Gods of the Mississippi

Description

Religion along the mighty river

From the colonial period to the present, the Mississippi River has impacted religious communities from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Exploring the religious landscape along the 2,530 miles of the largest river system in North America, the essays in Gods of the Mississippi make a compelling case for American religion in motion—not just from east to west, but also from north to south. With discussion of topics such as the religions of the Black Atlantic, religion and empire, antebellum religious movements, the Mormons at Nauvoo, black religion in the delta, Catholicism in the Deep South, and Johnny Cash and religion, this volume contributes to a richer understanding of this diverse, dynamic, and fluid religious world.

Foreword \ Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Religious Life on the Mississippi \ Michael Pasquier
1. "The Singing of the Mississippi": The River and Religions of the Black Atlantic \ Jon F. Sensbach
2. Religion and American Empire in Mississippi, 1790–1833 \ Sylvester Johnson
3. Movement, Maps, and Wonder: Civil Religious Competition at the Source of the Mississippi River, 1805–1832 \ Arthur Remillard
4. Looking for the New Jerusalem: Antebellum New Religious Movements and the Mississippi River \ Thomas Ruys Smith
5. "Go Down into Jordan: No, Mississippi": Mormon Nauvoo and the Rhetoric of Landscape \ Seth Perry
6. The Mississippi River and the Transformation of Black Religion in the Delta, 1877–1915 \ John M. Giggie
7. The Redemption of Souls and Soils: Religion and the Rural Crisis in the Delta \ Alison Collis Greene
8. Bonfires on the Levee: Place, Memory, and the Sacred in River Road Catholicism \ Justin D. Poché
9. "Big River": Johnny Cash and the Currents of History \ John Hayes
Afterword: "No Home Like a Raft": Repositioning the Narratives of U.S. Religious History \ Thomas A. Tweed

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• History of religions
• Christianity
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 27 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253008084
• Langue: English

Extrait

Gods of the Mississippi
Religion in North America
Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
of the
Mississippi

Edited by
MICHAEL PASQUIER
Indiana University Press
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This book is a publication of
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To our teachers
CONTENTS
FOREWORD \ Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION: Religious Life on the Mississippi \ Michael Pasquier
1 The Singing of the Mississippi : The River and Religions of the Black Atlantic \ Jon F. Sensbach
2 Religion and American Empire in Mississippi, 1790-1833 \ Sylvester Johnson
3 Movement, Maps, and Wonder: Civil Religious Competition at the Source of the Mississippi River, 1805-1832 \ Arthur Remillard
4 Looking for the New Jerusalem: Antebellum New Religious Movements and the Mississippi River \ Thomas Ruys Smith
5 Go Down into Jordan: No, Mississippi : Mormon Nauvoo and the Rhetoric of Landscape \ Seth Perry
6 The Mississippi River and the Transformation of Black Religion in the Delta, 1877-1915 \ John M. Giggie
7 The Redemption of Souls and Soils: Religion and the Rural Crisis in the Delta \ Alison Collis Greene
8 Bonfires on the Levee: Place, Memory, and the Sacred in River Road Catholicism \ Justin D. Poch
9 Big River : Johnny Cash and the Currents of History \ John Hayes
AFTERWORD: No Home Like a Raft : Repositioning the Narratives of U.S. Religious History \ Thomas A. Tweed
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
FOREWORD
This engaging collection of essays assembled by Michael Pasquier explores and exploits the manifold diverse ways that the Mississippi River and the Mississippi River valley have impacted historical, religious, geographical, social, and cultural realities in mid-America and continue to do so today. After working through these essays, one will never again be inclined to limit the Mississippi to any one single category of experience. These essays collectively challenge the standard simple definitions of the Mississippi.
Pasquier has brought together a selection of historians whose expertise ranges widely across the subfields of American history. Most also possess focused research interests on specific religious traditions, geographical regions, and/or cultural patterns with some link to the Mississippi or to the regions surrounding the river. These scholars bring their expertise to bear upon those waters and the religious contexts of this great river as well as upon the diverse ways the river has impacted our understanding of American history, especially the portions of the national narrative dealing with the religious experiences of Americans. The nature and character of those relationships form the substantive center of this collection.
The authors of the essays in this volume, for example, challenge a number of the older ways of organizing American religious history, a narrative that rather standardly moves on an east/west axis. The river s path, however, flows from north to south and features religious stories located in the Midwest, a neglected area in the nation s history, including its religious history. In these essays we encounter the religious traditions held by African slaves in the Mississippi River valley in the antebellum period, the religious changes introduced into the worlds of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Native American tribes when Christian missionaries entered the river valley, as well as the tensions and conflicts that surrounded the members of new religious movements who settled in the valley, including the Mormons at Nauvoo, Illinois. In the case of the Latter-day Saints, they experienced dramatic empowerment from the river but also ultimately tragic conflict with others in the region and the murder of their prophet and founder, Joseph Smith.
Another part of the Mississippi River valley was the delta region which in the decades following the Civil War became a shaping force on Christian worship and liturgical patterns within the expanding holiness and Pentecostal movements as well as a productive context for African American fraternal orders and societies. Religion in the lower Mississippi River valley and in the New Orleans region also included the powerful presence of Roman Catholicism, which was involved in the construction of racial boundaries, the formation of the culture of Jim Crow, and the empowerment of laywomen in the genesis and transmission of Catholic piety.
This rich account of Mississippi religion and culture takes a turn to the contemporary with an essay on Johnny Cash. It is an account of the inner life, the public career, and the biographical twists and turns that this prominent performer and entertainer experienced and the diverse ways in which he responded to religion at various times during his career. Mississippi culture clearly figured in his life at times in very troubling ways.
As he introduces the essays that follow, Pasquier speaks of the collision and coalescence of religious peoples and ideas shaped by and shaping the world of the Mississippi. He is correct to underscore the shaping character of the Mississippi upon the religion and culture of the people who moved to, across, or up and down the river. Thus the river becomes a rich metaphor for the process of cultural mediation carried out by religious people who were in the region of the river. The net result of the religious forces operative in the Mississippi River valley was very mixed. Some of the traditions prospered precisely because of the advantages-geographical location, abundant resources, expanding population, and the like that the context provided. Other religious communities were the victims of problems as a result of their presence in the valley. Pasquier did not intend that this collection would be an uninflected tribute to the Mississippi.
This volume closes with an important afterword by Thomas A. Tweed, a set of reflections subtitled Repositioning the Narratives of U.S. Religious History. Tweed uses the occasion of the publication of this collection of essays to praise the contributors who have expanded the substance and complexity of the narrative of American religious history by means of the attention they have directed to a region that has received too little attention in the conventional histories of American religion. This instance of a new narrative, in his judgment, holds the promise of other historians also expanding the geographical scope of the narrative of American religious history to a global tale, tracing the stories of religious Americans back to the locations across the globe from which they came. Such a perspective also invites informed comparisons between America s religious life and the host of geographical locations across the globe from which religious Americans came. In other words, Tweed judges that the essays in Pasquier s volume are highly suggestive about a possible variety of valuable expanding future moves by historians of American religious history. The mighty Mississippi leads to an even larger world.
Catherine L. Albanese Stephen J. Stein SERIES EDITORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Those responsible for supporting, organizing, and writing this collection of essays are many. I started soliciting contributors to Gods of the Mississippi in 2007. I was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University at the time. John Corrigan, Amanda Porterfield, and Amy Koehlinger were very kind to support my scholarship in Tallahassee. In 2008-2009, with backing from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I continued to solicit and edit essays from a growing number of scholars interested in expanding our understanding of religion in America. I am grateful to Jon Sensbach, Richard Callahan, Tracy Leavelle, Sue Ann Marasco, and Arthur Remillard for participating in a roundtable discussion of Religions along the Mississippi River: Region and Space in American Religious History at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Church History in 2009. The rich conversation that followed our presentations on that wintry day in New York City convinced me that we were onto something important.
The final pool of contributors crystalized in 2009. Many thanks to all of you-Jon Sensbach, Sylvester Johnson, Arthur Remillard, Thomas Ruys Smith, Seth Perry, John Giggie, Alison Greene, Justin Poch , and John Hayes. It is because of your patience and diligence that Thomas Tweed agreed to write the afterword to our book. Thank you, Tom. I am also grateful to my colleagues associated with the Young Scholars in American Religion Program and the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis-especially Ann Braude, Linford Fisher, John Hayes, and Quincy Newell-for reading a draft of the introduction. And thanks to Dee Mortensen, Sarah Jacobi, and June Silay at Indiana University Press for your incredible editorial insight, along with the copyediting skills of Elaine Otto and the commentary of Catherine Albanese, Stephen Stein, and the anonymous reviewers.
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