Monographs & edited volumes

Books

Six books trace one story: how religious practices move — through print, prayer, medicine, and law — and what changes when they do. Full publication lists, including journal articles and book chapters, are in my curriculum vitae.

Cover of Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools

Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion?

University of North Carolina Press, 2019

Are school yoga and mindfulness programs secular wellness — or religion by another name? Drawing on legal precedents, unpublished trial records, interviews, and insider documents, this book shows how secular framing can both veil and heighten religious effects, and proposes an opt-in model of informed consent that respects families of every conviction. Grounded in my service as an expert witness in four legal challenges — testifying, in different cases, for parents and for school districts.

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The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America

Oxford University Press, 2013

Yoga, chiropractic, acupuncture, Reiki, meditation, homeopathy: people usually ask whether such practices work without asking why they are supposed to work. This book uncovers the religious premises behind popular complementary and alternative medicine and follows the ethical and legal questions — informed consent, consumer protection, religious establishment — that follow those practices into the American mainstream.

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Testing Prayer: Science and Healing

Harvard University Press, 2012

Many people claim prayer has cured them of blindness, deafness, and metastasized cancers. Can, and should, science test such claims? This book argues that if prayer practices affect health — for better or worse, for natural or supernatural reasons — doctors, patients, and policymakers should want to know, and it models a multipronged empirical method: medical records, surveys, prospective clinical trials, and multiyear follow-up.

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The Future of Evangelicalism in America

Co-edited with Mark Silk · Columbia University Press, 2016

Essays exploring how culture, spirituality, theology, politics, ethnicity, and generational change make evangelicalism a vibrant and sometimes controversial movement — one whose future is closely tied to the future of America.

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Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing

Edited volume · Oxford University Press, 2011

Case studies from every inhabited continent showing that the primary appeal of Pentecostalism worldwide is as a religion of healing — the first book to map divine healing practices across global Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.

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The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789–1880

University of North Carolina Press, 2004

How evangelicals engaged the burgeoning nineteenth-century print market — and how a transatlantic community of writers, publishers, and readers used the printed word to pursue holiness in a commercial age.

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In progress

Father Francis: A Biography of Francis S. MacNutt (1925–2020): The first full biography of the Catholic charismatic healing minister whose ministry reshaped Christian healing practice worldwide.
Exorcism: Driving out Demons in a Post-Modern World: A historical and ethnographic study of demonology, deliverance, and exorcism practices.

Shorter writing

I write for general readers at Psychology Today (“Testing Prayer”), and my peer-reviewed articles and chapters — from Church History to the Southern Medical Journal — are listed in my CV.