Historians look at formative influences on their professional endeavors In these highly personal essays, both pioneering and promising young scholars discuss their work and interests as they recall how the circumstances of their upbringing and education steered them toward religious history. They tell of their own time and place and of their growing awareness of how religion ties into larger social issues: gender, class, and, most notably, race. Indeed, one essay begins,
I was asked to write about why I came to study religion in the South. It was then I realized that it was because my grandfather had been lynched.
Lutheran, Jewish, Catholic, Methodist, and Episcopal viewpoints are represented as, of course, are Baptist. While some contributors were born and reared in and now work in the Bible Belt, others are outsiders - physically, philosophically, or both. Despite their common interest in its history, southern religion is anything but an intellectual abstraction for the contributors to this book. It is a potent force, and here sixteen men and women offer themselves as proof of its power to shape lives.