Self-Help and Popular Religion in Modern American Culture

Self-Help and Popular Religion in Modern American Culture PDF Author: Roy M. Anker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313018219
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The second of two volumes on the relationship between popular religion and the self-help tradition in American culture, this book continues chronologically where the first left off. As with the first volume, this work focuses on the intersection of American history and popular religion and is intended as an introductory interpretive guide to major self-help figures and movements with origins in popular religious movements. This volume spans from Romanticism, the Gilded Age, and the history of Christian Science, with discussions of Mary Baker Patterson, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and Mary Baker Eddy, through Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller. Peale and Schuller, with the exception of Evangelist Billy Graham, constitute the public face of mainstream American Protestantism and bring this two-volume study to its conclusion in the second half of the 20th century. This reference will serve as a valuable research tool for American religion and popular culture scholars. Together with the first volume, Self-Help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture, these two meticulously researched volumes clearly define and present the broad scope of the self-help tradition as it pervades American culture and as it developed and was influenced by popular religion. An extensive bibliography is included.

Self-Help and Popular Religion in Modern American Culture

Self-Help and Popular Religion in Modern American Culture PDF Author: Roy M. Anker
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313018219
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
The second of two volumes on the relationship between popular religion and the self-help tradition in American culture, this book continues chronologically where the first left off. As with the first volume, this work focuses on the intersection of American history and popular religion and is intended as an introductory interpretive guide to major self-help figures and movements with origins in popular religious movements. This volume spans from Romanticism, the Gilded Age, and the history of Christian Science, with discussions of Mary Baker Patterson, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, and Mary Baker Eddy, through Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller. Peale and Schuller, with the exception of Evangelist Billy Graham, constitute the public face of mainstream American Protestantism and bring this two-volume study to its conclusion in the second half of the 20th century. This reference will serve as a valuable research tool for American religion and popular culture scholars. Together with the first volume, Self-Help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture, these two meticulously researched volumes clearly define and present the broad scope of the self-help tradition as it pervades American culture and as it developed and was influenced by popular religion. An extensive bibliography is included.

Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America

Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America PDF Author: Charles L. Cohen
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299225742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
Explores how a variety of print media—religious tracts, newsletters, cartoons, pamphlets, self-help books, mass-market paperbacks, and editions of the Bible from the King James Version to contemporary “Bible-zines”—have shaped and been shaped by experiences of faith since the Civil War

The Self-Help Compulsion

The Self-Help Compulsion PDF Author: Beth Blum
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 507

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Book Description
Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers’ rebukes of such instrumental purposes. As literary authors positioned themselves in opposition to people like Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie, readers turned to self-help for the promises of mobility, agency, and practical use that serious literature was reluctant to supply. Blum unearths a series of unlikely cases of the love-hate relationship between serious fiction and commercial advice, from Gustave Flaubert’s mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abby’s cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent polemics against self-improvement to the ways that contemporary global authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw explicitly draw on the self-help genre. She also traces the self-help industry’s tendency to popularize, quote, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what it might have to teach today’s university. Offering a new history of self-help’s origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life PDF Author: Richard Hofstadter
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307809676
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is a book which throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society. "As Mr. Hofstadter unfolds the fascinating story, it is no crude battle of eggheads and fatheads. It is a rich, complex, shifting picture of the life of the mind in a society dominated by the ideal of practical success." —Robert Peel in the Christian Science Monitor

Spiritual, But Not Religious

Spiritual, But Not Religious PDF Author: Robert C. Fuller
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780195146806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Fuller traces the history of alternative spiritual practices in America including astrology, Transcendentalism, and channeling.

Religion and Popular Culture in America, Third Edition

Religion and Popular Culture in America, Third Edition PDF Author: Bruce David Forbes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520965221
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 459

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Book Description
The connection between popular culture and religion is an enduring part of American life. With seventy-five percent new content, the third edition of this multifaceted and popular collection has been revised and updated throughout to provide greater religious diversity in its topics and address critical developments in the study of religion and popular culture. Ideal for classroom use, this expanded volume gives increased attention to the implications of digital culture and the increasingly interactive quality of popular culture provides a framework to help students understand and appreciate the work in diverse fields, methods, and perspectives contains an updated introduction, discussion questions, and other instructional tools

How to Be a Muslim

How to Be a Muslim PDF Author: Haroon Moghul
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807020745
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
A searing portrait of Muslim life in the West, this “profound and intimate” memoir captures one man’s struggle to forge an American Muslim identity (Washington Post) Haroon Moghul was thrust into the spotlight after 9/11, becoming an undergraduate leader at New York University’s Islamic Center forced into appearances everywhere: on TV, before interfaith audiences, in print. Moghul was becoming a prominent voice for American Muslims even as he struggled with his relationship to Islam. In high school he was barely a believer and entirely convinced he was going to hell. He sometimes drank. He didn’t pray regularly. All he wanted was a girlfriend. But as he discovered, it wasn’t so easy to leave religion behind. To be true to himself, he needed to forge a unique American Muslim identity that reflected his beliefs and personality. How to Be a Muslim reveals a young man coping with the crushing pressure of a world that fears Muslims, struggling with his faith and searching for intellectual forebears, and suffering the onset of bipolar disorder. This is the story of the second-generation immigrant, of what it’s like to lose yourself between cultures and how to pick up the pieces.

