Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace, co-authored with Shayne Lee (New York University Press, 2009).
Joel Osteen, Paula White, T. D. Jakes, Rick Warren, and Brian McLaren pastor some the largest churches in the nation, lead vast spiritual networks, write best-selling books, and are among the most influential preachers in American Protestantism today. Spurred by the phenomenal appeal of these religious innovators, sociologist Shayne Lee and historian Phillip Luke Sinitiere investigate how they operate and how their style of religious expression fits into America’s cultural landscape. Drawing from the theory of religious economy, the authors offer new perspectives on evangelical leadership and key insights into why some religious movements thrive while others decline.
Holy Mavericks provides a useful overview of contemporary evangelicalism while emphasizing the importance of "supply-side thinking" in understanding shifts in American religion. It reveals how the Christian world hosts a culture of celebrity very similar to the secular realm, particularly in terms of marketing, branding, and publicity. Holy Mavericks reaffirms that religion is always in conversation with the larger society in which it is embedded, and that it is imperative to understand how those religious suppliers who are able to change with the times will outlast those who are not.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Smiling Preacher: Joel Osteen and the Happy Church
Chapter 2: Great Jazz: T.D. Jakes and the New Black Church
Chapter 3: A New Kind of Christian: Brian McLaren and the Emerging Church
Chapter 4: Messed-Up Mississippi Girl: Paula White and the Imperfect Church
Chapter 5: Surfing Spiritual Waves: Rick Warren and the Purpose-Driven Church
Epilogue
Bibliographic Essay: Theory of Religious Economy
Purchase Holy Mavericks from NYU Press, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore.
Joel Osteen, Paula White, T. D. Jakes, Rick Warren, and Brian McLaren pastor some the largest churches in the nation, lead vast spiritual networks, write best-selling books, and are among the most influential preachers in American Protestantism today. Spurred by the phenomenal appeal of these religious innovators, sociologist Shayne Lee and historian Phillip Luke Sinitiere investigate how they operate and how their style of religious expression fits into America’s cultural landscape. Drawing from the theory of religious economy, the authors offer new perspectives on evangelical leadership and key insights into why some religious movements thrive while others decline.
Holy Mavericks provides a useful overview of contemporary evangelicalism while emphasizing the importance of "supply-side thinking" in understanding shifts in American religion. It reveals how the Christian world hosts a culture of celebrity very similar to the secular realm, particularly in terms of marketing, branding, and publicity. Holy Mavericks reaffirms that religion is always in conversation with the larger society in which it is embedded, and that it is imperative to understand how those religious suppliers who are able to change with the times will outlast those who are not.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Smiling Preacher: Joel Osteen and the Happy Church
Chapter 2: Great Jazz: T.D. Jakes and the New Black Church
Chapter 3: A New Kind of Christian: Brian McLaren and the Emerging Church
Chapter 4: Messed-Up Mississippi Girl: Paula White and the Imperfect Church
Chapter 5: Surfing Spiritual Waves: Rick Warren and the Purpose-Driven Church
Epilogue
Bibliographic Essay: Theory of Religious Economy
Purchase Holy Mavericks from NYU Press, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore.
Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith, co-edited with J. Russell Hawkins (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Christians and the Color Line analyzes the complex entanglement of race and religion in the United States. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of racialized religion, the essays in this volume consider the problem of race both in Christian congregations and in American society as a whole. Belying the notion that a post-racial America has arrived, congregations in the US are showing an unprecedented degree of interest in overcoming the deep racial divisions that exist within American Protestantism. In one recent poll, for instance, nearly 70 percent of church leaders expressed a strong desire for their congregations to become racially and culturally diverse. To date, reality has eluded this professed desire as fewer than 10 percent of American Protestant churches have actually achieved multiracial status.
Employing innovative research from sociology, history, philosophy, and religious studies, the contributors to this volume use Michael Emerson and Christian Smith's groundbreaking study Divided by Faith (Oxford, 2000) as their starting point to acknowledge important historical, sociological, and theological causations for racial divisions in Christian communities. Collectively, however, these scholars also offer constructive steps that Christians of all races might take to overcome the color line and usher in a new era of cross-racial engagement.
