Author: Joseph Bottum
Publisher: Image
ISBN: 0385521464
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.
An Anxious Age
Author: Joseph Bottum
Publisher: Image
ISBN: 0385521464
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.
Publisher: Image
ISBN: 0385521464
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.
If Protestantism Is True
Author: Devin Rose
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615445304
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Book Description
Devin Rose was raised atheistically but underwent a radical conversion to Protestant Christianity before ultimately becoming Catholic. This book was written after ten years of reflection and dialogue with Protestants and Catholics on the key issues that divide them. Rose presents a series of intelligible and compelling arguments for the Catholic Church's claim to be the Church that Christ founded. He considers the strongest Protestant responses to his arguments and offers straightforward rebuttals to them. The papacy, Ecumenical councils, the canon of Scripture, the Protestant Reformers, and the sacraments are just a few of the many topics covered in illuminating detail. Catholics will learn to defend their faith, and Protestants will be challenged to answer the toughest questions about the roots of their beliefs.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615445304
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Book Description
Devin Rose was raised atheistically but underwent a radical conversion to Protestant Christianity before ultimately becoming Catholic. This book was written after ten years of reflection and dialogue with Protestants and Catholics on the key issues that divide them. Rose presents a series of intelligible and compelling arguments for the Catholic Church's claim to be the Church that Christ founded. He considers the strongest Protestant responses to his arguments and offers straightforward rebuttals to them. The papacy, Ecumenical councils, the canon of Scripture, the Protestant Reformers, and the sacraments are just a few of the many topics covered in illuminating detail. Catholics will learn to defend their faith, and Protestants will be challenged to answer the toughest questions about the roots of their beliefs.
American Protestantism in the Age of Psychology
Author: Stephanie Muravchik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139499610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Many have worried that the ubiquitous practice of psychology and psychotherapy in America has corrupted religious faith, eroded civic virtue and weakened community life. But an examination of the history of three major psycho-spiritual movements since World War II – Alcoholics Anonymous, The Salvation Army's outreach to homeless men, and the 'clinical pastoral education' movement – reveals the opposite. These groups developed a practical religious psychology that nurtured faith, fellowship and personal responsibility. They achieved this by including religious traditions and spiritual activities in their definition of therapy and by putting clergy and lay believers to work as therapists. Under such care, spiritual and emotional growth reinforced each other. Thanks to these innovations, the three movements succeeded in reaching millions of socially alienated and religiously disenchanted Americans. They demonstrated that religion and psychology, although antithetical in some eyes, could be blended effectively to foster community, individual responsibility and happier lives.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139499610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Many have worried that the ubiquitous practice of psychology and psychotherapy in America has corrupted religious faith, eroded civic virtue and weakened community life. But an examination of the history of three major psycho-spiritual movements since World War II – Alcoholics Anonymous, The Salvation Army's outreach to homeless men, and the 'clinical pastoral education' movement – reveals the opposite. These groups developed a practical religious psychology that nurtured faith, fellowship and personal responsibility. They achieved this by including religious traditions and spiritual activities in their definition of therapy and by putting clergy and lay believers to work as therapists. Under such care, spiritual and emotional growth reinforced each other. Thanks to these innovations, the three movements succeeded in reaching millions of socially alienated and religiously disenchanted Americans. They demonstrated that religion and psychology, although antithetical in some eyes, could be blended effectively to foster community, individual responsibility and happier lives.
That Old-time Religion in Modern America
Author: Darryl G. Hart
Publisher: American Ways
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
In this cogent history, Hart unpacks evangelicalism's current reputation by tracing its development over the course of the 20th century. He shows how evangelicals entered the century as full partners in the Protestant denominations and agencies that molded American cultural and intellectual life.
Publisher: American Ways
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
In this cogent history, Hart unpacks evangelicalism's current reputation by tracing its development over the course of the 20th century. He shows how evangelicals entered the century as full partners in the Protestant denominations and agencies that molded American cultural and intellectual life.
The Old Religion in a New World
Author: Mark A. Noll
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802849489
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
A foremost historian of religion chronicles the arrival of Christianity in the New World, tracing the turning points in the development of the immigrant church which have led to today's distinctly American faith.
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802849489
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
A foremost historian of religion chronicles the arrival of Christianity in the New World, tracing the turning points in the development of the immigrant church which have led to today's distinctly American faith.
The Christian Century and the Rise of Mainline Protestantism
Author: Elesha J. Coffman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199938598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Since the 1972 publication of Dean M. Kelley's Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, discussion of the Protestant mainline has focused on the tradition's decline. Elesha J. Coffman's The Christian Century and the Rise of Mainline Protestantism tells a different story, using the lens of the influential periodical The Christian Century to examine the rise of the mainline to a position of cultural prominence in the first half of the twentieth century.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199938598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Since the 1972 publication of Dean M. Kelley's Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, discussion of the Protestant mainline has focused on the tradition's decline. Elesha J. Coffman's The Christian Century and the Rise of Mainline Protestantism tells a different story, using the lens of the influential periodical The Christian Century to examine the rise of the mainline to a position of cultural prominence in the first half of the twentieth century.
