Turn Around Religion in America

Playing on the frequently used metaphors of the 'turn toward' or 'turn back' in scholarship on religion, "The Turn Around Religion in America" offers a model of religion that moves in a reciprocal relationship between these two poles. In particular, this volume dedicates itself to a reading of religion and of religious meaning that cannot be reduced to history or ideology on the one hand or to truth or spirit on the other, but is rather the product of the constant play between the historical particulars that manifest beliefs and the beliefs that take shape through them. Taking as their point of departure the foundational scholarship of Sacvan Bercovitch, the contributors locate the universal in the ongoing and particularized attempts of American authors from the seventeenth century forward to get it - whatever that 'it' might be - right. As the essays demonstrate, authors as diverse as Pietro di Donato, Herman Melville, Miguel Algarin, Mark Twain, Edward Taylor, Robert Keayne, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, and Emanuel Levinas, among others, call for a discussion of religion's powers that does not seek to explain them as much as to put them into conversation with each other. Central to this project is Bercovitch' emphasis on the rhetoric, ritual, typology, and symbology of religion and his recognition that with each aesthetic enactment of religion's power, we learn something new.