ABSTRACT
Thomas A. Tweed, who received his PhD from Stanford University in 1989, currently hold the Gwyn Shive, Anita Nordan Lindsay, and Joe and Cherry Gray Professorship in the History of Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. Tweed teaches and researches religion in the United States, with particular emphases on ethnography and theory and method. His publications reect his manifold interests in the historical, ethnographic, and theoretical study of religion in America. For instance, he has edited Retelling U.S. religious history (1997b), which contains essays by leading scholars that examine traditionally marginalized topics such as sexual pleasure, colonization, gender, and inter-religious exchange. This volume is interested in taking seriously religious groups, in addition to geographical sites of difference. He has also co-edited, with Stephen Prothero, Asian religions in America: a documentary history (1999), a collection of essays devoted to examining the breadth and
depth of American encounters with Asian religions and their place within the American religious landscape and imagination.
