Atlanta, 2010

This year's meeting of the Religion in the American West seminar will center around four papers exploring constructions of identity, especially in the Southwest and California.  The papers under discussion examine the role of religion in constructing and complicating regional and national identities, sacred sites, and religious rituals. In addition to discussing the critical issues that each paper raises, the seminar discussion will also focus on ways that the four papers taken together highlight the distinct contributions the American West makes to understanding American religion. Seminar attendees are asked to read the four papers in advance; they are available for seminar members through the “Members Only” page of our website (http://www.yale.edu/relwest/).  Enrolled seminar members should have received an email with instructions about accessing this page; those interested in attending who are not yet enrolled should contact tisa.wenger@yale.edu for more information accessing the papers via the website.

 

The Seminar Meeting will take place during the 4:00-6:30pm session on Saturday Oct. 30. Here is the list of presenters and their topics:

 

Travis Ross, University of Nevada, Reno

Sectionalism in California’s Religious Periodicals: Place in Religious Rhetoric

 

Jonathan William Olson, Florida State University

“Not Merely Asiatic but Pagan”: Religion, Chinese Exclusion, and the American West

 

Barry Joyce, University of Delaware

Creating an Axis Mundi in the American Southwest: Religion, Science, and the Sacred at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park

 

Brett Hendrickson, Arizona State University

Mexican-American Religious Healing and the American Spiritual Marketplace

 

Following the discussion will be a business meeting, in which we will chart our direction for the remaining two seminar meetings.

 

We hope to see in you in Atlanta!

In Memoriam, David Weber

by Tisa Wenger

This has become a summer of loss—of the passing of giants in the history of the American west. As many of you reading this blog will already have heard, David Weber, who defined the field of southwest borderlands history, died at his home in New Mexico on August 20 after a long battle with multiple myeloma.

I first encountered Weber’s work in a graduate seminar on Religion in the Colonial Atlantic World. Although his primary interests were not in religion, his book The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992) included a wonderful chapter on the role of missionaries in the northern frontiers of colonial New Spain. More important, the groundbreaking quality of his work—its incisive treatment of a subject largely ignored by previous generations of historians—swept away a whole host of misconceptions and helped us all see why the borderlands mattered as an integral part of U.S. history. His work helped inauguarate the now thriving field of borderlands studies, and helped a new generation of American historians understand our work in the larger context of the western hemisphere.

A few years after that seminar, I was privileged to learn to know David when I held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies, which he founded and directed. Coming to SMU as a relative outsider to the worlds of western history and the southwest borderlands, I was deeply grateful for David’s welcoming kindness. He was a generous mentor to me, during and well beyond that fellowship year—as he has been to many others—and we will all miss him.

David was the author of more than seventy articles, and wrote or edited twenty-seven books. He was past president of the Western History Association, and the only American historian elected to membership in both the Mexican Academy of History and the Society of American Historians. In May 2003, he was knighted by order of the King of Spain, receiving the Encomienda de la Orden de Isabel La Católica; and in February 2005 he was named to membership in the Orden Mexicana del Águila Azteca (the Order of the Aztec Eagle), the highest award the Mexican government bestows on foreign nationals.

David is survived by his wife, Carol Bryant Weber of Dallas, a son and daughter-in-law, a daughter, three grandchildren, and three siblings. Memorial services will be held in Dallas, with details forthcoming on the SMU website at http://www.smu.edu. Rest in peace, David Weber.

Over the summer, we have explored a variety of conceptual frameworks for thinking about the American West.  In an eloquent post, Quincy suggested the body as a fruitful lens.  In another post, Tisa reflected on the centrality of religious freedom to western residents.  Brett pointed us to the absence of religion in literature.  As I remarked in the inaugural post, the multiplicity of tropes and metaphors for understanding the American West merely reflects the complexity of religious life in America.   However, thus far we have not explored one trope that seeps through the region's history:  violence.  To that end, I asked Todd Kersetter, author of God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land: Faith and Conflict in the American West to reflect on the way that his text offers critical reflection on the centrality of violence in the religious history of the American West.  Thanks, Todd, and congratulations on the arrival of your daughter, Leah!

