Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion
Inaugurated in 1980 and named in 2023 to honor the Cushwa Center’s founding director, the Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion convenes each semester at the University of Notre Dame to discuss a notable book recently published in the field.
Along with faculty and graduate students from Notre Dame, scholars from throughout the Midwest travel to campus to attend as invited guests of the Cushwa Center. The featured author engages with two invited commentators as well as the larger group. The Saturday morning seminar is free and open to all.
A Friday evening dinner for out-of-town guests along with breaks and informal gatherings make the weekend a time for connection and dialogue among longtime attendees and newcomers alike.
Joining the list of authors whose work has been chosen for the Dolan Seminar is recognized as a distinct honor among scholars of American religion.
One thing that was very interesting in my mind was to have an annual seminar on American religion. Not just American Catholicism, but American religion . . . That seminar has blossomed into fifty people now, showing up twice a year. It’s been a wonderful thing.
— Jay P. Dolan, 2015
Spring 2024
Stephen Bullivant, Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (Oxford, 2022)
Fall 2023
Lerone A. Martin, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism (Princeton, 2023)
Spring 2023
Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard, 2022)
Fall 2022
Philip Jenkins, Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval (Oxford, 2021)
Spring 2022
Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland (UNC, 2021)
Fall 2021
Kristen Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2020)
Spring 2021
Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2019)
Fall 2020
seminar postponed
Spring 2020
seminar postponed
Fall 2019
Kathleen Sprows Cummings, A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American (UNC, 2019)
Spring 2019
Catherine O’Donnell, Elizabeth Seton: American Saint (Cornell, 2018)
Fall 2018
David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, 2017)
Spring 2018
Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU, 2016)
Fall 2017
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870 (Knopf, 2017)
Spring 2017
John T. McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton, 2016)
Fall 2016
Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Belknap, 2016)
Spring 2016
Mark A. Noll, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (Oxford, 2016)
Fall 2015
Jason C. Bivins, Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion (Oxford, 2015)
Spring 2015
Grant Wacker, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation (Belknap, 2014)
Fall 2014
Paula M. Kane, Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America (UNC, 2013)
Spring 2014
Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford, 2013)
Fall 2013
Emma Anderson, The Death and Afterlife of the North American Martyrs (Harvard, 2013)
Spring 2013
Catherine A. Brekus, Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (Yale, 2013)
Fall 2012
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012)
Spring 2012
John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? A Historical Introduction (Westminster John Knox, 2011)
Fall 2011
Sarah A. Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire (Oxford, 2010)
Spring 2011
Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard, 2009)
Fall 2010
Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (Oxford, 2009)
Spring 2010
Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Cornell, 2008)
Fall 2009
Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford, 2008)
Spring 2009
Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (UNC, 2007)
Fall 2008
Catherine A. Brekus (ed.), The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past (UNC, 2007)
Spring 2008
Gerald McKevitt, Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848–1919 (Stanford, 2007)
Fall 2007
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (Anchor, 2006)
Spring 2007
Rudy V. Busto, King Tiger:The Religious Vision of Reies López Tijerina (New Mexico, 2005)
Fall 2006
Maureen Fitzgerald
Habits of Compassion: Irish Catholic Nuns and the Origins of New York’s Welfare System, 1830–1920 (Illinois, 2006)
Spring 2006
Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Harvard, 2005)
Fall 2005
Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Cornell, 2004)
Spring 2005
Peter R. D’Agostino, Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from Risorgimento to Fascism (UNC, 2004)
Fall 2004
George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale, 2003)
Spring 2004
Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford, 2002)
Fall 2003
John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (Norton, 2003)
Spring 2003
Colleen Carroll
The New Faithful: Why Young Adults are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Loyola, 2002)
Fall 2002
Timothy Matovina, Gary Riebe-Estrella, S.V.D. (eds.), Horizons of the Sacred: Mexican Traditions in U.S. Catholicism (Cornell, 2002)
Spring 2002
Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Harvard, 2001)
Fall 2001
Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Illinois, 2000)
Spring 2001
Diane Winston, Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of The Salvation Army (Harvard, 1999)
Fall 2000
Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, 1999)
Spring 2000
Kathryn T. Long, The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (Oxford, 1998)
1999
Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (UNC, 1998)
1998
Jon Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830–1917 (UNC, 1997)
Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (Oxford, 1997)
1997
Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (Yale, 1996)
John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago, 1996)
1996
Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (California, 1994)
Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1995)
1995
Roger Finke, Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (Rutgers, 1992)
1994
Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (Oxford, 1992)
George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford, 1994)
1993
Stephen J. Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (Yale, 1992)
1992
Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Yale, 1991)
1991
Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago, 1990)
1990
Mary Farrell Bednarowski, New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America (Indiana, 1989)
Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Harvard, 1990)
1989
Martin E. Marty, Essay prepared from his book Modern American Religion, Vol I: The Irony of It All, 1893–1990 (Chicago, 1986)
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (Yale, 1989)
1988
Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith since World War II (Princeton, 1988)
1987
Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (Oxford, 1986)
R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (Oxford, 1986)
1986
Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday, 1985)
1985
Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1984)
Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of A New Religious Tradition (Urbana, Illinois: University of illinois Press, 1985)
James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)
1984
Rosemary Keller and Rosemary Ruether, Women and Religion in America, Vol II: The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods—A Documentary History (Harper and Row, 1981)
Dennis Voskuil, Mountains into Goldmines: Robert Schuller and the Gospel of Success (Eerdmans, 1983)
Edward R. Kantowicz, Corporation Sole: Cardinal Mundelein and Chicago Catholicism (Notre Dame, 1983)
1983
Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America (Temple, 1982)
Grant Wacker, “In the Beginning Was Finney…Or Was it Bushnell?: The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism, 1880–1910.”
William Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Harvard, 1976)
Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: The Great Awakening As Interpretative Fiction.”
1982
Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago, 1981)
Thomas Kselman, “Our Lady of Necedah: Marian Piety and the Cold War.”
William M. Halsey, The Survival of American Innocence: Catholicism in An Era of Disillusionment, 1920–1940 (Notre Dame, 1980)
Philip VanderMeer, “Religion and Politics: Indiana in the Progressive Period.”
1981
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (Oxford, 1980)
Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1981)
Jon Butler, “Enlarging the Bonds of Christ: Slavery, Evangelism, and the Christianization of the White South, 1690–1840.”
1980
Martin E. Marty. Presented a paper examining recent works in American religious history. Later published as “The Editor’s Bookshelf: American Religious History,” Journal of Religion vol. 62 (January 1982), pp. 99–109.