Lauren Horn Griffin – författare

American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Three, is the third in a series of annual anthologies produced by the American Examples workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. In the latest volume from this innovative academic project, ten topically and methodologically diverse scholars vividly reimagine the meaning and applications of American religious history. These ten chapters use case studies from America, broadly conceived, to ask trenchant theoretical questions that are of interest to scholars and students within and beyond the subfield of American religious history.

After an opening section that explores the deployment of “crisis” in various aspects of higher education, this volume structures the critical approach to the category of crisis through four distinct sections: Language, Lexicon, Locus, and Locution. The section on Language examines the social rhetoric that emerges in historical moments of rupture, resistance, and reconstitution. The section on Lexicon considers different projects of persuasion exemplified in the critical study of religion in and through crisis. The section on Locus discusses three instances of religious institutions adapting to “crises” in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and Russia, highlighting that religions are not fixed entities but living constructions. The final section, Locution, brings together senior scholars to assess the stated aim of the American Academy of Religion (i.e., “thinking about the actual human implications of religion in a world upended”) and explain how we might provide an alternative to that use of crisis in the field of religious studies. The book is concluded with an Afterword by Aaron Hughes.