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Religion, Art, and Money: Episcopalians and American Culture from the Civil War to the Great Depression

Online ISBN:
9781469628134
Print ISBN:
9781469626970
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

Religion, Art, and Money: Episcopalians and American Culture from the Civil War to the Great Depression

Published online:
19 January 2017
Published in print:
23 May 2016
Online ISBN:
9781469628134
Print ISBN:
9781469626970
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

This cultural history of mainline Protestantism and American cities--most notably, New York City--focuses on rich, city-dwelling Episcopalians and what they did with their money. Peter Williams argues that such Episcopalians, many of them the most successful of industrialists and financiers, through their participation in major aesthetic and social welfare endeavors left a deep and lasting mark on American urban culture. Their sense of public responsibility derived from a sacramental theology that legitimized the material realm as a vehicle for religious experience and moral formation. Williams traces how the church helped transmit a European inflected artistic patronage that was adapted to the American scene by clergy and laity intent upon providing moral and aesthetic leadership for a society in flux. Episcopalian influence is most visible in the churches, cathedrals, and elite boarding schools that stand in many cities, but Episcopalians also provided major support to the formation of stellar art collections, the performing arts, and the Arts and Crafts movement. A pioneer in the study of material religion, Williams argues that Episcopalians thus helped to smooth the way for acceptance of the material in a previously iconoclastic, Puritan-flavored society.

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