Religion in the Lands That Became America
A New History
The Horn Shelter Man ranks as one of the oldest identifiable inhabitants in the lands that became America. He lived near a river now called Brazos and a place now called Waco more than 10,000 years before Captain John Smith allegedly charmed his way into Pocahontas’s heart.
Thomas Tweed makes the Horn Shelter Man one of the first actors in his masterful new survey of American religious history. Tweed describes him on page xiii as “a medicine man buried with 100 grave gifts in a rock shelter in Texas about 11,000 years ago.” The artifacts suggest that when he died, his community felt “metaphysical anguish.” After multiple appearances in the volume, he turns up a final time on page 367 in an archaeology exhibit in a county museum in Clifton, Texas.
The text stretching from the Horn Shelter Man’s first epiphany on page xiii to his last on page 367 is graced with luminous prose, staggering erudition, and uncompromised sophistication. Already reviewers have favorably compared Tweed’s Religion in the Lands That Became America with Sydney Ahlstrom’s iconic A Religious History of the American People (1972). Since specialists have long deemed Ahlstrom’s hefty tome the benchmark for defining the field, the comparison should be regarded, as we say in the South, as tall cotton.
