Seminars, Young Scholars, and Conference Proceedings at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

Paul Harvey

One report and two upcoming seminars/opportunities at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI for you to be aware of.

First, as noted here before, the next (and, for now, final) round of the Young Scholars in American Religion Program is upcoming, and applications to participate are due by February 15. Here is information on the program and how to apply; you can click also on the "young scholars program" label on the right of this blog to see all of our various entries about this in the past.

Next, the Center is hosting a NEH Summer Institute for teachers, July 12-30 2010, on "The Many and the One: Religion, Pluralism, and American History." Click on the link for full information, the schedule, and information on how to apply (applications due March 2, 2010); here is a brief description:

Thank you for taking an interest in The Many and the One: Religion, Pluralism, and American History, a Summer Institute for School Teachers to be held at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) from July 12 to July 30, 2010. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this three-week institute for teachers focuses on religion in American history and culture. Our Institute is part of the NEH’s “We the People” initiative, a program designed to encourage and enhance the teaching, study, and understanding of American history, culture, and democratic principles.

This institute will support the studies of twenty-five talented teachers from across the nation as they join with nationally renowned scholars to explore how religion has shaped, and been shaped by, the American experience. The Institute directors, Philip Goff, Arthur Farnsley, and Rachel Wheeler, are all noted scholars in their field, whose work encompasses a wide range of subject matter and methodologies.

Finally, a posting of great interest: last summer the Center ran the 1st Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture; our contributor Linford Fisher attended and so did our contributor Seth Dowland, whose thoughts are here. The proceedings from the conference have now been published and can be accessed (as a pdf file) here. Comments and presentations comes from many of the stars of the field, including Jon Butler, Amanda Porterfield, Robert Orsi, Daniel Walker Howe, and many others. I plan to blog about this further once I have a chance to read over more of these contributions carefully.

The Vigil of Epiphany

 

A joyful vigil which, even as kept under the traditional calendar, did not involve fasting on the part of the faithful, nor violet vestments for the priest celebrating the Mass. Let us prepare for the great manifestation of the Lord.

History. What Is It Good For? Absolutely -- Something.

Paul Harvey

Especially for you undergrads. and grad. students who read this blog, some thoughts, links, and posts on the job market for historians, and the job possibilities for undergraduate majors in history (happily, the latter appears considerably more open-ended at present).

Tenured Radical asks and offers a number of observations and suggestions on the question, How Should Graduate Schools Respond to the Bad Job Market, a topic that also got a lot of attention at the AHA last week and spurred a classic supply-side versus demand-side discussion (i.e., is the declining academic job market due to decline in demand in relation to supply of PhDs, or is it because that supply-demand imbalance has to do with deliberate university policies, inspired by the corporatization of the university, which have created it? Might it have to do with an "intentional restructuring of demand by administrators?"). The comments are coming in furiously from Tenured Radical's posts, so make sure to follow them as well. A challenge to the conventional narrative comes from Marc Bousquet (author of How the University Works) here.

Then, John Fea (whose blog also covered the AHA extensively) has a fantastic series What Can You Do With A History Major, 17 parts and counting so far, and featuring lots of former history majors who are now in a wide variety of fields, doing just about everything imaginable. This is a series I hope to see awarded a "best series of posts" in some future blogging awards competition; in the meantime, when students ask you that question this semester, you can send them there; and undergraduates reading this blog, do not pass go, just click the link above for some good thoughts on the perennial question of the humanities undergraduate.

"Vocations are Still a “Super-Priority”"

From The Catholic Key
By Bishop Robert W. Finn

Kansas City-St. Joseph

In my first months as bishop of the diocese I said Vocations were a “Super Priority.” While we have had a meaningful increase in vocations to priesthood, the diaconate, and some new vocations to consecrated life, I still offer this intention for more vocations to priesthood and Consecrated Life with fervor in my daily prayer. I hope you do also.

We are reaching the midpoint of the Year for Priests, inaugurated by Pope Benedict XVI last June. How proud I am of our priests who do so much for you, God’s people. Still, they need more help, particularly as the pastoral needs seem always to increase. This year, please God, we will ordain four new priests; and it remains possible that in 2012 we could celebrate the ordination of eight or nine new priests at once. I haven’t figured out how we will get everyone in the Cathedral; a pleasing dilemma!

Am I greedy to suggest that we need more priests? I believe that God is calling more men to this wonderful vocation, and we have to listen carefully and prepare well so that your sons can hear and answer that call.

