Meet the Faculty

Candy Gunther Brown

• Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies

Education

• Ph.D. at Harvard University, 2000

Contact Information

Background

• Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Indiana University, $14,500 (2007-2008)
• Summer Faculty Fellowship, Indiana University, $8,000 [declined] (2008)
• New Frontiers Exploration Traveling Fellowship, Indiana University, $2,500      (2006)
• Spiritual Healing Conference Grants, Deaconess Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Aquinas Institute, Voices Project, Incarnate Word Foundation,  Adorers of the Blood of Christ, Saint Louis University, $11,500 (2006) 
• Faculty Development Grants, Mellon Foundation, $6,500 (2002, 2003)
• Dissertation Completion Fellowships, Louisville Institute, Packard Foundation, $20,000 (1995)                     
• Research Grant, Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals, $1,500 (1999)
• Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Research Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society,   $1,000 (1998)
• John Clive Teaching Prize, Harvard University, $300 (1998)
• Research Grants, Harvard University, $2,000 (1995, 1998)
• Sidney E. Mead Article Prize, American Society of Church History, $250 (1995)
• Fulbright, Lilly, Mazur, and Sarah Bradley Gamble Graduate Study Fellowships (1992, 1993, 1994, 1995)  
• Coolidge and Greenman Debating Prizes, $2,750 (1990, 1991, 1992)
• Detur Prize, John Harvard Scholar, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa Junior 12 (1990, 1991, 1992)
• Charles Warren Center Thesis Research Fellowship, Harvard University, $2,000 (1991)
  

I am an historian of American religion and culture.  My book, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880, assesses how evangelicals interacted with the burgeoning print market of the mid-nineteenth century.  The recent success of the Left Behind series, which sold over 50 million books, points to an enormous readership of evangelical Christian literature that has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream publishing world.  But this is not a recent phenomenon; the evangelical publishing community has been growing for more than two hundred years.  The Word in the World explores the roots of this far-flung conglomeration of writers, publishers, and readers, from the founding of the Methodist Book Concern in 1789 to the 1880 publication of the runaway best-seller Ben-Hur.  I show how this distinct print community used the Word of the Bible and printed words of their own to pursue a paradoxical mission: purity from and a transformative presence in the secular world.  Although scholars usually claim that religious publishing fell prey to the secularizing engines of commodification, I argue that evangelicals knew what they were doing by adopting a range of strategies, including the use of popular narratives and beautiful packaging.  An informal canon of texts emerged in the nineteenth century, consisting of sermons, histories, memoirs, novels, gift books, Sunday school libraries, periodicals, and hymnals.  Looking beyond the uses of texts in religious conversion, I examine how textual practices have transmitted cultural values both within evangelical communities and across a larger American cultural milieu.  An epilogue considers twenty-first-century ties between religion and the media.

My current research focuses on spiritual healing practices. Recent public opinion polls suggest that eighty percent of Americans believe God supernaturally heals people in answer to prayer; nearly half the population believes that demons are behind some sicknesses. Although belief in divine healing and deliverance from demons conflicts with the controlling assumption of modern science, that permanent natural laws account for every observable phenomenon, many Americans see no contradiction in combining physical and spiritual approaches when confronted with a serious illness. One of my current book-projects, Miracle Cures? Divine Healing and Deliverance in America, traces a cultural history of divine healing and deliverance practices in the United States from the colonial era to the present, emphasizing links to Latin America, Canada, and Africa. I analyze the epistemological assumptions and narrative strategies employed by proponents and detractors; position specific practices within varied geographic and social landscapes; and relate changes over time to broader historical currents. The study illuminates competing constructions of the human body; incommensurable definitions of science; challenges to the cultural authority of modern medicine; struggles of women, African Americans and Latinos to create a public narrative voice; and global, multilingual patterns of cultural exchange in the construction of religious meaning. Healing practices have contributed, sometimes in ironic ways, to what I argue is one of the most significant religious and cultural realignments of the twentieth century: a shift from the traditional Protestant-Catholic divide to a new polarity between materialist and spiritual worldviews. Strange new alliances have formed with scientific naturalists and functionally naturalistic evangelical and liberal Protestants and Catholics aligned across a philosophical chasm from Pentecostal and charismatic Protestants and Catholics, as well as metaphysical-healing practitioners who embrace varying definitions of spiritual healing.

