On October 1 and 2, Gordon College will be hosting a conference, looking back fifteen years to the publication of Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Noll and ten other scholars will be speaking. You can get the details from the Gordon College website.

The entire Religion in America crew—Paul and Jessica, Lincoln and Abby—will be attending the conference. If you’ll be there too, send us an e-mail and we’ll get together.

Watt, David Harrington. Bible-Carrying Christians: Conservative Protestants and Social Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 165 pages. ISBN: 978-0-19-506834-4.

Ethnography is the study of human societies, a favorite tool of cultural anthropologists who seek to understand a community holistically rather than studying the constituent parts of that society. Ethnographers seek to directly experience a community without having to rely on the mediation of written texts. Historians relish archives and typically give short shrift to ethnography. But in Bible-Carrying Christians, David Harrington Watt used ethnography as a historical tool of analysis. Ethnography was a problematic tool for Watt since it required that he attempt to experience evangelicalism as if he were a member of our culture. Watt described his desire to “see things about the world that [he] could not see if [he] had not had them.” He sought a “space between belief and disbelief” so that he can understand our beliefs without embracing them himself. This was no small task for Watt, a self-described socialist, feminist, post-structuralist Quaker. Read the rest of this entry »