This event has been canceled and will be rescheduled at a later date.
The spring 2020 Seminar in American Religion will feature Darren Dochuk's Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (Basic Books, 2019). Commentators for this seminar are Melani McAlister of George Washington University and Andrew Preston of Cambridge University. Free and open to the public.
From the publisher:
Anointed with Oil places religion and oil at the center of American history. From the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation’s special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics—boosting America’s ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today’s political and environmental debates.