Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture

Front Cover
Walter Conser
University Press of Kentucky, 2010 M09 12 - 390 pages
" In this first-ever biography of Greer Garson, Michael Troyan sweeps away the many myths that even today veil her life. The true origins of her birth, her fairy-tale discovery in Hollywood, and her career struggles at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer are revealed for the first time. Garson combined an everywoman quality with grace, charm, and refinement. She won the Academy Award in 1941 for her role in Mrs. Miniver , and for the next decade she reigned as the queen of MGM. Co-star Christopher Plummer remembered, ""Here was a siren who had depth, strength, dignity, and humor who could inspire great trust, suggest deep intellect and whose misty languorous eyes melted your heart away!"" Garson earned a total of seven Academy Award nominations for Best Actress, and fourteen of her films premiered at Radio City Music Hall, playing for a total of eighty-four weeks--a record never equaled by any other actress. She was a central figure in the golden age of the studios, working with legendary performers Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Errol Flynn, Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, Debbie Reynolds, and Walter Pidgeon. Garson's experiences offer a fascinating glimpse at the studio system in the years when stars were closely linked to a particular studio and moguls such as L.B. Mayer broke or made careers. With the benefit of exclusive access to studio production files, personal letters and diaries, and the cooperation of her family, Troyan explores the triumphs and tragedies of her personal life, a story more colorful than any role she played on screen.

From inside the book

Contents

Just a Little Talk with Jesus
9
Miamis Little Havana
27
The Archaeology of African American Slave Religion in the Antebellum South
39
Prime Minister
63
Contextualizing the Apocalyptic Visions of McKendree Robbins Long
89
Flannery OConnor and the Southern Code of Manners
133
Meetings at the Buddhist Temple
147
Feedimg the Jewish Soul in the Delta Diaspora
164
These Untutored Masses
249
Purgatory in the Carolinas
275
Baptist Women and the South
303
Lynching Relgiion
318
Fundamentalism in Recent Southern Culture
354
Copyrights and Permissions
369
Contributors
371
Index
375

There Is Magic in Print
194
Scottish Heritage Southern Style
231

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Page 304 - Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church : and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
Page 259 - HOW firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in his excellent word ! What more can he say than to you he hath said, You who unto Jesus for refuge have fled...
Page 278 - I constantly hold that there is a Purgatory, and that the souls therein detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful.
Page 139 - Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them — not above, just away from — were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged. Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land.
Page 283 - It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from their sins.
Page 304 - A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach ; not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre ; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous ; one that ruleth well his own house...
Page 278 - I also affirm that the power of Indulgences was left by Christ in the Church, and that the use of them is most wholesome to Christian people.
Page 134 - Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free: not repulsive, but desirable: not helpless, but licensed and powerful: not history,less, but historical: not damned, but innocent: not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny...
Page 307 - For several weeks past, my mind has been greatly agitated. An opportunity has been presented to me, of spending my days among the heathen, in attempting to persuade them to receive the Gospel. Were I convinced of its being a call from God, and that it would be more pleasing to him, for me to spend my life in this way than in any other, I think I should be willing to relinquish every earthly object, and, in full view of dangers and hardships, give myself up to the great work.
Page 141 - No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

About the author (2010)

Walter H. Conser Jr. is professor of history and religion at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He is the author of A Coat of Many Colors: Religion and Society along the Cape Fear River of North Carolina. Rodger M. Payne is associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Asheville and is editor of the Journal of Southern Religion. He is the author of The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism.

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