387 - Protestantism and the American University: An Intellectual Biography of William Warren Sweet

Protestantism and the American University:
An Intellectual Biography of William Warren Sweet
By James L. Ash Jr.
Dallas, Southern Methodist University Press, 1982. 164 pp. $15.00.

William Warren Sweet was largely responsible for the emergence of American religious history as a specialized field of academic study. Kansan and Methodist by birth, educated at Ohio Wesleyan, then Drew and Crozer Seminaries, and finally at the University of Pennsylvania, he broke off a successful career as professor of history, and a promising one as a dean at DePauw, to join a constellation of historians at the University of Chicago committed to an environmental model for the historiography of Christianity. Sweet's explicit assignment was to identify and build up a resource collection and to train a generation of historians. The influence of both has been far reaching and the effect has been to legitimize the study of religious life within American culture. As an author of numerous books, Sweet was enormously influential in shaping perception of religion in our history.

While taking nothing away from Sweet's accomplishments, James

388 - Protestantism and the American University: An Intellectual Biography of William Warren Sweet

Ash's study nonetheless succeeds in demonstrating that Sweet's vision of American culture was remarkably restricted. In this respect his work was heavily biased toward British-derived Protestant denominations (excluding the Protestant Episcopal Church), and away from Roman Catholic and Jewish traditions, and virtually all new religions. So Sweet's new field of study was one "socially constructed"- directly derived from his own experience and interests. A well-written, carefully crafted inquiry, this study will be useful in understanding the evolving characteristics of society as well as its explicit subject.

John F. Wilson
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey