After reading Jon Butler's richly documented history of religion in Manhattan, I thought again of one of my favorite images: a 1939 watercolor by Ben Shahn called Self-Portrait among the Churchgoers, in which a photographer stands near a church on Sunday but points his camera toward the street and seems to ignore the gathering worshippers. Some U.S. historians might be relieved they do not need to learn more about those pious pedestrians, or what happens inside, but specialists in religious history might think the photographer has missed all the action. Has he? Well, in one sense, sure. Historians of religion must attend to churches and adherents, as Butler does, but, like Shahn's photographer, Butler also looks out to the wider cityscape. And that approach pays off as he asks how religion confronted “the challenge of modernity” in Manhattan, “the capital of American secularism.” More specifically, he hopes to explain why religion “didn't collapse in modernity's grasp,” as religion theorists like Max Weber and William James predicted.

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“宗教的引擎”：乔恩·巴特勒的《哥谭神》中的宗教与现代性理论化

在阅读了乔恩·巴特勒（Jon Butler）在曼哈顿记录丰富的宗教历史之后，我再次想到了我最喜欢的一幅图像：本·沙恩 1939 年的一幅水彩画，名为信徒之间的自画像，其中一位摄影师周日站在教堂附近，但将相机对准街道，似乎忽略了聚集的礼拜者。一些美国历史学家可能松了一口气，他们不需要更多地了解那些虔诚的行人，或者里面发生了什么，但宗教历史专家可能会认为摄影师错过了所有的行动。他有吗？嗯，在某种意义上，当然。宗教历史学家必须像巴特勒一样关注教堂和信徒，但就像沙恩的摄影师一样，巴特勒也着眼于更广阔的城市景观。当他询问宗教如何在“美国世俗主义的首都”曼哈顿面对“现代性的挑战”时，这种方法得到了回报。更具体地说，他希望解释为什么宗教“没有在现代性的掌握中崩溃，