Catalog of the College:
Religion 393. Rural Religion. A study of the religious forms of rural society
with special emphasis upon the rural church in the southeastern US.
Attention to historical, social, cultural, and demographic transformations of
rural institutions from 1800 to the present. Fieldwork required. Credit, one
course. Mr. Smith. 1998 and alternate years.
Synopsis:
This course will explore religion as it is disclosed in the forms of rural life.
These forms include the personal beliefs and values of farmers and others in
the rural landscape as well as the complex network of rural primary
institutions and the patterns of life related to those institutions. The
methodology is both descriptive and analytic, historical and
phenomenological. We are interested to understand the array of beliefs,
values and practices manifest in rural life but we must enter and access those
beliefs via the changing history of the land and the human structures of
meaning built upon it. Our route of access then will be through the history of
settlement, the genesis and development of primary institutions, and the
ongoing transformation of earlier institutions, and the appearance and effect
of non-rural life forms upon older patterns. Within a general historical
framework, we will look at both the continuities and discontinuities that are
exhibited in the transformation of the road, the house, the farm, the mill,
store, school, courthouse, and church as rural life develops from around 1700
to the present. As we sample and section the historical continuum at several
critical points we will attempt to understand the meaning of our
fundamental tokens of discourse: religion, rural, land, forest, wood, town,
settled, natural, and wild among others. The texts/ for our inquiry are
documentary [things written down or said or recalled], material [things that
were built or made], performative [the things that were done, ranging from
rituals to gestures and postures], and symbolic [the array of concepts and
beliefs arising from other texts/ as well as our own notions imposed upon
those other texts/.] Our procedure in the analysis of these texts/ will be to go
back and forth--from the land and its uses to our descriptions and analyses,
from the churches and their festivals to our theories of social forms, from the
barns and the life of the farm to our ideas of labor and order, and from the
distributed community of the countryside to our urban notions of
collectivized privacy.