Nurturing Happiness

Abstract Nurturing Happiness: How Religion Shapes Emotional Practice describes how American religious leaders at pivotal moments in their history attempted to guide—and control—their adherents’ thoughts about happiness and their experiences of it. It shows how religious authorities used their discursive power to draw moral distinctions among kinds of happiness and their institutional power to manage where it took place and how it was expressed. It demonstrates that religious authorities’ efforts to nurture happiness, while not always effective, played a crucial role in faith communities’ adaptation to changing social conditions. Nurturing Happiness: How Religion Shapes Emotional Practice describes these adaptations in colonial-era arguments about heavenly joy and virtuous living, nineteenth-century revival meetings and festive events, Progressive-era advocacy for useful service, and recent efforts to link play with transcendence and to associate spirituality with personal discipline. This is a book for first-time students of religion and sociology as well as for advanced scholars and for interested readers who want to understand better how religion relates to happiness.