Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South. By Paul Harvey. Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lecture Series No. 52. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. xi + 182 pp. $28.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South . By Paul Harvey . Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lecture Series No. 52. Athens : University of Georgia Press , 2012. xi + 182 pp. $28.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.Book Reviews and NotesScholars of religion in the American South are once again indebted to Paul Harvey for pushing against the boundaries of their field. In his previous works, Harvey challenged readers to rethink how they define and intellectually map the region's historical religious experience. Unlike historians who have focused on either black or white religion, Harvey believes that the key to understanding the region's religious culture is taking on the seemingly separate religious worlds of whites and blacks under a singular analytical framework. Likewise, historians must be willing to consider that Christians in the South contemplated the soul of man beyond the walls of churches and the constraints of formal theology. In his latest work, Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South , Harvey has fashioned an excellent monograph that began as a series of lectures at Mercer University in 2008. The book offers a refreshing examination of how Protestants in the American South grappled with "intractable religious and philosophical questions through religious expression and belief" (2-3) not only in formal institutions but also in their art, literature, folklore, and music.Harvey describes a religious world far more nuanced than many historians have previously acknowledged. He does not suggest that the Old South experienced pluralism as some historians have tried to emphasize--he contends that the region was a bastion of evangelical Protestantism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--but he does argue that any analysis of southern religion must include a broader array of actors, rather than just the "usual suspects" of the ministry and active laity. To understand how southerners, black and white, tried to answer "what is the soul of man?" one must conduct a broad survey of southern culture to include literature, folklore, and music. Harvey argues that "southern evangelicalism," a category long used to lump together the region's religious experience "is not capacious enough to capture the complex religious life of Christians in the region" (2). Though evangelicalism was indeed powerful, southerners turned to cultural archetypes, literature, and musical expression to understand the soul of man. …