1800s
19th century
A01=John Lardas Modern
academic
american
antebellum
anthropology
areligious
Author_John Lardas Modern
belief
Category=QRAM
communication
community
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
erotic
faith
ghosts
historical
history
innovation
literature
moby dick
new york
penny press
phenomena
phrenology
railroad
religion
religious studies
research
scholarly
secular
sex machines
social
society
technology
theoretical
time period
trains
unitarian
united states
Product details
- ISBN 9780226533230
- Weight: 879g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 15 Dec 2011
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Ghosts. Railroads. Sing Sing. Sex machines. These are just a few of the phenomena that appear in John Lardas Modern's pioneering account of religion and society in nineteenth-century America. This book uncovers surprising connections between secular ideology and the rise of new technologies that opened up new ways of being religious. Exploring the eruptions of religion in New York's penny presses, the budding fields of anthropology and phrenology, and Moby-Dick, Modern challenges the strict separation between the religious and the secular that remains integral to discussions about religion today. Modern frames his study around the dread, wonder, paranoia, and manic confidence of being haunted, arguing that experiences and explanations of enchantment fueled secularism's emergence. The awareness of spectral energies coincided with attempts to tame the unruly fruits of secularism - in the cultivation of a spiritual self among Unitarians, for instance, or in John Murray Spear's erotic longings for a perpetual motion machine. Combining rigorous theoretical inquiry with beguiling historical arcana, Modern unsettles long-held views of religion and the methods of narrating its past.
John Lardas Modern is assistant professor of religious studies at Franklin and Marshall College. He is the author of The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs.