What kind of life awaits the priest? To be sure, there are many joys, and also challenges. The priest is helped by God to give himself to many people. He shares in the greatest joys of people’s lives and is with them in times of hardship and sorrow. He is a pastor, a shepherd, a teacher, and spiritual father. He stands in the place of Jesus Christ, particularly in the Sacrifice of the Mass and in the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

How does a man discern a possible vocation to priesthood? The healthy man (healthy in body, mind and soul), as he matures, wants to give himself in an honest and generous way. It is important and normal that he sees the beauty of marriage, and its central meaning and purpose in society. At the same time, he realizes he has a spiritual dimension to his life and he wants to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and follow God’s call wherever it may take him. He works hard at every task before him, and finds joy in generously reaching out to others. He studies with zeal. He prays. He establishes caring friendships, and determines to live a moral life, growing in the frequent reception of the sacraments, particularly of Confession and Holy Eucharist.

As a man experiences this spiritual depth to his life, he does not seek a vocation that makes him materially rich or famous. Instead, having realized something of the cost and demands of authentic human love, he is ready to trust God and give himself to others out of love for God. He realizes that the Father in heaven has loved him a lot, and the awareness of this love and mercy makes him want to follow God’s plan in his life. Our seminarians are responding to this vocation to the priesthood. Our priests are living this out with dedication. Keep praying for them to persevere.

The role and support of parents is very important to those who are discerning God’s call. Your sons (and daughters) look up to you for approval. They should. Your love for them is unconditional and unselfish. I do not suggest that you should urge your sons to go to seminary, but pray for them, that they do whatever God wants for them. Support them in their search. I pledge once again to our parents that if we receive their sons as our seminarians we will do all in our power to see they get good formation.

Over the course of my priesthood, I have also had occasion to meet many outstanding men and women Religious. I was taught by and have worked closely with several Orders of Religious Women. There is a real renewal taking place in these vocations today. I have established an office for Consecrated Life, and we stand ready to direct young women and men who may be drawn to Religious life as priests, sisters or brothers.

The Devil, the Earthquake, Pat Robertson, and Some More Assholes

According to Peter Marshall, God decided to take out New Orleans with Katrina (because of, umm, something about gay people living in the French Quarter; or something; but actually the French Quarter escaped Katrina almost entirely unscathed, so I guess God's aim isn't so good); now, according to Pat Robertson, He has decided to go after Haiti. Who's next? If we're lucky, this line of Providential interpretation will find its way into the Texas state history textbooks (and more on that here).

Pragmatic Saint

Editor's Note: Below is the first of two reviews/assessments I hope to post of John Wigger's new biography of Francis Asbury. The first comes from our new contributor Christopher Jones, who is studying Methodism and other subjects at William and Mary.

“The Pragmatic Saint”

Review of John Wigger, American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

by Christopher Jones

“Why do we have no modern critical biography of Francis Asbury, one of the most revered and influential figures in the early republic?” (Nathan Hatch, 1989)

It took twenty years, but someone has finally answered Nathan Hatch’s call for a scholarly biography of Francis Asbury. John Wigger, who studied under Hatch at Notre Dame, has published American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists, a highly readable and lively portrait of the Methodist bishop who shepherded the movement through its early growing pains in America to set it on a course to become the largest Protestant denomination in antebellum America. Contradicting decades-old assessments that “no biographer should try to make [Asbury] lovable, for this he would never allow himself to be,” Wigger concludes that the exact opposite was the case: “Asbury loved and was loved, despite his flaws” (p. 416).

Wigger’s biography does much more than simply satisfy a decades-old call for a critical biography of Asbury and refute simplistic and outdated characterizations of the man, though.

It challenges common assumptions about religious leadership in American history. As Wigger noted in a recent interview, one of his goals in writing this book was to “raise questions for readers about the meaning of religious leadership in America.” Attributing scholarly neglect of Asbury to the fact that he doesn’t neatly fit any of the “three camps” in which “key figures in American religious history are generally lumped” (“charismatic communicators,” “intellectuals,” and “domineering autocrats”), Wigger contends that Asbury’s life forces us to nuance such categorization and look to alternate models of religious leadership. Never known as an eloquent speaker or innovative theologian and having left behind only a scant collection of published writings, Asbury is usually characterized as a rigid autocrat singularly committed to maintaining his hierarchical control by virtue of his status as the head of the Methodist episcopacy in the United States. Such a description, according to Wigger, ignores Asbury’s deeply-rooted piety, his ability to interact and communicate with individuals in intimate settings, his sensitivity to shifts in the surrounding culture (and his related ability to react and adapt), and his organizational genius. Asbury, Wigger maintains, led by example in supervising the force of itinerant missionaries he organized and led. He steered clear of politics (basically hiding out for two solid years during the height of the Revolutionary War), lived a life of relative poverty (never owning a home or plot of land, thus shunning the things of this world), never married (in an effort to more single-mindedly serve the Church), and traveled relentlessly to both preach and maintain personal contact with those he was given charge over (so as to be able to more effectively appoint preachers to locales better suited to different personalities and backgrounds). 

