Southern Religion in the World

Three Stories

Title Details

Pages: 120

Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in

Formats

Hardcover

Pub Date: 09/01/2019

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5572-6

List Price: $104.95

Paperback

Pub Date: 09/01/2019

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5592-4

List Price: $20.95

Southern Religion in the World

Three Stories

How southern religion has influenced and continues to influence global culture

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  • Description
  • Reviews

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.

Successfully offers up vignettes to explore broader themes in American religious history. Each chapter is a great starting point to discuss the relationship between personal choices and wider connections; local, national, and global developments; and ideas of where religion starts and ends.

—Hilde Løvdal Stephens, Journal of Southern History

Human imagination, expanded and stunted by social arrangements, tries to make sense of the world within which each individual lives. Harvey’s group biography shows us how to reconstitute these pasts as people navigated their known reality with the parts of traditions that they had been handed. The reshaping of southern religion as it moves not only in the region but also across the globe should give us more contradictions of those created and lived theologies than any tight narrative of systematic renderings of southern religion might give us.

—Douglas Thompson, H-Net Reviews

About the Author/Editor

PAUL HARVEY is a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era and Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South (Georgia).