I am currently a Professor of Religion and Humanities at Grove City College, which is located in western Pennsylvania. I teach a number of different courses, including Huma 101 Civilization, Huma 201 Civilization and the Speculative Mind, RELI 247 Contemporary American Religion, RELI 248 World Religions, and RELI 343 The Search for Christian America (which is about the changing nature and role of religion in American civic life).
I am currently working on two different research projects. The first book, The First Moral Majority: The New England Watch and Ward Society and Moral Reform Politics in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century America. I have received grants from the American Academy of Religion, Massachusetts Historical Society, Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Religion and Theology, Public Policy Education Fund, and American Historical Association to support my research on this project. I am also serving as the editor of Church, State, and Social Justice: Five Views. In our increasingly culturally and religiously diverse nation, Christians are often at odds over the role of religion in American public life. Leading advocates of these five different positions have agreed to contribute chapters representing their respective positions: Corwin Smidt, the Director of the Paul Henry Institute at Calvin College, Principled Pluralist position; Derek Davis, Director of the J. M. Dawson Center of Church-State Studies at Baylor University, the Classical Separation position; J. Philip Wogaman, former professor of Christian Ethics and Dean at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington D.C. and recently retired pastor of the Foundry United Methodist Church in D.C., the Social Justice position; Ron Sider, Eastern Baptist Seminary, the Anabaptist position; and Clark Cochran, Texas Tech University, the Roman Catholic position.
In addition to the above
research projects, I am also interested in the history of religion and American
higher education. I am the author of Princeton in the Nation's Service:
Religious Ideals and Educational Practice, 1868-1928, Religion in
America Series (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). I have also
co-edited with Henry Warner Bowden, American Church History: A Reader
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998). If you have extra money and suffer from
insomnia, feel free to purchase both books. The first title has proven to be a
wonderful form of literary sominex. If you’re really interested in
learning more about me, click
here to view my
CV.
This website has several different resources
Guide to Research:
Finding Gold Among the
Garbage: A Students’ Guide to Researching Books, Articles, and the Internet
Intelligently
This is my guide to conducting research. It contains detailed
information about finding books, articles, and Internet resources and also
advice on how to judiciously differentiate between scholarly and popular
sources, primary and secondary sources, and also advocacy, informational, and
commercial websites. The guide provides simple step-by-step instructions on how
to do research and how to evaluate resources.
Guides for Evaluating and Citing Internet Sources
Besides my own Guide to Research, there are a number of excellent online tools
for evaluating and properly citing internet sources.
Websites on Religion
The Worldwide web is both a treasure trove and garbage dump of
information about religion. This resource contains an index of links, for
example, to scholarly centers, mostly at universities, for the academic study of
religion, new religious movements, denominational websites, online scholarly
journals, and websites of various religion departments, individual scholars, and
particular religion courses.
Student Bibliographies for New Religious Movements
This resource leads to a list of exhaustive bibliographies of a number of new
religious movements, including the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, and
the Holy Spirit
Association for the Unification of World Christianity. These bibliographies were
produced by Grove City College students using the Guide to Research. In
addition, an exhaustive bibliography of works on the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-Day Saints is provided as an example as well as a paradigm for
classifying books, articles, and computer and internet resources into scholarly
and popular work, primary and second sources, and annotated examples of each.
You can contact me by:
Email:
pckemeny@gcc.edu
Mail: Grove City College
100 Campus Drive, Box 3083
Grove City, PA 16127
Phone: 724/458-2195