Judgment & grace in Dixie

In the essays collected in Judgement and Grace in Dixie, Charles Reagan Wilson makes a lively appraisal of religion's influence on such expressions of regional life as literature, music, and folk art, as well as on such public spectacles as football games and beauty pageants. Wilson's focus is on popular religion - evangelical Protestantism as embraced at the grassroots level, where distinctions between the sacred and secular are blurred and belief in the supernatural remains strong. As he traces the development and meaning of popular religion, Wilson ranges widely across a spiritual landscape rich in accumulations of people, places, events, and artifacts: church fans and Elvis Presley memorabilia, an African-American graveyard in the Mississippi Delta and a 27,000 member Baptist congregation in Dallas, the paintings of Howard Finster and the songs of Hank Williams, the Scopes trial and the death of Bear Bryant.