$50.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover/PLC with jacket
176 pages with 146 duotone photographs by the author
11.875″ x 10.0″ landscape/horizontal
ISBN: 978-1–938086–39–7
Published in October 2016
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
by David Wharton
with a historical introduction by Charles Reagan Wilson
Winner of the 2017 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Photography.
The rural American South has no grand cathedrals or other wonder-of-the-world monuments to religious belief. Nor has it ever been the site of religious wars or large-scale religious persecutions we see throughout the world. Nevertheless, as David Wharton reveals in his remarkable new book of photographs, the South is a place—a land, a region, a culture, a “way of life”—so heavily invested in religious belief that the spiritual is constantly made manifest in the ordinary. This is how religion in the rural South becomes pervasive and integral to everyday life for believers and non-believers alike.
Just as David Wharton did for his pioneering book Small Town South, he has traveled throughout the entire region since 1999, on hundreds of trips from Texas to Virginia, making thousands upon thousands of photographs about the rural South’s spiritual landscapes—from churches both active and abandoned in all vernacular shapes and sizes to actual church services and outdoor baptisms, from iconographic signs about Jesus, redemption, and sin to welcoming gestures about the wonders of revivals, grace, and rebirth. Lurking behind every image, however, is an acute sense of place about this most distinctive American region, in which religious commitment is confined neither to Sundays nor to individual houses of worship. Religion in the rural South is, quite literally, everywhere.
It is Wharton’s unique gift that his photographs have meaning and memory beyond merely recording the physical appearance of spiritual sites and worship activities. The people and places that appear in The Power of Belief are seen not to be a product of recent changes in religious life seen elsewhere in urban and suburban America but, instead, as an ongoing living tradition that dates far back into the history and culture of the rural South.
About
About the Author
David Wharton was born in New York City in 1947 and grew up in New Jersey. He attended Colgate University, where he earned his B.A. in English in 1969. After an extended trip through Andean South America in 1974, he resolved to teach himself how to use a camera and make photography his life’s work. From 1976 to 1978 he worked as a photojournalist for the Willamette Valley Observer in Eugene, Oregon. He then entered graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his M.F.A. in photography in 1986 and his Ph.D. in American studies in 1994. He taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio from 1996 to 1998 and, from 1999 until his death on September 25, 2022, was Director of Documentary Studies and an assistant professor of Southern studies in the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. His photographs have been exhibited throughout the United States, Latin America, and Europe, and he is the author of a trilogy of books on the American South: Roadside South (2022), The Power of Belief: Spiritual Landscapes from the Rural South (2016), winner of the 2017 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for photography, and Small Town South (2012), winner of the 2013 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for photography, all published by George F. Thompson Publishing. His first book, The Soul of a Small Texas Town: Photographs, Memories, and History from McDade (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), set the table for Wharton’s Trilogy of the American South.
About the Essayist
Charles Reagan Wilson was the Kelly Gene Cook Sr. Chair of History and Professor of Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi from 1981 until his retirement in 2014. He also served as Director of the Southern Studies academic program at Mississippi from 1991 to 1998 and as Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture from 1998–2007. Wilson is the author of numerous acclaimed books, including Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (1980), Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (1995), and Flashes of Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South (2011). He is also the editor of Religion in the South (1985), coeditor (with Bill Ferris) of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), which received the Dartmouth Prize from the American Library Association as the best reference book of the year, editor of Religion (1991), and general editor of the 24-volume The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (2006–2013).
Slide Show
Coahoma County, Mississippi 
Chicot County, Arkansas 
Madison County, Tennessee 
Victoria, Mississippi 
Blue Mountain, Mississippi 
Lafayette County, Mississippi 
Durant, Mississippi 
Bolivar County, Mississippi 
Blue Mountain, Mississippi 
Panola County, Mississippi 
Buras, Louisiana 
Hardeman County, Tennessee 
Delcambre, Louisiana 
Montgomery County, Mississippi 
Lafayette County, Mississippi 
Tippah County, Mississippi
Praise
“David Wharton, in The Power of Belief, has turned an amazing array of photographs into a true work of art that should resonate for years as one of our most complete books on the history and culture of the rural South.” —Charles Reagan Wilson, General Editor, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, from his Introduction
My Place
In 1983, on the first of many drives between my new home in Austin, Texas, and my parents’ house in North Carolina, I made a detour to visit Oxford, Mississippi. I had read most of William Faulkner’s novels over the years and wanted to see the town that inspired the fictional Jefferson, the county seat of Faulkner’s richly imagined Yoknapatawpha County. Oxford was further out of the way than I expected, and by the time I got there I was feeling hurried. So I parked the car, took a five-minute walk around the courthouse square, got back in the car, and drove away. I had no reasonable expectation of ever being in Oxford again.
And, now, I’ve lived in Oxford for fourteen years. I came here more as a matter of circumstance than by choice, though I’m happy to have ended up here. There’s much to like about Oxford. Most of the world knows it (if they know it at all) as the home of William Faulkner, the site of the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss” in local parlance), and the backdrop to James Meredith’s 1962 struggle to integrate the university—one of the defining moments of the Civil Rights Movement. All of these legacies draw visitors to town, and most learn, often to their surprise, that Oxford has an excellent bookstore, a sophisticated college-town populace, and several good restaurants.
But I have come to know the town differently, more intimately, and on a daily basis. I know it will rarely take me more than five minutes to get from my house to my office at the university. I know enough to stay home (or get out of town entirely) on those six autumn weekends every year when the town quadruples in size because of a home football game. I know what time to leave and what route to take in order to avoid church traffic on my weekly Sunday morning trips to the grocery store. I know that much of the summer is going to be stiflingly hot and humid, that fall is usually gentle and sweet, that winter will allow the use of a fireplace for six weeks or so, and that spring will be a long, drawn-out succession of flowers, as various trees and bushes bloom, one after another. I know enough to stay away from the courthouse square on weekend nights when the university is in session because of the large number of students who will be in the town’s many bars, celebrating their freedom from the parental restraints of home. I know Oxford’s a good town to walk in—to the Square for a cup of coffee or a beer or to browse the front tables at Square Books—or a little further to Faulkner’s grave or Rowan Oak, his restored antebellum home.
But, most of all, I like Oxford because it’s easy to get out of. A five-minute drive in any direction will have me in the country—the real country: not the large-lot subdivisions with big brick houses and acres of manicured green grass but actual land and space not always made pretty but shaped and made useful by many people over many years. Scattered throughout are hamlets like Abbeville, Lafayette Springs, Paris, Toccopola, and Yocona—each with a post office and perhaps a combined grocery store and gas station, a church or two, sometimes an elementary school and/or a pre-fab volunteer fire department building. Half an hour’s drive from Oxford will get me to towns like Holly Springs (north), Pontotoc (east), Bruce (southeast), Water Valley (south), and Batesville (west)—all except Bruce county seats and each with a history, culture, and society peculiarly its own. They are, no doubt, what Oxford would look like without the university.
I feel lucky to live in the cultured, historical Oxford, where people concern themselves with books, ideas, and civic improvement. I also feel lucky to have easy access to places where people don’t often (if ever) think about William Faulkner, the University of Mississippi, or which coffee house serves the best espresso.
Copyright © 2013 David Wharton. All rights reserved.