Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Review: 'The Rise Of Liberal Religion: Book Culture And American Spirituality In The Twentieth Century', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

Laubach’s story—in its emphasis on the spiritual benefits of reading, mysticism, and interfaith encounters— serves as the perfect coda to Hedstrom’s terrific study of religious liberalism in twentieth-century America. The Rise of Liberal Religion joins an expanding corpus of work—most notably Gary Dorrien’s three-volume The Making of American Liberal Theology (2001, 2003, 2006) and Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah (2005)—that provides balance to the substantive scholarly attention recently given to conservative Protestantism. This scholarship suggests—and The Rise of Liberal Religion is explicit in this regard—that there is much more to the …

Review: 'Godly Ambition: John Stott And The Evangelical Movement', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

In 2005, Time included John Stott in its list of the world’s 100 most influential people, describing Stott as both a “touchstone of authentic biblical scholarship that has scarcely been paralleled since the days of the 16th-century European Reformers” as well as “a significant factor in the explosive growth of Christianity in parts of the Third World.” With this, Alister Chapman begins Godly Ambition, a compact analysis of Stott’s career that certainly does justice to this extraordinarily significant figure in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century global evangelicalism.

Thanks in good part to Chapman’s access to Stott’s personal papers (Stott died …

Hearing The Silence: The University Of Dayton, The Ku Klux Klan, And Catholic Universities And Colleges In The 1920s, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

The "second" Ku Klux Klan exploded into national prominence in the 1920s. While the original Klan was based in the South and concentrated its animus against the newly freed slaves, the second KKK was a national organization that expanded its list of social scapegoats to include Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. Ohio perhaps had more Klan members than any other state, and in the 1920s the Dayton KKK chapter targeted the local Catholic university – the University of Dayton (UD) – with crossburnings and a bombing. While the school's administration avoided confrontation, UD students and the UD football team aggressively challenged …

Navigating Body, Class, And Disability In The Life Of Agnes Burns Wieck, Caroline Waldron Merithew

History Faculty Publications

The concerns expressed in Burns Wieck’s letter to Hapgood typify many of the issues that occupied her during the course of her life. She, like many Americans in the early twentieth century, thought that there were economic disparities as well as great cultural divisions between the working and middle classes in a capitalist system. Burns Wieck worried about how nature and environment shaped physical and emotional existence for her as a woman and as a worker.4 A question she asked about childbirth in her letter—“Why, oh why, can’t they find some way to humanize that experience?”—is one that she might …

Rosa Parks' Courage Should Inspire Us All, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

The Dayton Daily News published this op-ed piece contributed by Julius A. Amin on Feb. 15, 2013. The piece addresses the legacy of Rosa Parks in the U.S. and Africa. The views expressed are those of the author.

Evangelicalism And Religious Pluralism In Contemporary America: Diversity Without, Diversity Within, And Maintaining The Borders, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

Not that many people need convincing, but the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) provides confirming evidence that evangelicalism in America is alive and well. In this survey, which involved 54,461 telephone interviews, the 76% of respondents who identified themselves as Christians were asked a follow-up question: "Do you identify as a Born Again or Evangelical Christian?" Forty-five percent answered yes. This number obviously includes a fair number of folks within "mainline" denominations and within predominately African-American churches; more surprising, perhaps, 18.9% of American Catholics identified themselves as "born again" or "evangelical."

If one were to depend solely on the …