David G. Hackett

Religion and American culture : a reader

Religion and American Culture challenges the religions traditional emphasis on older European, American, male, middle-class, Protestant, denomination, northeastern narratives concerned primarily with churches and theology. Breaking through the field with multicultural tales of Native American, African Americans and other groups that cut across boundaries of gender, class and religion and region, David Hacketts anthology offers an illuminating and comprehensive overview of the most exciting work currently underway in this rapidly changing field. Drawing upon the newest work in the field, Hackett has gathered a chorus of voices that cuts across cultural, ethnic, class and gender boundaries. Incorporating regional religious stories of the South and the West, Native American religious history, working class Christianity, popular Catholicism, and urban Santeria, Hackett explores many of overlooked aspects of the role of religion in American culture and society. The contributors examine such issues as the complex role of women play within religious beliefs and practice. By examing what has been traditionall and historically excluded from the canon of religious studies, Hacketts reader promises to be a landmark work in its field and out of it. Ramon A. Gutierrez, David D. Hall, Albert J. Raboteau, Joel Martin, William B. Gravely, Mary Ryan, Marvin S. Hill, Sandra L. Myers, Leigh Eric Schmidt, Mark Carnes, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Robert

The Rude Hand of Innovation: Religion and Social Order in Albany, New York, 1652-1836.

Tracing the social and religious transformation of Albany, New York, from its colonial origins through the industrialization of the early nineteenth century, Hacketts study not only illuminates the social history of Albany, but abundantly demonstrates the central role played by religion in the creation of American social life.

The Prince Hall Masons and the African American Church : The labors of Grand Master and Bishop James Walker Hood, 1831-1918

During the late nineteenth century, James Walker Hood was bishop of the North Carolina Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and grand master of the North Carolina Grand Lodge of Prince Hall Masons. In his forty-four years as bishop, half of that time as senior bishop of the denomination, Reverend Hood was instrumental in planting and nurturing his denominations churches throughout the Carolinas and Virginia. Founder of North Carolinas denominational newspaper and college, author of five books including two histories of the AMEZ Church, appointed assistant superintendent of public instruction and magistrate in his adopted state, Hoods career represented the broad mainstream of black denominational leaders who came to the South from the North during and after the Civil War. Concurrently, Grand Master Hood superintended the southern jurisdiction of the Prince Hall Masonic Grand Lodge of New York and acted as a moving force behind the creation of the regions black Masonic lodges—often founding these secret male societies in the same places as his fledgling churches. At his death in 1918, the Masonic Quarterly Review hailed Hood as “one of the strong pillars of our foundation.” If Bishop Hoods life was indeed, according to his recent biographer, “a prism through which to understand black denominational leadership in the South during the period 1860–1920,” then what does his leadership of both the Prince Hall Lodge and the AMEZ Church tell us about the nexus of fraternal lodges and African American Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century?