Table of Contents
Foreword, Michael O. Emerson
Introduction, Phillip Luke Sinitiere and J. Russell Hawkins
Section 1: Looking Back--Failures and Successes in Erasing the Color Line
Chapter 1: Miles S. Mullin, II, Neoevangelicalism and the Problem of Race in Postwar America
Chapter 2: Karen Joy Johnson, Healing the Mystical Body: Catholic Attempts to Overcome the Radical Divide in Chicago, 1930-1948
Chapter 3: Brantley Gasaway, "Glimmers of Hope": Progressive Evangelicals and Racism, 1965-2000
Chapter 4: Tobin Miller Shearer, "Buttcheek to Buttcheek in the Pew": Interracial Relationalism in a Mennonite Congregation, 1957-2010
Chapter 5: Ryon Cobb, Still Divided by Faith?: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, 1977-2010
Section 2: Looking Forward--Possibilities for Overcoming the Color Line
Chapter 6: Mark T. Mulder, Worshipping to Stay the Same: Avoiding the Local to Maintain Solidarity
Chapter 7: Edward J. Blum, Beyond Body Counts: Sex, Individualism, and the Segregated Shape of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism
Chapter 8: Jerry Z. Park, Color-Conscious Structure-Blind Assimilation: How Asian American Christians Can Unintentionally Maintain the Racial Divide
Chapter 9: Erica Ryu Wong, Knotted Together: Identity and Community in a Multiracial Church
Chapter 10: Korie L. Edwards, Much Ado About Nothing?: Rethinking the Efficacy of Multiracial Churches for Racial Reconciliation
Theological Afterword: The Call to Blackness in American Christianity, Darryl Scriven
Purchase Christians and the Color Line from Oxford University Press, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore.
Christians and the Color Line analyzes the complex entanglement of race and religion in the United States. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of racialized religion, the essays in this volume consider the problem of race both in Christian congregations and in American society as a whole. Belying the notion that a post-racial America has arrived, congregations in the US are showing an unprecedented degree of interest in overcoming the deep racial divisions that exist within American Protestantism. In one recent poll, for instance, nearly 70 percent of church leaders expressed a strong desire for their congregations to become racially and culturally diverse. To date, reality has eluded this professed desire as fewer than 10 percent of American Protestant churches have actually achieved multiracial status.
Employing innovative research from sociology, history, philosophy, and religious studies, the contributors to this volume use Michael Emerson and Christian Smith's groundbreaking study Divided by Faith (Oxford, 2000) as their starting point to acknowledge important historical, sociological, and theological causations for racial divisions in Christian communities. Collectively, however, these scholars also offer constructive steps that Christians of all races might take to overcome the color line and usher in a new era of cross-racial engagement.
Table of Contents
Foreword, Michael O. Emerson
Introduction, Phillip Luke Sinitiere and J. Russell Hawkins
Section 1: Looking Back--Failures and Successes in Erasing the Color Line
Chapter 1: Miles S. Mullin, II, Neoevangelicalism and the Problem of Race in Postwar America
Chapter 2: Karen Joy Johnson, Healing the Mystical Body: Catholic Attempts to Overcome the Radical Divide in Chicago, 1930-1948
Chapter 3: Brantley Gasaway, "Glimmers of Hope": Progressive Evangelicals and Racism, 1965-2000
Chapter 4: Tobin Miller Shearer, "Buttcheek to Buttcheek in the Pew": Interracial Relationalism in a Mennonite Congregation, 1957-2010
Chapter 5: Ryon Cobb, Still Divided by Faith?: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, 1977-2010
Section 2: Looking Forward--Possibilities for Overcoming the Color Line
Chapter 6: Mark T. Mulder, Worshipping to Stay the Same: Avoiding the Local to Maintain Solidarity
Chapter 7: Edward J. Blum, Beyond Body Counts: Sex, Individualism, and the Segregated Shape of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism
Chapter 8: Jerry Z. Park, Color-Conscious Structure-Blind Assimilation: How Asian American Christians Can Unintentionally Maintain the Racial Divide
Chapter 9: Erica Ryu Wong, Knotted Together: Identity and Community in a Multiracial Church
Chapter 10: Korie L. Edwards, Much Ado About Nothing?: Rethinking the Efficacy of Multiracial Churches for Racial Reconciliation
Theological Afterword: The Call to Blackness in American Christianity, Darryl Scriven
Purchase Christians and the Color Line from Oxford University Press, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore.
Protest and Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis and American History, co-
edited with Amy Helene Kirschke (University of Missouri Press, 2014).
In looking back on his editorship of Crisis magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois said, “We
condensed more news about Negroes and their problems in a month than most
colored papers before this had published in a year.” Since its founding by Du Bois
in 1910, Crisis has been the primary published voice of the NAACP. Born in an age
of Jim Crow racism, often strapped for funds, the magazine struggled and
endured, all the while providing a forum for people of color to document their
inherent dignity and proclaim their definitive worth as human beings.
