractable matters of religion and conscience…. This book, and the three-day assembly of which it is the product, represent an invaluable framework for civic disagreement. That the disagreeing citizens are luminary thinkers makes this book a valuable part of the national conversation.
Brekus, Catherine, The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past (2007)
From Amazon.com: More than a generation after the rise of women’s history alongside the feminist movement, it is still difficult, observes Catherine Brekus, to locate women in histories of American religion. In this collection of 12 essays, contributors explore how considering the religious history of American women can transform our dominant historical narratives. Covering a variety of topics-including Mormonism, the women’s rights movement, Judaism, witchcraft trials, the civil rights movement, Catholicism, everyday religious life, Puritanism, African American women’s activism, and the Enlightenment-the volume enhances our understanding of both religious history and women’s history. Taken together, these essays sound the call for a new, more inclusive history.
Butler, Jon (Editor) and Stout, Harry S. (Editor), Religion in American History: A Reader. (1997)
From Amazon.com: At the end of the twentieth century, religion seems to be ubiquitous in America. Its existence and influence are especially apparent in our politics, but its presence is most deeply felt in our personal lives and experience. Was it always this way? Offering a rich selection of classic and recent scholarship, Religion in American History: A Reader presents an extraordinary portrait of religion’s fate across four centuries of the American experience. Its essays cover major issues in American history and religion, detailing religion’s purpose in American life and examining many topics that are either ignored or minimized in similar books. It addresses the decline and revival of American Indian religion; women’s powerful roles in American religion; immigration, assimilation, and separation, and how they have contributed to the American religious experience; political activism; and religious bigotry. It also discusses Catholics, Protestants and fundamentalism, Mormons, and Jews. Selected debates encourage readers to test conflicting interpretations about religion’s impact on American history, and original documents trace religion’s influence on slavery, race, and politics from the colonial era to the late twentieth century. Divided into three sections - colonial era, nineteenth century, and twentieth century - and featuring essays by prominent American historians, this volume serves as an excellent text for courses in American Religion, the History of Religion, and Religion and Culture. It is enhanced by helpful introductions to each essay and ample suggestions for further reading. Uniquely comprehensive, Religion in American History: A Reader serves as a one-volume tour through America’s tumultuous, varied, and often misunderstood religious past.
Cadge, Wendy, Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America (2004)
From Publishers Weekly: Cadge presents a carefully considered ethnography examining “how Buddhism arrived in the United States and is… adapting” to its new context. Specifically, she focuses on Theravada Buddhism, the branch practiced in such Southeast Asian countries as Thailand and Sri Lanka. She begins with an overview of the history of Theravada Buddhism and its establishment in the U.S. by both Asian immigrants and - separately - American-born converts who had studied in Asia. She spends the bulk of the book focusing on Wat Phila, a Thai temple near Philadelphia founded and attended by native Thais, and the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center (CIMC), founded and attended primarily by white Americans.
Marty, Martin E., Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America. (1985)
From M.B. Trapp: For a highly readable and engaging history of religion in America, you can’t get much better than Marty. Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America is the work of an accomplished scholar who knows how to write history as it should be: an ongoing drama filled with interesting characters moved by varying motivations. Marty paints the picture of American religious life as a vivid panorama of people and movements committed, in their own way, to that particularly American brand of the human search for God.
Meacham, Jon, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation. (2006)
From Publishers Weekly: Historian and Newsweek editor Meacham’s third book examines over 200 years of American history in its quest to prove the idea of religious tolerance, along with the separation of church and state, is “perhaps the most brilliant American success.” Meacham’s principal focus is on the founding fathers, and his insights into the religious leanings of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Co. present a new way of considering the government they created. So it is that the religious right’s attempts to reshape the Constitution and Declaration of Independence into advocating a state religion of Christianity are at odds with the spirit of religious freedom (”Our minds and hearts, as Jefferson wrote, are free to believe everything or nothing at all - and it is our duty to protect and perpetuate this sacred culture of freedom”). Meacham also argues for the presence of a public religion, as exemplified by the national motto, “In God We Trust,” and other religious statements that can be found on currency, in governmental papers, and in politicians’ speeches….Two extensive appendices reprint early government documents and each president’s inaugural bible verses.
McCloud, Aminah Beverly, Transnational Muslims in American Society. (2006)
From University Press of Florida Web site: “A must read for anyone with a serious interest in American Islam. This indispensable work complicates the process of immigration, citizenship or just what belonging means for Muslim migrants of all sorts . . . a balanced assessment by a highly respected Muslim scholar [and] a much needed voice in our divided world.” - Zain Abdullah, Temple University
This in-depth yet accessible guide to Islamic immigrants from the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa challenges the widely held perception that Islam is monolithic and exclusively Arab in identity and expression. Offering a topical discussion of Islamic issues, the author argues that there is no one immigrant Islam community but a multifaceted and multicultural Islamic world. She offers an insider’s look at what ideals and practices Muslims bring to this nation, how they see themselves as Americans, and how they get along with each other and with indigenous American Muslims.
Ostrander, Rick, The Life of Prayer in the World of Science: Protestants, Prayer and American Culture 1870-1930. (2000)
From Amazon.com: During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Christians carried on an intense debate concerning the doctrine of prayer. This ideological revolution affected not only the ways that they interpreted the Bible but also how they prayed. In this book, Rick Ostrander explores the attempts of American Christians to articulate a convincing and satisfying ethic of prayer amidst these changing circumstances.