The Automobile in American History and Culture

The Automobile in American History and Culture PDF Author: Michael L. Berger
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313016062
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
This comprehensive reference guide reviews the literature concerning the impact of the automobile on American social, economic, and political history. Covering the complete history of the automobile to date, twelve chapters of bibliographic essays describe the important works in a series of related topics and provide broad thematic contexts. This work includes general histories of the automobile, the industry it spawned and labor-management relations, as well as biographies of famous automotive personalities. Focusing on books concerned with various social aspects, chapters discuss such issues as the car's influence on family life, youth, women, the elderly, minorities, literature, and leisure and recreation. Berger has also included works that investigate the government's role in aiding and regulating the automobile, with sections on roads and highways, safety, and pollution. The guide concludes with an overview of reference works and periodicals in the field and a description of selected research collections. The Automobile in American History and Culture provides a resource with which to examine the entire field and its structure. Popular culture scholars and enthusiasts involved in automotive research will appreciate the extensive scope of this reference. Cross-referenced throughout, it will serve as a valuable research tool.

The Distance Cure

The Distance Cure PDF Author: Hannah Zeavin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262365782
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud’s treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions. Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, starting with Freud’s treatments by mail, psychotherapy has operated through multiple communication technologies and media. These have included advice columns, radio broadcasts, crisis hotlines, video, personal computers, and mobile phones; the therapists (broadly defined) can be professional or untrained, strangers or chatbots. In The Distance Cure, Hannah Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therapeutic dyad of therapist and patient as a triad: therapist, patient, and communication technology. Zeavin tracks the history of teletherapy (understood as a therapeutic interaction over distance) and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help. She describes its initial use in ongoing care, its role in crisis intervention and symptom management, and our pandemic-mandated reliance on regular Zoom sessions. Her account of the “distanced intimacy” of the therapeutic relationship offers a powerful rejoinder to the notion that contact across distance (or screens) is always less useful, or useless, to the person seeking therapeutic treatment or connection. At the same time, these modes of care can quickly become a backdoor for surveillance and disrupt ethical standards important to the therapeutic relationship. The history of the conventional therapeutic scenario cannot be told in isolation from its shadow form, teletherapy. Therapy, Zeavin tells us, was never just a “talking cure”; it has always been a communication cure.

A City Upon a Hill

A City Upon a Hill PDF Author: Larry Witham
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0060854278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Pivotal moments in U.S. history are indelibly marked by the sermons of the nation's greatest orators. America's Puritan founder John Winthrop preached about "a city upon a hill", a phrase echoed more than three centuries later by President Ronald Reagan in his farewell address to the nation; Abraham Lincoln's two greatest speeches have been called "sermons on the mount"; and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" oration influenced a generation and changed history. From colonial times to the present, the sermon has motivated Americans to fight wars as well as fight for peace. Mighty speeches have called for the abolition of slavery and for the prohibition of alcohol. They have stirred conscientious objectors and demonstrators for the rights of the unborn. Sermons have provoked the mob mentality of witch hunts and blacklists, but they have also stirred activists in the women's and civil rights movements. The sermon has defined America at every step of its history, inspiring great acts of courage and comforting us in times of terror. A City Upon a Hill tells the story of these powerful words and how they shaped the destiny of a nation. A City Upon a Hill includes the story of Robert Hunt, the first preacher to brave the dangerous sea voyage to Jamestown; Jonathan Mayhew's "most seditious sermon ever delivered," which incited Boston's Stamp Act riots in 1765; early calls for abolition and "Captain-Preacher Nat" Turner's bloody slave revolt of 1831; Henry Ward Beecher's sermon at Fort Sumter on the day of Lincoln's assassination; tent revivalist/prohibitionist Billy Sunday's "booze sermon"; the challenging words of Martin Luther King Jr., which inspired the civil rights movement; Billy Graham's moving speeches as "America's pastor" and spiritual advisor to multiple U.S. presidents; and Jerry Falwell's legacy of changing the way America does politics. A City Upon a Hill provides a history of the United States as seen through the lens of the preached words—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish—that inspired independence, constitutional amendments, and mili-tary victories, and also stirred our worst prejudices, selfish materialism, and stubborn divisiveness—all in the name of God.