History of American Religion, 1865 to Present will consider the varieties of American religious experience while keeping in mind the importance of pluralism in the U.S. context.
Growing up in cosmopolitan Beirut, Lebanon we lived in a popular neighborhood where a microcosm made up of the representatives of the officially recognized eighteen denominations lived side by side with their churches, mosques and the single synagogue of the Jewish quarter. Among this multitude, I also remember, we had a gathering place, located in [...]
Author Grant Tweed states in his introduction that the one concept that can definte the Pentecostal movement’s success, more than any other, is the “ability to hold two seemingly incompatible impulses in productive tension.” (Pg 10) Whether one calls it primative vs. pragmatic, supernatural vs. tangible, there is a difficult, yet symbiotic, tension between these [...]
My discussion prompt for the preface, introduction, and first three chapters of Grant Wacker’s Heaven Below will focus on its structure and thesis, and attempt to locate it historiographically. The book is a cultural history of a religious movement that also draws on social history. It is determinedly focused on the daily experiences [...]
The final four chapters in Grant Wacker’s “Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture” are extraordinarily important. These final four chapters ["Society", "Nation", "War", "Destiny"] effectively illustrate how the Pentecostals evolved with the changing historical events around them, particularly in the early twentieth century with the outbreak of World War One, the Roaring Twenties [...]