Additional information
by Darren E. Grem (Editor), Ted Ownby (Editor), James G. Thomas (Editor)
Contributions by Ryan L. Fletcher, Darren E. Grem, Paul Harvey, Alicia Jackson, Ted Ownby, Otis W. Pickett, Arthur Remillard, Chad Seales, and Randall J. Stephens
Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson's research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways.
This volume pays tribute to and extends Wilson's seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the essays examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson's model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South's religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes.
The volume first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region's fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, this book shows that Wilson's groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South's complicated history and culture.
Author Biography
Darren E. Grem is associate professor of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi, author of The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity, and coeditor of The Business Turn in American Religious History. Ted Ownby is William F. Winter Professor of History and professor of southern studies at the University of Mississippi. He is editor of The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South, Manners and Southern History, The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, and Black and White: Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South and coeditor of Clothing and Fashion in Southern History, and The Mississippi Encyclopedia, all published by University Press of Mississippi. James G. Thomas, Jr., is associate director for publications at the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is an editor of the twenty-four-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and The Mississippi Encyclopedia; coeditor (with Jay Watson) of multiple volumes in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series; and editor of Conversations with Barry Hannah. His work has appeared in Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi: The Twentieth Century, Southern Cultures, Southern Quarterly, and elsewhere.
