Leigh A Schmidt

Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965 (Lived Religions)

This collection of essays explores the significance of practice in understanding American Protestant life. The authors are historians of American religion, practical theologians, and pastors and were the twelve principal researchers in a three-year collaborative project sponsored by the Lilly Endowm...

Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays

Slogans such as "Let's put Christ back into Christmas" or "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" hold an appeal to Christians who oppose the commercializing of events they hold sacred. However, through a close look at the rise of holidays in the United States, Leigh Schmidt show us that commercial ap...

Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality

Yoga classes and Zen meditation, New-Age retreats and nature mysticismall are part of an ongoing religious experimentation that has surprisingly deep roots in American history. Tracing out the country’s Transcendentalist and cosmopolitan religious impulses over the last two centuries, Restless Souls...

Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality

Yoga classes and Zen meditation, New-Age seminars and holistic workshops, The Oprah Winfrey Show and books by Deepak Chopra—all are part of the ongoing religious experimentation that has surprisingly deep roots in American history. By tracing our unique spiritual heritage along its many colorf...

American Religious Liberalism (Religion in North America)

Religious liberalism in America has often been equated with an ecumenical Protestant establishment. By contrast, American Religious Liberalism draws attention to the broad diversity of liberal cultures that shapes America’s religious movements. The essays gathered here push beyond familiar tropes an...

Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment

“Faith cometh by hearing”―so said Saint Paul, and devoted Christians from Augustine to Luther down to the present have placed particular emphasis on spiritual arts of listening. In quiet retreats for prayer, in the noisy exercises of Protestant revivalism, in the mystical pursuit of the voices of an...

Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman

The nineteenth-century eccentric Ida C. Craddock was by turns a secular freethinker, a religious visionary, a civil-liberties advocate, and a resolute defender of belly-dancing. Arrested and tried repeatedly on obscenity charges, she was deemed a danger to public morality for her candor about sexual...

Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism

Winner of the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History, Holy Fairs traces the roots of American camp-meeting revivalism to the communion festivals of early modern Scotland. This new paperback edition of Leigh Eric S

The Religious History of America

The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today

Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment

Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment

Consumer Rites: The Buying & Selling of American Holidays

Consumer Rites: The Buying & Selling of American Holidays

Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965

Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism