Wednesday, January 17, 2007

2007 book 6

Charles H. Lippy's Being Religious, American Style
This is a pretty readable history of popular religion in America. It's (inevitably) Protestant-heavy, and definitely gives short shrift to Native American religions, but it does provide some nice comments on gender and on the supernatural elements of popular religion. He occasionally brings music into the mix, and clearly isn't a music scholar, and much of his material on Judaism came from an encyclopedia, so it wasn't perfect. Plus, it was written in '94 and shows it--I'd love to see an update for the last decade or so. However, for someone just looking for an overview, it's definitely helpful; I barely remembered anything from pre-1880s from all my college courses (except the Oneidas and the Shakers), so it was a good refresher.

I'm not going to grade the books I read for class, since the grades are generally based on my enjoyment of a particular book, and I'm not reading these for enjoyment, per se.

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