Moving beyond familiar myths about moonshiners, bootleggers, and hard-drinking writers, Southern Comforts explores how alcohol and drinking helped shape the literature and culture of the U.S. South.Edited by Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger, this collection of seventeen thought-provoking essays proposes that discussions about drinking in southern culture often orbit around familiar figures and mythologies that obscure what alcohol consumption has meant over time. Comple...

Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies expands the geographical scope of scholarship about southern swamps. Although the physical environments that form its central subjects are scattered throughout the southeastern United States—the Atchafalaya, the Okefenokee, the Mississippi River delta, the Everglades, and the Great Dismal Swamp—this evocative collection challenges fixed notions of place and foregrounds the ways in which ecosystems shape cultures and creations on both l...

**A sweeping history of Christianity in America, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the political triumphs of evangelicalism, showing the powerful, singular role the faith has always played in American public life.“Fast-paced and lucidly written ... Required reading for anyone who wants to understand American religion, and for anyone who wants to understand America.” —Kristin Kobes Du Mez, New York Times–bestselling author of Jesus and John Wayne**...

A sweeping history of Christianity in America, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the political triumphs of evangelicalism, showing the powerful, singular role the faith has always played in American public life**.**In the United States today, there is no faith more dominant than Christianity. In Chosen Land, historian Matthew Avery Sutton chronicles Christians’ five-hundred-year endeavor to turn North America into their version of the kingdom of G...

The untold story of the Christian missionaries who played a crucial role in the allied victory in World War IIWhat makes a good missionary makes a good spy. Or so thought "Wild" Bill Donovan when he secretly recruited a team of religious activists for the Office of Strategic Services. They entered into a world of lies, deception, and murder, confident that their nefarious deeds would eventually help them expand the kingdom of God.In Double Crossed,...

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2015The first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation, American Apocalypse shows how a group of radical Protestants, anticipating the end of the world, paradoxically transformed it.

Every child knows what it means to play, but the rest of us can merely speculate. Is it a kind of adaptation, teaching us skills, inducting us into certain communities? Is it power, pursued in games of prowess? Fate, deployed in games of chance? Daydreaming, enacted in art? Or is it just frivolity? Brian Sutton-Smith, a leading proponent of play theory, considers each possibility as it has been proposed, elaborated, and debated in disciplines from biology, psychology, and education to meta...

Adrienne von Speyr was one of the most important mystical theologians of the last century, heralded by figures like John Paul II and T.S. Eliot. However, her work has been eclipsed in many ways by her personal connection to Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Heaven Opens provides one of the first comprehensive accounts of von Speyr’s theology, MatthewLewis Sutton argues that the eternal, immanent relations of the Triune God ground the mystical theological vision of von Speyr. Root...

The first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation, American Apocalypse shows how a group of radical Protestants, anticipating the end of the world, paradoxically transformed it.Matthew Avery Sutton draws on extensive archival research to document the ways an initially obscure network of charismatic preachers and their followers reshaped American religion, at home and abroad, for over a century. Perceiving the United States as besie...

The untold story of the Christian missionaries who played a crucial role in the allied victory in World War IIWhat makes a good missionary makes a good spy. Or so thought "Wild" Bill Donovan when he secretly recruited a team of religious activists for the Office of Strategic Services. They entered into a world of lies, deception, and murder, confident that their nefarious deeds would eventually help them expand the kingdom of God.In Double Crossed,...

Patrick Matthew, in 1831, originated the complete theory of evolution by natural selection in his book On Naval Timber and Arboriculture, and did so before Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace claimed to independently replicate it in 1858. Unjustly, and against the Arago convention on priority (a ruling that gives origination of any science theory to the first to publish), Matthew has been illicitly denied his priority on the grounds he never influenced anyone with his breakthrough. Today, Bi...

The Statue of Liberty--depicted on a roadside billboard--did not carry her customary torch and tablet. Instead, she shielded her eyes from words that towered beside her, words that highway drivers could not possibly avoid: "We are no longer a Christian nation." Underneath was the name of the man who spoke them, the nation's president, Barack Obama. He had made the original statement--"Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation, at least not just"--four years earlier. Since ...