This Week's "Anxious Bench" Post at Patheos: "The Best Books in American Religious History That I Read This Year"

In the wake of Thomas Kidd’s post on his five most compelling religious biographies, I thought I would offer an end-of-the year reading list of my own.  Here are some of the best books (in no particular order) I read this year in the field of American religious history:

John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania. This is now the definitive work on the Quaker founding of Pennsylvania.  It is a fine piece of scholarship that rewards the persistent reader.

Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation.  Read it and teach it alongside Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity.  Porterfield offers an alternative narrative to Hatch that focuses on unbelief and doubt.

Read the rest here.