| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Visual Culture of American Religions. Ed. by David Morgan and Sally M. Promey. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. xiv, 427 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-520-22520-1. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 0-520-22522-8.)

As part of a growing literature that seeks to broaden our understanding of American visual culture, the contributors and coeditors of this book, David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, have produced a milestone that will prove a point of departure for emerging scholars and the public interested in the visual and built environments of American religion. 1

The book features a sophisticated yet accessible theoretical introduction to the power of images in American religious life, followed by fourteen well-argued and highly readable essays dealing with both the traditional iconography and the popular imagery of Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Native American individuals and groups. The book also explores the meanings and spaces reserved for the visual symbols of civil religion in the United States and includes an exceptional bibliography and information on archival sources for further research. 2

As the most wide ranging and useful outgrowth of a multi-year interdisciplinary collaborative project of research, exhibition, and publication funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Lilly Endowment, The Visual Culture of American Religions unites the concerns of academic art historians and scholars of religion, the media, and American studies in a book that maps both the breadth of concerns and the variety of theoretical and methodological approaches gaining ground under the visual studies rubric and that challenges historians of American culture to look seriously at the materializing tendencies that serve to enable a wide variety of religious beliefs. . . .

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