The "Return" of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art.

Traces the scholarship produced in the U.S. that concerns American artistic production and its historical relations to religion from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century. Discussion on the secularization theory of modernity; Example of the influence on art history of the twentieth-century split between modernism and religion; Factors that influenced the study of religion in the American academy; Characteristics of art history in the 1950s and 1960s; Approaches in the scholarship and criticism of art.