Russell Richey, the William R. Cannon Distinguished Professor of Church History Emeritus at Candler School of Theology, and arguably today’s best-known chronicler of American Methodism, has written yet another seminal monograph on the history of the Wesleyan movement in the United States. This particular volume, however, contains an unexpected twist because the specific topic of the book—the various perspectives regarding race displayed by mid-nineteenth-century white Methodists in Southern and Northern borderlands—reflects similar tensions regarding Black-white relations that Richey experienced personally as a native Southerner and as a Methodist churchman who has lived in both the South and the North.
All historiographical interpretations derive, to some degree, from a scholar’s personal background, often unacknowledged. But in A Church’s Broken Heart, Richey self-consciously and prominently includes a number of vignettes from his own biography, including an entire concluding chapter entitled ‘A Long Personal Postscript’ that details aspects of his upbringing and...
