Next year is the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. The Baylor-based Institute for Studies of Religion will be hosting a conference on April 7th-9th.

So far, the conference organizers have confirmed the participation of quite an impressive list of historians and theologians, including Mark Noll, Philip Jenkins, N. T. Wright, Alister McGrath, and David Bebbington.

From the conference website:

Major conference themes will include the way that the King James Bible created a common literary and religious culture in the English-speaking world; the significance of vernacular translation for Christian growth and development; and the challenges posed by recent declines in biblical literacy and the end of the King James’s dominance as the Bible translation for English-speaking Christians.

So mark your calendars and clear your schedules! To quote one of my professors, this is “arguably the Christian academic conference of the upcoming year.”

This evening at my church a missionary preparing to go to Cambodia noted the distinction between Cambodia’s official religion, Buddhism, and the daily faith of Cambodians, animism. Animists believe in multitudinous spirits and demons which have the power to bless those who respect them and curse those who do not. Animists make sacrifices to appease the spirits’ wrath and request their protection. Buddhism may shape the religious rhetoric used by Cambodian animists, but by and large it is a veneer covering a deep rooted folk tradition.

It is easy to think of syncretic relationships between folk religion and established religions in the developing world (e.g. Santa Muerte (“Saint Death“) in Mexico and Vodou in Haiti). But can we locate folk religion in American religious history? The question is complicated by the nature of animism, which appears to be defined in contrast with an established religion (à la Cambodian Buddhism and Mexican Catholicism). Can syncretistic folk religion exist in a country without a legal religious establishment?

Historians have found plenty of evidence of animistic practices from a time and place when America did have an established church: Puritan New England. Richard Godbeer’s The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England examines the practice of folk magic in New England and the role it may have played in the Salem witchcraft trials. (Keith Thomas did the same for Old England in Religion and the Decline of Magic.)

It seems clear that religious historians studying colonial America need to develop an understanding of folk religion, magic, and animism. But should folk religion change the way that scholars of religion in the United States perceive lived religion? Can we find evidence of folk religion and animism in nineteenth and twentieth century American Protestantism and Catholicism?

Moreton, Bethany. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

In To Serve God and Wal-Mart, Bethany Moreton looks at a series of big questions using the world’s biggest corporation as a lens. Her book is a cultural, not a business, history of Wal-Mart. Rather than chart Wal-Mart’s rise through its innovations in technology, logistics, and business practices, Moreton explains how Wal-Mart adopted and modified the culture in which it was founded. This approach permits analysis of a range of subjects, including gender in the workplace, the rise of a service economy, Christianity and free enterprise, business training in colleges and universities, and business promotion of free enterprise in the United States and abroad. This broad inquiry is motivated by two central questions: How did a discount retailer from the Ozarks become the world’s largest corporation, and what motivates the workers employed by Wal-Mart?

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