According to Wigger, “Asbury had a better feel for the tension between faith and culture than most of the religious leaders around him” (p. 417). He consistently navigated this tension by exhibiting a pragmatic approach to nearly all tensions within Methodism in an effort to allow the church to grow. He was committed to Arminian theology but never was as strident in his critiques of Calvinism as other Methodists (including Wesley) were. “Theological exactitude didn’t concern him as much as it did Wesley, Wigger suggests. Instead, Asbury read widely in theological and devotional writings in an effort to adequately assess “the intellectual currents of the day, so that he could guide the movement to engage them” (p. 107). He never experienced the miraculous and visionary episodes that other Methodist converts did, but forthrightly refused to automatically reject such experience as heretical or dangerous, and encouraged intimate communal gatherings (class meetings and love feasts) and later adopted camp meetings in an effort to nurture immediate and emotional religious experience. God, Asbury maintained, could manifest Himself differently to different people. While such pragmatism often allowed Methodism to prosper and grow, it sometimes had more negative consequences. Such was the case in Asbury’s shifting commitment to abolition and antislavery. Initially an advocate of requiring all Methodists to emancipate their slaves and no longer participate in the practice, Asbury later decided to allow individual conferences within the movement to decide for themselves whether local clergy and laity could own slaves and remain in good standing with the MEC. Practical commitment to institutional growth trumped ideological devotion to morality.

While Wigger’s biography thus provides a lively and provocative portrait of a complex religious leader, it also succeeds in revealing a detailed and intimate account of early American Methodism. Methodist dissenters and schismatics are granted a greater role in the story of American Methodism than in other accounts of the movement (including Wigger’s own earlier treatment, Taking Heaven by Storm), and several short but illuminating biographies of lesser-known leaders with the MEC are embedded within the larger narrative. In following Asbury’s daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly travels, relationships, and interactions, readers catch a glimpse of the growing pains associated with Methodism’s rise to prominence. Instead of simply noting that Methodism grew immensely during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, Wigger traces the ups and downs of that process, illustrating in the process that Methodist growth was never a guarantee, constantly being threatened by discontent dissenters, rival religious groups, and regional, theological, and ideological disputes within the MEC itself. Asbury’s singular commitment to seeing Methodism prosper in its American setting thus produced mixed results. But that commitment, combined with the dedication and piety of Asbury, qualifies him for the title of “American Saint” granted him by Wigger. 

I was disappointed in Wigger’s occasional failure to engage relevant literature on certain topics. In his otherwise excellent treatment of Asbury’s complicated relationship with Richard Allen and other black Methodist preachers, for example, he fails to cite or engage Richard Newman’s insightful biography of Allen entirely (reviewed at RiAH last year). But such omissions do little to detract from the value of this perceptive and thoughtful offering from Wigger. 

Throughout the book, Wigger’s admiration for Asbury shines through (he notes with apparent satisfaction in one footnote that upon completing his manuscript he “was surprised to find how closely Asbury resembled the leaders described” in a recent book on what makes modern businesses and leaders successful (p. 425, n. 17)). Perhaps previous biographers of Asbury refused to recognize as a lovable figure because they themselves felt no affection for the man. Such is not the case with Wigger. One senses in reading American Saint that Wigger sincerely enjoyed the extensive research and writing that went into this biography because he not only respects but genuinely admires Francis Asbury. Others will likely feel the same after reading the book. This is an important contribution to American religious history, and readers will discover a much more detailed and rich account of Asbury and early Methodism than what I’ve been able to cover here.

---

• Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 220.
• L.C. Rudolph, Francis Asbury (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966), 220.

Family the Focus of US Vocations Week

Click HERE to visit Vatican Radio website and listen to audio file of an interview with Fr. David Toups, director of the Secretariat of Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, discuss obstacles to the promotion of vocations in the US. (look for small speaker icon at the end of the paragraph)