ATLANTA – Mercer University's College of Continuing and Professional Studies, in partnership with the American Academy of Religion (AAR), will welcome noted religious history scholar Dr. Catherine L. Albanese to present an April 9 lecture, titled “When is God's Time? Watching the Religious Clock in Antebellum America.”
The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place at 3:30 p.m. in the Trustees Dining Room on the Cecil B. Day Campus in Atlanta. Following the lecture, a book signing and reception will be held.
“Dr. Albanese's lifelong commitment to world-class research, teaching and leadership embodies the integrity of Mercer's mission to learn, create, discover, inspire, empower and serve,” said Dr. Wesley Barker, assistant professor of religious studies in the College's Department of Liberal Studies. “On behalf of the entire Mercer community, the Department of Liberal Studies could not be more thrilled to welcome a scholar of Dr. Albanese's caliber by showing her the warmest of Mercer Bear welcomes.”
The visit by Dr. Albanese, J. F. Rowny Professor Emerita and Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, serves as the third installment of the five-part 2014 American Lectures in the History of Religions (ALHR) Lecture Series. The theme of the series, which will be held April 7-11 at Agnes Scott College, Spelman/Morehouse Colleges and Interdenominational Theological Center, Mercer, Emory University and Georgia State University, is “In an American Kaleidoscope: Revisiting Two Centuries of American Religious History.”
Former president of the AAR, 2003 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in the Humanities and a foremost scholar in the study of American religious history, Dr. Albanese has authored six books, including the critically acclaimed Nature Religion In America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age, and the widely read textbook America: Religions and Religion, which is currently in its fifth edition. She has published numerous articles and essays and edited several books on religion in America, including The Spirituality of the American Transcendentalists: Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau, published by Mercer University Press in 1988. Dr. Albanese's most recent book, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion, was co-winner of the 2007 AAR Award for Excellence in Historical Studies and was selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2007.
Founded in 1891, the ALHR's mission is to encourage path-breaking scholarship through a lecture and book series. The ALHR, which has been operating under the auspices of the AAR since 1994, offers a lecture series that has featured an elite list of world-famous scholars in religious studies, and, in cooperation with Columbia University Press, these lectures have resulted in some of the most groundbreaking publications in the study of religion over the last 70 years. These works include R.M. Grant's Gnosticism and Early Christianity (1959), Victor and Edith Turner's Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (1978), Peter Brown's The Body and Society (1988), Caroline Walker Bynum's Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (1995) and Wendy Doniger's The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (1998).
Dr. Albanese joins the ALHR's list of distinguished scholars by presenting her unique and pioneering study of the relationship between the Anglo-Protestant “mainstream” and American evangelicalism in the 18th and 19th centuries.
