Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture. Edited by Walter H. Conser, Jr., and Rodger M. Payne. Religion in the South. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. 383 pp.

摘要

Students of religious history have long been methodologically inventive,nbringing analytical tools from sociology, ethnography, anthropology,ngeography, and elsewhere to bear in their research. Walter H. Conser, Jr., andnRodger M. Payne fully embrace this trend toward interdisciplinarynscholarship in Southern Crossroads, an anthology of new and previouslynpublished work on religion in the American South. Indeed, the editorsndeliberately drew from different approaches within their subfield, and the fifteen essays selected include “explorations into such domains as food, music,nart, vernacular folkways, and literature” (4). The volume’s center of gravity,nhowever, is still in the contributions of historians, and works by CharlesnReagan Wilson, Paul Harvey, and others mentioned below reflect long andnthoughtful engagement with the documentary record. The works by non-nhistorians are uniformly provocative, but only Marcie Cohen Ferris in hernstudy of Jewish foodways and Charles E. Orser, Jr., in his survey of thenhistorical archaeology of slave religion offer pieces substantial enough tonserve as counterweights to the more traditional histories.