Southern Religion, Southern Culture ― Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson

Contributions by Ryan L. Fletcher, Darren E. Grem, Paul Harvey, Alicia Jackson, Ted Ownby, Otis W. Pickett, Arthur Remillard, Chad Seales, and Randall J. Stephens

Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson's research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways.

This volume pays tribute to and extends Wilson's seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the essays examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson's model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South's religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes.

The volume first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region's fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, this book shows that Wilson's groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South's complicated history and culture.

Darren E. Grem is assistant professor of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi, author of The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity, and coeditor of The Business Turn in American Religious History. Ted Ownby is professor of history and southern studies and director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is editor of The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South, Manners and Southern History, and Black and White: Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South, all published by University Press of Mississippi. James G. Thomas, Jr. is associate director for publications at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, is editor of multiple works on southern literature, and was managing editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.