The Visual Culture of American Religions [Paperback]

David Morgan (Editor), Sally M. Promey (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520225228 | ISBN-13: 978-0520225220 | Publication Date: May 7, 2001 | Edition: 1

Contemporary artists have often clashed with conservative American evangelicals in recent years, giving the impression that art and religion are fundamentally at odds. Yet historically, artistic images have played a profound role in American religious life. This superb collection of essays, with its unique assembly of images, challenges the apparent tension between religion and the arts by illustrating and investigating their long-standing and intriguing relationship from the early nineteenth century to the present day. The essays explore such varied topics as Sioux Sun Dance artifacts and paintings, American Jewish New Year postcards, the New Mexican santos tradition, roadside shrines, images of journey in African American pictorial traditions, the public display of religion, and the religious use of nineteenth-century technologies of mass reproduction.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"At last, a book that overturns the long-standing assumption that there has been little or no visual culture in American religious practice, Editors Morgan and Promey, along with twelve other authors, prove their case brilliantly....This book is a benchmark." - Elizabeth Johns, author of American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life "These essays are unusually strong, sophisticated, mature, and insightful. They are remarkably readable, not merely for art historians but also for a broadly interested and intelligent audience. The result is a truly fascinating collection whose essays touch on a wide range of important topics in the two-hundred-year experience of both American art and American religion." - Jon Butler, editor of Religion in American History: A Reader"

From the Inside Flap

"At last, a book that overturns the long-standing assumption that there has been little or no visual culture in American religious practice. Editors Morgan and Promey, along with twelve other authors, prove their case brilliantly, beginning with a splendid introduction that presents their theoretical stance and a range of essays that examine the visual culture of Protestant Bible illustrations, the National Shrine in Washington, D. C., Jewish New Year postcards, Sioux Sun Dance painting, African-American images of rail travel, and many more. This book is a benchmark."--Elizabeth Johns, author of American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (Yale, 1991)

"These essays are unusually strong, sophisticated, mature, and insightful. They are remarkably readable, not merely for art historians but also for a broadly interested and intelligent audience. The result is a truly fascinating collection that touches on a wide range of important topics in the two-hundred-year experience of both American art and American religion."--Jon Butler, editor of Religion in American History: A Reader

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 404 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (May 7, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520225228
• ISBN-13: 978-0520225220
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #834,680 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Morgan (b. 1957) is Professor of Religion at Duke University with an additional appointment in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke. His areas of interest are religious history, visual culture, media and religion, and art theory. Morgan is author of four books and editor or co-editor of another five volumes. He has held fellowships in Clare Hall, Cambridge University; the National Endowment of the Humanities; J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities; and the Pew Program in Religion and American History at Yale University. He has also been a Stewart Fellow at Princeton University; a Mellon Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, a Franklin Fellow of the American Philosophical Society, and a Society of Print Collectors Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. Morgan is an elected life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. He is co-founder and co-editor of Material Religion, an international journal on the material culture of religions, and he co-edits a book series on 'Religion, Media and Culture' at Routledge. He is currently writing a book entitled The Embodied Eye: Visual Culture and the Material Worlds of Religion.