Amanda Porterfield – författare

Business is an understudied area in American religious history that has profound implications for how we understand the popularity and ongoing transformation of religion in the US. This volume explores the business aspects of American religious organizations by analyzing the financing, production, marketing, and distribution of religious goods and services and the role of wealth and economic organization in sustaining and even shaping worship, charity, philanthropy, institutional growth and missionary work. Treating religion and business holistically, the essays show how business practices have continually informed American religious life. Laying important groundwork for further investigation, the essays show how American business has operated as a domain for achieving religious purpose that historians of religion often overlook. Even when critics denounce its corruption and fallen state, business occupies a central place in American religious life that merits better understanding. Historically, religion has been more powerful in America when interwoven with business.Chapters on Mormon enterprise, Jewish philanthropy, Hindu gurus, Native American casinos, and the wedding of business wealth to conservative Catholic social teaching indicate the range of new studies stimulated by the business turn in American religious history. Other essays show how evangelicals joined neo-liberal economic practice and right-wing politics to religious fundamentalism to consolidate wealth and power, and develop marketing campaigns and organizational strategies that transformed the broader parameters of American religious life. All these essays stimulate new ways of thinking about American religious history, and about American success.Some essays in this volume expose the moral compromises religious organizations have made to succeed as centers of wealth and influence, and the religious beliefs that rationalize and justify these compromises. Other essays dwell on the application of business practices as a means of sustaining religious institutions and expanding their reach. Still others take account of controversy over business practices within religious organizations, and the adjustments religious organizations have made in response. Together, the essays collected here offer various ways of conceptualizing the interdependence of religion and business in the U.S., establishing multiple paths for further study of their intertwined historical development.

Business is an understudied area in American religious history that has profound implications for how we understand the popularity and ongoing transformation of religion in the US. This volume explores the business aspects of American religious organizations by analyzing the financing, production, marketing, and distribution of religious goods and services and the role of wealth and economic organization in sustaining and even shaping worship, charity, philanthropy, institutional growth and missionary work. Treating religion and business holistically, the essays show how business practices have continually informed American religious life. Laying important groundwork for further investigation, the essays show how American business has operated as a domain for achieving religious purpose that historians of religion often overlook. Even when critics denounce its corruption and fallen state, business occupies a central place in American religious life that merits better understanding. Historically, religion has been more powerful in America when interwoven with business.Chapters on Mormon enterprise, Jewish philanthropy, Hindu gurus, Native American casinos, and the wedding of business wealth to conservative Catholic social teaching indicate the range of new studies stimulated by the business turn in American religious history. Other essays show how evangelicals joined neo-liberal economic practice and right-wing politics to religious fundamentalism to consolidate wealth and power, and develop marketing campaigns and organizational strategies that transformed the broader parameters of American religious life. All these essays stimulate new ways of thinking about American religious history, and about American success.Some essays in this volume expose the moral compromises religious organizations have made to succeed as centers of wealth and influence, and the religious beliefs that rationalize and justify these compromises. Other essays dwell on the application of business practices as a means of sustaining religious institutions and expanding their reach. Still others take account of controversy over business practices within religious organizations, and the adjustments religious organizations have made in response. Together, the essays collected here offer various ways of conceptualizing the interdependence of religion and business in the U.S., establishing multiple paths for further study of their intertwined historical development.

Amanda Porterfield documents the claim that for Puritan men and women alike the ideals of selfhood were conveyed by female images. Constructed largely by men, Porterfield argues, these female images taught self-control, shaped pious ideals, and also established the standards against which the moral character of actual women was measured. Porterfield's work reflects a synthesis of literary critical and historical methods, combining analysis of Puritan theological writings with detailed examinations of historical records of changing patterns of church membership and domestic life.

This introductory textbook describes and compares six religious traditions - Native American, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist - focusing on ways in which belief is played out in practice, experience, and community. Emphasis is placed on religion in the USA today, with attention to the historical developments each religion has undergone, especially in response to the religious pluralism of American culture.

American women played in important part in Protestant foreign missionary work from its early days at the beginning of the nineteenth century, enabling them not only to disseminate religious principles but also to break into public life and create expanded opportunities for themselves and other women. No institution was more closely associated with women missionaries that Mount Holyoke College. This book examines Mount Holyoke founder Mary Lyon and the missionary women trained by her. Porterfield sees Lyon and her students as representative of dominant trends in American missionary thought before the Civil War. She focuses on how their activities in several parts of the world--particularly northwest Persia, Maharashtra in western India, and Natal in southeast Africa--and shows that while their primary goals remained elusive, antebellum missionary women made major contributions to cultural change and the development of new cultures.

Amanda Porterfield offers a survey of ideas, rituals, and experiences of healing in Christian history. Jesus himself peformed many miracles of healing, and Christians down the ages have seen this as a prominent feature of their faith. Indeed, healing is one of the most constant themes in the long and sprawling history of Christianity. Changes in healing beliefs and practices offer a window into changes in religious authority, church structure, and ideas about sanctity, history, resurrection, and the kingdom of God. Porterfield chronicles these changes, at the same time shedding important new light on the universality of religious healing. Finally, she looks at recent scientific findings about religion's biological effects, and considers the relation of these findings to age-old traditions about belief and healing.