As the magazine’s editor from 1910 until 1934, Du Bois guided the content and the
aim of Crisis with a decisive hand. He ensured that each issue argued for civil
rights, economic justice, and social equality, always framing America’s intractable
color line in an international perspective. Du Bois benefited from a deep pool of
black literary and artistic genius, whether by commissioning the visual creativity
of Harlem Renaissance artists for Crisis covers or by publishing poems and short
stories from New Negro writers. From North to South, from East to West, and
even reaching across the globe, Crisis circulated its ideas and marshaled its impact far and wide.
Building on the solid foundation Du Bois laid, subsequent editors and contributors covered issues vital to communities of color, such as access to resources during the New Deal era, educational opportunities related to the historic Brown decision, the realization of basic civil rights at midcentury, American aid to Africa and Caribbean nations, and the persistent economic inequalities of today’s global era.
Despite its importance, little has been written about the historical and cultural significance of this seminal magazine. By exploring how Crisis responded to critical issues, the essays in Protest and Propaganda provide the first well-rounded, in-depth look at the magazine's role and influence. The authors show how the essays, columns, and visuals published in Crisis changed conversations, perceptions, and even laws in the United States, thereby calling a fractured nation to more fully live up to its democratic creed. They explain how the magazine survived tremendous odds, document how the voices of justice rose above the clamor of injustice, and demonstrate how relevant such literary, journalistic, and artistic postures remain in a twenty-first-century world still in crisis.
Table of Contents
Preface, Gerald Horne
Introduction, Shawn Leigh Alexander
Chapter 1: Robert W. Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois and Positive Propaganda: A Philosophical Prelude to His Editorship of The Crisis
Chapter 2: Amy Helene Kirschke and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, W. E. B. Du Bois as Print Propagandist
Chapter 3: Amy Helene Kirschke, Art in Crisis during the Du Bois Years
Chapter 4: Barbara McCaskill, "We Return Fighting": The Great War and African American Women's Short Fiction in The Crisis, 1917-1920
Chapter 5: Garth E. Pauley, W. E. B. Du Bois and The Crisis of Woman Suffrage
Chapter 6: Katharine Capshaw Smith, The Crisis Page, The Brownies' Book, and the Fantastic
Chapter 7: Edward J. Blum, God in Crisis: Race, Class, and Religion in the Harlem Renaissance
Chapter 8: Phillip Luke Sinitiere, W. E. B. Du Bois's Prophetic Propaganda: Religion and The Crisis, 1910-1934
Chapter 9: Megan E. Williams, The Crisis Cover Girl: Lena Horne, Walter White, and the NAACP's Representation of African American Femininity
Chapter 10: Charles H. Ford and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, The Crisis Responds to Public School Desegregation
Epilogue, Amy Helene Kirschke and Phillip Luke Sinitiere
Purchase Protest and Propaganda from the University of Missouri Press, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore.
edited with Amy Helene Kirschke (University of Missouri Press, 2014).
In looking back on his editorship of Crisis magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois said, “We
condensed more news about Negroes and their problems in a month than most
colored papers before this had published in a year.” Since its founding by Du Bois
in 1910, Crisis has been the primary published voice of the NAACP. Born in an age
of Jim Crow racism, often strapped for funds, the magazine struggled and
endured, all the while providing a forum for people of color to document their
inherent dignity and proclaim their definitive worth as human beings.
As the magazine’s editor from 1910 until 1934, Du Bois guided the content and the
aim of Crisis with a decisive hand. He ensured that each issue argued for civil
rights, economic justice, and social equality, always framing America’s intractable
color line in an international perspective. Du Bois benefited from a deep pool of
black literary and artistic genius, whether by commissioning the visual creativity
of Harlem Renaissance artists for Crisis covers or by publishing poems and short
stories from New Negro writers. From North to South, from East to West, and
even reaching across the globe, Crisis circulated its ideas and marshaled its impact far and wide.
Building on the solid foundation Du Bois laid, subsequent editors and contributors covered issues vital to communities of color, such as access to resources during the New Deal era, educational opportunities related to the historic Brown decision, the realization of basic civil rights at midcentury, American aid to Africa and Caribbean nations, and the persistent economic inequalities of today’s global era.
Despite its importance, little has been written about the historical and cultural significance of this seminal magazine. By exploring how Crisis responded to critical issues, the essays in Protest and Propaganda provide the first well-rounded, in-depth look at the magazine's role and influence. The authors show how the essays, columns, and visuals published in Crisis changed conversations, perceptions, and even laws in the United States, thereby calling a fractured nation to more fully live up to its democratic creed. They explain how the magazine survived tremendous odds, document how the voices of justice rose above the clamor of injustice, and demonstrate how relevant such literary, journalistic, and artistic postures remain in a twenty-first-century world still in crisis.
