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American Religious Liberalism
Retrospect and Prospect
Princeton University, April 10-11, 2008
Locations: Bobst Hall 105 (Thursday) & Chancellor Green 103 (Friday)
Schedule • Directions • Downloads • Registration
When the freethinking feminist Voltairine de Cleyre reported on a series of lectures on religion that the Ladies’ Liberal League of Philadelphia hosted in the mid-1890s, she pointed to three movements as being the focus of attention for those who wanted to reconstruct the religious realm on progressive terms: 1) Unitarianism; 2) Theosophy; and 3) Whitmanism. To be sure, that list reflected the rebellious eccentricity of a particularly radical cadre, but it also suggested that American religious liberalism was seen as far more than a species of Protestant modernism. This conference revisits the history of religious liberalism in America in an effort to redirect scholarly energies on this movement beyond the usual Protestant theological points of departures: that is, to push beyond the familiar tropes of the social gospel and the modernist impulse. The papers foreground two themes for consideration:
1) The connection between religious liberalism and the arts: Did religious liberals, in effect, put the arts in the place of churches and synagogues, the poet’s inspiration in the place of the priest’s liturgy, the novelist’s imagination in the place of the biblical scholar’s philological mastery? It was a common form of romantic displacement--to look for the spiritual in art, not in institutions. If that aesthetic impulse has indeed been a prominent part of American religious liberalism, then what have been the ongoing consequences of that move?
2) Religious liberals were, more often than not, heady cosmopolitans and global networkers, and it is important to assess how they imagined the ideals of religious ecumenism, encounter, and diversity. Were they little better than dabblers in whatever struck their fancy—Christianity yesterday, Buddhism today, Vedanta tomorrow? Or, were they serious pluralists ready to engage the orthodox as much as their fellow modernists in other faiths? Or, were they pragmatists, ready to embrace religious differences primarily at those junctures where that diversity served their own larger purposes—social, political, intellectual, and cultural?
These two intertwining themes run throughout the conference; a closing panel offers a broader re-evaluation of the progressive strands in America’s religious past and present.
The conference is free and open to the public. No registration is required. Inquiries may be directed to the Center for the Study of Religion: csrelig@princeton.edu, (609) 258-5545.
Thursday, April 10
Location: Bobst Hall 105
1:00 Welcome and Opening Remarks
Leigh Schmidt, Religion Department, Princeton University
1:30-3:00 The Psychology of Liberal Religion: Optimism, Assurance, and Hope
Leigh Schmidt, Chair
Carrie Bramen, English Department, SUNY Buffalo, is the author of The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Harvard University Press, 2001).
•“Christian Niceness and the Likeable Jesus: The Role of the Novel in Religious Liberalism”
Christopher White, Religious Studies Department, Georgia State University, is the author of Measured Faith: Psychology and the American Pursuit of Spiritual Assurance, 1830-1940 (forthcoming University of California Press).
•“Into that ‘Deep, Imageless Truth’: The Middle Eastern Pilgrimages of Juliet Thompson, Artist”
3:30-5:00 Religious Liberalism and the Arts
Wallace Best, Religion Department, Princeton University
Michael Robertson, English Department, The College of New Jersey, is the author of Worshiping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton University Press, 2008).
•“Reading Poetry Religiously: Walt Whitman and Seeker Spirituality”
Sally Promey, Department of American Studies, Yale University, is the author of Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library (Princeton University Press, 1999).
•“Visible Liberalism”
5:00-6:00 Reception, Bobst 101
Friday, April 11
Location: Chancellor Green 103
9:00-10:30 Gender, Sexuality, and Religious Experimentation
R. Marie Griffith, Religion Department, Princeton University
Kathi Kern, Department of History, University of Kentucky, is the author of Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Cornell University Press, 2001).
•“Strange Bed Fellows?: Rethinking Political and Religious Liberalism in the US Women's Rights Movement”
Jeffrey Kripal, Department of Religious Studies, Rice University, is the author of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2007).
•“The Dominant and the Damned: The Metaphysical Liberalism of Charles Fort”
11:00-12:30 Reconstructing Religious Liberalism after World War I
Judith Weisenfeld, Religion Department, Princeton University
Yaakov Ariel, Religious Studies Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Evangelizing the Chosen People: Missions to the Jews in America, 1880-2000 (UNC Press, 2000).
•“Tribal Modernism: The Paradox of Reconstructionist Judaism”
Matthew Hedstrom, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University, is in the process of revising his dissertation, “Seeking a Spiritual Center: Mass-Market Books and Liberal Religion in America, 1921-1948.”
•“Reading across the Divide of Faith: Liberal Protestant Book Culture and Interfaith Encounters in Print, 1921-1948”
1:30-3:00 Graduate Student Workshops: Research in Progress
Locations: Chancellor Green 103 & 105
Session 1, Sally Promey, Chair
Emily Mace, Religion Department, Princeton University. Her dissertation explores the rituals and practices of liberal religious particularism and universalism, 1880-1940.
•“‘Citizens of All the World’s Temples’: Cosmopolitan Religion at the Dedication of Bell Street Chapel”
Gretchen Boger, History Department, Princeton University. Her dissertation examines the impact of foreign missions on American Protestantism at home, 1919-1939.
•“‘Quietly Shifted from St. John to St. James’: The Impact of Chinese Nationalism on Protestant Missionary Practice in the 1920s”
Session 2, Leigh Schmidt, Chair
Lindsay Reckson, English Department, Princeton University. Her work centers on American literature, realism, and religion, particularly social-gospel novels.
•“Each Attitude a Syllable: Jamesian Pragmatism and the Syntax of Belief”
Nathan Rees, Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland. His dissertation investigates the confluence of theosophy and primitivism in the work of several early-to-mid-twentieth-century painters in New Mexico.
•“Theosophical Primitivism: Race and Religion in the Art of Emil Bisttram”
3:30 -5:30 Concluding Panel and Discussion: Religious Liberalism, Retrospect and Prospect
Robert Wuthnow, Department of Sociology, Princeton University, and Director, Center for the Study of Religion
Gary Dorrien, Union Theological Seminary and the Religion Department, Columbia University, is the author of The Making of American Liberal Theology: (I) Imagining Progressive Religion; (II) Idealism and Realism in Modernity; (III) Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950-2003 (Westminster John Knox, 2001-2006).
Paul Raushenbush, Associate Dean, Office of Religious Life, Princeton University, is the editor of the 100th Anniversary Edition of Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis (HarperCollins, 2007).
Amy Sullivan, Nation Editor, Time magazine, is the author of The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap (Scribner, 2008) and a contributor to Liberalism for a New Century (University of California Press, 2007).
John F. Wilson, Religion Department, Princeton University, is the author of Religion and the American Nation: History and Historiography (University of Georgia Press, 2003).
Conference Flyer (Coming Soon) (PDF)
Conference Poster (Coming Soon) (PDF)
Hotel Information (Nassau Inn)
Travel Information and Directions to the Princeton Campus:
Conference events will be held in two locations. Thursday's panels will be held in Bobst Hall 105. Friday's panels will be held in Chancellor Green 103. An interactive map featuring both buildings can be found here: http://www.princeton.edu/%7Epumap/.
For directions to the Princeton Campus please see this link: http://www.princeton.edu/main/visiting/
Links:
