RELG 573: Religion in the South
Professor: Kevin Lewis
tel: 777-2561
email: kevin@sc.edu
Office: Rutledge 325
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Generic syllabus
Office hours: will be posted
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“Next Sunday we all went to church, about three mile, everybody a horseback. The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kep them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching - all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith, and good works, and free grace, and prefore-ordestination, and I don't know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.”
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The South is “another land,” in the words of W.J. Cash, and its vivid and varied religious life compels description and appraisal. Religion in Southern history is marked by extraordinary homogeneity and by notable diversity. There are many Souths. There is but one South.
Here, as elsewhere, religion shapes and in turn is shaped by regional culture.(Popular religion in the Bible Belt, observes Marshall Frady, has been “A romance about the Cross - a dire melodrama of thorns and betrayal and midnight anguish, with nothing in the life of Jesus mattering quite so much as his suffering and his death.”) Hence our interest in the Southern “mind” and imagination, in the region's cultural isolation, tragic history, politics, geography, and weather. Here older traditions have been extended and renewed. Here new traditions have been forged.
Method of inquiry: eclectic. How different is religious life in the South? How important is it? Who are the players? How has the drama evolved over time? What are the beliefs (and behaviors) of different churches and faiths? How has religion been affected by race? Where is religion headed?
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Samuel Hill, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion in the South
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Martin Luther King Letter, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
William Faulkner, Light in August
Wilbur Cash, The Mind of the South (graduate students only)
Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptised in Blood (graduate students only)
SUGGESTED READINGS:
James McBride Dabbs, Haunted By God
Will Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly
Charles Lippy, ed., Religion in South Carolina
Aldridge, Marion, and Kevin Lewis, eds., The Changing Shape of Protestantism in the South
REQUIREMENTS:
Attendance expected. Class participation solicited. Reading required.
Two tests and Final Exam
Quiz
10-Page Paper
*Graduate students will be asked to prepare an additional paper of at least 7-8 pages in length on a topic of their choosing which (a) is related to the contents of the course, and (b) integrates concerns and/or methods of the field in which they are proposing to take their degrees (which will not necessairly be Religious Studies). This paper may take the form of a critical review of a relevant scholarly book.
CLASS SCHEDULE:
- WEEK ONE
- Introduction, Methods, Issues
Encyclopedia: Geography (284-8), Colonial Period (855-9), Anglicanism (33-6), Dissenters (206-7), Episcopal Church (225-7)
- WEEK TWO
- Migration Southward (472-3), Presbyterianism (607-10), Great Awakening (309-10), Brush Arbor (118-9)
Jefferson (346-8), Unitarianism (789-91), Quakers (627-30), Lutheranism (428-33), Moravians (511-2)
- WEEK THREE
- Great Revival (311-3), Cane Ridge (135), Evangelicals (239-45), Camp Meeting (127), Campbellites (129-32), Frontier, Influence of (273-5)
Calvinism (125-6), Arminianism (69-71), Baptists (85-8), Methodists (467-71)
- WEEK FOUR
- REVIEW
TEST
- WEEK FIVE
- African-American Religion: Black Religion (108-12), AME Church (3-6), AMEZ Church (6-8), Silver Bluff (692)
Millenialism (478-9), Pentecostalism (584-7), Holiness (325-9), Assemblies of God (72-5), Church of God (159-61, Darbyite Movement (193)
- WEEK SIX
- The Fire Next Time
“Letters from Birmingham Jail”
- WEEK SEVEN
- Roman Catholicism (647-60), Nativism (530-2)
Video: "The Displaced Person" (Flannery O'Connor)
- WEEK EIGHT
- TEST
Lost Cause (412-3), Literature and Religion (406-12)
- WEEK NINE
- Light in August
Light in August QUIZ
- WEEK TEN
- Light in August
Mind of the South: W.J. Cash, etc.
- WEEK ELEVEN
- Mind of the South:
Recent South (859-64), Charismatic Movments (144-5), James McBride Dabbs (191), Will D. Campbell (128-9)
- WEEK TWELVE
- Jewish Immigration (351-2), Jews in the South (354-62)
Fundamentalism (275-8)
- WEEK THIRTEEN
- William Jennings Byran (119-20), Scopes (677), Scopes Trial (677-8); Video: “Creation Science on Trial” (1981, Little Rock, Arkansas)
Video: “Thy Will Be Done” (First Baptist Church, Dallas)
- WEEK FOURTEEN
- Bob Jones (365-6); Video: "The Power and the Glory"
PAPER DUE - No Exceptions
FINAL EXAM
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