In this groundbreaking work, Amanda Porterfield explores the long intertwining of religion and commerce in the history of incorporation in the United States. Beginning with the antecedents of that history in western Europe, she focuses on organizations to show how corporate strategies in religion and commerce developed symbiotically, and how religion has influenced the corporate structuring and commercial orientation of American society.Porterfield begins her story in ancient Rome. She traces the development of corporate organization through medieval Europe and Elizabethan England and then to colonial North America, where organizational practices derived from religion infiltrated commerce, and commerce led to political independence. Left more to their own devices than under British law, religious groups in the United States experienced unprecedented autonomy that facilitated new forms of communal governance and new means of broadcasting their messages. As commercial enterprise expanded, religious organizations grew apace, helping many Americans absorb the shocks of economic turbulence, and promoting new conceptions of faith, spirit, and will power that contributed to business.Porterfield highlights the role that American religious institutions played a society increasingly dominated by commercial incorporation and free market ideologies. She also shows how charitable impulses long nurtured by religion continued to stimulate reform and demand for accountability.

Amanda Porterfield offers a survey of ideas, rituals, and experiences of healing in Christian history. Jesus himself performed many miracles of healing, and Christians down the ages have seen this as a prominent feature of their faith. Indeed, healing is one of the most constant themes in the long and sprawling history of Christianity. Changes in healing beliefs and practices offer a window into changes in religious authority, church structure, and ideas about sanctity, history, resurrection, and the kingdom of God. Porterfield chronicles these changes, at the same time shedding important new light on the universality of religious healing. Finally, she looks at recent scientific findings about religion's biological effects, and considers the relation of these findings to ages-old traditions about belief and healing.

Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical religion and democracy in the early days of the republic. This is a widely accepted narrative that is maintained as a matter of fact and tradition - and in spite of evangelicalism's more authoritarian and reactionary aspects. In Conceived in Doubt, Amanda Porterfield challenges this standard interpretation of evangelicalism's relation to democracy and describes the intertwined relationship between religion and partisan politics that emerged in the formative era of the early republic. In the 1790s, religious doubt became common in the young republic as the culture shifted from mere skepticism toward darker expressions of suspicion and fear. But by the end of that decade, Porterfield shows, economic instability, disruption of traditional forms of community, rampant ambition, and greed for land worked to undermine heady optimism about American political and religious independence.Evangelicals managed and manipulated doubt, reaching out to disenfranchised citizens as well as to those seeking political influence, blaming religious skeptics for immorality and social distress, and demanding affirmation of biblical authority as the foundation of the new American national identity. Porterfield demolishes the idea that evangelical growth in the early republic was the cheerful product of enthusiasm for democracy, and she creates for us a very different narrative of influence and ideals in the young republic.

Protestants have been the dominant religious group since the colonial period, and they remain a vibrant and influential cultural force in the United States. But the term Protestant encompasses people with a vast range of beliefs, backgrounds, politics, and experiences, and this books provides an accessible introduction to this complex situation. The Protestant Experience in America lays out the history of Protestants in America, the core beliefs and common practices that they mostly share, the major events and controversies, and long-term trends for the future of Protestants in the United States.

In this outstanding historical reader, the editor has gathered nine essays and over thirty primary documents to present a coherent picture of the history of American religion.

Investigating the practice and teaching of religion at American colleges and universities, the authors of this work uncover a surprisingly diverse and vital religious scene on campus. Based on extensive fieldwork at four very different US institutions, the text challenges theories of the secularization of higher education and the decline of religion on campus. It reveals instead that both the practice and the study of religion are thriving, nourished by a campus culture of tolerance, diversity and choice.

This student-friendly introduction combines both thematic and chronological approaches in exploring the pivotal role religion played in American history - and of its impact across a range of issues, from identity formation and politics, to race, gender, and class. A comprehensive introduction to American religious history that successfully combines thematic and chronological approaches, aiding both teaching and learning Brings together a stellar cast of experts to trace the development of theology, the political order, practice, and race, ethnicity, gender and class throughout America's history Accessibly structured in to four key eras: Exploration and Encounter (1492-1676); The Atlantic World (1676-1802); American Empire (1803-1898); and Global Reach (1898-present). Investigates the role of religion in forming people's identities, emotional experiences, social conflict, politics, and patriotism

This student-friendly introduction combines both thematic and chronological approaches in exploring the pivotal role religion played in American history - and of its impact across a range of issues, from identity formation and politics, to race, gender, and class. A comprehensive introduction to American religious history that successfully combines thematic and chronological approaches, aiding both teaching and learning Brings together a stellar cast of experts to trace the development of theology, the political order, practice, and race, ethnicity, gender and class throughout America's history Accessibly structured in to four key eras: Exploration and Encounter (1492-1676); The Atlantic World (1676-1802); American Empire (1803-1898); and Global Reach (1898-present). Investigates the role of religion in forming people's identities, emotional experiences, social conflict, politics, and patriotism

This work tells the story of the dramatic transformation of American religion, attempts to understand its causes, and looks at what the future may hold. The author postulates that the demise of the longstanding Protestant hegemony in America is traceable to the success of deeply ingrained Protestant ways of thinking: emphasis on the individual's relationship with God, tension between spiritual life and religious institutions, egalitarian ideas about spiritual life, and belief in the practical benefits of spirituality. Porterfield analyzes the role of each of these interlocking strands of Protestant thought in the dramatic changes of the past three decades.