This article details the early twentieth-century emergence of chaplains in the New York Police Department (NYPD), the first police chaplains in the United States. Chaplains would eventually be seen as a crucial part of many American institutions, including the military and law enforcement, but initially the prospect of chaplains in the NYPD seemed strange, even a joke. Through attention to newspapers, published city records, and denominational publications, this article argues that police chaplains emerged when they did because the role helped the NYPD address two problems that were top of mind for its critics as it attempted to modernize and professionalize: officer misconduct and the department's fraught relationship with certain religious communities. However, it also argues that chaplaincy roles offered a way for the NYPD to address these problems from within and on its own political and racial terms. These appointments bolstered the power of the department even as they cemented the link of police to emerging "tri-faith" conceptions of American religion.
Scholars of American religion should be attentive to the ways in which academic Religious Studies in a US context have been implicated in the acquisition of sacred objects from religious communities abroad. This article illustrates these entanglements with a case study tracing the acquisition history of a collection of religious artifacts removed from the Samaritan community of Nablus in Palestine. It uses archival records to reconstruct the collection's extraction by a group of Christian philanthropists connected to the World Sunday School Association, and its subsequent movements across spaces and owners in the United States. The story of this collection-now accessioned as the Chamberlain Warren Samaritan Collection and held in Michigan State University's Library-is one example among many of a lively antiquities market for Western acquisition of artifacts out of Palestine during the 19th and early 20th centuries. What is especially informative about this case study for scholars of American religion, however, is that it illuminates how the concept of historical significance has functioned as a barometer for evaluating not only the worth of objects but also the religious communities from which they originate.
After the Supreme Court incorporated the Establishment Clause against the states in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), raucous national debates broke out between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews about the constitutionality of government aid to parochial schools. This article offers the first account of how these interconfessional hostilities shaped the Catholic Church's parochial school litigation strategy after Everson. To undercut claims that government aid to parochial schools would perniciously enrich the (Roman) Catholic hierarchy, the Church's public spokesmen increasingly framed debates about parochial school aid after Everson as implicating the constitutional rights of American parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children. In so doing, these figures eschewed arguments made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the government has an obligation to fund institutional religion. Moreover, to prevent anti-Catholic prejudice from impacting the disposition of discrete church-state disputes, lawyers associated with the Catholic bishops' official episcopal organization sometimes refrained from publicly involving themselves in local litigation, all while privately supplying litigants with strategic counsel. In concluding, this article suggests that the Church's post-Everson approach to defending the constitutionality of parochial school aid was motivated by a consistent conviction that parents who sent their children to Catholic schools ought to be treated in the same manner as parents who sent their children to other nonpublic (but non-Catholic) schools. When the scope of government aid to nonpublic schools grew in later years, this argument could therefore be invoked to support parochial schools' equal inclusion in more robust aid programs.
While scholarship on the Bible's reception in the United States has frequently engaged with modern translations of the text, the popularity of abridged Bibles during the first half of the twentieth century represents an overlooked chapter of this history. This essay takes up one of these shortened Bibles, The Living Bible (1928), edited by the lawyer and back-to-the-land advocate Bolton Hall, as a window into the larger significance of these abbreviated versions for American religious history. Though not a biblical scholar or clergyman, Hall was confident that he had successfully condensed the substance of the canon into a text a third of its size, which he proudly proclaimed as the first "readable" Bible. Together with Hall's other abridgment projects and his advocacy for single-tax proposals, this Bible reflects a larger optimism in this period about the power of simplification-what the historians Kenneth Cmiel and John Durham Peters aptly call the "culture of happy summary." This article examines Hall's condensed canon in relationship to his advocacy for the simplification of government and his abridgment of other classics by Henry George and Leo Tolstoy as artifacts of a hope shared by many in this period that the truths of an increasingly complex world could be reduced without remainder.
Since its inception, evangelical Protestantism has attracted passionate converts and produced anguished deserters: people with intense conversion experiences who have later chosen to flee their churches and the peculiar stream of Christianity that once held their devotion. In past generations, a person exiting evangelicalism left community into seclusion. However, I argue that in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, post-evangelical feminists used digital media to create online post-evangelical feminist communities that alleviated isolation for those leaving conservative evangelical communities. This paper explores the invention and adoption of digital technologies in light of the evangelical history of media innovation. Using blogposts, social media posts, and interviews, it examines the experiences of twenty-first century post-evangelical feminists who participated in digital communities. The metaphor of outposts in "the wilderness," commonly used by post-evangelical feminists, suggests that digital communities acted as havens of theologically and politically progressive sociality outside evangelical institutions. These communities provided an important function for those early twenty-first-century post-evangelical feminists who left evangelicalism but maintained a Christian faith. Those marginalized by their gender and their theological positions used digital media as a structure to forge religious belonging in a period defined by the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. This history illuminates the promises and the limitations of digital religious communities.