Table of Contents
Preface, Gerald Horne
Introduction, Shawn Leigh Alexander
Chapter 1: Robert W. Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois and Positive Propaganda: A Philosophical Prelude to His Editorship of The Crisis
Chapter 2: Amy Helene Kirschke and Phillip Luke Sinitiere, W. E. B. Du Bois as Print Propagandist
Chapter 3: Amy Helene Kirschke, Art in Crisis during the Du Bois Years
Chapter 4: Barbara McCaskill, "We Return Fighting": The Great War and African American Women's Short Fiction in The Crisis, 1917-1920
Chapter 5: Garth E. Pauley, W. E. B. Du Bois and The Crisis of Woman Suffrage
Chapter 6: Katharine Capshaw Smith, The Crisis Page, The Brownies' Book, and the Fantastic
Chapter 7: Edward J. Blum, God in Crisis: Race, Class, and Religion in the Harlem Renaissance
Chapter 8: Phillip Luke Sinitiere, W. E. B. Du Bois's Prophetic Propaganda: Religion and The Crisis, 1910-1934
Chapter 9: Megan E. Williams, The Crisis Cover Girl: Lena Horne, Walter White, and the NAACP's Representation of African American Femininity
Chapter 10: Charles H. Ford and Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, The Crisis Responds to Public School Desegregation
Epilogue, Amy Helene Kirschke and Phillip Luke Sinitiere
Purchase Protest and Propaganda from the University of Missouri Press, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore.
Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity (New York University Press, 2015).
Joel Osteen, the smiling preacher, has quickly emerged as one of the most recognizable Protestant leaders in the country. His megachurch, the Houston based Lakewood Church, hosts an average of over 40,000 worshipers each week. Osteen is the best-selling author of numerous books, and his sermons and inspirational talks appear regularly on mainstream cable and satellite radio. How did Joel Osteen become Joel Osteen? How did Lakewood become the largest megachurch in the
U. S.?
Salvation with a Smile, the first scholarly book devoted to Lakewood Church and Joel Osteen, offers a critical history of the congregation by linking its origins to post-World War II neopentecostalism, and connecting it to the exceptionally popular prosperity gospel movement and the enduring attraction of televangelism. In this richly documented book, historian Phillip Luke Sinitiere carefully excavates the life and times of Lakewood’s founder, John Osteen, to explain how his son Joel expanded his legacy and fashioned the congregation into America’s largest megachurch. As a popular preacher, Joel Osteen’s ministry has been a source of existential strength for many, but also the routine target of religious critics who vociferously contend that his teachings are theologically suspect and spiritually shallow. Sinitiere’s keen analysis shows how Osteen’s rebuttals have expressed a piety of resistance that demonstrates evangelicalism’s fractured, but persistent presence. Salvation with a Smile situates Lakewood Church in the context of American religious history and illuminates how Osteen has parlayed an understanding of American religious and political culture into vast popularity and success.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: John Osteen's Pentecost: The Origins of Lakewood Church
Chapter 2: John Osteen's Prosperity Gospel: Faith and Divine Healing at the Oasis of Love
Chapter 3: Joel Osteen's Prosperity Gospel, Part I: "We Believe in New Beginnings"
Chapter 4: Joel Osteen's Prosperity Gospel, Part II: The Mind, Mouth, and Body Becoming Better
Chapter 5: Joel Osteen's Tel-e-vangelism: The Message and Its Media
Chapter 6: Lakewood's Charismatic Core: Healing Hurts, Extending Hope
Chapter 7: The Redemptive Self: Finding and Forging Faith at Lakewood Church
Chapter 8: Joel Osteen's Piety of Resistance: New Calvinism and Evangelicalism's Crisis of Authority
Conclusion
Appendix A: Joel Osteen, "What the Resurrection Means to Us as Believers" (1999)
Appendix B: Joel Osteen, "Vision Sunday" (1999)
Purchase Salvation with a Smile from NYU Press, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore.
