Manhattan’s Many Congregations — A Review of God in Gotham

April 21, 2021.Reading time 9 minutes.

Butler, Jon. God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Bob Carey If I were still teaching Introduction to Religion in American History, I would assign Jon Butler’s God in Gotham, with its excellent cameos of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Abraham […]

Where the Waters Meet the People: A Bibliography of the Twin cities

October 7, 2020.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Avigail Oren In This Tender Land (2019), William Kent Kreuger’s loose update of Huck Finn, the O’Banion brothers and their compatriots Emmy and Mose end up in St. Paul, Minnesota, after escaping from the Lincoln Indian Training School—and its despicable, abusive, headmaster Mrs. Brinkman—and sailing down the Minnesota River in a canoe. After passing […]

Digital Summer School: Digitizing Rochester’s Religions

August 25, 2020.Reading time 27 minutes.

Religion has often been a central force in urban America, particularly in the twentieth century. For example, by 1940 Los Angeles exhibited a “multiplicity and diversity of faiths…that probably cannot be duplicated in any other city on earth,” noted the authors of the WPA guide to Los Angeles. L.A.’s religious diversity included Buddhism, Catholicism, Judaism, […]

Finding Religion in the City: A Review of Mark Wild’s Renewal: Liberal Protestants in the American City after World War II

May 12, 2020.Reading time 8 minutes.

Mark Wild. Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Review by Bob Carey Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II is a well written study of how liberal Protestants (liberal, white male Protestants, it is important to note) tried to establish […]

Member of the Week: Constanze Weise

February 25, 2020.Reading time 13 minutes.

Constanze Weise Department of Social Sciences Henderson State University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? Presently, I am working on two book manuscripts. I am currently finishing up the manuscript for my first book which is based on my doctoral dissertation. Tentatively titled Kingdoms of the Confluence: Ritual, Politics, and Sovereignty […]

An Obscure Afro-Brazilian “Colony” in Ghana: Accra’s Tabon Community

November 21, 2019.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Hermann W. von Hesse In the summer of 2017, I returned from Madison, Wisconsin to Accra – my hometown and Ghana’s capital since 1877 – to do my pre-dissertation research. Besides my main dissertation interests, I had since childhood been interested in the music and religion of Accra’s Afro-Brazilian descended community. Though not of […]

Digital Summer School 2019: Religion, Community, and Milwaukee

July 10, 2019.Reading time 13 minutes.

Editor’s note: With the July 4th holiday behind us and summer in full swing, The Metropole brings you our second annual Digital Summer School, our effort to highlight digital humanities projects focusing on urban history. First up, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Chris Cantwell and the digital project Gathering Places, Religion and Community in Milwaukee. Why did you […]