The need for healing may prove to be one of the most powerful engines for reshaping American religions, culture, and politics in the twenty-first century. A second book-project, Therapeutic Pluralism: America’s Pursuit of Healing for Body, Mind, and Spirit, begins with the observation that alongside the widespread practice of divine healing, therapeutic alternatives rooted in vitalistic and metaphysical religious philosophies, such as homeopathy, Christian Science, chiropractic, curanderismo [folk healing], yoga, acupuncture, and Therapeutic Touch, have made spiritual healing a flourishing business in America. Indeed, many of the twenty-three percent of Americans who are charismatic or Pentecostal Christians regularly exposed to divine healing and the forty-percent of Americans who use metaphysical alternatives but may have no particular religious connections sample the same therapies. In an era in which the political power of conservative Christian and alternative healing constituencies is of great media interest, the largely unrecognized intersections of these communities merit further consideration. As globalization accelerates, U.S. patterns are increasingly influenced by healing practices that have long flourished in parts of the world where scientific naturalism has never been the dominant paradigm. Cultivating a “therapeutic” culture that privileges the practical fulfillment of individual needs over religious or medical orthodoxy, Americans in need of healing tend to experiment with diverse therapies. In what scholars have termed lived religion, people select, negotiate, and create from available alternatives as they confront life’s complexities, particularly when basic matters such as health, illness, and healing are at stake. At times, the drive to relieve pain has led people to do things they otherwise would not choose to do and to believe things they otherwise would not choose to believe. Since the civil rights and consumer revolutions of the 1960s, “informed consent” has become a watchword as Americans insist upon their moral and legal rights to make autonomous choices, based on the principles of personal autonomy and self-determination. Citizens have a legal right to freedom of choice, but for choices to be genuinely free, individuals must know what they are choosing and why. Pragmatic healthcare decisions can lead people to restructure their worldviews rather than make informed choices about whether particular therapies further their long-range goals and values. The issue is not whether any particular alternative is a good or bad option, but that therapies are often chosen unreflectively. If Americans become accustomed to accepting any seemingly effective therapy, the door is opened wide to uncritical acceptance of countless alternatives, some of which may in the long-term compromise individual or societal goals and values.

Research Interests

• American Religious History
• Spiritual Healing Practices
• Religious Print Cultures
• Evangelicalism
• Charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity

Courses Recently Taught

• Religion and American Culture
• Religion, Illness, and Healing
• Evangelical America
• Women and Religion in America
• Evangelical and Charismatic Christianity in the Americas

Publication Highlights

Books

The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Articles

"Global Reach: Practice, 1898-present." In Religion in American History, ed. John Corrigan and Amanda Porterfield. Malden, MA: Blackwell, forthcoming.

“Healing Words: Narratives of Spiritual Healing and Kathryn Kuhlman’s Uses of Print Culture, 1947-1976.” In Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America, ed. Charles L. Cohen and Paul S. Boyer, 271-297. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008.

"Religious Periodicals and Their Textual Communities." In A History of the Book in America, vol. 3, The Industrial Book, 1840-1880, ed. Scott Casper, Jeff Groves, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, 270-278. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press & AAS, 2007.

"From Tent Meetings and Store-front Healing Rooms to Walmarts and the Internet: Healing Spaces in the United States, the Americas, and the World, 1906-2006." Church History (Sept. 2006): 631-647.

"Publicizing Domestic Piety: The Cultural Work of Religious Texts in the Woman’s Building Library." Libraries and Culture 41.1 (winter 2006): 35-54.

"Singing Pilgrims: Hymn Narratives of a Pilgrim Community’s Progress from This World to That Which is to Come, 1830-90." In Sing Them Over Again to Me: Hymns and Hymnbooks in America, ed. Mark A. Noll and Edith L. Blumhofer, 194-213. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.

"Sanctified Singing: The Role of Hymnody in Shaping Wesleyan Evangelism, 1735-1915." In Considering the Great Commission: Evangelism and Mission in the Wesleyan Spirit, ed. Stephen Gunter and Elaine Robinson, 211-220. Nashville: Abingdon, 2005.

"Domestic Nurture Versus Clerical Crisis: The Gender Dimension in Horace Bushnell’s and Elizabeth Prentiss’s Critiques of Revivalism." In New Perspectives on North American Revivalism, ed. Michael McClymond, 67-83. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

"America’s Passion for Jesus," Reviews in American History (Sept. 2004): 439-446.

"Prophetic Daughter: Mary Fletcher’s Narrative and Women’s Religious and Social Experiences in Eighteenth-Century British Methodism." Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work, and Culture 3 (2003): 77-98.

"'Faith Working through Love': The Wesleyan Revivals and Social Transformation—Considerations for the Contemporary Filipino Church." Phronesis (Jan. 1997): 5-20.

"The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Rachel Stearns, 1834-1837: Reinterpreting Women’s Religious and Social Experiences in the Methodist Revivals of Nineteenth-Century America." Church History (Dec. 1996): 577-595.

26 additional articles and reviews.

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