Southern Religion, Southern Culture
Southern Religion, Southern Culture
Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson
Contributions by Ryan L. Fletcher, Darren E. Grem, Paul Harvey, Alicia Jackson, Ted Ownby, Otis W. Pickett, Arthur Remillard, Chad Seales, and Randall J. Stephens
Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson’s research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways.
This volume pays tribute to and extends Wilson’s seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the essays examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson’s model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South’s religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes.
The volume first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region’s fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, this book shows that Wilson’s groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South’s complicated history and culture.
Here broad interpretations of religion are not a gimmick; they are instead testaments to the pervasiveness of religious impulses, and to the reciprocal influence between the churches and culture of the American South. Wilson gave scholars permission to grapple with this dynamic church-culture interplay in new and creative ways, and since each essay bears his unmistakable imprint, Southern Religion, Southern Culture is a fitting tribute to one of the most influential scholars of southern religious history.
Specialists in the field will find some of the topical essays in this volume useful as they teach and undertake further research. More general readers of American or religious history will benefit from the introductory and concluding essays, which could lead them into Wilson’s own books and articles, a body of scholarship worthy of the celebration this book intends, featuring methods that can tell the story of religion better in almost any region or tradition.
In this Festschrift, Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson, editors Darren E. Grem, Ted Ownby, and James G. Thomas Jr. have compiled a collection that is appropriately diverse in its content and consistent in employing the creativity cultivated by the honoree. On topics that range from antebellum Episcopalians in politics to African American education, Holiness media innovation, football goalposts, and macabre southern relics, the essays in this volume successfully reflect the powerful impact that Wilson has had on the field of southern history.
From Elvis’s shroud to toppled goalposts paraded through Oxford like religious relics on parade, with stops along the way to reexamine a diverse array of topics including the complicated racial legacy of John Lafayette Girardeau, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and higher education in Mississippi, and Pentecostal innovations in using media to reach and preach to the masses, this is a wonderful set of magnetically eclectic essays to celebrate the career and inspiration of Charles Reagan Wilson.
The editors of this elegant volume have pulled off a near-miracle: create a portrait of religion in the American South that captures the theoretical rigor and experimentation of one of its greatest historians, Charles Reagan Wilson. Like Wilson, the contributors challenge the boundaries traditionally circumscribing fields of inquiry and objects of study and instead search for the divine in the mundane, the unusual, and the wondrous. They find it in southerners’ relationships to football, Civil War reenactors and Civil War relics, the media, and education. Patiently listening to how different types of southerners—white and black and brown, denominational and charismatic—experience faith in their daily lives, they capture forgotten voices of spiritual experience that drift across the landscape. In their analytical innovation and sophistication, the editors offer a fitting tribute to one of the field’s most significant practitioners.
Darren E. Grem (Editor)
Darren E. Grem is associate professor of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi, author of The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity,and coeditor of The Business Turn in American Religious History.
Ted Ownby (Editor)
Ted Ownby is William F. Winter Professor of History and professor of southern studies at the University of Mississippi. He is editor of The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South, Manners and Southern History, The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, and Black and White: Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South and coeditor of Clothing and Fashion in Southern History, The Mississippi Encyclopedia,and Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
James G. Thomas Jr. (Editor)
James G. Thomas, Jr., is associate director for publications at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is an editor of the twenty-four-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and The Mississippi Encyclopedia;coeditor (with Jay Watson) of Faulkner and Print Culture, Faulkner and History, and Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas; and editor of Conversations with Barry Hannah. His work has appeared in Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi: The Twentieth Century, Southern Cultures, Southern Quarterly,and Living Blues.