When God Spoke Greek
Author: Timothy Michael Law
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199781729
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Book Description
Most readers do not know about the Bible used almost universally by early Christians, or about how that Bible was birthed, how it grew to prominence, and how it differs from the one used as the basis for most modern translations. Although it was one of the most important events in the history of our civilization, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the third century BCE is an event almost unknown outside of academia. Timothy Michael Law offers the first book to make this topic accessible to a wider audience. Retrospectively, we can hardly imagine the history of Christian thought, and the history of Christianity itself, without the Old Testament. When the Emperor Constantine adopted the Christian faith, his fusion of the Church and the State ensured that the Christian worldview (which by this time had absorbed Jewish ideals that had come to them through the Greek translation) would leave an imprint on subsequent history. This book narrates in a fresh and exciting way the story of the Septuagint, the Greek Scriptures of the ancient Jewish Diaspora that became the first Christian Old Testament.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199781729
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 229
Book Description
Most readers do not know about the Bible used almost universally by early Christians, or about how that Bible was birthed, how it grew to prominence, and how it differs from the one used as the basis for most modern translations. Although it was one of the most important events in the history of our civilization, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the third century BCE is an event almost unknown outside of academia. Timothy Michael Law offers the first book to make this topic accessible to a wider audience. Retrospectively, we can hardly imagine the history of Christian thought, and the history of Christianity itself, without the Old Testament. When the Emperor Constantine adopted the Christian faith, his fusion of the Church and the State ensured that the Christian worldview (which by this time had absorbed Jewish ideals that had come to them through the Greek translation) would leave an imprint on subsequent history. This book narrates in a fresh and exciting way the story of the Septuagint, the Greek Scriptures of the ancient Jewish Diaspora that became the first Christian Old Testament.
The Old Faith and the New
Author: David Friedrich Strauss
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 504
Book Description
German philosopher and radical theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) distinguished himself as one of Europe's most controversial biblical critics and as an intellectual martyr for freethought.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Christianity
Languages : en
Pages : 504
Book Description
German philosopher and radical theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) distinguished himself as one of Europe's most controversial biblical critics and as an intellectual martyr for freethought.
The Last Puritans
Author: Margaret Bendroth
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146962401X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
Congregationalists, the oldest group of American Protestants, are the heirs of New England's first founders. While they were key characters in the story of early American history, from Plymouth Rock and the founding of Harvard and Yale to the Revolutionary War, their luster and numbers have faded. But Margaret Bendroth's critical history of Congregationalism over the past two centuries reveals how the denomination is essential for understanding mainline Protestantism in the making. Bendroth chronicles how the New England Puritans, known for their moral and doctrinal rigor, came to be the antecedents of the United Church of Christ, one of the most liberal of all Protestant denominations today. The demands of competition in the American religious marketplace spurred Congregationalists, Bendroth argues, to face their distinctive history. By engaging deeply with their denomination's storied past, they recast their modern identity. The soul-searching took diverse forms--from letter writing and eloquent sermonizing to Pilgrim-celebrating Thanksgiving pageants--as Congregationalists renegotiated old obligations to their seventeenth-century spiritual ancestors. The result was a modern piety that stood a respectful but ironic distance from the past and made a crucial contribution to the American ethos of religious tolerance.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146962401X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 259
Book Description
Congregationalists, the oldest group of American Protestants, are the heirs of New England's first founders. While they were key characters in the story of early American history, from Plymouth Rock and the founding of Harvard and Yale to the Revolutionary War, their luster and numbers have faded. But Margaret Bendroth's critical history of Congregationalism over the past two centuries reveals how the denomination is essential for understanding mainline Protestantism in the making. Bendroth chronicles how the New England Puritans, known for their moral and doctrinal rigor, came to be the antecedents of the United Church of Christ, one of the most liberal of all Protestant denominations today. The demands of competition in the American religious marketplace spurred Congregationalists, Bendroth argues, to face their distinctive history. By engaging deeply with their denomination's storied past, they recast their modern identity. The soul-searching took diverse forms--from letter writing and eloquent sermonizing to Pilgrim-celebrating Thanksgiving pageants--as Congregationalists renegotiated old obligations to their seventeenth-century spiritual ancestors. The result was a modern piety that stood a respectful but ironic distance from the past and made a crucial contribution to the American ethos of religious tolerance.
God and Mammon
Author: Mark A. Noll
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195148010
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Book Description
This collection of essays offers a close look at the connections between American Protestants and money in the Antebellum period. They provide essential background to an issue that continues to generate controversy in the Protestant community today.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195148010
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Book Description
This collection of essays offers a close look at the connections between American Protestants and money in the Antebellum period. They provide essential background to an issue that continues to generate controversy in the Protestant community today.