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William James, Pragmatism, and American Culture focuses on the work of William James and the relationship between the development of pragmatism and its historical, cultural, and political roots in 19th-century America. Deborah Whitehead reads pragmatism through the intersecting themes of narrative, gender, nation, politics, and religion. As she considers how pragmatism helps to explain the United States to itself, Whitehead articulates a contemporary pragmatism and shows how it has become a powerful and influential discourse in American intellectual and popular culture.

This article analyzes allegations of fraud and deception in two popular evangelical Christian \"mommy blogs\" in order to demonstrate how the rhetoric of authenticity in social media plays a central role in the formation of online communities. I argue that a personal religious blogger together with her readers constitutes an ongoing public conversation and community, one that is held together by a kind of belief or trust in the truthful representation of the blogger and her story. When a blog claims to be a story about the power of faith, hope, and miracles, it can be read and understood by its devoted readers as \"evidence of things unseen,\" that is, as a representation of the evidence of authentic religious faith and practice shared by the community. On the other hand, if credibility is doubted, the blog may become the focus of allegations of deception, leading to the creation of new forms of online community. These cases highlight the importance of attending to claims of credibility and authenticity as constitutive of religious practice and community formation in social media and in the academic study of religion more broadly.

A significant step toward achieving concrete organizational change was to envision a new Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR) leadership structure: one with not only a more diverse leadership group but also clear governance processes and transitions between those leaders. Formerly, there were four officers and several directors of FSR, Inc. who were responsible for budgetary and planning decisions. While these individuals were often part of FSR units, they were also able to act independently of the units and there was no required transparency for decision-making. Additionally, the board has developed new governance policies and procedures, including a nominations and elections process for new officers and directors of the organization. We also implemented term limits. FSR, Inc. has a newly elected secretary, Peter Mena, and its two current interim officers, Deborah Whitehead and Kathleen Gallagher Elkins, plan to step down as soon as more new officers are elected this year.

William James's interest in psychical research is often treated as something of an anomaly. The fact that James took \"that large group of debatable phenomena designated by such terms as 'mesmeric,' 'psychical,' and 'spiritualistic,'\" seriously as a legitimate area of scientific inquiry seems slightly bemusing to our contemporary jaded ears. As a result, his writings collected in Essays in Psychical Research tend to be marginalized, even ignored by most serious James scholars. But American pragmatist communication theorist John Durham Peters, in his innovative philosophical and cultural history of communication, Speaking into the Air, provides the key to a new appreciation of this oft-neglected work by asserting that, for James, \"the question of communication was one of our time's questions of faith.\" By this Peters means that James's investigations were not simply about whether communication with the dead via mediums was scientifically possible but also and more fundamentally about the desire for authentic person-to-person or soul-to-soul connection across distances. As Peters reads James, the question of communication is fundamentally a religious one, involving issues of hope, trust, faith, and interpretation; James's \"concern was never to rule out the possibility of contact with the inhuman– beast or God.\" Why? Because of the difference that it made, the effects that it had.

Whitehead emphasizes the larger issue of the contested nature of historical narratives, and to think about what might be appropriate and effective responses of religious and nonreligious feminist scholars, activists, and educators who are committed to women's reproductive rights and/or to different understandings of US and world history than those provided by religious and political conservatives. She suggests that the desire to recover the \"Godly foundations\" of America or a \"traditional\" family-centered feminism is not about \"accuracy\" or fidelity to history, at least not primarily, but rather about seeking to locate contemporary US political and religious conservatism along a narrative of declension and reclamation that itself replicates a familiar kind of evangelical Christian narrative about America as a chosen nation.

The preceding chapters have demonstrated how a focus on rhetoric and narrative in the pragmatist tradition, with special attention to the intersecting tropes of nation, gender, and religion, results in a new interpretation of the tradition, one that looks backward to a deeper appreciation of context and text, as well as forward to new possible directions of appraisal and application of pragmatism in our own day. In calling attention to the rhetorics and politics of narrative as well as the prevalence and resonance of particular pragmatist narratives, I have shown that the pragmatist tradition is and has always been heterogeneous.

“Pragmatism is a reconstruction,” John Stuhr has said, a reconstruction of philosophy, experience, and community. As such, it is “piecemeal, multiperspectival, uncertain, and always unfinished”: As criticism, pragmatism faces forward and identifies itself as the future of philosophy. It is instrumental: a criticism of the present on behalf of possibilities for the future inherent in the present; an inquiry into today in the service of more enduring and extensive values tomorrow. At the same time, as criticism, pragmatism also faces backward and presents itself as the history of the future of philosophy. It is genealogical: a history of the present

I began the book with James’s story about the birth of the pragmatic method in a wilderness camping dispute. Returning to Jehlen’s argument that this is a characteristically American story, I argue in this chapter that we can also read it as a kind of “primal scene” of pragmatism’s American origins, one deeply rooted in the particular geographies of the nation. Reading pragmatism as an American story in this way highlights the intimate connections between Jamesian pragmatism and nationalism. This chapter explores the “Americanness” of pragmatism in two respects: James’s use of the frontier metaphor, with its associated ideas of