Examines the evolution of Catholic prayer, from the traditional devotional practices that were common in the past to the ways Catholics pray and view prayer in modern times.

This book introduces, from an anthropological standpoint, French Catholic missionary colonial ethnographic writing from the highlands of north Vietnam and Yunnan at the turn of the 20th century, and searches for the genealogies of the intellectual influences at play.

Overview: Familiar accounts of religious freedom in the United States often tell a story of visionary founders who broke from the centuries-old patterns of Christendom to establish a political arrangement committed to secular and religiously neutral government. These novel commitments were supposedly embodied in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. But this story is largely a fairytale, Steven Smith says in this incisive examination of a much-mythologized...