Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

Weisenfeld (Princeton Univ.) explores medical records, historical accounts, and press reports exposing how white psychiatrists pathologized African American spiritual beliefs and practices from Reconstruction until the mid-20th century. She recounts efforts by African American medical professionals and clergy to counter these racist narratives. The book begins with the story of the Children of the Wilderness, an African American religious group that met in Georgia. The white press argued that the group's ecstatic worship caused insanity and violence among participants. Wiesenfeld repeatedly finds white psychiatrists who claimed that African American religious practices led to insanity. These psychiatrists also claimed African Americans had mental health problems because they were incapable of handling the freedom brought by emancipation and because of their inability to develop "respectable" religion outside of white control. As her narrative moves into the 20th century, she shows how African American psychiatrists argued that the stresses of racism and poverty often led to mental health struggles among African Americans. Black Religion in the Madhouse is crucial for historians of both American religion and medicine. Questions of the evaluation of religious belief among mental health professionals also remain issues in clinical mental health practice today.Summing Up: Essential. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

Tipton (emer., Emory Univ.) probes the surge in the number of those without any religious identification (the "nones") and those who are "spiritual but not religious" in this study of a Silicon Valley megachurch and three suburban Atlanta United Methodist congregations. Tipton argues that social context must shape how congregations might engage such persons in their ministry. Most significant is providing a sense of being part of a moral community without pressuring people to formally join. Also vital is the desire even of the religious nones to engage in programs and activities that address social issues and promote justice. Least significant is belief; many dismiss doctrine and dogma as impediments to ethical living, claiming that one need not believe in God to be a moral person. Tipton also notes that generations since the baby boomers may be part of a congregation and then exit from one several times without abandoning ethical behavior and societal involvement. A concluding chapter extends the analysis to Black churches, but without focusing on a particular congregation. Meticulously documented, this study is essential at all levels for those examining trends in contemporary American religion.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Human society's swirl of individual views and values, conflicting priorities, and memory is only complicated, not simplified, by the truth claims that religions advance. Many scholars and polemics have explored the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' conflicted experience with race. A key problem is that because of the church's truth claim, cultural expressions continue to hold weight long after circumstances and ideas change. Harris (Colorado State Univ., Pueblo) has produced a profoundly significant book, peering into perhaps the least reachable corner of American religious experience with race, which superlatives only cheapen. Focusing mostly on the second half of the 20th century, the first half of the book explores forces and experiences prior to the 1978 policy change on priesthood membership. The second half does credit to the depth and complexity of culture by addressing the succeeding half-century of lingering racism within the sect and individual leaders' effort to rebuild relationships. Harris narrates the Mormons' internal administrative challenge and changes about its segregated race policy. This is an excellent model for appropriate social history: extensively researched and documented, fairly interpreted, well written. Although not a general work on the topic, it is nevertheless crucial.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty.

John Marrant (1755-91) led an extraordinarily cosmopolitan life as an African American converted Christian, under the tutelage of George Whitefield, in the 18th century. He was a sojourner among the Cherokee in Georgia, a teacher to Prince Hall and the Black Freemasons in Boston, a Methodist minister for the Huntingdon Connexion, a military man for the British navy during the American Revolution, and, later, an organizer of churches in Novia Scotia. He thus traversed the British-American-African Atlantic world of his era and, in doing so, helped along the "transformation of African American Christianity from the backwoods religion of enslaved people ... to the institutional face of the abolitionist movement in the years of the early republic." His story has been told in a number of other works, but it is nowhere better analyzed than in this fascinating study of his multiple influences and modes of interpretation. The author emphasizes the transatlantic nature of Marrant's thought, using previous works such as Theophus Smith's Conjuring Culture (CH, Jul'94, 31-6000), to place Marrant as a figure who brought a particular African Atlantic conjure sensibility to his Christian message. Saville emphasizes his "recognition of African-descended people's divinely ordered, collective purpose and identity in the transatlantic world." This is an illuminating text.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.