God’s Country, Uncle Sam’s Land:  Faith and Conflict in the American West originated as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Nebraska where my studies focused on the American West.  The Branch Davidian conflict broke out while I was writing a research paper on the Lakota Ghost Dance and the 1890 tragedy at Wounded Knee.  The two incidents contained a number of parallels that struck me as remarkable, but the question that drove my research was, “How could these dramatic episodes of violence involving religious groups unfold in the West, a region so often associated with opportunity, individualism, and freedom?”  Furthermore, I wanted to assess what role religion played in these conflicts and in the West’s history.  I began developing a comparative project and, at the urging of my mentor, John Wunder, added a case study of Mormon-U.S. relations in the 19^th century.  I tried to uncover how religion drove Mormons, Ghost Dancers, and Branch Davidians and also how religion influenced responses to the groups by mainstream U.S. society and government.  I think the book’s contributions come in two areas.  First, it brings the discussion of each religious group into larger discussions about religion, region and conquest, and nation.  Second, it tries to draw out the significance of religion in the lives of all people involved in these conflicts, which gets at the often overlooked significance of religion in the West and in the United States.

Call for Recommended Reading

by James Bennett

Ok fellow scholars of Religion in the American West (RAWers?), here’s our chance to help shape the way that people understand our budding field of study. Quincy and I, as co-chairs of the AAR Religion in the American West Seminar, recently received this call. Rather than shouldering the burden of representing the field ourselves, we’d like to get your feedback on what titles we should submit:

Religious Studies News Online asks each Program Unit Chair to recommend two to five books which you consider influential, pivotal, seminal, or otherwise important publications in your field — publications that someone within the broad field of religion and theology might be interested in, even if the topic is outside of their area of specialization or concentration. This information will be included in a recommended list of reading under each Program Unit in a new section in the online Religious Studies News website.

So what should it be? What titles would you characterize as influential, pivotal, seminal, or otherwise important publications for the study of religion in the American West?
We look forward to your responses.

Archive Envy

by James Bennett

My summer consists mostly of being a stay-at-home dad this year. It is unquestionably time well spent, but that doesn’t mean that occasional sibling squabbling doesn’t send me dreaming of archives! Alas, my forays into archives of religion in the American West will have to wait until the dog days of August, or even September (which is, here on the West Coast, the best weather of the year!). Fortunately, the quarter system (an academic phenomena largely of the West?), facilitates late season archiving when my children are already back in school.

But back to archives: what are some of your memorable archive experiences researching religion in the American West? I’m thinking here not of the biggies (the Huntington, the Bancroft, the Beinecke, etc.), but the little, out of the way treasure troves—not just of documents, but of knowledgeable and friendly archivists. The previously unknown sources (at least to me) that such places might contain is exciting, but there is something stimulating about just working in such an environment.

I’m still in the process of shifting my scholarly energy from the South to the West, so have yet to experience this while working on the West. I did, however, have several such experiences working on my first project. Perhaps the most memorable was the archives of the Josephite Fathers in Baltimore, MD. Father Pete Hogan, who served as the Josephite archivist for over forty years, had collected the largest repository of black Catholic materials in the country, all stored and organized according to a classification system he invented. It was controlled chaos. Fr. Hogan was gracious to a fault, generous in sharing whatever he knew and whatever he had. But for someone used to working in the strictly regulated environment of traditional archives and reading rooms, the Josephite archives were quite a shock: before proceeding down to the basement archive, you could grab and cup of coffee and a doughnut and bring them with you! A visit always included lunch. Once you received the dot-matrix tractor feed sheets of paper showing the classification numbers of the documents you wanted, you just got up, wandered through the basement and pulled the archive boxes you needed off the shelves yourself. If you needed a copy, you copied it yourself. If you needed to work late, you could stay in the basement and turn off the lights yourself when you were done. But most enjoyable, was being part of the banter with Fr. Hogan and his assistants and the recipients of their knowledge and insights. Gentle teasing and insight reminiscing replaced the sacred silence that dominates most reading rooms.

For me, one of the most exciting parts of embarking on a new project is anticipating the new places I’ll do my research. What treasure troves of religion in the American West have you come across?