Joel Osteen, the smiling preacher, has quickly emerged as one of the most recognizable Protestant leaders in the country. His megachurch, the Houston based Lakewood Church, hosts an average of over 40,000 worshipers each week. Osteen is the best-selling author of numerous books, and his sermons and inspirational talks appear regularly on mainstream cable and satellite radio. How did Joel Osteen become Joel Osteen? How did Lakewood become the largest megachurch in the
U. S.?
Salvation with a Smile, the first scholarly book devoted to Lakewood Church and Joel Osteen, offers a critical history of the congregation by linking its origins to post-World War II neopentecostalism, and connecting it to the exceptionally popular prosperity gospel movement and the enduring attraction of televangelism. In this richly documented book, historian Phillip Luke Sinitiere carefully excavates the life and times of Lakewood’s founder, John Osteen, to explain how his son Joel expanded his legacy and fashioned the congregation into America’s largest megachurch. As a popular preacher, Joel Osteen’s ministry has been a source of existential strength for many, but also the routine target of religious critics who vociferously contend that his teachings are theologically suspect and spiritually shallow. Sinitiere’s keen analysis shows how Osteen’s rebuttals have expressed a piety of resistance that demonstrates evangelicalism’s fractured, but persistent presence. Salvation with a Smile situates Lakewood Church in the context of American religious history and illuminates how Osteen has parlayed an understanding of American religious and political culture into vast popularity and success.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: John Osteen's Pentecost: The Origins of Lakewood Church
Chapter 2: John Osteen's Prosperity Gospel: Faith and Divine Healing at the Oasis of Love
Chapter 3: Joel Osteen's Prosperity Gospel, Part I: "We Believe in New Beginnings"
Chapter 4: Joel Osteen's Prosperity Gospel, Part II: The Mind, Mouth, and Body Becoming Better
Chapter 5: Joel Osteen's Tel-e-vangelism: The Message and Its Media
Chapter 6: Lakewood's Charismatic Core: Healing Hurts, Extending Hope
Chapter 7: The Redemptive Self: Finding and Forging Faith at Lakewood Church
Chapter 8: Joel Osteen's Piety of Resistance: New Calvinism and Evangelicalism's Crisis of Authority
Conclusion
Appendix A: Joel Osteen, "What the Resurrection Means to Us as Believers" (1999)
Appendix B: Joel Osteen, "Vision Sunday" (1999)
Purchase Salvation with a Smile from NYU Press, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore.
Citizen of the World: The Late Career and Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois, Editor
(Northwestern University Press, 2019). Critical Insurgencies Series
In his 1952 book In Battle for Peace, published when W. E. B. Du Bois was eighty-
three years old, the brilliant black scholar announced that he was a "citizen of the
world." Citizen of the World chronicles selected chapters of Du Bois's final three
decades between the 1930s and 1960s. It maps his extraordinarily active and
productive latter years to social, cultural, and political transformations across the
globe.
From his birth in 1868 until his death in 1963, Du Bois sought the liberation of
black people in the United States and across the world through intellectual and
political labor. His tireless efforts documented and demonstrated connections
between freedom for African-descended people abroad and black freedom at
home.
In concert with growing scholarship on his twilight years, the essays in this
volume assert the fundamental importance of considering Du Bois's later
decades not as a life in decline that descended into blind ideological allegiance to socialism and communism but as the life of a productive, generative intellectual who responded rationally, imaginatively, and radically to massive mid-century changes around the world, and who remained committed to freedom's realization until his final hour.
Table of Contents
Introduction: 'To Know and Think and Tell the Truth as I See It,' Phillip Luke Sinitiere
Part I: A Global History of Race and Revolution
Chapter 1: Yuichiro Onishi and Toru Shinoda, The Paradigm of Refusal: W. E. B. Du Bois's Transpacific Political Imagination of the 1930s
Chapter 2: Derek Catsam, W. E. B. Du Bois, South Africa, and Phylon's "A Chronicle of Race Relations," 1940-1944
Chapter 3: Bill V. Mullen, Russia and America: An Interpretation of the Late W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for World Revolution
Chapter 4: Erik S. McDuffie, A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century: The Black Radical Vision of The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois
Part II: Gender and the Politics of Freedom
Chapter 5: Lauren Louise Anderson, Du Bois in Drag: Prevailing Women, Flailing Men, and the "Anne Du Bignon" Pseudonym
Chapter 6: Alys Eve Weinbaum, The Gender of the General Strike: W. E. B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction and Black Feminism's Philosophy of History
Chapter 7: Bettina Aptheker, W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois: Personal Memories, Political Reflections
Part III: The Politics of Memory and Meaning
Chapter 8: David Levering Lewis, Exile in Brooklyn: W. E. B. Du Bois's Final Decade
Chapter 9: Gary Murrell, Herbert Aptheker's Struggle to Publish W. E. B. Du Bois
Chapter 10: Phillip Luke Sinitiere, 'A Legacy of Scholarship and Struggle': W. E. B. Du Bois's Life after Death
Chapter 11: Robert W. Williams, The Digital Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois in the Internet Age
Afterword, Gerald Horne
Purchase Citizen of the World from Northwestern University Press, Amazon, or your local independent bookstore.
© Phillip Luke Sinitiere, 2018
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