Religion, History on the Web

Completing a dissertation continues to keep me from posting more frequently (I'll get back to Reconciliation Blues soon), but I want to draw attention to two item.

Media studies scholar Mara Einstein now has a blog, Brands of Faith, and has a forthcoming book on religion and America's spiritual marketplace. Make sure you pick it up, since it features some of the first serious scholarship on Joel Osteen.

Historian of race and religion in America, Edward J. Blum, was featured this week on History News Network. I've posted a little about him here, and look forward to his book on W.E.B. Du Bois, due out next week. I plan to post about the book later this summer.

Jerry Falwell

Bible Belt Blogger posts a number of Falwell stories here, Get Religion has this story, and Prof. Jonathan Walton offers his own remembrance here. Christianity Today writer Ed Gilbreath links to an interview he did with Falwell in 2000, and Randall Balmer cites the following 1965 Falwell quote in Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America (2006): "Believing the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ, and begin doing anything else--including fighting Communism, or participating in civil-rights reforms" (p. 17). (For the gist of his book, read this Balmer essay.) While the implications of such a posture are clear-read any history of the Religious Right-interested readers may also want to read Susan Friend Harding's patient, probing, critical, and interesting anthropological reflections in The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (2000).