The Puzzle of American Methodism

Abstract

Picture, if you will, the rich landscape of American religious history that has taken shape over the last half century. At least three features of this terrain stand out, the first being a richly-textured panorama before us, a recognizable field of study that has come into existence in a relatively short span of time. This field has been shaped by a varietyof forces, among them the vast expansion of religion departments since 1960, the recovery of the role of religion in the broader disciplines of history, literature, sociology and political science, and the stubborn persistence of religion in modern American life which scholars struggle to explain.