Using as their starting point a 1976 Newsweek cover story on the emerging politicization of evangelical Christians, contributors to this collection engage the scholarly literature on evangelicalism from a variety of angles to offer new answers to persisting questions about the movement. The standard historical narrative describes the period ......
Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail
Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" is arguably the most important written document of the civil rights protest era and a widely read modern literary classic. Personally addressed to eight white Birmingham clergy who sought to avoid violence by publicly discouraging King's civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, the ......
The innovative and dazzling short stories collected in Josh Russell's King of the Animals explore love and heartbreak, growing up and growing old, cities and suburbs, the fantastic and the everyday. A teenager and his family seek asylum in an Atlanta IKEA after their split-level is burned down because his father made fun of an autocrat's bad ......
Reflecting on the Salem witch trials, Puritan minister Cotton Mather cautioned his flock against the moral temptations of the unknown wild, located in what he termed an ""American desert."" Today, more than three hundred years later, we understand that our troubles have their origins not in some ambiguous beyond; rather, they are of our own ......
The Roots of Violent Crime in America is criminologist Barry Latzer's comprehensive analysis of crimes of violence-including murder, assault, and rape-in the United States from the 1880s through the 1930s. Combining the theoretical perspectives and methodological rigor of criminology with a synthesis of historical scholarship as well as original ......
In Wild Juice, the poet and novelist Ashley Mace Havird confronts global and personal change. Her subjects range from the extinction of a prehuman species to the present-day reduction in sea life due to the climate crisis. Closer to home, she confronts the death of her father and her own aging. Running throughout these lyrics of loss is the ......
Struggling to accept her impending blindness, the speaker in Julia B. Levine's fifth collection of poetry, Ordinary Psalms, asks everyday life to help her learn how to see beyond appearances into fundamental truths. As she contemplates the loss of one friend to cancer and another to suicide, along with her own visual impairment, Levine holds the ......
The History, Recipes, and Symbols of a New Orleans Tradition
Every year on March 19, Roman Catholic churches and households in and around New Orleans celebrate St. Joseph's Day. As centerpieces of these celebrations, the elaborate tiered displays of foods, prayers, and offerings known as St. Joseph Altars represent a centuries-old tradition established in south Louisiana by immigrants from Sicily. In ......
In Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, Nathan J. Rabalais examines the impact of Louisiana's remarkably diverse cultural and ethnic groups on folklore characters and motifs during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Establishing connections between Louisiana and France, West Africa, Canada, and the Antilles, Rabalais explores how ......