Foreword by Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein
Acknowledgments
A Note on Places
Introduction: Churching the Northern Wilds
1. No Schism in the Body: The Town Church in Crisis
2. Zion Travels: The Itinerant Enterprise
3. Scrambling for the Right: Disestablishment and the Town
Church
4. 'Tis All on Fire: Landscapes of Religious Community
5. Fairly Missionary Ground: The Congregationalist Turn to
Itinerancy
6. A City Set on a Hill: Northern New England's New Religious
Geography
Conclusion: A Place of Paradoxes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
How churchgoers organized their communities
Shelby M. Balik is Assistant Professor of American History at Metropolitan State University of Denver.
[A]n ambitious and engaging piece of scholarship. . . Rally the
Scattered Believers promises to complement classic and
much-respected works on Vermont's religious communities during this
period. . . More significant than the book's engagement with that
earlier scholarship is its contribution to recent and ongoing
scholarly discussion about the place of religion in early American
life. Balik's New England is a religious place. . . [H]er
interesting new book provides an alternative to other recent books
that see more of the secular than the sacred in America's past.83.1
Winter/Spring 2015
*Vermont History*
I strongly recommend Balik's book for those studying colonial
religious landscapes and heritages not only in New England, but in
the nineteenth-century religious diasporas that swept the continent
with varying mixes of European colonials and also African and Asian
heritages.
*University of Kentucky*
Rally the Scattered Believers is an important new interpretation of
how religious change shaped American cultural identity in the early
republic.
*Journal of American History*
[A] deeply researched and meticulously sourced book. . . [R]eading
Rally the Scattered Believers helped me to consider anew the
centrality of place—and the differing ways that religious
organizations organize space—in understanding religious
history.9/22/14
*Religion in American History*
The book's meticulous coverage of the spread of these faiths and
its interpretation through the lens of geography is a strength. . .
. Recommended.
*Choice*
Using church and town records, the personal writings and
correspondence of laity and clergy, books, pamphlets, and religious
periodicals, Balik has written an engaging, ground-level religious
history with larger implications.
*Journal of the Early Republic*
Shelby Balik's deeply researched 'Rally the Scattered Believers:
Northern New England's Religious Geography' offers a finely grained
picture of that era of burgeoning development. . . . Balik's book
delivers one of the best histories of precisely what the 'Second
Great Awakening' amounted to in northern New England. Dec 2015
*American Historical Review*
Balik's exhaustively researched book represents the most
comprehensive and important study of northern New England's
religious history published to date. It is also a significant
contribution to a small body of scholarship on the spatial study of
religion. . . . In sum, this is a major work of extraordinary
scholarship.
*Church History*
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