Traditionally, art historians have relied on iconography, biography, and connoisseurship as the fundamental means of studying images. These approaches and methods stress the singularity of an image, its authenticity, and its authorship; therefore, they reflect an enduring debt to the humanist tradition of individualism. The image is understood principally as the product of the unique and privileged inspiration of an individual artist and is regarded as a measure of this individual's genius. Iconographical and biographical research secure authorial intent; connoisseurship authenticates the work. While this scholarly apparatus certainly offers the art historian indispensable tools, it is important to understand that its commitment to original intent is singularly ill-equipped to assess the reception of images, the ongoing history of response that keeps images alive within a culture from generation to generation.

In 1975, Robin Gill wrote that “as yet there is a rather thin body of literature on possible correlations between sociology and theology.” Since then, a host of other writers have joined Gill in commenting on the absence of such correlations and in seeking to connect the two phenomena. Indeed, the current era in American culture might, as several commentators have noted, be understood as one of detente between social science and religion. Such a depiction, of course, rests on the assumption that sociology and theology are hostile enterprises that may be brought together. This has, however, not always been the case: the past fifteen years are not the first occasion when theology and sociology have intersected and a Christian sociology been proposed.

Recent studies of the Second Great Awakening have stressed the strong appeal of evangelical religion to female worshippers. The revival has been portrayed as a “women's awakening” that nurtured “bonds of womanhood,” promoted female benevolence, and shaped antebellum canons of domesticity. Mary Lyon (1797-1849) and the founding of Mount Holyoke Seminary, which opened in 1837, have not gone unnoticed by historians of a women's awakening. In a follow-up essay to her important study of Catherine Beecher, for example, Kathryn Kish Sklar established the educational significance of Mount Holyoke and situated Lyon's efforts in the context of the Second Great Awakening. Mount Holyoke's innovations included secure financial support funded by the evangelical community at large; a resultant low cost that enabled students from modest and even poor backgrounds to enroll; and an intellectually rigorous curriculum that eschewed “ornamentations” such as dancing and the cultivation of gentility.

How one should classsify religious groups in the United States is a persistent question. The necessity for some sort of classification system is obvious: the vast diversity of religion in the United States requires that we be able to bring order out of what would otherwise be sheer chaos. At the same time, the pluralism that raises the issue in the first place makes the development of an adequate method of classification difficult. Both the historic Judeo-Christian mainstream and the alternatives to it that have emerged throughout our history must be given their due in a way that obscures the importance of neither one.