American Denominational History

Yesterday, in my mailbox, a copy of a new book arrived to which I contributed an essay, American Denominational History: Perspectives on the Past, Prospects for the Future, edited by Keith Harper (University of Alabama Press, 2008). These are mainly historiographical essays on denominational history that chart the past fifty years and propose new directions for the future:

• Catholic Distinctiveness and the Challenge of American Denominationalism by Amy Koehlinger
• New Directions on the Congregational Way by Margaret Bendroth
• Presbyterians in America: Denominational History and the Quest for Identity by Sean Michael Lucas (you can read this essay here, here, and here)
• From the Margin to the Middle to Somewhere In Between: An Overview of American Baptist Historiography by Keith Harper
• "Everything Arose Just as the Occasion Offered": Defining Methodist Identity through the History of Methodist Polity by Jennifer L. Woodruff Tait
• Black Protestantism: A Historiographical Appraisal by Paul Harvey
• Mormon Historiography by David J. Whittaker
• Interpreting American Pentecostal Origins: Retrospect and Prospect by Randall J. Stephens
• "We're All Evangelicals Now": The Existential and Backward Historiography of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism by Barry Hankins