Raboteau, Albert J.,Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans. (2001)
From Amazon.com: Throughout African-American history, religion has been indelibly intertwined with the fight against intolerance and racial prejudice. Martin Luther King, Jr., America’s best-known champion of civil liberties, was a Baptist minister. Father Divine, a fiery preacher who established a large following in the 1920s and 1930s, convinced his disciples that he could cure not only disease and infirmity, but also poverty and racism. An in-depth examination of African-American history and religion, this comprehensive and lively book provides panoramic coverage of the black religious and social experience in America. Renowned historian Albert J. Raboteau traces the subtle blending of African tribal customs with the powerful Christian establishment, the migration to cities, the growth of Islam, and the 200-year fight for freedom and identity that was so often centered around African-American churches. From the African Methodist Episcopal Church to the Nation of Islam and from the first African slaves to Louis Farrakhan, this far-reaching book chronicles the evolution of an important and influential component of our religious and historical heritage. The book combines meticulously researched historical facts with a fast-paced, engaging narrative that will appeal to readers of any age.
Sarna, Jonathan D., American Judaism: A History. (2005)
From Booklist: Sarna’s detailed history of Jewish life in the U.S. spans 350 years, from its colonial beginnings in 1654 to the present. Sarna points out that already in the late colonial period American Judaism had begun to diverge from religious patterns that existed in Europe and the Caribbean. The American Revolution, the ratification of the Constitution, the passage of the Bill of Rights, and the nationwide democratization of religion further transformed Jewish religious life. Fear for American Judaism’s future underlies many aspects of its history, but Sarna believes that the many creative responses to this fear, the innovations and revivals promoted by those determined to ensure that American Jewish life continues and thrives, seem of far greater historical significance. This comprehensive and insightful study of the American Jewish experience is much more than just a record of events. It is an account of how people shaped events: establishing and maintaining communities, responding to challenges, and working for change. It is compelling reading for Jews and non-Jews alike. George Cohen. Copyright © American Library Association.
Sloan, Richard P., Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. (2006)
From Amazon.com: Thanks to some studies and to accounts by physicians, patients and theologians, it has become popular to believe that prayer can heal the sick and that attending religious services regularly can extend one’s life. But does the evidence for a link between religion and health hold up? Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia, probes the matter in this sometimes provocative but often prosaic book. Reports of the relationship between religion and medicine, he says, are greatly exaggerated and detrimental to both. He writes that dissatisfaction with contemporary medicine, uncritical media stories about religion and health, and advocacy groups that promote a link between religion and health have encouraged patients to seek alternative treatments that exploit that connection. Sloan examines the thousands of reports that prayer has been the key element in healing and finds many are based on anecdotes rather than systematic data collection. Even scientific studies on the healing capacities of faith and prayer do not always prove what they are purported to prove; some, for instance, touch only peripherally on the role of religion in health. For Sloan, attempts to connect religion and medicine can jeopardize patients’ lives by giving false hope.
Stevens Arroyo, Antonio M. and Diaz-Stevens, Ana Maria, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence in U.S. Religion: The Emmaus Paradigm. (1997)
From Amazon.com: This book is a “must read” for all serious students of the contemporary Latino/a religious, cultural, and political experience in the United States. The authors bring research skills and first-hand knowledge of many of the individuals and movements they describe in filling in a complex picture of social change in churches and society. In so doing, they provide an important overview of Latino religious experience (both Protestant and Catholic)…. Most significantly, Recognizing the Latino Resurgence in U.S. Religion illuminates the dangers of entangling the Latino experience - religious and otherwise - with that of Euro-Americans and Afro-Americans, or of naively assuming that Latinos are following the assimilationist model of the Euro-American experience. The American penchant for thinking along racial rather than colonialist lines is also subjected to a much need critique vis-a-vis the Latino experience. The text is dense at points, but always engaging and filled with provocative insights into the ever-changing dynamics of religion and culture in American society. This book is highly relevant to a variety of topics as diverse as ethnic and intergroup relations, the theology of popular religiosity, Latino religion(s), social change, organizational dynamics, studies of identity formation, multicultural pluralism and the complex role of faith experience in American political and social life.
Zaleski, Philip and Zaleski, Carol, Prayer: A History. (2005)
Bryce Christensen © American Library Association: In prayer, the poet George Herbert recognized the acme of civilization. Yet this religious practice has rarely received the sort of careful cultural analysis the Zaleskis here offer. From Ramses II’s petitions invoking Amun’s assistance in battle to Ansel Adams’ photographs offered as an opus Dei, this sweeping cultural history illumines the abiding influence of prayer in shaping human thought and behavior. Readers explore the way those who pray - whether in modern America or in ancient Babylon - hope for magic and submit to the divine will, seek for answers and contemplate mysteries. The Zaleskis limn traditional taxonomies of prayer that have long differentiated adoration from confession, thanksgiving from intercession, and they examine the forms of language, art, and music through which generations of believers have reached toward heaven. But many readers will particularly value the distinctively contemporary note in the survey of scientific studies of the efficacy of prayer and in the dissection of recent controversies over prayer in schools and other public forums. Surprisingly, investigation of modern prayer ends up teaching almost as much about skeptics (such as Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton) as about saints (such as Therese Martin). And in the American passions stirred by post-9/11 prayers, readers will discern a tangle of devotion and politics. A much-needed study of a neglected topic.
