Michael J. Altman – författare

Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu is a groundbreaking analysis of American representations of religion in India before the turn of the twentieth century. In their representations of India, American writers from a variety of backgrounds described "heathens," "Hindoos," and, eventually "Hindus." Before Americans wrote about "Hinduism," they wrote about "heathenism," "the religion of the Hindoos," and "Brahmanism." Various groups interpreted the religions of India for their own purposes. Cotton Mather, Hannah Adams, and Joseph Priestley engaged the larger European Enlightenment project of classifying and comparing religion in India. Evangelical missionaries used images of "Hindoo heathenism" to raise support at home. Unitarian Protestants found a kindred spirit in the writings of Bengali reformer Rammohun Roy. Transcendentalists and Theosophists imagined the contemplative and esoteric religion of India as an alternative to materialist American Protestantism, while popular magazines and common school books used the image of dark, heathen, despotic India to buttress Protestant, white, democratic American identity. Americans used the heathen, Hindoo, and Hindu as an other against which they represented themselves. The questions of American identity, classification, representation and the definition of "religion" that animated descriptions of heathens, Hindoos, and Hindus in the past still animate American debates today.

Fresh new perspectives on the study of religion, ranging from a church-architecture mecca of Southeast Indiana to what an atheist parent believes.American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume One is the first in a series of annual anthologies published in partnership with the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama. The American Examples initiative gathers scholars from around the world for a series of workshops designed to generate big questions about the study of religion in America. Bypassing traditional white Protestant narratives in favor of new perspectives on belief, social formation, and identity, American Examples fellows offer dynamic perspectives on American faith that challenge our understandings of both America and religion as categories.In the first volume of this exciting academic project, five topically and methodologically diverse scholars vividly reimagine the potential applications of religious history. The five chapters of this inaugural volume use case studies from America, broadly conceived, to ask larger theoretical questions that are of interest to scholars beyond the subfield of American religious history.Prea Persaud’s chapter explores the place of Hinduism among the “creole religions” of the Caribbean, while Hannah Scheidt captures what atheist parents say to each other about value systems. Travis Warren Cooper explains how the modernist church architecture of Columbus, Indiana, became central to that city’s identity. Samah Choudhury dissects how Muslim American comedians navigate Western ideas of knowledge and self to make their jokes, and their own selves legible, and Emily D. Crews uses ethnographic fieldwork to read the female reproductive body among Nigerian Pentecostal congregations. Editor Michael J. Altman also provides a brief, rich introduction assessing the state of the discipline of religious history and how the American Examples project can lead the field forward.Visit americanexamples.ua.edu for more information on the group and news about upcoming projects.

The second volume of American Examples presents nine new essays with fresh multidisciplinary approaches to understanding the place of faith, broadly understood, in America, broadly understood

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.

Uses 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.

Hinduism in America: An Introduction is a concise introduction to the long history of religion in the encounter between America and India. It is not a book that will tell you what Hinduism is; rather, it is an introduction to the variety of ways in which Hinduism has been represented, constructed, and practiced in the United States. Americans have been interested in the religions of India since the colonial period, and by the late nineteenth century the first Hindu teachers arrived in the United States. Throughout the twentieth century, interest in Hinduism and yoga grew, even as anti-Asian and anti-immigrant politics and policies in America intensified. When the Cold War led to changes in U.S. immigration policy in 1965, new immigrant communities arrived in the United States and built new Hindu institutions.Hinduism in America is an accessible introduction to these developments of Hinduism in the United States. Each chapter uses a key theoretical term in the study of religion to explore a variety of historical topics including: American missionary encounters with India;representations of Hindu religions in American literature;world religions and Hinduism;Vedanta;yoga;Hinduism in the American counterculture of the 1960s; andimmigrant Hindu communities in the United States. Hinduism in America provides an overview of the multifaceted history of Hinduism in America. Ideal for students and scholars approaching the topic for the first time, the book includes sections in each chapter that provide useful theoretical terms for understanding that history.